Persistent sameness

I read two really interesting pieces over the weekend, the first was a really long, (I mean really long, give yourself an hour or so to take this one on), review and analysis of the Sony Pictures Entertainment hack. This is an endlessly interesting and evolving story, I blogged about it briefly last week, but even just a week later it is probably worth revisiting, as the repercussions from this case are only just starting to be felt.

The second piece that caught my attention is quite unlike the Sony tale, is much lighter (fitting the start of what is for most a short, holiday week), but no less interesting, just in a different way.

The piece comes from Citylab.com and is titled 20 Years of Street Photography Shows Just How Boring We All Are, a review of the work of Dutch photographer Hans Eijkelboom over that past two decades.

From the Citylab piece:

Since 1993, he has worked on his "photo notes"—arriving in a city, setting up on a major street, and then, within 10 to 15 minutes, choosing a recurring visual theme before shooting in the same spot for one to two hours. Once he's done, he puts the best examples into a grid, with the place and time at the bottom of the page. This technique yielded a stream of Louis Vuitton-style murses in 2006 Paris, a pack of Canadian tuxedos (denim on denim, see the image on the right) in 2007 Amsterdam, and an army of shirtless rollerbladers in 1997 New York.

I grabbed the example of the Canadian tuxedos to run with the post, but you really should click over to Citylab to see some of the other examples that Eijkelboom has captured over the years. And the interesting part is that these collages of sameness only take about an hour or two to compile, and probably could be even larger if they were not edited down for presentation.

I am not going to overthink the significance of these observations and images, it is pretty obvious I guess that most folks like to fit in, to swim with the prevailing tide with respect to fashion anyway. I suppose the greater danger arises when we allow this tendency towards sameness to extend other areas that are not as trivial as fashion choices. I will think about that when I see the 27th article this week about why 'Employee engagement is important' or '5 Tips to be Super Amazing in 2015' that gets shared relentlessly on social media.

When we all tend to dress the same you get the funny and sort of ridiculous images in the Eijkelboom works. When we all seem to read the same things, quote the same quotes, listen to the same Ted Talks - you get the idea, we end up with something worse that a picture of two dozen people in the same shirt.

It's worse that than, but it's much harder to take a picture of what it looks like.

Have a great week!

Cause, correlation, and chemistry

I am willing to be you have probably read, heard, or even repeated the following admonition in the last few weeks:

Correlation is not causation.

Here's why I think this assertion need to be retired, or at least pushed off to the side and filed away for a while with your Vanilla Ice CDs, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe figures, and Gloria Vanderbilt jeans.You have the power.

First, on the inability of correlation, i.e. lining up two sets of data that seem to track in the same direction and making a claim that one event or activity 'causes' the other, well sure, I think everyone understands that trap.

After seeing everyone at the State Fair rocking their bad tattoos, and therefore thinking that getting a bad tattoo will make one attend the State Fair is not a conclusion most rational observers would reach.

But the problem with the 'Correlation is not Causation' admonition is that it has the effect or shutting down the debate and stifling the potential discovery of useful information. A strong correlation between two related and relevant data series may not imply or prove causation, but it probably implies something. And that something might just be really important for us to understand - say the correlation between the course of study our last dozen newly promoted employees took, or the relationship between managers that successfully completed the latest leadership development program and the 12-18 month success of their team members.

In HR and Talent Management I am not sure the goal should be to try and 'prove' any one thing can actually cause another thing to happen anyway. We are dealing with people, not robots, (not yet anyway), and attempting to make sense out of interpersonal relationships, motivations, rewards, and capabilities. It is, in many ways, much harder than sitting in a chemistry lab tracking how agents react to one another. 

If I remember my high school chem lab accurately, loading up a beaker with a few solids and enough unstable acids and stopping up the top caused it to explode every time.  People, while often predicable, are not always that consistent.

The last warning I will raise is that team 'Correlation is not Causation' like to use this conclusion as a fake scientific argument against any proposals or ideas that they disagree with, or did not come up with themselves.

Here's a simple example:

'Hey, I noticed last week when his car was in the shop, Jake got a tremendous amount of work accomplished working from home - maybe we should explore letting some of the other developers do some teleworking?'

Can we know for certain that working from home was the reason for the spike in Jake's productivity?

Of course not. 

Might there have been a dozen other factors that might have been more responsible for the increase in output?

Sure.

Does your organization have the time or capacity to set up highly controlled experiments to try and figure it out - assuming that is even possible?

No way.

In science, proving causation might be the goal, the desired end state, but in Talent, we are much better served finding the correlations, using our understanding of work, people, and the world, and seizing on the ones that make sense for our business and our teams.

What do you think? Do you ever drop the 'Correlation' bomb around the office?