Category Archives: communication

If your model has always been wrong

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Piet, a reader who comments from time to time on this blog, hasn’t enjoyed what I’ve said about the economy recently. I’ve tried really hard, entirely ineffectively it seems, to answer his points and tease out exactly where his real problems lie.

This post by Paul Krugman talks exactly to “Piet’s views” – the deep-seated emotional views and ideologies that “must” make sense without the careful thought, analysis and model-building required. The same views that have proved almost completely ineffective at predicting anything so far.

Lots of people declared that they “just couldn’t believe” that huge budget deficits wouldn’t drive up interest rates, that “printing” lots of money wouldn’t cause runaway inflation, that slashing government spending wouldn’t have a positive effect on confidence. We know how that has turned out.

Paul doesn’t talk in this post about those who then start changing the facts that don’t agree with their views. “Inflation must be high because the Fed is printing money, but inflation isn’t high, therefore the measure of inflation must be wrong.” – even though multiple independent measures suggest the same level of inflation.

what a difference several years make

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The laminated card in the seat pocket of the SAA Boeing 737-800 I’m flying in describes how I can use most devices in “flight mode” once in the air.
It’s dated November 2011, but I’m quite sure I’ve still heard cabin crew telling people off for not having their phones off over the last two months. However late, be it several years or several years and two months, the relaxation of the draconian and relatively unique restrictions on the use of electronic devices in the air has been lifted.
So rather than losing 4 hours of my life with every Cape Town – Joburg trip, I now lose more like 2 hours and get to plough through an embarrassingly large list of unattended emails and arrive with a sense of accomplishment, lower stress levels and hopefully fewer irate colleagues waiting on email replies.
Now I can’t wait for a wifi connection so I can retrieve truncated emails and attachments and communicate in real time. And publish the posts I write while on the plane!

Dangerous information

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Land Restitution is an emotional issue.

It’s not really a practical issue since recent history has shown that not all beneficiaries of land restitution ultimately want to work the land. This is also entirely reasonable given the change of our economy from a primary economy to a secondary and tertiary economy over the last 50 years.

So when I read that the SA Institute of Race Relations states that more land could have been returned to black beneficiaries if money was not offered instead, I just wonder what the point is.

If people are accepting cash rather than land, it may well be because they want the cash rather than the land. Given land, I’m not aware that there is a prohibition on selling that land (which would be a poorer form of property right than they originally had so surely can’t be allowed) so we could end up in the same situation.

The danger for me is that the measures of land restitution could so easily, accurately and misleadingly, refer to the amount of land that has been restituted, or the amount of land currently in the hands of black South Africans, when this is clearly not an accurate measure of what progress has been achieved.

 

Narratives vs facts

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I don’t usually write about The Final Frontier, but this article has a great parallel to what I do write about.

It’s worth reading the entire article, but the main message is that we cannot use the dream or story or fairy tale of imminent migration into space and other planets as an excuse not to deal with the very real problems we have on Earth right now. The misconceptions, Hollywood induced and otherwise, about the ease of space travel or even the extent of our current capabilities, are massive.

As with so many things, the stories that fill our society can be very different from the harsh reality.

Communicating harsh truths

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Communication is critically important for any business. Communication with clients and employees defines those relationships and the value they can create for everyone.

Managing poor performance is tough because it’s so easy and so attractive to shy away from communicating the truth. Avoiding conflict and not addressing problems is far worse for all concerned.

Robert Kiyosaki, author of “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” outlines a similar viewpoint in response to research that shows “nice guys earn less than mean guys”. His take is that it’s not actually “nice” to hide the truth and dance around issues. There’s never a need to make attacks personal, but sometimes the news is not good and it needs corrective action.

As Kiyosaki says, “cowards finish last”.

Compounding wisdom from a surprising source

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I really struggled when Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi announced (many sources, but here is one) that private healthcare costs have increased by 121% over the last decade.

He continued: “Over the past decade, private hospital costs have increased by 121%, while over the same period, specialist costs have increased by 120%.”

Anyone who measures growth over long periods without using compound annual rates can’t be taken seriously. Abusing numbers for shock value is a sure sign of a weak argument or a lack of appreciation for long-term issues.

121% over nine years (2001 to 2009) equates to an average cumulative annual growth rate of 9.2%. Now medical price inflation of 9.2% is high given inflation over the period and modest real growth in GDP and salaries. But 9.2% tells a very different story to a layperson than 121%. The 9.2% is more useful, more comparable to inflation, more easily able to be understood. 121% is more shocking.

I was really encouraged to read this in a story, quoting Matlala from HASA:

He pointed out that while the green paper said private healthcare costs had increased 121% between 2001 and 2009, this should be contextualised against the backdrop of contributions to public healthcare increasing by more than 100% over the same period.

“Even the price of bread has increased 111% over the decade… We have to face up to the fact that the cost of living has gone up, including healthcare,” Matlala said.

Finally, someone quoted acknowledging that the 121% figure is utterly misleading.

Incidentally, 111% over 9 years is equivalent to an 8.7% annually compounded growth rate, just 0.6% per annum below healthcare cost increases. 

 

Teamwork from HBR

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Found these views on teamwork interesting, and largely in line with my own experiences. In particular, I’ve gone from thinking videoconferencing is all we need to the realisation that in-person interaction is important. I’d add to the point about stable, long-standing teams performing better by suggesting this is at least partly through better understanding each other’s strengths and weaknesses.