How to prioritize to find interesting opportunities
Miscellaneous / / January 12, 2022
It turns out that managing your luck is real.
The effort, time and money are not endless. To be successful, you need to spend your resources wisely. Better yet, to subdue randomness. New York University professor Christian Bush is sure that this is real. Other researchers agree with him. The main thing is to develop serendipity, that is, the ability to find valuable information and opportunities through successful coincidences. Literally optimize fate.
How to do this, Bush tells in the book “No Accidental Accident. How to manage luck and what is serendipity. " With permission from Alpina Publisher, Lifehacker publishes an excerpt from Chapter 6.
You are on vacation and you need to buy shampoo. There are only two brands in the village shop and one promises shiny hair while the other offers thick head of hair. In this case, you can easily choose what you need depending on your preferences.
But suppose that the only store you found is a hypermarket with four dozen shampoos, and from each label a person with snow-white
smile and the thickest and shiniest hair you've ever seen. And what do you choose in this case?If you are like me, you will prefer the first store: it will be easier to make a choice there, and you just take the shampoo that works best. If you can't make a decision, you can flip a coin.
Interestingly, with a wide variety of people, as a rule, it takes longer to choose Iyengar and Lepper, 2000. , but at the same time they buy less than in a situation where the choice is not so great. When it comes to serendipity, we are faced with a similar problem: how to choose which serendipity situations of continuing to act or inaction and how to avoid being overwhelmed by too many opportunities? How concentrate?
On a bus in Oslo, the former CEO of one of the world's leading mobile phone companies told me what matters most in life when it comes to serendipity. For him, this is the ability to allocate time. You need to understand when to say “no” to something that is not really your heart, and focus on what we really believe in.
Of course, the situation changes with age: at the beginning of our careers, we must be pragmatic about the choice, because the number of options is potentially limited. The older we get and the more wiggle room we have, the more we can choose based on what we think is right, taking into account opportunity costs and the like.
Dan Shulman, CEO of PayPal shared a similar experience, who told our Leaders on Purpose team that he believes in experiments, but he knows for sure that in fact it is also important to be able to grasp the moment when it is time to complete them and learn something from results.
Warren Buffett's pilot Mike Flint once asked his boss how he should prioritize his career ambitions. Buffett told him to write down 25 of his goals, and then circle the five most cherished. Flint said he would immediately start working on achieving them, and Buffett asked what he was going to do with the other 20.
Flint replied that they are still important, so he will take some time for them when he is not working on the top five. Buffett stated that in fact everything is wrong and the other 20 are now on the list "avoid at all costs." Flint shouldn't give them any attention until he has dealt with the top five. Fortunately, as my literary agent Gordon Wise, who lives by his last name, remarked Wise - eng. "Wise, judicious" , in the process of reaching the top five, many of the other goals will still be realized!
This again underlines what is important. concentrate focus on turning serendipity into a productive outcome, especially after the initial collection of ideas. Often, as we advance in our careers, we have more and more formal filters, which include a personal assistant and a chief of staff. Be careful, these gatekeepers can hide potential serendipity from your eyes. If the assistant says "no" to anything that does not bring obvious benefits to you, then this is a big problem.
Approaches like Opportunity Engineering allow us to expand the Opportunity Space a little while at the same time containing risks. These approaches seek to find ways to select opportunities with a realistic chance of high growth or the smallest decline. It's about breaking the project down into stages.
If the idea doesn't work early, the project can be abandoned without much loss - or a new direction, as in the inexpensive and fast prototyping methods discussed earlier. But even this often does not allow us to capture unknown components.
In the workplace, it is very important to learn by yourself and educate support staff to be alert to potential serendipity information and events that in the long term can be valuable, for example, by identifying potential theories of value or space opportunities.
At Diamond Bank in Nigeria, one approach was to include "low probability options" - options that presumably would not become staple products, but could catch on with some people (in other words, Diamond did rates). The bank has released a digital update for its mobile app, which has a subscriber base of 3.1 million.
The goal was to digitize the traditional group savings scheme, allowing application users to connect with each other and form savings groups. After a certain period of time, one of the group members received a pool by rotation method. savings. This solution was well received in the market and implemented very well.
But the real surprise, according to CEO Uzoma Dozi, was that customers immediately embraced a feature that Diamond hadn't even advertised - individual targeted savings. The assimilation of individual savings was more than 10 times higher than the assimilation of group savings.
Here it is, a great example of how digital starts to really work for an organization, when customers suddenly take it and use it for something unexpected.
Diamond changed advertising to promote individual savings, because this is what the customers wanted, not what the bank originally wanted from them.
But how do you know when to focus on the unexpected? How do I filter out potentially relevant observations? Researchers Napier and Quan-Hoang Wong believe that if we notice an anomaly or an unexpected encounter, both we have a willingness and ability to assess it, then we can either conduct an instant assessment, or systematic.
Instant assessment is a quick analysis based on gut instinct for unusual information. The trained eye can find ways to relate it to something else. Within companies, especially those focused on numbers, information must be matched with an appropriate prevailing logic, standard or language to be acceptable.
Systematic assessment is an analytical analysis that can lead to a clearer determination of the possible value of information. This assessment method can include criteria such as the level of uncertainty, timing, tolerance. risk and additional data that help to confirm or deny unexpected information.
The quality of the result will depend on the initial selection process, which determines the nature of the potential opportunity. In the world business the main filter is the systemic assessment of the investment committee.
Alternative filters can be peer reviews, during which people test ideas. colleagues, analyzing factors such as the ability to implement the idea, its attractiveness and viability.
Creating filters that help increase the number and quality of meaningful meetings sets the stage for massive serendipity.
But often in our own lives, filtering comes down to how many people to meet and how many ideas to try out. How do you evaluate all this?
The power of curated dating
Timothy Lowe, an entrepreneur and CEO of a Singapore-based non-profit organization, talks about creating his own filter for what he calls "serendipity optimization." Its main task was to determine how many events are enough to optimize serendipity, and how many of them will be too large.
Timothy likens changing the number of events and networking to an hourglass: he started at the top, squeezing into schedule the maximum number of events, and then slowly moved down, leaving only those events to which he had lay soul.
The first phase for him was the time when he was a new player in the market and tried to get to know everyone with whom it is possible, and get to as many events as possible in order to study well peace startups. He needed to find out who the key players are, what are the norms in this world, to learn the language of this world, the internal jargon, where the coolest clubs are, and so on.
He attended up to a dozen events a month and felt that it was very important for a beginner. Timothy learned quickly and managed to make contact with people who later became very important to him. But over time, the value of all these events began to diminish rapidly.
He was no longer a beginner, and learning had reached a plateau stage. The "value of the event" was about to plummet.
It was then that Timothy entered the second phase, in which he began to reduce the number of attended events, yet without much filtering. This allowed him to more efficiently allocate time, both in terms of professional development (meeting the right people) and from the point of view of emotional health (meeting friends, full relaxation). This reduced the number of events, and with a simple binary choice, professional goal / mental health, Timothy was able to keep the event value high.
The third phase began when he began to refuse new activities. This meant that now Timothy attended only those events where he could discuss various issues with already familiar people with whom he was comfortable communicating. Sometimes he made new acquaintances there, which were supervised by the organizers of the event - already among the "proven" people. These were now “high-yield” events and connections. After eliminating low-income events, Timothy said that “the average value of an event skyrocketed. I was spending less time with more value. "
Finally, the fourth phase came after realizing the problem of the third phase - a person drives himself into a kind of echo chamber An echo chamber is a concept in media theory that means reinforcing certain ideas by repeating them constantly in a closed system. At the same time, it usually turns out that these ideas completely drown out other information flows. . So Timothy started to apply a more specific and well thought out filter to slightly increase the size of the funnel. Here are its filters:
- Will I be helpful at this event or in this company of people?
- Their activity is interesting to me, would I like to do it or learn it?
- Is there a ground for constructive interesting conversation or even discussion?
He mused, “The average value of each activity remains the same as in the third phase, but since I can slightly expand coverage due to targeted selection, then the cumulative value per month doubles, or even triples ".
Tim went through a process familiar to many: an almost limitless beginning, and then narrowing the scope with gradually evolving criteria based on the "theory of value" or current priorities for the selection of the right activities. And in this whole process, it is important to avoid the very echo chamber into which so many people please.
What other filters can you apply? For example use Guy et al., 2015; McCay-Peet and Toms, 2010. technologies for selecting relevant, not just similar events. You can search not only for known items, but also for those that may be important.
Modern technologies allow us not only to take into account already known criteria in the search, but also to participate in “serendipity search”. We can include Guy et al., 2015; McCay-Peet and Toms, 2018 or turn off contextual filtering on recommendations, change search parameters to dynamically reorder results, and control the width of the offer range.
But, just like in real life, tight and tight personalization can be a problem if it filters out the desired serendipity interactions. In this case, we find ourselves Fan et al., 2012; Pariser, 2001. trapped in bubble filters. New products and ideas are tracked through our search history and we risk Andre et al., 2009; Benjamin et al., 2014. miss out on serendipity if we don't include really different (and unexpected) results.
Personalization narrows that circle even further. However, studies have shown Huldtgren et al., 2014. that too specific search criteria does not necessarily lead to better results, because narrowing the parameters limits serendipity events.
Would there be populist elections around the world, would there be a Brexit vote, or would it be such a surprise if we got out of our bubbles? Our echo chambers have far-reaching political implications. I will never forget driving around London in a taxi with a Pakistani driver who was a supporter of Brexit and said: "Finally, all foreigners will become equal!" (implying that earlier Europeans had more rights than citizens of other continents).
I also remember a Syrian taxi driver in Boston shortly before Trump's election who said, “Trump has to win. My parents were legal immigrants and worked very hard for this, so Justice will triumph if illegal immigrants remain on the sidelines. " For me, these points of view were extremely unexpected, because in my usual filter bubble, I practically did not notice the existence of such views.
Interests are dynamic and change with different situations or over time.
Just as in real life, serendipity triggers can serve as helpful events or hindrances, so ISPs have developed ways to allow serendipity to begin the incubation period. For example, good platforms allow us to postpone good ideas for the future and add bookmarks so we can come back. McCay-Peet and Toms, 2010; Toms et al., 2009. to them at the right time.
We can also use an idea diary to record our thoughts. For example, a Facebook strategic partner manager uses a notebook on his iPhone to do this. So she can focus on the task at hand, and come back to good ideas later when the time comes.
Some of the companies I have worked with used a parking system to store good ideas on an internal wiki page when they came up during a targeted discussions. Thanks to this, people do not have to deviate from the planned agenda, but their ideas will not be forgotten, because you can return to them later.
Filters are everywhere. They are especially effective when combined with deadlines that help Pina e Cunha et al., 2010. we get together and not get stuck in one place. For example, while working on this book, I made a commitment to send the publisher a chapter per month. Having a deadline helped me focus on work and be responsible. I practice this approach in every project where I am my own boss: setting clear deadlines motivates me, helps me keep track of what has been done - and in the end I certainly achieve set goals.
Beware of filters that are based not so much on effective selection as on bias.
When Robin Warren and Barry Marshall presented their discovery to the world that stomach ulcers are not caused by stress or bad food, as previously believed, and bacteria, then members of the scientific community not only rejected this report, but also named Meyers, 2007. the researchers themselves are "crazy, who are talking complete nonsense." In 2005, Warren and Marshall received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work on the causes of ulcers stomach.
Even if we have effective filters, the main challenge is to provide time and space for the ideas that deserve it. Sometimes serendipity occurs suddenly, and sometimes it requires an incubation period.
Throughout his life, Christian Bush has found new confirmation that it is possible to manage randomness, and by his own example he explains how to develop serendipity thinking. It may be easier to attract luck than it seems.
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