W I L L YO U R B U S I N E S S F U N D R E T I R E M E N T ?

A I T H E D R I V I N G FO R C EB E H I N D A M A ZO N

M E N TO R I N G 2 1 C

M A G A Z I N E

T H E F U E L F O R B U S I N E S S

I S S U E N O . 1 4A U T U M N 2 0 1 8

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From an 8 to 5-hour work day

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to break your addictions

Dr Amantha Imber�

3 ways

issue no.14

It’s 10am and you are at your desk with a mug of coffee. You don’t

have a meeting scheduled so you figure it’s a good time to start work on writing that report that you have been putting off. The report is critical for moving your most important project forward and securing more funding. It also happens to be due in your boss’s inbox in two days’ time.

You open a Word document and write the title of the report. You’re not quite sure what to write next. Just then, a notification flashes up on your screen - you have a new email from a prospect you have a new business proposal in with. “Better just check what they want,” you say to yourself.

You hop into your email and read it. The message isn’t actually that important and you don’t really need to respond. However, given you are now in your inbox, you start opening up emails you have already read earlier this morning and wondering

if there is anything you can send a quick reply to and feel a little hit of progress. Fifteen minutes have now passed and you remember that you’re meant to be writing a report. You switch back into the Word document.

You’re still stuck on the first sentence. You have a few goes but nothing seems quite impactful enough. Just then your phone lights up with a notification that says you have five new likes on the photo of your son that you posted on Facebook last night. You open up Facebook and see who has liked it. You feel smug and popular as your photo now has 40 likes.

“I might just have a quick scroll through my news feed,” you think to yourself. Forty minutes, ten likes, five comments, and one purchase of a gadget you’ll probably never use, later, you shake yourself out of your Facebook fog, and get back to your Word document.

It’s now 11am and a whole hour has passed and you’re not quite sure how that has happened.

If that sounds like your morning, you may be facing a distraction addiction. But don’t worry - you’re not alone. Research shows that we

check our mobile phone an average of 85 times per day. We can’t go a measly ten minutes without just checking our phone for something. In addition, a survey of over 5,000 leaders showed that 78% admit to checking their emails frequently throughout the day.

And we are bombarded with notifications from our phone, our watch, and our computer every few minutes. Distractions are everywhere.

While you may think this is harmless, research from the University of London has shown that even just the presence of notifications on your screens decreases our IQ by an average of 10 points. That’s the same loss we receive from not having slept the night before, and twice as much as smoking marijuana.

So if you are ready to beat your battle with distraction, here are three tips on how to do so.

1Switch off ALL notifications

Oscar Wilde famously said, “I can resist everything except temptation.” Notifications tempt us. They flash up on our screen and scream “Read me now!” One of

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the simplest ways to break your distraction addiction is to turn off all your notifications. This means across all your devices - not just one. Removing temptations helps make it easier to keep focused on the task at hand.

While turning off notifications will probably make you sweat with anxiety for the first few days - who knows that important status update you may miss (!) - in the long run, this is the first step in changing your distraction habits.

2 Switch to Flight Mode

So you’ve switched off all your notifications, but your phone still rings and beeps when people are trying to contact you through the good old fashioned phone. While you may feel perfectly happy

sending the “Blocked Number” to voicemail, it’s too easy to pick up the phone when your partner calls and have a little chat.

To avoid the temptation of the call or SMS, switch your phone to Flight Mode. Just like turning off notifications, if you can eliminate the temptation to begin with, it’s far easier to create blocks of distraction-free time in your day.

3 Turn your phone to Grayscale

Have you ever noticed how bright and colourful and fun the screen of your phone looks? Sort of like those bright and colourful and fun slot machines in Vegas. This is not a coincidence. The makers of many of the social media applications you use on your phone employ hundreds of attention

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engineers - the very same people that try to make gambling addictive are also applying the same tricks to your phone.

Beat them at their own game by switching your phone to Grayscale. As senior editor of the Atlantic James Hamblin says, “Instagram, when everything is in grayscale, looks pretty awful.”

Breaking any addition is hard, but if you stick with these three tips, I can guarantee you will have broken your bad habits in no time.

About the author Dr Amantha Imber is the Founder of Inventium, Australia’s innovation consultancy. Her latest book, The Innovation Formula, tackles the topic of how organisations can create a culture where innovation thrives.

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From an 8-hour

Dr Amantha Imber�

t2o a 5-hour workday

issue no.14

I knew something had to change.

David Meyer, a psychology professor from the University of Michigan, argues that multitasking actually makes us less productive, not more. To start with, the term multitasking is actually misleading – it implies that we are doing two tasks in parallel. However, the reality is that our brain is unable to pay conscious attention to two things at the one time. Try thinking of a pink elephant and adding up 16 + 32. It’s impossible.

A more accurate name for multitasking is task switching. Meyer describes that two things have to happen every time you switch tasks. First, “goal activation” needs to happen. Your brain says to itself “I am going to stop focusing on this task, and instead, focus on that task”. The second step is “rule activation”. This is your brain shutting down the rules for the task you are currently completing, and opening up the rules for the task you are about to switch to.

In research conducted into task switching, Meyer, University of Michigan colleague Jeffrey Evans, and Joshua Rubinstein, of the Federal Aviation Administration, uncovered a big reason as to why you might want to stop multitasking. They discovered that the simple act of constantly switching tasks costs us up to 40% of time.

Several years ago, I did a work styles test and it revealed

that one of my strongest skills was being a “time optimiser.” I wore this title like a badge, and for the following year, it defined the way I worked.I would frequently switch tasks, for example, when I was working with sub-optimal internet. If the page I needed was taking more than a second to load, I would “optimise” my time by changing tasks so I wouldn’t waste five or 10 valuable page-loading seconds. I would then switch back 30 seconds later once I was sure the page would have loaded up. “Efficiency” was my middle name.

At the same time in my life, I worked very long hours. I’d often arrive at the office before 8am, and while I would leave by 6pm, I’d log straight back onto my laptop almost every evening. There always seemed to be tasks left to finish.

However, over the same time period, I would often get to the end of a day, and think to myself, “What have I actually achieved today?” Many days felt like a hurricane of tasks, but a lack of meaningful progress on projects that mattered.

To extrapolate that into a typical workday, if you happen to be a rampant multi-tasker, like I was, you are unnecessarily expanding your workday.

So if you would like to start working a day that is a little over five hours rather than eight, simply focus on one thing at the one time.

About the author Dr Amantha Imber is the Founder of Inventium, Australia’s innovation consultancy. Her latest book, The Innovation Formula, tackles the topic of how organisations can create a culture where innovation thrives.

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If you only work an eight-hour day, the bottom line is that if you start focusing on one task at a time, you could leave work at around 2.30pm instead of 5pm, and achieve the exact same level of output.

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Why you should never hold your management meeting in the afternoon

Dr Amantha Imber�

issue no.14

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as Shakespeare famously wrote, that timing is everything. When

management teams meet,

one of the reasons is usually to make decisions. These might be budgeting decisions, decisions about resourcing or strategy - generally anything where the stakes are high and important. After all, that is why managers, as opposed to others lower down the ranks, have been given responsibility to make these decisions. And in an ideal world, when management teams meet, those decisions will be effective ones.While a considerable amount of work goes into scheduling those meetings by diligent and patient executive assistants, the effort is concentrated around finding a window of time when everyone is available. However, rather than simply focus on availability, people need to shift their attention to cognitive science to get the most out of their meetings. It turns out,

Research into decision-making shows that our brains make poorer quality decisions in the afternoon, compared to the morning. Essentially, every single decision we make over the course of the day eats away at our decision making “battery”, whereby the end of the day, our battery is running on empty. And the implication of this decision fatigue is that when making decisions, we will take the easy way out.

One of the most famous studies into Decision Fatigue examined 1,100 decisions that Israeli judges made as to whether to grant the

Unfortunately, each hour of the workday is not created equal. Time of day has a dramatic impact on the quality of our decision making, thanks to a concept called Decision Fatigue.

prisoner parole. Those who were up in front of the judge at 9am had good odds - they had a 70% chance of being granted parole. However, fast forward to the mid afternoon and those chances dropped to 10% - and that’s after controlling for all sorts of extraneous variables such as the type of prisoner and severity of the offence. When decision fatigue has set in after lunch, the judge was simply taking the easy way out.

If we think back to the workplace, some decisions may not be overly affected by taking the easy way out. Keeping the stationary budget at the same level as last financial year might not have huge implications. However, if you take certain types of meetings, such as those of an Innovation Council (a group of leaders responsible for deciding which ideas their organisation should progress), decision fatigue can have dire consequences. An innovator never changed the world by taking the easy way out.

Because most managers and their executive assistants are not neuroscientists and perhaps don’t understand the implications of meeting timing on brain functioning (and thus meeting outcomes), the vast majority of meetings are scheduled at

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completely random times during the day. Worse still, some critical meetings are regularly scheduled for the afternoon or evening.

Take, for example, not-for-profit board meetings. A good friend of mine used to sit on the board of a local charity. Like all of the other directors, it was a volunteer position. And given the role was unpaid, she had a day job like all of the other directors. As such, this necessitated that all board meetings were at night. They started at 6pm and often went through until 9pm or 10pm. The meetings were scheduled at the worst possible time for effective decision-making.

Australian parliament is another example. When parliament is sitting (and decisions are being made), sitting sometimes begins as late as 12noon, and on most days, continues through until 8pm at night. This may come as no surprise that politicians are frequently taking the easy way out with many decisions given they are making their most important decisions at the exact worst time of day.

At health insurer Australian Unity, having a knowledge of decision fatigue and its implications have lead to a number of changes. The company’s Quarterly Innovation Review meeting, in which important

decisions are made about its innovation pipeline, are scheduled to start first thing in the morning, and conclude before lunch.

In addition, full day innovation workshops are now always broken into two half days at Australian Unity.

Changing the structure of workshops has significantly improved their outcomes.

At property and construction company Lendlease, a concerted effort is made around meeting effectiveness. Meetings tend to be scheduled earlier in the

About the author Dr Amantha Imber is the Founder of Inventium, Australia’s innovation consultancy. Her latest book, The Innovation Formula, tackles the topic of how organisations can create a culture where innovation thrives.

The first half day is used for exploring issues and problems and generating ideas. The group then comes back the next day first thing in the morning to make decisions about which ideas to shortlist and progress.

day to combat decision fatigue. In addition, staff are strongly encouraged to take a break between meetings. To help make this possible, meetings rarely run for a full hour, but instead finish at quarter past or quarter to the hour. This structure helps to create a 15-minute gap between meetings to allow people to refresh.

So if you want to make the best possible decisions, think consciously about the timing of your meetings, and please pass this article on to whoever is responsible for scheduling meetings at your organisation.

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How likely

would you be

....?

Why you should never ask customers

Dr Amantha Imber�

whether they think they will buy your new product

About the author Dr Amantha Imber is the Founder of Inventium, Australia’s innovation consultancy. Her latest book, The Innovation Formula, tackles the topic of how organisations can create a culture where innovation thrives.

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Dr Amantha Imber

All around the world today, thousands of companies are running focus groups to ask customers whether they will buy the new product that they have just designed.

And these focus groups all look very similar.

There will be a moderator, employed by the company or their market research agency, and they will be sitting on a table with seven or eight potential customers. They hold up a mocked up picture of the new product, perhaps a new chocolate bar. The moderator describes the new bar in generous (and delicious) terms.

The moderator then asks what they think is their killer question: “Imagine you saw this chocolate bar on the shelf of your local supermarket. How likely do you think you would be to purchase it?”

Each person thinks to themselves, “I like chocolate. And this bar sounded tasty.” They say out loud, “Yes, I would be very likely to buy it”.

Executives in the company rejoice after hearing the results of the research: Eight out of 10 people said they would definitely buy this new bar.

Six months later, when the bar finally makes its way to supermarket shelves, sales are dismal. Executives ask what has happened. “Didn’t 80% of customers say they would buy this bar?”

The marketing team shrug their shoulders and say yes, that is what customers told us.

Nine months later, the bar is pulled from shelves due to lack lustre

sales and the product is labeled as a failure.

The reason focus groups and other research methodologies that involve asking customers what they think are so poor at predicting the future is because people are bad at predicting how they will behave in the future. Research into the relationship between our intentions versus actual behaviour shows that there is only a weak correlation between what people say (i.e. their intentions), and how they will actually behave in the future.

In order to more accurately predict the success of new products and services, organisations need to do the following. So if you want to make the best possible decisions, think consciously about the timing of your meetings, and please pass this article on to whoever is responsible for scheduling meetings at your organisation.

Put a ban on focus group testing for new product development

While focus groups can be useful for understanding how people say they feel about something, they are notoriously poor at predicting how people will behave in the future. Save focus groups for research projects that are aimed at understanding the present, such as exploring people’s brand perceptions, rather than asking them to be a clairvoyant about their own behaviour.

Stop asking questions beginning with “How likely would you be…”Outside of focus group methodology, researchers need to stop asking questions that begin with the words

“How likely would you be…”. This question is only a measure of how someone intends to behave in the future, as opposed to whether they actually will behave this way in the future.

The only thing this question generates is false hope. People often have the best intentions, but this often doesn’t play out in real life.

Run experiments to test actual behaviourWhen a good idea is born that needs to be tested, run an experiment to test actual behaviour. Experimentation involves setting hypotheses as to why an idea will add value to the customer and creating a minimum viable product (MVP), which is the most basic version of the idea that will still allow for learnings. Experiments can then be set up to test hypotheses using the MVP. Because experiments are designed to measure cause and effect, good experiments measure behaviour, not intentions. And then based on the results, organisations can iterate or change course accordingly.

Because experimentation measures actual behaviour, it is a very effective way to de-risk innovation. Companies from Google, through to Lendlease, through to Commonwealth Bank all embrace experimentation as a key stage in their innovation process.

And for Australian and New Zealand companies that are already embracing the benefits of experimentation, entries of the 2018 AFR Most Innovative Companies list (www.mostinnovative.com.au) are now open.

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