Celebrating Scientific Thinking in All Business on 4th of July

Just when so many businesses had just learned to manage and overcome the pandemic many are now facing inflation and a potential recession. And as the business world looks for more reasons to celebrate this last weekend before America's birthday tomorrow, July 4, 2022, perhaps it should turn to science to save itself and even grow. We tend to research the unmet needs, the market when we start or build a business or product brand, and when we sell, acquire, or in the unfortunate scenario, declare our failure and bankruptcy. Yet it is that "messy middle" between the start and finish line as per Scott Belsky's book title where we spend most of our time. This is when we abandon science in our decisions or strategy, and leave it to the "scientists" to explore. And when resources or pipelines dry up we often let our beliefs and assumptions swim to surface, exploit our comfort, politics, perceptions or restructure. Well, what if every business and its employees regardless of their industry and background training could continue to ask questions and explore instead during these difficult times, using new methods and questions to generate more data and products?

This is the question I began to ask years ago as someone who never mastered laboratory science in my undergraduate training years, yet ended up building a career of developing long-standing relationships with scientists and clinicians who shaped medicine and healthcare research. And the longer I spent in the pharmaceutical industry, the more I learned to not only translate complex scientific research, but the more convinced I became that applying the scientific method throughout different business life cycles is the key to success in not only mine, but in any industry. In fact, when science is combined with sportsmanship among competing interests internally or externally, the combination can be a leadership platform that can regenerate and grow any business. At least, this was my personal hypothesis that led to the birth of the @Alloutcoach podcast episodes and articles that I began to write.

So as a "scientist" with an interest in quantifying abstract concepts of leadership and company culture, I began to search and collect the most direct, robust evidence of a financial or bottom-line productivity value and role of various approaches to organizational change. And I found there is a lot more evidence available that links economic benefit or return on investment with company culture, educational, or training initiatives, than business executives tend to realize or reference. After all, we should not wait until tragedies such as the Boeing accidents several years ago when frontline workers' critical problems in manufacturing never made it to those in management, until we build a case for changing our standards of communication.

There is one social scientist in particular whom I enjoy following, Adam Grant, because he always manages to speak through specific and unique examples or studies that close the gap between critical abstract behaviors in organizations and bottom-line results business executives care most about, the root causes of which they often do not investigate nor address. In this issue of InWeekend, I list specific studies he referenced in his most recent keynote presentation I attended on the Future of Work webinar led by @Grammarly. I have added them to my personal collection and bibliography, and hope you can explore these examples and links below in more detail to inspire new approaches to leading your organizations in a demanding and volatile business environment.

SCIENTIFIC TRAINING OF BUSINESS EXECUTIVES

Adam contrasts the scientist's mode of thinking to that of a preacher, prosecutor, politician or cult leader's approaches to thinking in business, and ultimate results.

A randomized controlled trial on 116 early startups was conducted in Italy a few years?ago with in which hundreds?of entrepreneurs were randomly assigned to either?a scientific thinking group or a?control lean startup method.

Scientific training involved using?first-principle? thinking which allowed them "to identify assumptions and leaps of faith". Then, they deconstructed their business model into its individual components such as value proposition and learned how to approach it more holistically. Importantly, they were trained how to collect and interpret evidence based on their design and methods, and conduct rigorous data analysis. Finally, they learned the art of communicating decision rules that would enable them to continue or modify their experiments.

Over the year they were followed,?the founders who were randomly assigned?to think like scientists, brought it on average more than?40 times the revenue of the?control group which Adam stated was one of the biggest, most staggering differences he has ever seen. The scientifically trained founders were twice as likely to pivot and not "preach they were right when their product launch bombed", prosecute and blame people for being wrong, or lobby the executive board to maintain the status quo for example. And I'd argue, they would be more likely to react earlier and prevent the Boeing accidents that took hundreds of people's lives I reference above.

Adam's analogy of scientists versus prosecutors or politicians reminded me of the inspiration behind a post from last year titled "Pandemic Intelligence 2021" which I had shared widely with my friends and colleagues to reflect on our collective intelligence in decisions we make in business.

In addition, the data Adam Grant shared adds some evidence that relates to some of the principles and recommendations offered in this podcast episode that also explains how to inspire employees to think like sports athletes and scientists

REWRITING JOB DESCRIPTIONS

One of Adam Grant's favorite case studies in business is Morning Star, a tomato processing and packing company, which he referenced in his Grammarly Business keynote. At this company, hiring managers gives employees the job description of the predecessor but also the right to rewrite their own job description to fit themselves after a year under certain conditions. Employees are asked to explain how the new job description advances the company's mission by convincing 5-10 interdependent colleagues that it benefits the company and not only the employee. In exchange, Adam argues that granting this type of freedom allows employees to "tolerate other constraints" from the company.

ADDING "PERSONALITY" TO WORK DURING IMPERSONAL TIMES

The ability to express our identity at work, or the freedom to share our personal journey can help us not merely share words or information but feelings with colleagues, which can take innovation and scientific thinking to the next level. How we ultimately express ourselves is shaped immediately during new hire onboarding. In one of the most memorable new hire orientation programs I recall to this day, the supervisors asked all of us new employees individually to reflect on and share publicly what we felt our personal legacy was as one of the first questions during which we collaborated and got to know each other on a more personal level than customary. This company offered me the most personalized, longest, and extensive on-boarding training program and in retrospect, it strikes as no surprise how quickly it grew and was acquired by a larger corporation.

Adam Grant cited some tremendous evidence by Francesca Gino (Harvard Business School) and colleagues?from an experiment that compared three new hire one-hour onboarding sessions: 1) training based on standard skills and company overview vs. 2) organizational identity condition training focused on company values, culture vs. 3) individual identity condition training focused on the new hire introducing themselves, their journey, and personal highlights at Wipro BPO, an India-based global leader in the business-process-outsourcing industry providing telephone and chat support for its global clients’ customers. Results demonstrated that prioritizing new hires' introductions of their personality in detail to the company first during onboarding rather than merely introducing the organization and cultural values to new employees led to 18% higher performance and up to 50% greater employee retention after 6 months.

The case above reflects an important framework that centers on employee experience and sense of belonging during onboarding but Grant also shared another experiment testing the "personal" dynamic at work in his presentation which extends across the work lifecycle among current or seasoned employees. In this experiment by Jason Sandvik and colleagues , sales people were randomly paired up to have lunch once a week with absolutely no?agenda. This required and enabled colleagues to make new connections and extend their internal networks despite a competitive framework of sales and despite only implementing this practice for one month, four months later, the average salesperson?reported 24% higher revenue.

"OPTIMAL DISTINCTIVENESS" TO CLOSE THE GENERATIONAL LEADERSHIP GAP IN BUSINESS

The studies above challenge organizational standards of communication across the different generations of leaders. In turn, our work lifecycle has evolved and shortened to such degree that we have entered a "new generation" of our work lifecycle in which transitions are more frequent, and employee engagement or retention more challenging than ever before. While the causes for the trends of "job-hopping" or "gig economy" are multifactorial, the perceptions and reactions to them across the generations of leaders are quite different. Just how large this gap may be was explored during the thought-provoking discussion devoted to the future of work at Grammarly Business which followed Adam Grant's keynote.

In this discussion Abbey Lunney, managing director of thought leadership practice at the Harris Poll, shared a recent study with Adam Grant, which she conducted along with her colleagues at the Milken Institute evaluating what hundreds of global business leaders across different industries find most interesting and critical today. It turns out their number one concern is "changing generational values in the workplace" even more so than inflation. As a result, they are optimizing their business models and beginning to measure how their employee's perspectives are changing.

Abbey then discussed another survey of the future of ambition among younger employees which shows that they are more likely to prioritize energy management and set clear boundaries of how their work, e-mail or life is being monitored, and have higher demands than older generations to express their personality at work. Thus, she concluded that there is indeed a strong, emerging culture among the promising young talent which needs to be addressed with appropriate respect, cultural language and attention.

Thus, there is a paradox in play in the work lifecycle expectations regardless of the generation which the younger people are now reminding us every minute wherever we turn, which is what Adam Grant referred to as "OPTIMAL DISTINCTIVENESS".

He defines this concept as the following dichotomy - in as much as every employee, consultant, or volunteer should always be expected to belong and contribute for the benefit of the team's success, they should also be expected to express just the optimal level of their character or personality to feel "distinct" or unique yet part of the group.

IMPACT OF WORKFLOW ON QUALITY

Celebrating the scientific mode of business means allocating time appropriate for deep, uninterrupted work because the norms of communication and workflow we create ourselves directly influences both our expectations and outcomes in business, in my opinion. According to Adam Grant, the workflow concepts at the forefront today had a strong scientific foundation for decades in the business management literature yet were mostly ignored until the acceleration of the pandemic. For example, decades prior to the era of likes, and social media or app notifications, Leslie Perlow, a renowned management consultant from the University of Michigan, author of the book Finding Time ran a Quiet Time experiment , in which she showed that when employees were given quiet time of no interruptions or business meetings before noon three days a week (Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday) the average?engineers' productivity in her experiment went?up by about 67%. Another reminder of years of data that foreshadowed the pendulum that is now swinging in the direction of more flexible work shared by Adam Grant was his review of the literature that showed that?even as early as 2007, there were over 40 studies collectively showed that if employees were in the office for about half of the week and could work from anywhere, they were more satisfied and productive without a cost to business relationships. And he referenced Nick Bloom from Stanford as an author of some of the most rigorous studies on work flexibility demonstrating that fully or partially remote work schedules maintains or increases performance while increasing the overall employee experience, despite the cost of actual work at nights and on the weekends though on their "own schedule".

Similarly, I conducted a global study to evaluate a potential "Virtual Productivity Threshold" on identifying the impact of our workflow on our deep, uninterrupted work in November 2020, when we were all learning to adapt to work remotely while being productive, presented in June 2022 in Chicago at the Drug Information Association (DIA) Annual Global Meeting (abstract) . My experiment of colleagues in the pharmaceutical industry and medical devices across the globe confirmed the number of virtual meetings and breaks between them correlated with our self-assessed deep work, and days with less than 3 virtual meetings were associated with 50% longer periods spent in deep work than those with 3 or more meetings. In my recent LinkedIn Live 30-minute detailed presentation of the results from my study, I divided the commonly used word "workflow" into its two constituents, work and FLOW to emphasize a distinction between being present at work and delivering quality work through productivity and creativity, both of which emerge when we produce deep uninterrupted work and are in FLOW.

Adam Grant's gifted insight into fully expressing the human spirit and talent in the workplace achieves timelessness across our society through his extraordinary library of organizational research which he chose to display in his keynote I was fortunate to attend.

Here is a clear and important reminder from Adam with which I will conclude this InWeekend issue's summary of his memorable keynote presentation

You do not get quality work if you do not get quality of life.

Share this issue with your friends and network, and subscribe to my "InWeekend" Newsletter !

Tim Mikhelashvili, Co-Founder and CEO, Amedea Pharma

Host, Alloutcoach YouTube Channel and Podcast available across all platforms which you can access by clicking any of the links below.

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