Mental Models

3 Ways to … Avoid Overthinking

October 17, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Overthinking and over-analyzing the causes and meaning of your thoughts can be tamed through greater self-awareness and mental disengagement.

Set a time limit for your “thinking time,” then make yourself move on to something else or force your decision. Vent your worries to the world, but there’s a risk that you’ll end up even more confused if you keep asking everyone’s opinion. Most of the time, things aren’t as complicated as you perceive them.
Pause and take a step back. Interrupt the thinking process or distract yourself by diverting your attention to something very different. Focused distraction can calm your mind and help you have a coherent view of the whole situation.
Accept that uncertainty is part of this life, and you’ll never have all the facts or know what’s further down the road. Studies suggest we fear an unknown outcome more than a known bad one. Not everything you plan will work out, and that’s ok. It’s often better to set a clear course today and tackle problems that arise tomorrow.

Idea for Impact: Right-size your expectations. Overthinking comes from trying to control what you can’t control.

Dear Customer, Speak Early and Have it Your Way!

September 12, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

At the heart of every successful product is the ability to address a real need or circumstance of struggle—a “job to be done”—in consumers’ lives. Identification of this “job” happens early in the innovation process, as it forms the core insight around innovation development and execution.

Feedback-Influenced Design is a Key Point of Differentiation

Long before its current mess, Boeing was once the pioneer in aspects of product development. No example illustrates Boeing’s inventive stills than the groundbreaking Boeing 777 program, particularly in its use of iterative, paperless computer-aided design, assembly process-planning, and agile product development. Not only that, the Boeing 777 program offers the most high-profile examples of companies tapping consumers as never before to help them create new products.

Knowing very well that the secret to long-term success starts very early in the innovation process, director of engineering Alan Mulally led a “working together” initiative to organize product development around customer input. (Mulally left Boeing after not being named CEO in 2006 and engineered a dramatic turnaround at Ford Motor Co.)

Concept Testing at Every Stage of Development

In the late 1980s, just as the 777 program was being launched, Mulally made a consequential decision to involve its major potential customers in the development of the aircraft specifications. Mulally made up a “gang of eight” comprising All Nippon Airways, American Airlines, British Airways, Cathay Pacific, Delta Air Lines, Japan Airlines, Qantas, and United Airlines. At the group’s first meeting in January 1990, Mulally’s team distributed a 23-page questionnaire asking what each customer wanted in the design. Within two months, Boeing and the airlines decided on a basic design configuration.

The “working together” initiative was a radical departure from the bureaucratic project organization. Internally, Boeing had become bureaucratic and department-focused. Specialists in various departments would design their parts. Then, it was up to the manufacturing team (the system integrators) to figure out how to make it all come together. It was a “throw-it-over-the-wall” environment where the disconnect was a persistent problem.

Having customer input implied that development was centered on customer needs. This would also tear down the walls between departments—designers, suppliers, and assemblers usually separated by organizations or development phases would now be engaged collaboratively and talking and collaborating in real-time.

In an industry where manufacturers classically designed aircraft with only token customer input. Rather than presenting the market with what Boeing perceived as their idea of what was required, customers had direct input. Over the decades, the Boeing 777 became one of the world’s most successful commercial aircraft and continues to be the workhorse of many a customer fleet.

Idea for Impact: Create Something People Want

Whether selling products or services, fast food, or experiential travel, the most innovative companies organize their offerings around customers’ needs. From the very beginning, they tap consumers as never before to help them create new products, and they’re embedding customer knowledge into the business. Early and frequent feedback is one way to cope with the pressure for shorter product cycles and to be prudent about not investing time and resources in unpromising ideas. It also augurs well for the experiences-over-possessions shift in consumer values.

When Anonymity Becomes Cowardice

September 8, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

A variety of psychological factors contribute to people being nasty online. Rider University psychologist John Suler famously argued that online environments unleash aspects of our personality that we usually keep under guard—a phenomenon he called the online disinhibition effect. With names concealed, there’s no pressure to maintain a public facade. Cyberspace becomes a separate dimension where the usual rules don’t apply. Actions no longer carry consequences. There’s no liability for rudeness and inappropriate behavior.

The disinhibition effect is also called ‘The Gyges Effect,’ after the Ring of Gyges, a mythical invisibility device in Plato’s Republic. The ring grants its owner the power to become invisible at will. Plato considers whether an intelligent person would be just if one did not have to fear any bad reputation for committing injustices.

Social media has a way of magnifying some of the worst facets of human nature. By allowing masked identities, as Professor Suler points out, abusers avoid accountability for their conduct and dissociate their online selves from their real-world selves. In real life, combative behavior triggers a victim’s immediate reaction–a change in tone of voice or a counterargument, even aggression. However, these deterrents are missing or delayed in the online world, and social inhibition is removed. Online abusers see their victims as faceless, abstract cutouts with no feelings and undeserving of fairness, compassion, and honesty.

Idea for Impact: Keep away from being nasty online. Awareness and activism are vital to civic duty, but you should seek out actual human beings who know how to converse intelligently on anything they disagree with.

How to … Overcome the Tyranny of Your To-Do List

September 5, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Long before management consultants made the humble 2×2 matrix their stock-in-trade, President Dwight D. Eisenhower used the format to create one of the most powerful productivity tools of the 20th century: take your itemized to-do list, and dichotomize all the items on their importance and urgency. Then, classify these on a 2×2 with urgency on the x-axis and importance on the y-axis. The items in each bucket warrant a different kind of response.

The urgent-and-important tasks in the ‘Do’ quadrant need doing now (e.g., call the fire brigade if your house is burning down.)
The urgent-but-not-important tasks in the ‘Delegate or Automate’ quadrant are best delegated where possible (think booking a hotel or clearing low-priority emails.)
The important-but-not-urgent tasks (strategic planning, training) in the ‘Schedule’ quadrant should take up most of your time. Eisenhower noted that truly vital yet immediate tasks are few and far between: “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.” That means committing to doing the tasks you schedule. Being effective can’t happen if you keep kicking the can down the road.
The neither-important nor-urgent tasks in the ‘Eliminate’ quadrant are usually time-wasting activities and must be eliminated forthwith. They don’t move you towards achieving your goals.

De-prioritize Stuff You Shouldn’t Be Doing in the First Place

The Eisenhower Priority Matrix isn’t entirely ground-breaking. Still, it can help you recognize you can deliver yourself by knowing it’s okay not to complete them all, so long as you get the most vital ones done. The challenge lies in being able to determine what’s essential and what isn’t, as expounded tediously in Steven Covey’s First Things First (1994):

Urgent matters are those that require immediate action. These are the visible issues that pop up and demand your attention now. Often, urgent matters come with clear consequences for not completing these tasks. Urgent tasks are unavoidadable, but spending too much time putting out fires can produce a great deal of stress and could result in burnout.

Important matters, on the other hand, are those that contribute to long-term goals and life values. These items require planning and thoughtful action. When you focus on important matters you manage your time, energy, and attention rather than mindlessly expending these resources. What is important is subjective and depends on your own values and personal goals. No one else can define what is important for you.

The key to productivity is to be very selective in what you pick and execute your most important priorities. Be ready to delegate and be quick and not-to-perfection on as many things as possible. You really don’t need to give 110% on everything.

Idea for Impact: Use the Eisenhower Priority Matrix to Triage Your To-Do List

The Eisenhower method can be an indispensable weapon in your efficiency arsenal. Your life will never be the same when you internalize clarity of habits. Once you’ve been using the matrix for a while, you can realize a pattern of your own behavior. With some discipline, you can change your behaviors to ensure you’re spending more time on the ‘Schedule’ and ‘Do’ quadrants, improving your ability to plan your work.

Try taking a few minutes each day and analyze your task list. Are there things on there that you can delegate or eliminate? Are you genuinely focusing on the right tasks? It’s incredible how much more productive you can be with a bit of planning and forethought.

Why People are Afraid to Think

August 26, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth—more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible; thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. (Bertrand Russell, Why Men Fight: A Method of Abolishing the International Duel (1916,) pp. 178–179)

Laziness and inability usually coerce people to reject thinking. But, as Russell contends, fear is a non-obvious inhibitor of thought. Not just because meticulous reasoning is demanding but because thinking may occasion an undermining—even revaluation—of our long-held convictions about all sorts of matters—notably religion and ethics.

People reject thinking because we fear it may challenge our equilibrium—how we make sense of the world. We’ll be coerced to see the world anew. As I’ve emphasized previously, once a belief is added to our corpus of viewpoints, we indulge in “intellectual censorship.” We cling to our ideas rather than objectively reassessing and questioning them.

Idea for Impact: Life should alter you. Through conscientious thinking, your worldview can—and should—reflect that growth.

The Loss Aversion Mental Model: A Case Study on Why People Think Spirit is a Horrible Airline

August 11, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

When Spirit Airlines pivoted to competing on price in the late 2000s, it quickly gained a reputation not only for operational inefficiencies but also for its in-your-face, take-it-or-leave attitude towards customer service.

Where other airlines charged by-the-package fares for the flight experience, Spirit pared back service and introduced an a la carte pricing model. Charging for the “ancillaries”—i.e., everything optional, including water—allowed Spirit to keep ticket prices down and appeal to price-sensitive travelers willing to sacrifice the usual amenities for a lower ticket price.

In the ensuing years, the unconventionality of this business model did not go down well with customers. Much of the flying public’s frustration with Spirit had to do with Loss Aversion. That’s the notion that the emotional disappointment of a loss is more extreme than the joy of a comparable gain. If finding a cheaper fare on Spirit felt delightful, giving up some—or all—of the savings to purchase ancillaries and surrender the savings felt utterly miserable.

Passengers felt ripped off by these seemingly hidden fees, especially when the true cost of flying Spirit ended up greater than what the initial ticket price led them to believe.

Spirit became quickly convinced that there was a perception problem—its customers didn’t fully understand how its fares work. Particularly, first-time customers blindly presumed that Spirit Airlines works the same way as other airlines. In reality, there were no hidden or excessive fees, and passengers could only pay for what they need or want. In 2014, the airline introduced its “Spirit 101” campaign to educate customers and alter their perceptions. With time and the increased adaptation of the “Basic Fare” model and curtailed customer service by every other airline, passengers’ expectations have since been right-sized. Spirit Airlines has come a long way, and its customer service has improved vastly.

Further studies on loss aversion have shown that a cascade of successive fees is worse than the cumulative: i.e., three ancillary fees that add up to, say, $70, feel a lot worse than a single $70 fee. Appropriately, Spirit offers a “Bundle it Combo” package.

Evolution, Not Revolution

August 1, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Innovation often transpires from synthesizing existing ideas in new ways, as the following case study on the iPod will illuminate.

In some sense, the iPod wasn’t a breakthrough innovation at all. It emerged from Steve Jobs’s “digital hub” approach to integrating iMac software for playing, editing, and managing photos, music, and movies. According to Walter Isaacson’s masterful biography of Steve Jobs (2011,) when Apple designers learned that Toshiba had newly prototyped a tiny 1.8-inch hard drive that could hold five gigabytes of storage (that’s about a thousand songs,) they conjured up a digital music player. Apple found that existing gadgets were “big and clunky or small and useless” with “unbelievably awful” user interfaces.

Sony’s Walkman had previously proven the market potential of portable audio players, having sold 200 million units in the two decades before Apple conceived the iPod. Napster had offered digital audio file distribution for over five years. Finger-driven touchscreens were pioneered in the 1960s, and Citibank rolled out touchscreen ATMs in the 1980s. (Apple didn’t offer touchscreens until 2007 with the iPhone.) Hence, the iPod’s innovation was in bringing all these capabilities together in a way that was easier to use and relevant to the consumer. Dartmouth’s strategy professor Ron Adner writes in The Wide Lens: What Successful Innovators See That Others Miss (2013.)

Apple was three years late [behind Creative, SanDisk, Sony, and Samsung, who had previously launched portable music players]. As we’ll see again in the case of the iPhone, Jobs tended to be late for everything because he wanted everything to be ready for him. Reflecting on catching technology waves in 2008, he said, “Things happen fairly slowly, you know. They do. These waves of technology, you can see them way before they happen, and you just have to choose wisely which ones you’re going to surf. If you choose unwisely, then you can waste a lot of energy, but if you choose wisely, it actually unfolds fairly slowly. It takes years.” Jobs’s discipline paid off.

Idea for Impact: Innovation often builds on existing technological competencies or as a synthesis of smaller innovations.

Quantity is the Path to Quality

July 30, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Happiness is not how much time you spend doing what you love, but how little time you spend doing what you hate.

As in Charlie Munger’s recipe for success: “It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.” And “I know I’ll perform better if I run my nose in my own stupid mistakes.”

Idea for Impact: The road less stupid can keep you from silly errors, if not all errors.

Sometimes a Conflict is All About the Process

July 27, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

There’s a considerable difference between a “decision conflict” and a “process conflict,” and it’s necessary to disentangle the two.

A decision conflict is about a choice or another to be made. But a process conflict is about the approach, e.g., where making a choice has lacked rigorous deliberation (haste, a lack of participation from essential stakeholders, contempt for shared priorities, lack of attention to the tradeoffs, and so forth.) A sound decision has ensued from a meticulous-enough thought process, even if the decision emerges to be defective in the fullness of time.

Idea for Impact: Worry about bad decision processes. Make the “how” the anchor for your decision-making process. Improving the quality of decisions is developing better frameworks for making those decisions.

Stop Stigmatizing All Cultural ‘Appropriation’

July 21, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

From The Telegraph over the weekend: a Leeds-based “woke dance school,” the Northern School of Contemporary Dance, “drops ballet from auditions as it is ‘white’ and ‘elitist'” as it “reviews ballet art form as part of a diversity drive.”

Many other performance arts are rooted in other cultural traditions, so should we expect that white folk refrains from performing those because that would be cultural appropriation? Shun yoga, not wear cornrow, and drop taco nights?

Should everyone else avoid trains, cars, computers, and much else because they’re white European originations?

Should people not be allowed to wear clothing, cultivate hobbies, or pursue careers that aren’t reflective of the culture they were raised in?

Look, works of art incorporating racist clichés and caricatural images (such as in The Nutcracker) should be reassessed with a different consciousness. Appropriation is elastic and ill-defined. Not all cultural appropriation is harmful or exploitative, certainly not innocuous cultural appreciation—where elements of other cultures could be used to pay reverence and highlight the historic oppressions of those cultures. Appropriation is but offensive when what’s being appropriated brings problems to the people to who the cultural artifact belongs.

On embargoing ballet, let’s stop denunciations of white pride where it doesn’t exist before. Let’s not fuel resentment with our shrill accusations and ill-thought overreactions and contribute to the rise of white supremacy.

Idea for Impact: Raise cultural hackles only for a good cause, i.e., when there’s real offense intended. Don’t stigmatize valuable cultural interchange. Delimiting features of cultures is contradictory to our goal of creating a diverse, melting-pot society. E pluribus unum.

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Mental Models

Wondering what to read next?

Feedback-Influenced Design is a Key Point of Differentiation

Concept Testing at Every Stage of Development

Idea for Impact: Create Something People Want

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De-prioritize Stuff You Shouldn’t Be Doing in the First Place

Idea for Impact: Use the Eisenhower Priority Matrix to Triage Your To-Do List

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