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Welcome to this week's edition of Workshift Weekly!
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It's funny how glorified displays of intelligence are the common sense principles we apply in our everyday lives but fail to see
What's that saying again? Oh… “nothing exists until or unless it is observed”.
In Today’s Edition
- Avoiding Unintended Consequences
- What It’s Like to Lead Older Employees
- These College Students Built a Software Used by 60% of US Colleges
- Moving from the Great Resignation to the “Big Stay”
Avoiding Unintended Consequences
You just won a lottery ticket to shop all you want from your favourite supermarket for 30 secs;
The reasonable thing to do would be to grab a cart first so you can fill it with as much as possible. However, if someone for whatever reason (probably the surge of adrenaline) fails to grab a basket first, hurries to pack all he can with his hands and loses a huge chunk of it on his way to the counter because his hands couldn't hold it all in place - I bet you'd be the first to say: “But that's just common sense!”
However, you and I tend to ignore common sense every day (I promise I'm not judging 🤭)
Let me explain;
In the mundane things we do daily, like waking up early, making your bed, having a healthy breakfast, getting work done on time, and taking needed breaks - we try to avoid unintended consequences like; arriving late to work and getting a query, eating well so you don't break down while taking on the day's tasks.
But when it comes to important management decisions, we tend to throw this common sense principle in the bin and end up with unintended consequences we could have easily avoided.
I'll explain this using a lesson from history:
At the end of the 19th century, Caribbean plantation owners were tired of their relentless war against field rats – the rodents were eating into their precious sugar cane crops.
Come 1872, a chap called W.B. Espaut had an original idea: why not bring over a few Indian mongooses – those unpretentious mammals known as enthusiastic rat hunters?
Espaut travelled to India, had some mongooses captured and brought them to Jamaica.
Proud of his achievement, the fellow even wrote a journal article, praising the mongoose as the best thing since sliced bread.
The problem – it soon turned out – was that the mongooses did not just kill rats; they killed birds, ate eggs, insects, useful reptiles, and even small deer fawns.
True, the Mongooses also hunted and killed lots of rats; but they did not kill them all. In fact, the rodents continued to multiply – and so did the Mongooses.
Worse, both rats and mongooses carry a disease called leptospirosis, which can be lethal to humans.
To cut a long story short, rather than getting rid of one pest, the hapless Hawaiians ended up with two. To this day, they still have to use poison and traps – only now they fight both rats and mongooses.
On the surface, the idea to bring the mongooses appeared to be a success with the rats being killed - 1ST ORDER THINKING.
But then other useful animals in the ecosystem were also being annihilated - 2ND ORDER EFFECTS.
This meant that the mongooses didn't only find rats to be a delicacy and preferred a rather diverse diet leaving the rats to multiply - 3RD ORDER EFFECTS
Not only were the rats multiplying but also the Mongooses - 4TH ORDER EFFECTS
And they harboured the zoonotic disease Leptospirosis, putting the humans in the population in danger - 5TH ORDER EFFECTS
While you might not have experience managing rat populations, parts of this story are likely familiar to most of us: the idea that problems are often more complex than they seem and that well-intentioned ‘solutions’ can have unintended consequences and can even make a problem worse.
An intelligent man and observer of human behaviour Professor Jay W. Forrester called this principle Systems thinking which is a problem-solving approach that invites us to treat every problem as a system, made up of elements and the relationships between them.
Understanding those relationships can help us to predict the effect of certain changes to the system, and to plan for desired effects.
Thinking in systems doesn’t guarantee the success of our solutions, but it allows us to anticipate consequences and make more strategic interventions in problem systems.
We are surrounded by numerous inventions of system thinkers from smartphones to the internet, satellites, alternative energy and even the possibility of life on the moon.
This principle is basically built on the question, "Then what?"
By questioning the possible outcomes of every decision, you uncover another order of effects.
In my opinion, every leader should be a systems thinker, carefully analyzing challenges from hiring, and onboarding to retention, reward, and sustainability and their possible solutions.
If you wanted to expand to an international market for example, and you are seeking to hire local talent; first-order thinking would be to put a job ad out and spend time and resources in search of talent with the suitable background and skills - which may be unyielding and wasteful in the long run.
Whereas, second-order thinking would find the right talent acquisition partner in the region with the right knowledge and skillset to help you increase your hiring efficiency so you could invest in your company's expansion efforts.
The systems thinking approach is used at the highest levels of power and leadership. Read this a couple of times over and make your notes on how this approach can offer solutions to current and future challenges in your company, and also in your life.
Rooting for you!
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P.S: I snipped some more resources on this topic I figured you could find useful:
- Second Order Thinking by Noah Pepper Now: Engineering and Product at @stripe. Earlier: Founder/CEO @luckysort (acq by Twitter).
- Systems Thinking in the Workplace by Corporate Finance Institute (CFI)
- First Principles Elon Musk on the Power of Thinking for Yourself
COMING UP
Counting down to Workshift 2.0!
Join us this June for the highly anticipated second edition of Workshift with CareerBuddy, where we will delve into the power of Employer Branding as a premium tool for attracting top candidates and making the right hires. Gain valuable insights and strategies to strengthen your organization's brand and enhance your ability to attract top talent.
P.S.: We are only admitting 100 participants and more than 50% of the seats are taken! So hurry now to register.
SPECIAL FEATURE
Quit Guessing Your Content Strategy
In a landscape dominated by generic data and subjective opinions, the foundations of most content strategies often fall short. However, MarketMuse’s pioneering AI revolutionizes the paradigm by meticulously scrutinizing every facet of your website. Using a comprehensive analysis, they deliver profound and personalized insights that transcend the limitations of traditional approaches.
CORPORATE CULTURE AND TEAMS
What It’s Like to Lead Older Employees
For the average African, respect is a big deal, and age and position are major determining factors of respect as well.
Even at the workplace, with all its official ambience, this still plays out. So, imagine what it would be like to lead older employees.
Corporate life offers a myriad of experiences, from being an employee to leading other employees, and in this article, five team leads talk about what’s it like to lead co-workers older than them.
Additional Resources:
Discover a wealth of valuable resources tailored for employers in our extensive blog library. Here are a few handpicked snippets just for you:
Access our Human Resource Guides
Access our Job Descriptions Directory
Access our Interview Questions Directory
AS SEEN ON TWITTER
These College Students Built a Software Used by 60% of US Colleges
Twitter has become a school with endless resources, every week I will be sharing useful tweets that will be beneficial to you as you continue to build amazing products. Click on the images to view the thread.
FROM THE LEADER’S LIBRARY
Lessons learned from the great resignation, as we usher in the ‘big stay’
After nearly two years of widespread job switching, turnover has eased and the great resignation is drawing to a close, giving way for a new era called the “big stay.”
MEME OF THE WEEK
AI TOOLS OF THE WEEK
AI Tools you should be using to make your work easier
Audio Read - Listen to articles, PDFs, emails, YouTube in your podcast player
Contents - Contents is the Generative AI platform to create impactful content
Caspa AI - Create & edit AI images for your brand
Eightify - Summaries for YT: 8 key ideas to decide if a video is worth watching
Chatfuel - AI-powered chatbot platform: elevate customer support and sales
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
All of us are watchers – of television, of time clocks, of traffic on the freeway – but few are observers. Everyone is looking, not many are seeing.”
- Peter M. Leschak
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Written by Oluwaseun Aladetoyinbo, Ayodeji Faleye
Edited by Oluwaseun Aladetoyinbo
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