The Business Sensei

Celebrate Progress

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers

One of the most important things you can do as a team is periodically celebrating progress. It is always more motivating to look at how far you’ve come rather than how far you have yet to go. Indeed, it’s more motivating to say, “we’re half done,” than to say, “There’s still half left to do.” The two statements may be mathematically equivalent, and IBM’s Watson, the Jeopardy playing computer, would probably find them identical. If you happen to be employing Watson, then it may not matter what you say. However, if you happen to be employing people, it matters.

In jujitsu practice, the students who always focus on how far off the black belt is tend to not finish the journey. Those who focus on how far they’ve come are the ones who keep coming back.
You don’t need to highlight individuals every time you do this; in fact, you shouldn’t. The goal is not to make anyone feel bad for not getting as much done as someone else; rather, it’s simply about sharing success. Feeling that the team is making progress helps boost everyone’s morale, increases team cohesion, and helps build trust.

Depending on your organizational culture, you can occasionally highlight individual accomplishments in much the way that some sports teams will highlight most valuable players. It’s important, though, to pay close attention to how people work and what they expect. At Atari, a new CEO tried to transform the highly collaborative, team-based culture into a more individual, competitive culture. He focused heavily on “engineer of the week,” and other such awards. However, engineers at Atari viewed game development as a collaborative process, where everyone worked together to produce a quality product. The focus on individual performance shattered the team structure, turning high performance teams back into struggling level one groups. Atari never recovered.

When you celebrate team successes, you build relationships, strengthen competence, and provide the trust necessary for greater levels of autonomy. Success builds on success just as failure feeds on failure. What you focus on is what you get.

Stephen Balzac is an expert on leadership and organizational development. A consultant, author, and professional speaker, he is president of 7 Steps Ahead, an organizational development firm focused on helping businesses get unstuck. Steve is the author of “The 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development,” published by McGraw-Hill, and a contributing author to volume one of “Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play.” Steve’s latest book, “Organizational Psychology for Managers,” is due out from Springer in late 2013. For more information, or to sign up for Steve’s monthly newsletter, visit www.7stepsahead.com. You can also contact Steve at 978-298-5189 or steve@7stepsahead.com.

The Game’s Afoot!

Remember Sherlock Holmes’s famous line: “Come Watson! The game’s afoot.”

While some have argued that Holmes was referring to a soccer match, in fact this line almost always preceded Holmes going forth and solving the mystery.

This time, though, Watson was the brilliant one.

The news of Watson, the IBM supercomputer, winning Jeopardy has been all over the web lately. I was lucky enough to attend an event at IBM in Littleton where they explained a bit about Watson and how it was developed, followed by the final Jeopardy show.

Yesterday, I received an email from someone arguing that Watson was, quite possibly, just a publicity stunt. After all, doesn’t a computer have an innate advantage in buzzing in? And what”s the big deal about a computer answering questions? After all, can’t Google do that?

Here’s my response (although since I’m quoting myself, I get to add all the things I wished I’d thought of when I originally responded 🙂 )
An interesting post on Watson, but your questions are easily answered… just use Google 🙂

Seriously, as impressive as Watson’s question answering was, that wasn’t what made it so successful. Let me address your other points first, though.

The trigger finger point: all human players develop heuristics for training themselves to buzz in as quickly as possible without getting locked out. Watson has its own algorithms, based on how much confidence it has in its answer. There were times when the human players beat Watson to the punch. However, just as a human player will try to keep the questions in an area where he has greater knowledge, which translates to an improved ability to respond quickly, Watson does the same. Just as humans respond more rapidly when we have higher confidence in our answers, so does Watson.

Watson vs. Google: try typing a typical Jeopardy question into Google: “A city whose first airport is named for a WWII hero and whose second for a famous battle from the same war.” What you’ll get is a discussion of how Watson answered that question (Toronto???). Google forces us to ask questions in a way the computer understands; Watson answers questions the way we naturally speak. Although probably oversimplified, Google does keyword matching ranked by popularity. Watson is attempting to do semantic matching — in other words, answer based on meaning. That’s more like what we do, although Watson doesn’t necessarily mimic how we do it.

The real secret to Watson’s success, though, was less about its ability to answer questions as its ability to gauge the confidence of its answers. Watson bets small amounts when it has low confidence and large amounts when it has high confidence, just like a person (or at least how a person might wish to act). However, Watson is considerably more able than most people to accurately assess the likelihood of its being right or wrong.

Watson is also able to calculate with a high degree of accuracy where Daily Doubles are likely to occur. Apparently, it’s a statistical calculation based on past games, and Watson can run that calculation very, very fast. Faster than any human. Given the previous discussion on confidence, we can see that this strategy gives Watson a chance to really clean up.

In short, as impressive as is Watson’s ability to understand English and understand puns (yes, it can do that!), the real secret to Watson’s success is that it knows how to win big when it’s right and cut its losses when it’s wrong.

Now that’s a lesson we might all benefit from!