Politics, CAPTCHAs, Distortions, and Meetings

Democratic Field is Closing

It looks like Cory Booker, Beto O’Rourke, Julian Castro, and Amy Klobuchar probably won’t surge and make a meaningful improvement in their campaigns. Empirically, their numbers are lower than most that have been able to make good strides. They aren’t taking advantage of an Iowa and New Hampshire opportunity to rise in the polls. If there is an opportunity for any of the candidates to rise, it’s applying special circumstances, rather than empirical evidence–like a special pleading logical fallacy. Andrew Yang is, however, polling and acting quit differently than any of the other lower-performing candidates.

[Silver, 2019]

The Top Democratic Candidates Cover the Five Corners

The top three to five candidates cover the five corners of the Democratic party: Party Loyalists, The Left, Millenials and Friends, Black voters, Hispanic voters. College educated voters tend to like Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Buttigieg; non-college others prefer Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. Older voters like Biden, and younger voters like Sanders and Warren. Biden is well liked by black voters. Hispanic voters don’t have an obvious first choice.

[Silver, 2019]

CAPTCHA

CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test, a design to distinguish humans from computers. By asking questions or creating challenges that are difficult to complete, computers can be kept from some resources online. There are text-based, image-based, and audio-based CAPTCHA.

[Octoparse, 2019]

Dealing with CAPTCHA

The best way to deal with CAPTCHA is to avoid it. Slow down scraping, and have bots act more human like. You can also integrate manual interventions or use machine learning tools to solve CAPTCHA challenges. Some libraries like Octoparse has these tools integrated.

[Octoparse, 2019]

Distortions Outlined

Filtering focuses on and magnifies the negative details, unable to see the positive.

Polarized thinking is an all or nothing perspective, using extremes with no middle ground.

Overgeneralization is coming to a conclusion based on a single incident or a single piece of evidence.

Jumping to conclusions assumes why another person is feeling or thinking in a particular way, possibly anticipating negative consequences and choosing not to engage in life.

Catastrophizing is expecting disaster, magnifying the importance of less-meaningful events.

Personalization treats everything as if it is a direct reaction to them, constantly comparing themselves with others.

Control fallacies can be found in beliefs that we are in complete control, or have zero control over our lives.

The fallacy of fairness assumes what is fair and develops resentment, anger, and hopelessness because things aren’t as they should be.

Blaming holds other people responsible for emotional pain.

Shoulds develop rules about how people should behave and develops anger, frustration, and resentment when it doesn’t work out that way.

Emotional reasoning assigns truth because of feelings, taking over all cognitive function.

Fallacy of change is the expectation that other people will change to make one happy.

Global labeling or mislabeling is an extreme form of overgeneralizing, using colored and emotionally loaded language to see people and events without any specific context.

Always being right overpowers reality and the feelings of others.

Heaven’s reward involves self denial and sacrifice, thinking there is a global force keeping score, and developing bitterness when it doesn’t turn out that way.

[Grohol, 2019]

Meetings are Important

Meetings are generally seen as failure, wasted time and effort, costing companies a lot of money. We have a mutual hate for meetings. All of us have endured bad meetings. Some of us have led bad meetings. Yet, meetings are important for getting things done.

When building a company, the most important tool for creating shared values is communication. Meetings are critical to communication. Bringing talented and diverse individuals together and expecting benefits from the effort requires getting people to talk, listen, and understand each other’s perspectives. High performance teams meet, share, and learn together. Ping pong, email, and shared docs don’t do enough.

[Sinofsky, 2018]

Problems with Meetings

There are a lot of distractions, from agendas, meeting preparation, tracking, issue lists, decision-making tools, templates, and other tools. The goal is to share, build, and decide on things.

Usually the only person that likes a meeting is the person that called it. Each of us will call for meetings that others won’t like.

Meetings don’t make it through their agendas.

Very few opinions change during the meeting.

[Sinofsky, 2018]

Tactical Response to Meetings

When people are distracted during meetings, reconsider the meeting.

If the people invited to a meeting don’t fit in the room, reconsider the meeting, not the room.

Presenting data may mean preparing to present dynamic data, not just static slides.

Giving the room two possible solutions, it’s common that a third solution will be discovered in the meeting.

Meetings are just steps along the way to improvement.

If an issue is contentious and its decision is forced, it will likely be revisited shortly.

Voting creates winning and losing sides on an issue. Rather, ask questions to understand other people’s views.

No process makes a meeting effective.

If people start banning all meetings, the pendulum will swing back to too many meetings.

If it’s difficult for people to meet with me, they probably won’t.

Meetings should not create work. Everyone has a backlog of work. Piling on is slowing down.

The worst thing for an engineer is reworking or rewriting something because of misunderstanding, poor explanations, new data, or someone changing their mind.

If you don’t know what to do, don’t call a meeting. Meandering towards a problem wastes people’s time. Better to formulate a problem and potential solutions by walking and talking.

A strong and collaborative culture can be built very well with meetings, so learn how to meet, even in an email, slack, or voice call culture.

[Sinofsky, 2018]

Maker Time

Maker time, as outlined by Paul Graham, is the most valuable time in a product effort. This is more true in an early stage technology company. However, engineers often miss the opportunity of a meeting in their pursuit of efficiency. Getting things done is important, getting the right things done is critical. We do the right things by listening, talking, and discussing. These are not soft skills, because there’s no other way to focus–this is crucial.

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[Sinofsky, 2018]

Allow Discussion

Trying to make meetings efficient, goal-oriented, and conclusive leads to shutting down the discussion, getting people to think what they will say next rather than listen, and prevents collaboration.

Meetings are practice sessions. By working together in meetings, we know how people react, what they can do to assist, and what will likely come of our decisions and efforts. Since nobody is above practice, nobody is above meetings.

After the seed stage, failing to communicate and collaborate leads to inefficiencies and rework. People hate this. People debate a long time rather than spend the little time to do rework. Everyone at every level in a company is a maker of something, so protect everyone’s ability to make.

[Sinofsky, 2018]

Types of Meetings

A stand-up is about cultural and operational workflow. A full-company stand-up is not a meeting, but a chance for announcements.

Status meetings are for updates and are difficult to keep interesting.

Team organization meetings include 1:1 meetings, skip level meetings, team meetings, and e-staff meetings. Team organization meetings make a company run, but are most often skipped or rescheduled.

Workgroups are important because they don’t include the manager–they are for collaboration.

Proposal introductions are about getting people information about where things might go.

Approving decisions meetings are to get stakeholders into agreement. Learning and exploring meetings are for diagnosing problems, learning how things work, ideally sharing the impact of this information.

Process and procedure meetings outline a process, but often fail because either things aren’t well thought through or because change is difficult and people are resisting it.

Escalation meetings occur when people can’t agree and take it to a higher level–meetings about tradeoffs and roles.

An “ask” meeting is about enrolling people to do the next step.

Introduction meetings are to get people thinking together.

Training and development meetings are about training specific skills.

Kickoff meetings and offsite meetings are about building momentum, a good opportunity to liven things up.

Crisis meetings communicate a critical concern, working together in the worst of times.

[Sinofsky, 2018]

When Meetings Fail

When meetings fail, they fail for several reasons.

Sometimes people fail to hear from everyone present. Sometimes there is a lot of talking and little listening. Sometimes people read data off slides. Sometimes fake data is shared–from the presenter or attendants–and people don’t know what’s going on.

Whiteboards can allow people to take over the conversation. When meeting notes are inaccurate or biased, it adds a lot of tension. Surprises in a group setting can be the worst way to share bad news. If someone hijacks the meeting, everyone feels their time has been wasted.

Going around the table too slowly can waste a lot of time.

If people don’t know whether they can share what they learned in a meeting, things can go very wrong.

When the discussion goes off topic, people need to either acknowledge that the new direction is important or get back on track.

When the boss holds court, everyone feels they are waiting to be called on, nobody knows the purpose of the meeting, or why information is being sought. If a hidden agenda is present in a meeting, people take sides and get political.

Unprepared participants waste time.

Excluding some functional areas often leads to the outcome failing to stick. When people are mismatched, it gets awkward fast.

If people polarize their perspectives, it takes a lot of work to start working together again. Voting polarizes people. If people are trying to override prior decisions by escalating the meeting, listen and clearly don’t decide, then meet with those effected, and offer the full view to everyone, working together towards consensus.

If a meeting is held to make a choice, but information is missing, get that settled beforehand, such as deciding price before determining features of a product.

If someone thinks the meeting is a performance review, they won’t take chances, or they will take credit for others’ work.

When inappropriate feedback is given, take a break and have a direct conversation with the person creating concerns. When one person is managed in front of the group, it breaks trust–everyone has to do things they don’t agree with, but that doesn’t have to be pushed in a public forum.

When someone uses a presumptive close, they prematurely cut off discussion. If a conversation ends with an agreement to disagree, everyone is missing out on learning and working together.

[Sinofsky, 2018]

Meetings Build Culture

If a meeting was only to convey information, then it could be done with an email or Slack. However, meetings build culture, express values, and give companies form. Because people learn, create, and decide differently, and because a company is more than the sum of efforts of individuals, people need to come together in ways that work for everyone. Meetings have to get work done. Meeting are for collaboration. Collaboration comes from communication. So, a meeting should establish shared goals, agreed schedules, consistent participation, and predictable processes. As a bonus, meetings that start and end on time and are scheduled carefully support the team as well.

Meetings for team building, marketing, or selling a product are valuable too. It’s practice for the company. Knowing what people think, how they think, allows us to work at a higher performance level. Real work is not done by one person, execution requires a team.

[Sinofsky, 2018]

Some More Effective Meetings

Some meetings are more productive than others. 1:1 meetings are critical, and 1 hour a week works, even in startups. Skip level meetings allow companies to scale. Without meetings is about execution orientation. All-hands or full-team meetings create context for goals and purpose. Ad hoc chats, or managing by walking around, are effective for as much as 60% of the time.

[Sinofsky, 2018]

References

Grohol, J. M., & read, P. D. L. updated: 24 J. 2019~ 7 min. (2016, May 17). 15 Common Cognitive Distortions. Retrieved September 9, 2019, from Psych Central website: https://psychcentral.com/lib/15-common-cognitive-distortions/

Silver, N. (2019, September 10). If You’re Polling In The Low Single Digits, You’re Probably Toast. Retrieved September 10, 2019, from FiveThirtyEight website: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/if-youre-polling-in-the-low-single-digits-youre-probably-toast/

Sinofsky, S. (2018, May 8). Reaching Peak Meeting Efficiency. Retrieved September 10, 2019, from Medium website: https://medium.learningbyshipping.com/reaching-peak-meeting-efficiency-f8e47c93317a