Enabling productivity a practitioner's guide
An observation and response to an interesting paper on equality, advice and the productivity gap from Elias Bouacida, Renaud Foucart and Maya Jalloul identifying that access to expert advice did not significantly reduce the gap in performance between lower and higher-ability chess players [0].
As someone who created incentive campaigns at Motivforce to effect a lasting change in behaviour at organisations, there are a number of issues that explain this behaviour and I offer insights into how this issue has been successfully addressed in the past.
Observation
Renaud Foucart summarises it well:
We’re all getting access to better quality advice in our jobs. In theory, this should lead to lower inequality, as the least productive workers benefit from high quality advice the most. Our experiment with chess players shows it is not necessarily true…
This is both unremarkable and reassuring to many of those who employ cheaper workers.
There are two types of people. Okay it's a spectrum, but when we enter the world of work there is a business imperative to nudge behaviour into one of creativity or conformity leading to a concentration at both ends of the spectrum, heavily weighted to conformity.
How often have you heard the phrase "Let me worry about that, you carry on with your work!"
Many businesses run on paper thin margins so it's essential their workers perform at maximum efficiency and don't get distracted. They are encouraged to work hard and often discouraged from thinking outside the box, if they do come up with ideas it's rare for them to be rewarded fairly if at all. It's almost inevitable those with exceptional abilities will find more useful and supportive organisations to work for, leaving a competent and compliant core to carry out those repetitive tasks. A business sells a product or service so any deviation might either not deliver the product as sold or take longer than expected impacting profits. This environment and conditioning inevitably leads to the observed behaviour.
R&D - Looking for new markets
Bees and their Waggle Dance is a key case study by Rory Sutherland[1] on the essential requirement to constantly research new markets. About 20% of bees don't follow the Waggle Dance and instead search for new opportunities. As nature is ruthless, this is an essential function they perform without which hives would not be sustainable.
Organisations tend to either innovate internally with designated departments or outsource to consultants. There are plenty of alternatives such as industrial espionage and nobbling competition. Spectrum of choices from legal to unethical and illegal.
Change is hard, often really hard. Not because it's particularly difficult, but because having found something that works, any change is disruptive and involves risk. There are organisations in continual flux, experimenting and improving their products and services, but these tend to be less common.
Continuing the bee analogy, there is a well known saying in beekeeping that in the summer you should move a colony less than 3 feet, or more than 3 miles and within reason this works well[2]. It's the same for learning new singing voices, or learning a new skill; you need to break conformity with a current skill by doing absurd extremes before settling on a new normal.
There are many similarities between industries, I remember a new CEO of an airline being questioned about his lack of experience in the industry, his reply was clear, he was selling space exactly as he had been doing in previous roles for many years; from memory he was successful.
Enabling change
There is enough information above and in general circulation to enable change in any organisation so why is it not happening more often?
The reality is that there is always a flux in the continuum of continuity and change. Banking has transformed out of all recognition, we once needed to visit a branch to cash a cheque, now we wave a piece of plastic. Retail was once personal counter service, now we checkout goods ourselves with a range of products that range from traditional fare to the latest sourdough, product development is big busiess. We once had three TV channels, now we have hundreds with Netflix, YouTube and many others in the mix, blurring the distinction between watching TV in a living room, a film in a cinema, to watching and engaging with anything anywhere.
When working at Deloitte I saw the value of ideas and how much value could be created, alas consultancies such as McKinsey & Company and the Boston Consulting Group are often commissioned to reduce costs rather than creating value. Silicon Valley is the world's main source of creating and delivering innovation, for example Uber has increased choice and reduced prices and is continuing to innovate and consume transport.
In Britain we have had a few decades of austerity and that has influenced organisational behaviour. There is more incentive to extract value than create it.
There are many ways to innovate and increase value. At Motivforce the play-book was identify the best opportunities to align staff with the firm's outcomes then create a campaign to deliver it using various incentives. The average productivity uplift was about seventeen percent. The techniques, whilst numerous, were essentially communicate and nudge behaviour, reassurance coming from group alignment and targeted incentives, and reinforcing it with continued incentives over a period of three to six months. Any less and it would have been a sugar rush - easily forgotten. See moving bee colonies above.
The hardest part, and where the initiative needs to start, is always with the founders, owners or board of directors recognising the need for change. Looking for a consultant? There are many excellent ones, many good ones that might not be the best value for your organisation - domain expertise is like Darjeeling tea, there's far more sold than grown, and sadly more than a few charlatans. Mix in fads and the latest craze and you can see it's often less risky to maintain stability. Judgement calls may be necessary but they're often tough and expensive and there's no consumer law to protect businesses, it's very much caveat emptor.
Strategic change rarely happens without careful planning and buy in from those who hold the purse strings as well as those carrying out the work. Benefits often fail to materialise as the tasks are neither obvious nor intuitive. Nudging demonstrably works as part of a carefully planned campaign, that many think it doesn't sadly demonstrates knowing what makes an effective campaign is a rare skill.
Ebb and flow used to be a useful check ensuring individuals and organisations were on their toes, keeping up to date, adapting and always looking for opportunities.
With global turmoil of wars and global warming, never ending need to chase diminishing resources and inevitable errors of judgement, these ebbs and flows are increasingly shocks too large to be accommodated without eroding returns necessary for sustainability. From the Great Slump of 1430-1490 to the early 1990s recessions[3] it's a tough call whether to let good businesses fail, or after the 2008 Great Recession for Gordon Brown to create stability by abolishing Boom and Bust[4] keeping mediocre businesses afloat encouraging stagnation leading to continuing decline. Either has its merits and pitfalls.
Remember the Waggle Dance[5]? Twenty percent might be high for your business, but nature is spot on that there needs to be a constant pipeline of new sources of revenue if an organisation is going to thrive and grow. Evolving products and skills is essential, bees know that to survive they need a constant source of nectar, R&D is an essential part of that toolkit and retraining lower-ability / skilled workers is an essential part of the mix.
Notes
[0] Elias Bouacida, Renaud Foucart, Maya Jalloul. When Expert Advice Fails to Reduce the Productivity Gap: Experimental Evidence from Chess Players. 2024. https://shs.hal.science/halshs-04453028v1/document
A research study on chess players found that access to expert advice did not significantly reduce the gap in performance between lower and higher-ability players. Despite the potential for high-quality advice to act as a "great equalizer," lower-ability players often stuck with their initial evaluations and missed out on the potential benefits. This suggests a strong preference for adhering to one's own ideas, even when presented with better alternatives.
The study, conducted as a lab-in-the-field experiment during chess tournaments in Lebanon, involved players evaluating chess positions and then revising their evaluations after receiving advice from a higher or lower-ability player according to a paper by Bouacida, Foucart, and Jalloul. The results showed that lower-ability players, despite receiving accurate advice 75% of the time from an International Master, often disregarded it, leading to a higher premium for ignoring good advice compared to their more skilled counterparts.
This finding has implications beyond chess, suggesting that individuals may be resistant to changing their initial assessments, even when presented with strong evidence to the contrary. The study highlights a potential limitation of advice-giving in various contexts, particularly when dealing with individuals who may be less receptive to feedback or new information.
[1] Rory Sutherland - Permission to fail: why maverick bees can teach us all a valuable lesson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4t-LY3q6wU
[2] Moving bees by Roger Patterson
http://www.dave-cushman.net/bee/movingbees.html
[3] List of recessions in the United Kingdom
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_United_Kingdom
[4] Boom and Bust: The Politics and Legacy of Gordon Brown by
Simon Lee https://www.waterstones.com/book/boom-and-bust/simon-lee/9781851686643
[5] Waggle Dance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waggle_dance