Shifting Sands
Some things never change. Like death, taxes, and the old believing that the young are degenerates.
But when it comes to work–times are a changing. The labor market has gone from local to global, white-collar workers have gone from rise-and-drive to sleep-’til-8:59, and job-hopping has become a sign of savviness instead of a scarlet letter.
There has also been a heavily reported shift in generational attitudes towards work. Namely, that each subsequent generation sees work as less important than the previous generation. ‘Quiet quitting’ and ‘job-hopping’ are the latest buzzwords that acts as a lodestone for a variety of attitudes about work.
However, it is misleading to view changing attitudes about work as a recent phenomenon. Yes, the pandemic threw gas on a fire, but these beliefs were already smoldering for a long time. While the specific studies parroted by bloggers and news outlets are utter rubbish (see appendix), they are also likely not wrong. A more rigorous–but still flawed–meta-analysis of time-lag studies suggest that work is becoming less important to each subsequent generation and this has been going on for some time:
Mistrust and Misincentives
Why do people generally care less about work? Many reasons, but increased mistrust is not discussed enough.
People have made untrue statements since the dawn of mankind, however, technology–in particular the internet–has made it easier than ever to detect a falsehood. Whereas before a business executive could make uncontested claims like ‘we treat people like family’, ‘we pay our people the best’, ‘we are the market leader’, now one can verify the truth of these statements within minutes using resources like Glassdoor, levels.fyi, and analyst reports.
Now, those examples are deliberate lies and easy to detect, but far more interesting are the unwitting falsehoods that drive business decisions. Through consulting and direct employment I’ve worked with executives at ~10 different companies and here are a few unwitting falsehoods I’ve heard repeated as gospel:
Healthcare: our outcomes are the best (when arbitrarily excluding 80% of cases as ineligible)
Healthcare: we guarantee access in less than 2 days (to our call center, not an actual doctor)
Healthcare: we give people the tools to succeed on their own (without ever looking at relapse rates)
Dairy: quality is everything to us (when they have 2x as much of an ingredient as labeled)
Retail: our merchandise assortment is superior to competitors (when they actually just have more affluent customers)
Ticketing: we care about the fans (when their objective is to maximize revenue for venues and artists…I bet you can guess who this was)
In my experience, most people lie not because they are dishonest, but rather because they don’t know better–and why would they? Business can be incredibly nuanced and executives don’t have time to dig into the details. However, the problem is that those who have time to dig into the details have are not incentivized to share bad news–what’s the expected outcome of telling your boss that they’re wrong? At best you will fight an uphill battle to earn no monetary reward and a reputation as a ‘buzzkill’. There is a reason most employees only share truly controversial critiques via an anonymous app or when they are quitting (or prepared to be fired).
A solution? Chief Skeptic Officer
The more complex a business, the greater the need for a person whose job is explicitly to challenge the status quo. In terms of responsibilities, some major questions to continually investigate are:
- Is our business model sustainable? Are customers sticking with us? If not, why?
- Are customers actually satisfied? Or is response bias leading us astray?
- Is it time to pull the plug on a new venture?
- Do we actually have the skills to execute on something new?
- What are the opportunity costs of an acquisition? Are we going to be bogged down with integration for 5 years?
- Do we need to refresh our workforce strategy? Are we hiring the right skills? Are high-performers jumping ship? Are we firing enough poor-performers? Is this person still right for the job?
Questions like these are taboo in most organizations and even if a company is more open-minded, there is a big difference between allowing someone to ask the question and paying someone to answer it; it’s cool to not drink the kool-aid, but none dare kill a sacred cow.
This is undoubtedly a challenging role, but there are candidates well-suited for this type of work. A few qualities to look for:
- Independence: this person should be deeply familiar with the business, but independent enough to keep a more objective perspective. They must not be swayed by the need for external approval.
- Curiosity: this person should be deeply curious and able to examine a topic using a variety of perspectives. Those with a variety of interests outside of business are especially desirable.
- Analytical: this person should be deeply analytical and be able to use data to overcome resistance to unpopular ideas. While this person does not necessarily need to be hands-on-keyboard technical (can hire others for that), a working knowledge in statistics in necessary.
- Emotionally Intelligent: perhaps most important of all is that this person should be deeply compassionate and able to navigate the emotions of challenging cherished beliefs. This person will quickly find themselves alienated if they are not able to maintain the trust of their peers.
Empowering a Chief Skeptic Officer will undoubtedly increase the conflict within your company, however, conflict is a necessary ingredient for cathartic growth. Pressure-testing is an idea behind so many of the wonderful innovations of science (via experiments and hypothesis testing), but the truth of this idea was recognized by ancient elders as well:
As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.
Proverbs 27:17
For a company to reach their full potential they must listen to a skeptic.
Appendix
CSO vs CSO: Chief Skeptic Officer vs Chief Strategy Officer
The laws of business state their can only be one meaning per acronym. In my experience a Chief Strategy Officer is actually almost always a chief of staff or head of business operations so I think we can re-title most Chief Strategy Officers and actually decrease confusion.
While we are on the topic a Chief Skeptic Officer is different than a Chief Visionary Officer in that a CSO is more focused on the medium-term (2-3 years), whereas CSOs are typically tasked with thinking far enough into the future where their ideas have no relevance to reality.
Scientific literacy and the media
It’s often overwhelming to sift through the volume of information that exists so I get frustrated when the media chooses to propagate bad information instead of curating the good. Yes, bad and good can be relative, but they can be objective as well.
For example, the ‘research’ featured in the media is almost always either:
- Conjecture: one person’s opinion, sometimes from someone deeply thoughtful and intuitive, often from someone who has passable ‘credentials’ and a strong desire for publicity.
- Cross-sectional: data collected at only one point in time. There is nothing inherently wrong with comparing Millennials to Boomers, but the issue is that any differences are usually presented as generational differences when they are more likely age-driven differences.
These are sometimes defensible if nothing else exists (although ‘not knowing’ is usually more righteous), but in this case the gold standard ‘time-lag’ research does exist. Time-lag is when data is captured for multiple groups at multiple points in time. This actually allows us to say whether Boomers and Millennials have different attitudes when they were the same age.
Evaluating the validity of a study is difficult because of all the nuance (e.g. n-size, selection bias, etc.) and it should not be the job of a layperson to learn these skills and apply them to dense academic articles.
That said, while individuals in the media bear the brunt of responsibility to separate the good from the bad, it does not hurt for a layperson to improve their scientific literacy (print, podcast), or at the very minimum, increase their level of skepticism.