According to research from McKinsey, a community marketing strategy is the method of choice for new startups. I’m not surprised by this at all after spending the past year deeply involved in conversations with Taylor Harrington as she built the thriving community at Groove, and I began working with Sam Lee on building a thriving community at IndeCollective.
Startups are beginning to move on from treating people like data points, building a funnel, and dumping massive amounts of dollars into ad spend. They’re focusing on speaking to people as part of a united community. Turning followers into members, and members into advocates.
Check out this Youtube Video of Social Media Examiner for some fascinating insight into the the Future of Community Based Marketing
Community-Based Marketing: The Future of Business
Fish Oil Pills and Migranes… Hear Me Out…
I thought this study was super interesting. Here’s the TLDR:
- Omega-3 is present in fish oil / krill oil supplements.
- Traditionally, these supplements are looked at for joint and cardiac health
- This study is preliminary evidence that fish oil pills can actually decrease the amount of chronic headaches you get per month
In conclusion, higher dietary intakes of EPA and DHA were associated with lower prevalence of headache supporting the hypothesis that omega-3 PUFAs may prevent or reduce headache.
Check out the full abstract here: https://www.plefa.com/article/S0952-3278(18)30072-3/fulltext
How to Stop Headaches Using Science-Based Approaches | Huberman Lab Podcast
Underrated Things to Be Grateful For
I found this website through another newsletter I subscribe to this week, and I found it super interesting. It essentially outlines 30 Underrated Things to be Thankful for. Honestly, I agree with some, have trouble understanding others, but I found all of them thought provoking.
Here’s the first one:
That our atmosphere has low enough pressure and levels of deuterium that nuclear fission in air doesn’t cause hydrogen atoms to fuse into helium, meaning that the first nuclear bomb test in 1945 didn’t in fact ignite the atmosphere and engulf the planet in flames, which was still a bit of an open question when it happened.
Explore here: https://dynomight.net/thanks/
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Intuition often gets a bad rap in business decision-making. Search for “gut-feel business intelligence” in Google, and you’ll find articles that disparage intuition and champion rational analysis as the more effective strategy.
Clearly, the negative attitude towards intuition plays to the self-serving interests of vendors that sell analytics software. And sometimes analytics software really is superior to gut feel. But recently, there’s been a resurgence of interest in intuition and the fact that it can sometimes be an appropriate strategy—as highlighted in the following books and others:
In Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman shines a spotlight on the two different systems of thought and the advantages of each
Gary Klein, in Streetlights and Shadows, makes a case for blending intuition and analysis to capture the best of both worlds
In How We Decide, Jonah Lehrer recounts how real-world decisions rely on a mix of feelings and reason
Books like these and related articles often refer to seminal research first published two decades ago. What started as a clever study to measure decision-making strategies in individuals evolved into a second study with even deeper implications for intuition in business.
The Iowa Gambling Task—Original Version
In 1994, Iowa-based neuroscientist Antonio Damasio and his team of researchers published their first paper describing a “novel task which simulates real-life decision-making in the way it factors uncertainty of premises and outcomes, as well as reward and punishment.”
In the method, test subjects were given a “loan” of $2,000 in fake U.S. bills and asked to play a game with four decks of cards. The objective: maximize profit on the loan.
They could select one card at a time from any of the four decks in return for a sum of money. Sometimes, the subjects would also have to pay a penalty that varied in size. They weren’t told in advance how long the game would last, but it always ran until 100 cards had been selected. Unknown to the subjects, the four decks were rigged:
Decks A and B always paid out $100 per card but had an average penalty of $125 per card
Decks C and D always paid out $50 per card but had an average penalty of $25 per card
By counting the number of selections subjects made from each deck, the study measured how quickly they learned that decks A and B were bad—because they had a higher penalty relative to their payout—and should be avoided. Not surprisingly, the researchers found that most subjects picked far fewer cards from decks A and B in the last 50 selections than they did in the first 50.
The Iowa Gambling Task—Hunchified Version
In 1997, Damasio and his team kicked things up a notch in a new study. Could they gauge when a person’s emotional response to the bad deck of cards actually began?
To do this, they ran the same gambling task as before, but this time hooked up electrodes to the hands of the subjects. The electrodes were there to measure skin conductance and help quantify the emotional reaction to a stimulus.
In the study’s widely cited results, Damasio’s team identified several stages of cognition:
The pre-hunch stage, roughly between the 10th and 50th cards, when subjects didn’t suspect that there might be a bad deck
The hunch stage, between approximately cards 50 and 80, when they “reported ‘liking’ or ‘disliking’ certain decks…but were not sure of their answers”
The conceptual stage, after about the 80th card, when subjects could accurately articulate their task and knew for certain which were the good and bad decks
What’s interesting, though, was what the electrodes showed. In the pre-hunch period, just before a subject selected a card from a bad deck, the electrodes measured a significantly higher emotional response. In other words, their emotions flagged the deck as bad even before they began to consciously suspect something was amiss.
Even more surprising was that during the pre-hunch period, subjects also selected fewer cards from decks A and B. It’s as if their gut was subconsciously telling them to avoid the bad decks, despite the fact they had no conscious knowledge that their card-selection strategy was changing.
Lessons for Business
The original goal of Damasio’s studies was to compare control subjects with others who had damage to their prefrontal cortex and see how their responses differed. But his results can also be instructive in a business context—as lessons for how to improve decision making.
- Build Quick Feedback into Your Processes
Damasio and his team created a system with immediate feedback. When a subject selected a card, he’d win money or pay a penalty. He didn’t have to wait until the next day, week, or quarter to link cause and effect. It’s a no-brainer to extend that lesson to your organization—the faster you report the results of your actions, the better.
- Use Data to Train Your Hunches
Once you have a system that provides immediate and frequent feedback, use it to develop your intuition. Whether it’s sales targets, marketing numbers, or production metrics, if you can accurately link your action to an emotional response (triggered, perhaps, simply by viewing positive or negative data), you may start making better decisions even before you can verbalize your hunches. At the very least, you’ll have a head start on others who insist on slower, traditional decision-making strategies.
Broader Recommendations
Eugene Sadler-Smith, a U.K.-based researcher on organizational behavior, goes even further in connecting Damasio’s results and scores of related studies to explicit lessons for executives. In his paper, The Intuitive Executive, he suggests several ways to harness and build intuition in a business setting.
- Open Your Decision-Making Closet
The key, says Sadler-Smith, is to admit that intuition is “automatic and involuntary,” especially if your natural tendency is to suppress your gut feelings before you’ve had a chance to vet them. In truth, experienced leaders often admit they prefer intuition, but if intuition is suppressed, it may stop working. No one learns if executives hide their intuitions.
- Ask for Constructive Feedback
Build an environment that encourages constructive criticism. Find someone “to give honest, accurate, and constructive feedback on [your] behaviors, attitudes, and performance.” If you surround yourself with staff who don’t challenge your decisions, you’ll learn the wrong lessons and hamper the ability to refine your intuition accurately.
- Seek Out a Devil’s Advocate
Don’t just ask for general feedback—actively seek out someone who can “raise objections to favored choices, challenge underlying assumptions, and point out alternatives.” This process can expose weaknesses in your intuition and help make it stronger in the long run.
A Magic Bullet?
Is there a single magic bullet—one tool or process—that alone will help you grow your organization’s intuitive strengths? Of course not, but by changing your attitudes about intuition—and coupling them with tools for fast analysis and an environment that supports collaboration and feedback—you’ll be on the right track.
