From: Moore, Danny
To: Management Team
Date: 12 July 2021 at 12:35 pm
Hey All,
I’d drafted five notes as potential topics for this week’s MEMO but none really resonated with the biggest issues that came up in conversation last week. So for the sixth…
No nice anecdote here, but one key topic I’ve always had a keen interest in is IQ / organisational intelligence, in particular as through various iterations we’ve always aimed for high functioning teams, so its useful to know the type of people and attributes that come together to create high functioning teams. We’ve all heard anecdotes like “As hire As and Bs hire Cs”.. but reality and implementing a team building strategy is a bit more complex.
The aspect of IQ in its purest sense that always confused me (read into this as you will) is that I always scored really, really, really badly in IQ tests, like the bottom 20-30%. One test I did while at Uni suggested I was special needs. Meanwhile my best friend through school and uni was not only in the top1% per Mensa, he was also a representative snooker player, and highly competitive, but I could toy with him by beating him in exams by 1% or 2% at will over many years. Drove him bananas. My translation was that I wasn’t quite as challenged as the test results suggested.
Interestingly, given IQ tests have been around for a long time there is quite a bit of research on the subject, in particular how test results translate to long term performance in life. Summarising, there seems to be:
I’ll skim over the first because your reaction will probably boil down to whether or not you believe in the power of IQ tests. My personal leaning on the issue is pretty clear, as are my biases.
Some of the research on the cardio fitness side knocked me for six.
More by coincidence that design I did a lot of running in the months before my GCSEs and A-Levels, and the smartest person I knew going up went on to row competitively, so the suggestion that there might be a link didn’t come as a shock. Also, anyone who have ever trained dogs knows that their all round curiosity and joy of life increases as they get fit. Take the same dog after a year with no exercise and he’ll lie lethargic in the corner all day moping.
What was shocking to me was a study showing that walking speed for kids aged 5 had strong correlation between a whole range of health and success markers in a study group 45 years later at age 50. This doesn’t necessarily show cause and effect, but one inference is that there is potentially a lot of long term upside to getting young children out for a walk every day.
The link between long term success and curiosity makes perfect sense on the face of it. Folks that are always poking around and learning will tend to learn a lot more, get better at learning and see all sorts of other compound effects in the long term.
The big one though seems to be “growth mindset”.. which to translates to the person’s level of belief that they can learn and improve. It suggests that people who succeed in the long term tend to have an unwavering belief that they can learn new things, that practice over the coming weeks, months and years will see them master a skill where they flop today, that every loss is a valuable learning opportunity, etc. Their abilities in a certain area weren’t fixed at birth.
So, how do we think about all this in the context of the business and building the Options team?
I only came across the research linking cardio health to long term success recently. However, twenty years ago in previous lives we twigged pretty quickly that kids with a solid sporting background tended to bring a certain resilience to areas like front office IT support which can be brutally high pressure environments. We hired a lot of athletes more through luck than any explicit strategy. We’ve also had key health and fitness focal events in the annual calendar going right back to 2005. The annual marathon relay challenges or this year’s hiking challenges. I actually did the Belfast marathon relay for charity with my friends most years since the mid 1990s.
On the “curiosity” side we’ve always jumped on the opportunity to hire engineers who tinkered in the lab they’d built in their garage and clearly put in a lot of effort to keep abreast of developments in technology and experiment with all the new things. Most top tier engineers or software developers read widely, experiment, tinker and have strong opinions based on the outcomes of that experimentation.
Growth mindset is a bit trickier. I’ve only came across the term in the last few years so speaking personally am only just beginning to figure out how to harness it in the business and help team members morph their thinking to harness the phenomena.
My current thinking is that the best indicator for growth mindset is the “take it on the chin test”.. or to put it another way how well the person handles it when you as the manager points out they’re being bit of a dope. Where people get really defensive and shut down, or even take offence about matter-of-fact feedback, well, lets just say that any learning or growth from the experience is going to be a challenge. Anecdotally in situations where the broader team needs to realign their thinking the folks who get most defensive seem to be the folks most likely to sabotage broader change initiatives. Tricky.
Business practices get “cast in stone” because “that is the way we’ve always done it”. Our last management checkpoint pre-Covid was built around research by Jim Collins suggesting technology companies who frequently used the phrase “not our model” were the most likely to go bust. Standing still isn’t a great idea in a rapidly evolving business and technology landscape.
At the other end of the spectrum there are people who routinely respond with “yeah, that seems like a fair comment”. They stop for a moment, reflect, then jump straight into the new pattern, or from time to time come back with a well worked analysis to show that I (the manager) was in fact the person being the dope.
Hope this useful… 🙂
Cheers,
Danny