Most workplaces are optimized for efficiency, not emotional truth

One piece of advice for you this week, from the Executive Director of Case Research at Harvard, Carin-Isabel Knoop: Bring your emotions to work.

In an essay about the unspoken feelings many of us carry into our jobs (and throughout our lives), Isabel-Knoop asks: Is there something you're carrying alone that you wish others understood? She encourages leaders to not just check in on the state of their businesses, but on the "emotional pulse" of their teams, because — and this feels very true to me — most workplaces are optimized for efficiency, not for emotional truth. (When was the last time you left a meeting feeling like some “emotional truth” had been revealed? I can remember a few meetings that felt like that, but they're rare—and transformative, when they do happen.)

How would you build a workplace that's emotionally true? A few of Isabel-Knoop’s thought starters...

• What if we measured how safe people feel to say "I'm not okay"?
• Do you feel proud of who you are here — not just what you do?
• How many trusted relationships do you feel that you have at work? Do you have someone here you can trust when things are hard?
• How often do you feel that someone listens to you without interrupting?

Last year, we published an issue of this newsletter on bringing your "whole self" to work — and we pushed back on the idea a bit, arguing that, sure, bringing your whole self is fine... but what you really want is to bring your best self to work. Many people equate their "best selves" with emotionless automatons, but that doesn't have to be true. As executive coach Melody Wilding writes, your emotions themselves, especially at work, are less important than your self-awareness about them. "If you take ownership of your feelings and reactions, it conveys strength and confidence that other people will respect."

Source: Harris Sockel

https://blog.medium.com/most-workplaces-are-optimized-for-efficiency-not-emotional-truth-809d082b7801

How “circles of trust” explain the political divide

Last month, Nichola Raihani — British psychologist and author of The Social Instinct, a book about the history of human cooperation — published a fascinating story on Medium. It made me think differently about why (in the U.S., at least) we’re so divided politically.

A Gallup poll released in January reveals that Republicans’ and Democrats’ ideologies have grown more extreme in the last 30 years. Even if you compare polls from the last 2–3 years, the number of people who label themselves “very conservative” or “very liberal” is increasing.

Raihani sees political division through a specific lens: circles of trust. We mentioned this briefly in issue #261, but essentially, political differences (in Raihani’s view) come down to how we envision our obligations to people who are not close family or friends. She cites a behavioral study which found that political conservatives “profess greater love for their family, but less love for humanity as a whole (with political liberals showing the opposite pattern).” Conservatives’ circles of trust are smaller (family + township come first); liberals’ circles of trust are larger (love for humanity writ large). By extension, conservatives trust institutions less than liberals, because institutions (e.g. banks, schools, governments) are basically manifestations of care for people beyond your core family/friend group.

For an institution to exist, its users must have a pretty wide circle of trust.

More interestingly, our circles of trust expand and contract over time. If we perceive our institutions as untrustworthy, our circles of trust shrink; if our institutions serve us well, they expand. Raihani concludes: “Our moral boundaries are, therefore, determined as much by the society that we live in as they are by our own personal values and beliefs.”

Source: Harris Sockel

https://blog.medium.com/how-circles-of-trust-explain-the-political-divide-d51a058a16ac

ChatGPT’s favorite words & punctuation

Following up on last week’s issue re: two years of ChatGPT, I’ve been thinking about something. How do you know, on a word or sentence level, when someone’s used it? What are the tells? What separates “this is kinda formulaic writing” from “this is definitely AI”?

As you may remember from a previous newsletter, GPT loves to “delve.” Its preference for overly formal, vaguely British language is a well-documented result of being trained by workers in Nigeria, where “delve” is used in a business context far more than in the U.S. or anywhere else. A few more tells, via Jordan Gibbs who analyzed 1 million words from the machine and published his results on Medium:

• Tirelessly
• Cannot
• Reimagined
• Intertwine
• Intricate
• Tapestry
• Expanse
• Kaleidoscopic

A more recent analysis corroborates these findings, and adds a few more words. Pivotal. Vital. Comprehensive. ChatGPT also imitates certain syntax patterns common among smart-sounding writing, like em dashes and colons in titles.

There’s a deeper pattern I’ve noticed, though: ChatGPT can’t write well in first-person. By “well” I don’t just mean clearly. I mean the type of first-person writing where you feel like there’s a real human behind the words. (This is a great example of writing that felt 100% human to me.) One way humans do that — show other people we’re human, not automatons — is by telling jokes, but ChatGPT kind of fails at being funny. I mean, it’s fine at dad jokes (one-liners, puns, predictable humor) but it’s terrible at a type of humor that is uniquely human: subtext. Humor that says more than what words alone convey. An example: Sarah Cooper’s 10 tricks to appear smart in meetings, which communicates nuanced subtext about corporate conformity.

Journalist Will Lockett writes: “As ChatGPT doesn’t actually know what it is writing, it can’t have the self-aware, helicopter view of writing needed to create great subtext.” ChatGPT might be able to riff on a theme, but it doesn’t have the societal and self-awareness to come up with those themes in the first place.

Source: Harris Sockel

https://medium.com/blog/chatgpts-favorite-words-punctuation-fca042bb6bea

How Jaguar’s logo lost its roar

 

Jaguar just got rid of the jaguar. I saw the rebrand and was reminded of Facebook’s 2019 logo (before it became Meta) — both feel cold and robotic, as if these companies are trying to become Eye of Sauron-style Tech Giants instead of what they actually are. Here’s Jaguar’s before and after:

When you see a rebrand this drastic, it’s (sometimes) a cry for help. Jaguar is an 89-year-old brand whose sales have dropped 80% since 2017. It’s too uncool to compete with Bentley, too retro to rival Tesla. After years of declining relevance, Jaguar is suspending new car sales for a year before it reincarnates as an electric-only car manufacturer. It’s a brave strategy: Instead of incrementally improving their product, they’re going all-in on a vision they believe will save them long-term.

That’s why there’s no car in the ad.

Marketing vet Madelaine Lucy Hanson thinks the rebrand will alienate Jaguar’s core customer base: conservative men. Brand designer Aakansha Raj feels underwhelmed; now Jaguar looks the same as everyone else. And it’s true — so many brands have sanded down their edges over the last decade. Why is everything… bland?

https://fluxbranding.com/the-rise-of-blanding/

One reason: Simpler shapes play better across today’s screens — especially on an internet where low-resolution images travel widely.

Still, if you want to stand out, maybe add some detail? In the words of design leader Himanshu Bharadwaj, “the decision to ditch the iconic leaping cat feels like swapping a timeless tuxedo for a tech startup hoodie. It whispers ‘relevance’ but risks losing the roar of rebellion.”

Source: Harris Sockel

https://medium.com/blog/how-jaguars-logo-lost-its-roar-83bf42475bcb

3 tips for your work week

Three doses of practical wisdom for your week:

• The main purpose of a meeting isn’t whatever you’re talking about — it’s something called narrative alignment, or helping everyone on your team think of themselves as part of the same story. A lot of that alignment happens nonverbally, which is why ditching meetings might make things more efficient in the short-term but backfire long-term.
• People don’t read online; they scan. Most readers follow an “F-scanning pattern,” meaning they run their eyes down the left side of the page and move to the right when they see something interesting. One lesson here, if you happen to be writing an internal document this week and want your coworkers to pay attention: Keep paragraphs short and front-load your main point into the first 3–5 words.
• I loved this deep-dive into how to get over writer’s block from game designer Doc Burford. It’s written through the lens of creating video games, but the lessons apply to any type of generative work. Here’s one piece of wisdom, a version of the adage that your first idea is never your best: “Any idea you have should be taken at least twice as far as your instinct tells you.”

Source: Harris Sockel

https://medium.com/blog/3-tips-for-your-work-week-plus-brats-anti-design-f96c5b2b77db