Category: Uncategorized (Page 1 of 2)

It’s seldom I read a book and I want to start putting in to practice what I’ve read right away. First written in 1983 by Genie Z. Laborde, Influencing With Integrity has so much that is applicable within the working environment today.

Laborde begins with a foreboding opening, almost a warning. A warning that the subsequent pages will help you understand the practice of influencing. She acknowledges that the techniques in the book can be used for manipulation, but that the intent for use originates from inside the person applying them. That the methods and approaches, the ‘super powers’ must be used for good…

“Achieving your own outcome at the expense of, or even without regard for, the other party constitutes manipulation. What makes this particular “informed manipulation” so frightening is that people with these skills acquire such personal power that they are able to affect people deeply, and their capacity to misguide others is thereby increased to the point of evil. I cannot prevent that evil. It exists within those people as a choice they have made. It does not exist within the skills elaborated here. I recommend influencing over manipulation.”

Essentially, the book centres around effective communication – specifically around defining intent and steps to realise what you want to see. She begins by taking the time to discuss the desired state that you are trying to reach, which she refers to as Outcome. This is immediately interesting as it’s something that people often don’t take the time to do. How do I want to feel after this exchange? What do I want to observe happen? This is a great help in pushing forward the focus and the reason for the interaction. It can be particularly difficult when sometimes you don’t even know what it should be, or it’s perhaps hidden from you subconsciously on some level. There also needs to be time for reflection ‘how will I know when I’ve been successful and achieved the desired outcome?’ which is used in countless other books and outlined methods on how one should be effective. Laborde’s writing feels a little different though, perhaps a little more based on intraversion, or even intimacy. She uses the senses much more in her exploration, these being a prominent theme which aligns with the rest of the book.

The approach is deeply rooted in familiar aspects of psychology and linguistics and so feels very familiar and is of course the back bone to much of communication studies as a whole – exploration of the gaps between meaning and intention, and the noise that always comes from trying to convey a message. Many ideas have a very similar feel or even have similar themes to those within NLP, which is mentioned in the book fairly early on, but Zaborde refers to her particular technique as the ‘Syntonic model’.

“Syntonics separates the intricacies of the communication process into discreet steps of easily understood information. Knowing these steps enables you to interact with others successfully”

At length she describes difference types of observation during communication – the ways in which others approach their interactions. Visual, auditory  and kinaesthetic, explains their largely subconscious thought processing traits and how to recognise them both in yourself and in the eyes of others to aid in positive influencing. Exercising the muscle of the trait you lead with least can really help when responding to others and develop what she calls your ‘sensory acuity’:

“By paying attention to your least-used sense (visual, auditory, or kinaesthetic) you can increase your awareness of the information perceived through that door. You can become conscious of a whole new class of data.”

I do think the core of much of what she covers is about developing and exercising your self awareness muscles – the techniques that really help you to recognise what you’re seeing or hearing, both in yourself and with others. It’s important to develop this sensory acuity into what I refer to as ‘muscle  memory’ and Laborde gives exercises that one can practice – but this needs to be done in concurrent consciousness. In other words, you need to be able to pick up on it while someone is talking , and simultaneously be listening to the content of what they’re saying, which, although gets easier with dedicated application, is quite a tricky feat. Whilst explaining she uses a variety of anecdotes to help bring some of the concepts to life and make the reading more enjoyable.

It takes a bit of practice but I highly recommend the Fiver Finger Pointers exercise… Which I won’t relay in detail here, but it is designed to help you understand what an individual really means with their communication, and contains ‘the most useful set of words you will learn’. Other techniques or frameworks described involve lots of acronyms, and feel a bit like common sense but can actually make a world of difference when applied thoughtfully. Some of the questions are quite basic, but are ones I wish I’d asked more often in the past, as I may have reached the core of an issue or a problem more easily.

Laborde gives a word of warning about the entanglement of behaviour and identity. Something I think should probably have been given a march larger section of the book and always deserves attention. Attaching behaviour to identity inevitability makes us inflexible – we cannot realise or try out new behaviours to gain our desired outcomes as this risks us ‘becoming someone else’ – keeping us rigid to the familiar. This is a very interesting topic and Laborde has some somewhat amusing exercises to help us come out of our rigid ways be trying new things that perhaps we would have thought would have never really chimed with our personalities. The humour within the exercises makes the subject accessible whilst recognising the fluidity of situations. People are not just one thing or the other different flavours arise due to particular and individual contexts.

“We are not our behaviours. We are responsible for our behaviours, but our behaviours are not us.”

On reflection, the book is very much a toolkit – some hugely helpful exercises that can be developed to be called on when needed (building muscle memory) but this book is not going to help you figure out what you want your outcomes to be or who to speak to about them in the first place. It’s very much that toolkit to get you from A to B, once you’ve been specific enough about what B is and what it feels like to have arrived there.

Many of the tools you will have read/seen in any other good communication based book (The Definitive Book of Body Language by Allan and Barbara Pease is probably the best, it’s old, but still good) such as mirroring to build rapport and watching the lower lip for tell tale emotional cues. The writing is chunked up across the pages with lots of white space, accompanied by some fairly gaudy drawings which at first glance look like they belong in a surrealist museum but after a while seem to compliment the sentiments described. They definitely help break up large paragraphs and give you space and time to reflect on where the approaches may be applicable in one’s own personal circumstances. The book is old, but it doesn’t read as dated.

In the latter stages the book gives a lot of airtime to the notion of Congruence – how to keep personal integrity whilst using the techniques to influence, which again feels like quite an important topic, perhaps more so these days. I would perhaps refer more to that as authenticity, which is something that’s become quite important yet hard to discern in our modern world of professional influencers and deepfakes.

Although the prologue does make mild reference to differences in language and cultural context, there isn’t much mention of this in latter stages of the book where I feel, certainly in more current times it is a really pertinent topic. Particularly so in the philosophical chapters that are effectively talking about linguistic determinism and how this gives way to differences in sentiment and understanding or perceptions of reality:

“Words are representations of the sensory representations – several steps removed from the experience. This representations of representations is where part of the slippage of language occurs.”

“Reality is a puzzle each of us puts together.”

How have I managed to utilise what’s here in my everyday life? I have to say, trying to apply these techniques in a world where your meetings are either side of a video call or behind masks is near impossible, and it has forced me to rely on other cues. It’s also become much more difficult to ‘read the room’ when it’s just a gallery of faces where people are actually sitting at home, or picking up on subtleties within breathing when nearly everyone is on mute. Much harder to read the energy. Perhaps there is a market for video-based NLP.

Continuing my unintended theme of circular book references across posts, it does mention the difficult balance of wanting to be part of a team yet striving to be recognised individually that is cited within In Search Of Excellence, by Tom Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr. This is another oldie which I have actually read, but is still on my list to write about.

I have already felt that this book was much easier to write about, and even now I still feel like I have more to say. It’s another of those books that’s pretty old now, but still gets recommended regularly for a reason. It’s certainly much more memorable and stays with you long after reading. As Rain Blockley writes in the editor’s note, even before the preface:

“This book is too much to absorb in one reading, yet alone one sitting. Don’t bother trying. Read it carefully, and then keep it handy.”

I definitely will.

This will be a short one because the book is mainly about the process and is fairly detailed – so if it’s something for you it’s worth buying and reading fully or there articles where it’s been summarised it online. However, there are a couple of things that I found quite useful which could be transferable.

Written by some guys from Google Ventures, the notion is a bit like the Scrum Sprint where the objective would be to have something testable with users at the end, but it’s on steroids. With a big emphasis on speed, the idea is that this could be applied to any problem you’re trying to solve, as long as the problem is big enough. It has to be important. The book guides you through the process and what to do each day, along with where to spend most of your time. All sounds great until you try to get all of the people required, your best stakeholders, (aim for 7) into one room for a whole week with limited email checking! However, there are a couple of great takeaways that could be used as part of this, but also as part of other parts of the product design process.

One of the exercises they propose towards the beginning of the Sprint is the idea of ‘Starting at the End’ – where clarifying the problem to be solved and making sure all of the team have a clear focus in which to put all of their energy.

“When a big problem comes along, like the challenge you selected for your sprint, it’s natural to want to solve it right away. The clock is ticking, the team is amped up, and solutions start popping into everyone’s mind. But you don’t first slow down, share what you know and prioritize, you could end up wasting time and effort on the wrong part of the problem.”

The method that really stuck with me and I could see immediate application for was the ‘How Might We‘ method. Originally devised by IDEO via Proctor and Gamble in the ’70s, the idea is to transform the way in which the team thinks about problems by reframing what we’re trying to solve and get a bit closer to the customer. It works by each team member applying the “How Might We?” question every time their hear something interesting, e.g. If were trying to sell a loan to customers we could start with some “How might we?” questions such as, ‘How might we help customers buy a new car, or a new kitchen?’ and ‘How might we create an environment where customers would trust us?’ Everyone ends up with a stack of notes they can then end up prioritising later and do some affinity mapping to bring similar ideas together.

‘When we tried it, we came to appreciate how the open-ended, optimistic phrasing forced us to look for opportunities and challenges, rather than getting bogged down by problems, or almost worse, jumping in to solutions too soon’

The book is an easy read, split up into bit-sized chunks so you can put it down and pick it up when you need it. I think it’s a great method book to read even if you never manage to convince your leadership to actually follow through with it. In addition there are a number of techniques in there which can be highly valuable at lots of other points – there are some good ways to make decisions here, particularly if that’s often your sticking point in Agile and Scrum it is often said that ‘Done is better than perfect’. The drawings are quite cute too.

Given the world is currently in a pandemic and people are having a lot of choices made for them with regards to how they spend their time, many are left deciding what to introduce back in to their lives, once allowed to do so. This book, written by Greg McKeown in 2014 has become a useful guide to help increase focus on what’s important. 

On the face of it, it looks like a bit of an obvious idea that, if you try and do too many things you spread yourself too thin and end up doing nothing well. Which we all know, but it can be hard to create a level of discipline that allows us the clarity of thought to mindfully choose what we do with the time we have. We are always making choices about how to spend our time, even when we don’t realise. But the book really does make you examine your own thought process of where your time is used. It provokes you to ask yourself questions such as, What is the most important thing I could be doing with my time right now? Only a few things really matter, so what are the trade offs? And mantras like, ‘if you don’t prioritise your life, someone else will’.

A lot of the other things mentioned are things that are simple to say, but much harder to do in practice. They’re things which require a fair amount of practice before they stop being an uncomfortable habit, such as, cutting out trivial activity (seems obvious). But also having the ’emotional discipline’ no to people, which has come up in many similar books before (if it’s not a clear yes, then it has to be a no). However, reading about it over and over doesn’t make it any easier to do. 

It goes over how unimportant so much of life really is, the importance of play (play sparks exploration), the importance of sleep (sleep is for high performers and breeds creativity), of automating your routine (helps create a sense of flow, mentioned yet again!), of setting boundaries (much like in design, constraints are really your friends) and the importance of the ability to focus to help you choose where your time should be spent and find out truly what gives you purpose (‘In order to have focus we need to escape to focus’). All of these things help us have the energy to prioritise: 

Our highest priority is to protect our ability to prioritise.

Everything written about boils down to the simple principle of ‘less but better’. Which is a good principle to keep in mind next time you have that choice of what to do with your precious time. This also includes being intentional with the choices – being deliberate about the time spent. It also mentions the ancient, but ever applicable Pareto Principle, or 80/20 rule which comes up in many management or productivity books – 20% of our efforts product 80% of our results. 

To embrace the essence of Essentialism requires we replace these false assumptions with three core truths: “I choose to”, “Only a few things matter” and “I can do anything but not everything”.

One of the anecdotes I enjoyed the most was this idea of ‘Identifying the slowest hiker’ – the idea that if you have a set of hikers it’s usually the weakest link that is slowing down the entire team. The fictional hiking leader reorganises the group from slowest to fastest (instead of having the slowest at the back) so that they can all keep up and it makes it easier for him to analyse their speed. If you can pinpoint exactly why the front hiker is slow and find a way of speeding them up (in his example, leaning on the other hikers in terms of load) then the whole team of hikers’ speed will increase, then on to the next slowest. This is about finding the obstacles and systematically eliminating them. Again, it seems like an obvious thing to do, but takes a level focus in order to be able to identify and then remove the obstacles. This idea coupled with ’subtracting’ – the idea of producing more with removing more – is at the core of Essentialism:

This approach goes beyond just solving problems; it’s a method of reducing your efforts to maximise your results.

It is quite timely as I was recently reading a Guardian article on secrets to a (fairly) fulfilled life by Oliver Burkeman that echoed some of these sentiments:

The upside is that you needn’t berate yourself for failing to do it all, since doing it all is structurally impossible. The only viable solution is to make a shift: from a life spent trying not to neglect anything, to one spent proactively and consciously choosing what to neglect, in favour of what matters most.

This was a great book and at a time like this, more than any, devoting the time you have to purpose and deliberate choices does seem like a fruitful way to focus. 

9 Lies About Work has two authors and was only published last year (2019). The first thing I think of is, as far as I can tell the authors are British but it seems the book was directed at an American audience. I understand this given the market is larger, but it does grate after a while – “He lives in the United Kingdom, where anaesthesiologists are called anaesthetists.”

I won’t go through all the lies since you can read them yourself but I can give a high level view of the ones that I found to be the most useful. 

The first ‘lie’ is that people care about which companies they work for – which you would think would be particularly pertinent for some of the younger generations of talent in the workplace – those looking for meaning and purpose in their work. While the authors don’t dispute the search for a cause or meaning, they say that instead people care much more about the teams they work with, that effectively, people join for a cause but stay for the team, perhaps. 

“When we push on the data, and examine closely its patterns and variations, we arrive at this conclusion: while people might care which company they work for. The truth is that, once there, people care which team they’re on” 

The book also mentions the drivers, or questions, that appear in ‘Strengths surveys’ conducted by the Gallup organisation such as, ‘In my team, I am surrounded by people who share my values’ and ‘At work, I clearly understand what is expected of me’ – which are a good set of questions that in my experience, companies use to measure overall employee engagement at work. The authors talk about these factors and how the results of a survey featuring these drivers can be used to explain or maybe even predict certain sentiment or behaviour. I’ve also seen it in action in my working life – and it is helpful to be able to pinpoint drivers or detractors of engagement but it’s much harder to do something about it. In the same vein, they also mention the importance of team leads – people that trust their team leader were more likely to be fully engaged at work. 

Another lie is that ‘the best people are well-rounded’ – this chapter deals with the idea that people should not necessarily try to become multi disciplinary and that competency models are a waste of time. This is similar to what companies who endorse the Gallup methodology promoting the idea that instead of trying to work on your ‘development areas’ or ‘weak points’ you should just try really hard to improve on your strengths and areas in which you excel – using Lionel Messi’s magic left foot as an example. I don’t necessarily agree with this in all contexts. Whilst there are people that excel at one particular subjects, most people benefit from being multi-disciplined and certainly having an awareness of areas in which they struggle. Particularly if you look at soft skills such as negotiation and empathy or emotional intelligence. Many things do take a lot of experience and practice, and people are perfectly capable of developing these skills over time. 

There are a few other things I don’t agree with. One is the book’s mention of the Hawthorne effect when discussing lie that ‘people need feedback’. Instead they purport that people need attention and use the famous 1920s psychological study to prove a point. Describing the study they talk about how when participants are being watching productivity goes up regardless of the changing conditions (lights on it goes up, and then further up with lights off) and talk about how this is due to the fact they enjoyed the attention: 

“Each of these interventions demonstrated to the workers that management was interested in them and their experience and they liked that’

However most people cite the Hawthorne affect when they talk about the fact that someone is being watched. So from what I’ve read in the past it’s not an enjoyment factor, more of the idea of the workers being on their best behaviour. Perhaps it doesn’t matter, and that really the crux of it is that it is that attention is what is important – even if not everyone enjoys it. 

The book also references other popular books  such as Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus and Jim Collins’ Good to Great, as well as the concept of ‘flow’ although they don’t mention Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi by name – this can be useful as it helps you understand how other theories fit with what they are proposing. 

The book is a very easy read, but it didn’t blow me away. Some parts seemed a little sensationalist (‘the idea that leadership is a thing is a lie’) Aside from a fairly alarming story about an anaesthetist (or anaesthesiologist?), many of the ideas here I have come across previously in various other forms. And whilst I agree with a lot of them, I think the book lacks a little on ways in which to enact the alternatives in some places… The lies they’re talking about are ingrained in working culture. I don’t see the theories changing the status quo within the workplace any time soon. 

This book as been around for a while, and it’s easy to see why. The premise is fairly simple – whenever you’re transitioning into a new role, be it internally within an organisation or to a new job entirely, you only get three months to prove yourself. These are the crucial few months where you can make and impression and whatever that impression is – it’s likely to stick.  This book, written by Michael D. Watkins is about how to make the most of those 90 days. He uses a combination of stories, strategies and frameworks to outline pointers and highlight common pitfalls and gives a huge emphasis to the importance of soft skills and of understanding organisational culture. 

All new roles are likely to have different variables, but what this book does is gives you a basic framework and some examples for you to apply yourself and your situation.  The main framework is about the type of objective your new role has, Watkins suggests tailoring your strategies to your specific type of objective within the ’STARS’ model:

• Start Up – Assembling the capabilities to get a new business or initiative off the ground
• Turnaround- Saving a business or initiative to be widely acknowledged to be in serious rouble
• Accelerated Growth – Managing a rapidly expanding business 
• Realignment – Reorganising a previously successful organisation that now faces problems 
• Sustaining success – Preserving the vitality of a successful organisation and taking it to the next level 

It may be that your role has a combination of these elements but many will only have one underlying objective that fits these. The rest of the book then gives different guidance depending on the particular objective you find yourself in. It may also help to think about which of these types of objectives suits you, your working style – what sort of projects do you like to work on and why?  I also found it beneficial to think back over previous roles I’ve had, to see which of these buckets it would fall in to and whether I had taken the best approach with them at the time. Given the answer has usually been “I could have done better”, it makes me wish I’d found this book sooner. 

The book starts chapters with anecdotal stories that illustrate the theme of the chapter. Sometimes I found these a bit simplistic but they did their job in terms of getting across the main points. Some of the key advice in the book covers:

• Taking a clean mental beak between jobs
• Systematic ways to accelerate learning of the organisation, people, tools and systems 
• Secure early wins to demonstrate your value – in my experience, this is particularly important and can severely damage your reputation if not done or not done well 
• Building the right teams
• Creating coalitions and generating supportive alliances for you and your goals – basically gaining buy-in which is essential in any role where you want to get something done!

It isn’t saying you’re going to get up to speed and be a top performer within 3 months. In fact, at the beginning of the book it gives a graphical representation of the typical journey from when you begin a job and drain the resources of those around you to where you begin to create more value (a ‘net contributor’) for the business than the value you take up, with a break even point in between. Watkins says although it varies, it can take double that:

“When two hundred company CEOs and presidents were asked for their best estimates of the time it takes a typical mid-level leader who has been promoted or hired from the outside to reach the break-even point, the average of the responses was 6.2 months.”

The examples and the anecdotes are generally better suited to more senior roles, for example, there is a lot about securing resource and budget to run programmes of work but there are definitely some nuggets that anyone could use, regardless of their point in career. Watkins talks about certain nuances of new roles such as the changing nature of interpersonal relationships – what if you now end up managing some of your former peers? How should you change your behaviour, or not? How do you create meaningful alliances? How do you make decisions which weren’t previously yours to make? He also cautions against using your strengths at every opportunity:

“The qualities that have made you successful so far, can prove to be weaknesses in your new role.”

Something else that probably resonates well with anyone who has worked in a political environment (I mean politically charged, not necessarily government) is Watkns’ mention of the ’shadow organisation’ [emphasis added]:

“In the political domain, you must understand the shadow organisation – the information, set of processes and alliances that exist in the shadow of the formal structure and strongly influence how work gets done.”

Or in some cases, doesn’t get done. It also talks about ’transition coaching’ (very much separate from developmental coaching) which is using a coach to help you through this specific transition period – usually someone already in the organisation, that has a lot of knowledge, particularly the tacit kind, and can help share that knowledge to get you up to speed more quickly. 

Like anything, there will be a lot of personal circumstances that get in the way of achieving everything the book mentions, in the timescales it talks about. For example, I started a new job during the Covid-19 lockdown period and so building relationships was a much more difficult task than I had been able to meet people in person. Despite this, I personally still found it incredibly useful and can definitely see myself using it to refer to each time I transition to something new. 

Recent times have seen an increased focus on consumer savings and attitudes to money, and budgeting in the media. General savings and saving enough for pensions, retirement and longer life have been in the spotlight in particular. Last year some studies reported that up to a quarter of people in the UK have no savings at all with more than half wishing they could save cash.

Enter the new micro-savings platforms. These products are designed to help you saving by saving in small regular amounts that should add up over time, but not be so much that they disrupt your budgeting. There are many, I’ve tried a few over last few months. Let’s go through some of them.

 

Plum & Cleo – Micro savings and money tips chatbots with automated savings but based on the Facebook Messenger platform

Both these players’ have a proposition about using AI to help you manage your money. They sweep your account (once you’ve told it your details) and then automatically takes money money out and places it in to a savings account for you. They have a conversational UI, supposedly giving you hints and tips which you can access using Facebook Messenger.

I found the tone of some of them quite patronising, and maybe a bit juvenile? But perhaps that’s because I don’t like being told what to do with my money. Other people might find it helpful. But my biggest issue, and the reason I didn’t save any money, is that they don’t have the overall picture of my spending – if they can’t see that all of my spending is on my credit card and that ring fence a lot of my money for buffer accounts and emergency savings. And I keep a fair amount in my current account because I earn interest on it – the apps think I’m loaded! I’m not, it’s just buffer money, but they would scrape lots out of the account as I’d left it in there. I also think having Facebook near my finances makes me uncomfortable – again, a personal thing.

 

Chip – Dedicated app for automated savings

Like Plum and Cleo, Chip is a conversational UI complete with GIFs. Unlike Plum and Cleo this was app-based from the off. Just like the above it sweeps your account, guesses how much to take and then saves it for you. I liked it for a while, but it used to send me too many push notifications and it would give me same issues by sweeping too much because of the state of my current account. They also used to do a scheme where you could refer people for a better interest rate which was nice while it lasted.

They’ve also just opened their new community platform, just like Monzo, just like Emma which have similar features but have more of a focus on general financial management. Are there lots of people members of all of these communities or do they just expect hard core fans? Sounds like a lot of effort to part of multiple. And a few too many emojis for me.

I have used Lloyds ’Save the Change’ round up payments that go automatically in to a savings account, this isn’t new – but if you use your credit card for payments it’s quite slow to build.

 

Moneybox – Rounded up transactions that are moved to an investment account

This is a bit different as it’s straight to investments, not a savings account. My Moneybox account is attached to my credit card for round ups, but not directly. It was a bit strange initially – Moneybox reads my credit card transactions but only has debiting permissions for my current account. So it calculates round up amounts from my credit card and then takes the total from my current account. It’s nice to have someone doing this in the background especially as I’m not planning to touch it for a while. The app is quite nice, but the animations feel quite child-like. But getting back to the money, your odds at beating inflation are much better with investing, especially over the long term. Do read the small print and make sure you understand investing before embarking on that. There are different types of investment account, Lifetime ISA, Stocks and Shares ISA, or General Investment Account. Settlement also takes longer with investments than cash – something to bear in mind.

There are lots of different people after your money – it pays to do a bit of research when working out where to put it.

I’m not a very loyal shopper when it comes to supermarkets. I have some specific needs and I’ll be as fickle as possible to whichever shop – total sucker for convenience! Which means, I love Ocado. I’ve been shopping with them for a couple of years and haven’t really considered switching online supermarket. Why do I like it so much? Well, they have great variety, and a great range. I suppose these are some of the perks of not having to deal with physical stores. I’ve never had poor quality vegetables (well, not really) and they have a great loyalty scheme and are always offering me discounts and free stuff, which is a nice bonus. It’s also all really easy to redeem, a lot of it is added to my account or basket without me having to do anything (they have this interesting Smart Pass for free delivery and other perks).

Except vouchers. I get sent a cashback code by email for any items that could have been cheaper at a different supermarket. It’s a great feature but they need to sort that out so that it’s automatic. But the main reason is because when things go wrong, which of course they do, sometimes… Ocado always fix it. It’s definitely these moments of truth that builds your love and trust for a brand – and that’s exactly what they’ve done with me.

Discovering new ways in which companies are attempting to be helpful to me and personalising my experience by using my data is one of my favourite past times, and Ocado has some interesting features. Firstly, they have a number of dynamic panels that pop up when you do various things. The one below shows the ability to drill down into your choice – in this example you can choose to narrow your sear to wholemeal wraps etc. Additionally, it’ll show you other frequently bought items such as beef stock cubes with your kidney beans and so on. Seems pretty useful.

 

Secondly, and one of the more surprising ones was when they suggested some substitutes based on calorie count during checkout. I’d put some tonic water cans and some pots of risotto in my trolley and within the ‘before you go’ step of the check out it has suggested a slimline alternative. It says by choosing their suggested alternatives I could apparently save 576 calories which is equivalent to an 188 minute walk and 59 minute run. To my knowledge, I’ve not told Ocado that I’m dieting or watching what I eat or calorie counting etc. I’m not sure how I feel about it. I think converting it into actual activity and not just talking about calories themselves is more compelling. I think it works better for single meals as well, so, in this example it worked better for the risotto than the cans. I’m not going to drink all of the cans in one sitting so I’m able to explain away the extra calories.

I did a mini survey around the office and the views were a pretty even 50:50 split – with some people calling it judgmental and others saying it’s good for the supermarket to promote healthy choices. We then had a debate on whether it should be an opt in or opt out solution. Does it make much difference to the supermarket? They’re not actually going to make more money by me switching to healthier choices in this instance. Does this mean they would be more likely to offer a healthier choice if it was more expensive? Or less likely to offer one if they were going to make a loss? There are clearly some decisions of an ethical nature that need to be made here.

So did I change my choices? No. Maybe it was in defiance, I’m not sure. Sometimes I don’t like the idea of a machine telling me what it thinks I should do – perhaps this is going to be one of the biggest problems that AI will now face. There is going to need to be greater research into different ways of talking to customers – with persuasive design at the forefront. Perhaps I was part of an A/B test experiment… I haven’t seen it since… Maybe that’s a sign of how well it’s doing or how well it’s been received by customers!