Dear Reader,
I spent the day yesterday with Insights professionals who help their organizations see what's coming and understand the results of data, research, focus groups and surveys. The big question at the heart of my talk was all about influence and how we get leaders to listen. The business world is full of expertise that falls upon deaf ears. What does it take as a professional to command the sort of respect where people pay attention to your recommendations?
In my keynote, I shared how Non-Obvious Thinking and the ability to see what others miss can be a superpower. At the end, I shared the big announcement that we are launching a Non-Obvious Thinking Certification Masterclass! This course has been years in the making for me and includes all of the techniques that I have been teaching in live workshops and university programs around the world. Attendance will be limited and I will share more details about how to secure a seat in our inaugural cohort for the class next month so stay tuned for that.
For stories, you'll read about the challenges of dealing with obtuse leaders, why Singapore is paying citizens to spend 15 uninterrupted minutes just reading, why we are finally saving the whales and how changing your situation can change everything.
Enjoy the stories and stay curious!
Rohit
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Singapore Pays People To Put Down Their Phones and Just Read
Can paying people to spend 15 minutes a day reading actually improve an entire population's literacy and overall level of intelligence? This is the latest idea from the Singapore government aimed at trying to help people of all ages have a small financial incentive to read more.
"The country has launched a new initiative designed to turn reading into a daily habit. Spend at least 15 minutes reading, record the session through the government’s platform, and you’ll receive 20 virtual coins. Collect 1,000 of them, and you can exchange them for S$ 1, or roughly 80 cents in the US. Since only one reading session counts each day, reaching that first dollar takes 50 days. Nobody is getting rich here, obviously. But that’s what makes the idea interesting. The cash functions more like the achievement badge or daily streak you’d find in an app, except this one tries to pull your attention away from the screen."
The gamification of this idea and the behavioral psychology behind it is sound. Despite the relatively small payout, the idea of the streak combined with the growing desire among people of all ages to find more time away from their devices could make this a case study in how to shift a population's reading and media consumption habits through the formation of new habits for reading. As the national library board chief Melissa Tam notes, "we know that habits are built through small, consistent actions. So, we are starting with a simple goal: just read for 15 minutes a day. On the bus, before bed or over lunch."
Of course, it also raises questions about what sort of reading materials are available through the government portal and whether those are locked to certain topics - but it will be interesting to watch whether this small incentive along with gamified rewards are enough to help break the toxic habits of doomscrolling and get people reading again.
Why We Finally Did Save the Whales
40 years ago in the movie Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Admiral Kirk and his crew travel back in time to San Francisco in 1986 to try and save humpback whales that are extinct in the future because they hold the key to answering an alien message and saving 24th century Earth from destruction. The movie shined a spotlight on the conservation efforts in progress to save the whales and for a time that became a rallying cry of environmental groups. The movie was credited with fueling a resurgence in humpback whales back from the brink of extinction.
The global shift continued this past week, when Iceland quietly joined hundreds of other nations to ban whale hunting, leaving only Norway and Japan as the last two countries on Earth that allow the practice to continue. The reasons for their change of policy, though, did not come down to the moral argument. Rather, increasing tourism dollars from whale watchers was the real driver, combined with a dwindling demand for Icelandic whale meat. The biggest remaining challenge, as the story illustrates, is the connection between whale hunting and the independent identity of some Icelanders. For students of behavior change, this story has everything. Financial incentives, national identity, geopolitical pressure and an environmental win forty years in the making.
The Art of Being Obtuse (Like Mark Zuckerburg)
Obtuse: To be slow at understanding simple things, or to act like you do not get something that is obvious to everyone else.
That's probably the best word I can think of to assign to Mark Zuckerburg's reaction to any criticism of Meta. When the company is criticized for compromising teenager's mental health, he suggests the problem isn't that bad. When people warn that the Meta glasses are being used by perverts to take images of women, he dismisses the concerns and focuses only on the positive use cases. When the world calls for a slowing of AI advancements to really understand their impact on humanity, he "argues that competition and legal liability already give companies sufficient reason to build their models responsibly."
"Obtuse" describes a fundamental problem with many other leaders of large organizations (or governments) today as well. They see only one small myopic view and are unable or unwilling to understand the broader implications. They focus on the optimistic micro perspective instead of the realistic macro one. Sadly, offering up case studies or examples doesn't seem to help. They just double down on what they already think. So, what would it take for leaders with these limited mindsets to actually understand the implications of what they promote?
In movies, the only thing that ever works is bringing the consequences to their doorstep. Unless they feel for themselves what it's like to have privacy compromised, or the toxic effects of cyberbullying, those scenarios are easy to minimize. Sometimes an evolution of thinking doesn't happen until a wake up call comes first.
