Your monthly CX and insight newsletter from TLF Research

In the short term, you are as good as your intensity, in the long term you are only as good as your consistency.

Shane Parrish

Change is difficult. We all know that when it comes to changing our own habits and behaviours, but we often seem to forget it when it comes to change in organisations.

Some changes are simply a matter of making a decision (like buying a house or restructuring a department), but can have psychological and cultural repercussions that last for a long time. Others take consistent effort to establish new habits and patterns of behaviour (like an exercise regime or customer centricity).

Either way you need grit, patience, and trust to achieve beneficial change whilst minimising any negative consequences.

Thanks for reading,
Stephen

Here are 7 things we think are worth you time this month

My Side Of The Fence Is Ok

Excellent post from Steve Simpson (of UGRs fame) with an analogy about corporate culture and silo mentality. Silos are one of the big problems we come across in our journey mapping work, and they spring up with frustrating ease! "Often, silo thinking is an unintended by-product of structures and priorities - business units are urged to grow without consideration of the impacts on the organisation overall."

Read: My Side Of The Fence Is Ok

Begin With Trust

Interesting Harvard Business Review article on the importance of trust in leadership, focusing on Uber. "Trust has three drivers: authenticity, logic, and empathy. When trust is lost, it can almost always be traced back to a breakdown in one of them. To build trust as a leader, you first need to figure out which driver you 'wobble' on."

Read: Begin With Trust

The 5 Stages of Grief in Business

This article looks at the Kubler-Ross Change Curve (which many know as the 5 stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance) and asks how it applies to business, particularly communicating change. "If change is well planned and formulated, it can produce positive results but even in spite of planning, change is hard to incorporate, accept and appreciate."

Read: The 5 Stages of Grief in Business

The Principles Of Patience

A great post from Austin Kleon on the idea that originality often lies on the other side of unoriginality. "...the energy in the work won’t just consist of the time we spent actually making it, it will also consist of all the time we spent leading up to the work…all the days we thought were going nowhere…"

Read: The Principles Of Patience

The Growing Cost of Deep Learning

Deep learning is at the heart of almost all cutting-edge AI, but as this article explains it's now entering a diminishing returns phase which some are predicting will lead to another "AI winter". The solution is almost certainly to combine human expertise with deep learning techniques in order to build better models. "Models for which experts have established the relevant variables are able to learn quickly what values work best for those variables, doing so with limited amounts of computation..."

Read: The Growing Cost of Deep Learning

A Day In The Life Of A Data Journalist

I always say that data journalism is the place to go to learn about data storytelling, and I really enjoyed this insight into how an Economist data journalist spends a typical day (scroll to about half way down). "Today’s meeting was just 20 minutes long, so it’s back to visualising."

Read: A Day In The Life Of A Data Journalist

Top Reads: The Psychology of Survey Response

The only book I know of that examines in detail what cognitive science has to tell us about the way people understand questions, remember experiences, and choose how to respond to surveys. Technical, but might change how you think about surveys for good. "We prefer to think that quite a large number of paths to an answer are possible, depending on the interplay between retrieval and judgment."

Top Reads: The Psychology of Survey Response