Think Fast Talk Smart: Communication Techniques - 126. BONUS Making Meetings Meaningful: When Face-to-Face Meetings Matter

Episode Date: January 30, 2024

If we want to generate better ideas, then we need to get people back to the office.In this bonus meetings mini-series episode, we feature an episode from the newest podcast from Stanford Grad...uate School of Business – If/Then: Business, Leadership, Society. In this conversation with senior editor Kevin Cool, Professor of Marketing and former TFTS guest Jonathan Levav details his study of remote work and creativity. “Pairs that worked face-to-face generated 15 to 20% more ideas than pairs that worked on Zoom,” Levav notes. What’s more, in-person brainstorming helped people consider a wider and more diverse range of possibilities. “Working on Zoom was a double penalty. Fewer ideas — and a narrower set of ideas.”Remote work may be the new normal in our post-pandemic world, but Levav cautions us from accepting the status quo — especially if we want to keep our creative edge. As this episode of If/Then explores, our best ideas could still lie ahead of us — if we can all get in the same room.If/Then is a podcast from the Stanford Graduate School of Business that examines research findings that can help us navigate the complex issues we face in business, leadership, and society. Each episode features an interview with a Stanford GSB faculty member.   Key Takeaways: For hybrid work environments, managers should select “in-office” days based on tasks we perform better in person, such as collaboration and brainstorming.More flexible schedules for remote and office work allow employees to bring their best selves and perform better at their jobs.  Be sure to also listen to Part 1 and 2 of our Making Meeting Matter mini-series.Connect:Premium Signup >>>> Think Fast Talk Smart PremiumEmail Questions & Feedback >>> hello@fastersmarter.ioEpisode Transcripts >>> Think Fast Talk Smart WebsiteNewsletter Signup + English Language Learning >>> FasterSmarter.ioThink Fast Talk Smart >>> LinkedIn,  Instagram, YouTubeMatt Abrahams >>> LinkedIn ********Thank you to our sponsors.  These partnerships support the ongoing production of the podcast, allowing us to bring it to you at no cost.Strawberry.me. Get 50% off your first coaching session today at Strawberry.me/smartJoin our Think Fast Talk Smart Learning Community and become the communicator you want to be. 

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Hi, Matt here. We have two days left before we close our listener viewer survey. A big thank you to all of you who have already provided feedback. Please take a few minutes to share your input on the show. We still have a few prizes left to give to lucky respondents. Go to FasterSmarter.com.com. To give us your input. That's FasterSmartter.com.io slash survey. And now a word from one of our sponsors.
Starting point is 00:00:24 Their support allows us to bring you quality content free of charge. If you've ever thought, I know I can do more, but something's holding me back. You're not alone. Whether you're navigating career growth, seeking better balance, or wanting to communicate with more confidence, coaching can help you bridge the gap between intention and action. At strawberry.comme, you'll get matched with a professional coach who's trained to help you clarify your goals, build lasting confidence, and make intentional choices professionally and personally. This is not therapy. It's not consulting. It's a thought partnership designed to help you take action with more clarity and purpose.
Starting point is 00:01:05 I strongly believe in the value of coaching. All of us can benefit from the help of a coach. Visit strawberry.me slash smart to get matched up with your coach today. That's strawberry.comme slash smart and get 50% off your first coaching session. It's the most affordable time ever to see if coaching is right for you. Hi, Matt here. We have a special treat for you today. I am excited to introduce you to the latest Stanford GSP podcast, If Then. If you like Think Fast Talk Smart, then please consider If Then. Each episode has a Stanford GSB faculty member talking about their area of research and its real-world
Starting point is 00:01:50 application. Take a listen to this episode featuring my colleague, friend, and past Think Fast Talk Smart guest Jonathan Lavav. After learning from Jonathan on If Then, please check out Think Fast Talk Smart Episodes 88 and 94 to hear more from Jonathan. Please enjoy If Then, and be sure to subscribe
Starting point is 00:02:11 and add it to your playlist. I already have. If we want to generate better ideas, then we need to get people back to the office. First of all, it's a rhythm thing, right? Will Tracy was an executive producer on the HBO series Succession, a co-writer of the film The Menu,
Starting point is 00:02:35 and was a staff writer for last week tonight with John Oliver. During his career, he's been in a lot of writers' rooms. When you're with a group of writers physically around a table in a room, there's a sense of ideas building on each other, following directly on the heels of somebody's idea, maybe even in a way that feels not rude but collaborative, almost jumping on top of someone's sentence. And so it's almost like you are crafting that idea together at the same time.
Starting point is 00:03:09 When writing a season of a television show, creators can spend up to three or four months in a writer's room, volleying ideas, talking about characters in different situations. It is a highly creative and collaborative environment. In his many years as a writer, Will has never tried to do that kind of collaboration virtually. With Zoom, there's always this kind of, forced good manners where you have to wait for someone to come to a complete end of their statement. And then there's a lag because people are also waiting for, did that go through? Is there a time lag between anyone here? So someone finishes their sentences and then there's
Starting point is 00:03:48 like a four second gap. And then someone starts to speak again. And that just doesn't have the rhythm and dynamism of real conversation. It doesn't feel like a real conversation. It doesn't feel like a real conversation. It feels like people are making a prepared statement, then there's a wait, and then there's another prepared statement. And I don't know how it works for other businesses. I think for writing, that is not great. Will sees the value of virtual meetings for some gatherings. In fact, this conversation with Will was done on Zoom. But he doesn't think this technology is well suited for writers in a collaborative setting. I also have a feeling just knowing how writers are and how distracted they are and how they like to procrastinate and distract themselves.
Starting point is 00:04:32 I always suspecting that somebody is at least two or three people on the Zoom screen are looking at their email or looking at another window on their laptop and finding a way to avoid writing and confronting something head on because they think, well, these other people are talking and no one knows what I'm really doing right now. And you can't do that in a writer's room. You're right there on stage, basically. Everyone has to be focused on the task. You avoid that problem completely. You need the grist of everyday life for a writer's room.
Starting point is 00:05:06 You need to talk about what you had for dinner last night. You need to talk about what's going on in your relationship, what movie you watched. You need that sense of something to draw on, or else you are going to, when you're writing a story with characters, your mind will resort to the stereotypical, unless you can use a bit of experiential something from the room. And it usually comes from the room.
Starting point is 00:05:29 It comes from people in the room. We all accept that there are trade-offs to virtual gatherings, but are they bad for creativity? How does virtual video affect collaboration? How do we decide what we do on Zoom and when it's better to come to the office? I'm Kevin Kuhl, senior editor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Today we speak with Jonathan Lavav,
Starting point is 00:05:54 the King Philanthropies Professor of Marketing at Stanford Graduate School of Business. And we'll talk about a paper Professor Lavov co-wrote with Melanie Brooks, now a professor at Columbia, asking about the effects of communicating via video on creative idea generation. We wanted to contrast is working face-to-face versus working over video. And the reason that came about was in part because of a conversation that I'd had with a friend of mine who's a noted Silicon Valley CEO, who always said to me that, order for product development to happen, your engineers have to be co-located. And I believe one of the exercises you had the study of participants do was think of uses for
Starting point is 00:06:39 bubble wrap, right? Now, that seems like a fun exercise. Yes. I mean, I would like to be a part of that sort of meeting. Yeah. So what did you find? So what you're referring to is what's called in the creativity literature, the alternative uses task. What you do essentially is you give people an object and you say, what are all the different ways
Starting point is 00:06:57 in which you could use that object. In this case, it was bubble wrap. And then your dependent variable is the number of uses people come up with. Right. So if I came up with 10 different uses and you came up with five different uses and I generated more ideas than you generated. So basically what we did in the study is we contrasted the number of ideas and the type of ideas. We can talk about that a little bit later, both the number and the type of ideas,
Starting point is 00:07:23 the pairs of participants generated, whether they were in person or if they worked over Zoom. And what was the result? Drum roll. Can we have it? And so the result was that pairs that worked face-to-face generated more ideas about 15 to 20% more ideas than pairs of people that worked on Zoom. And everybody got the same amount of time to work and the same incentive to work, but people that worked face-to-face generated more ideas.
Starting point is 00:07:52 But even more interesting than that was that if we analyzed, we were able to to analyze the ideas that people generated, the pairs of people generated. And we could analyze those ideas, not just for the number of ideas, but for the type of ideas and how connected those ideas are to each other. And so imagine, I tell you, Kevin, I want you to give me as many alternative uses for a frisbee you can. So you can say frisbee, paint palette, plate, sled. Okay, those are very unrelated concepts that are.
Starting point is 00:08:27 all could be alternative uses for a frisbee. Contrast that with frisbee, plate, coaster, tray. Those are all things that are related to serving food. So that's a much narrower set of ideas. And so the interesting thing was that not only did people who worked on Zoom generate fewer ideas, but their ideas tended to be more clustered together than the people that worked face to face.
Starting point is 00:08:53 So it's almost like you get a double penalty. One penalty is in the number of ideas. and what you want in, let's say, a new product development process is to generate as many possibilities to select from in the idea generation phase of the new product development process. And you want those ideas to be as different from each other as possible because then that also allows you to connect things that are otherwise unconnected and create something that's more novel.
Starting point is 00:09:17 And so working on Zoom was a double penalty, fewer ideas and a narrower set of ideas. So those of us who've been in creative, meetings on Zoom and that's a lot of people. This does seem sort of intuitive maybe to what our experience is, but why do you think that difference exists? What sort of objectively is different about it? So first of all, I don't know that it's intuitive. So I've had that response from people. So I remember when I presented this in a class of executives and I said, what do you think would happen if I ran this experiment? And they said, oh, people working face to face would generate more
Starting point is 00:09:55 ideas and I asked them why and they said well because you would just generate more because you're working face to face so you can't have the explanation be the experimental treatment and so on the face of it if the information exchanges is the same in theory there shouldn't be a difference and after we published the paper and had the result went out and was picked up by the press and so on and so forth we had a lot of people who really fought us tooth and nail to tell us how we were wrong They didn't necessarily present any evidence that we were wrong, but they just kept telling us that how our experiments were terrible. They didn't point to a particular factor in the experiment,
Starting point is 00:10:32 but just that they were terrible. And that's when you start getting a sense that people here have more religious belief around this question than data. And so let's think about having a conversation. So right now we're sitting in this studio. In the studio, there's all kinds of stuff, right? So there's a poster on the wall. There's the door.
Starting point is 00:10:49 There's the Stanford business backdrop. There's all kinds of wires. is microphones and so on and so forth. If I look away for a moment at something else, right, I'm still in this conversation, right? You know that I'm still here because our shared environment is this entire room. Okay.
Starting point is 00:11:07 But think about what it means to work over video or on Zoom or whatever other platform you're using. Now our shared environment is this narrow monitor, right? Typical laptop monitor sizes 13 inches. Everything else is outside of that shared environment. So the way to think about it a little bit is like the iPhone portrait mode. So in the iPhone portrait mode, you focus on one object and everything else gets pixelated. That's a little bit like what sort of Zoom requires of you.
Starting point is 00:11:37 So in order to remain in the conversation, I have to remain in the shared environment. In order to remain in the shared environment, I basically have to put blinders on. It's almost like narrowing your gaze. Now, there's research that shows that people's physical experience influences their own. a cognitive style. So if you think about it, I have to be super narrow and super focused. That's going to translate into cognitive style. It's also narrower and more focused.
Starting point is 00:12:03 And so in a creative idea generation task, which is what you want to be is to think expansively, right? I want to sort of generate ideas, lots of ideas unrelated to each other, if you will, like a big gigantic oak tree of ideas. Now I have a physical experience that's narrowing me down. And instead of making an oak, I make a cypress. And so what we found is pretty strong relationship between people's physical experience. And we measured that by actually filming them and seeing where their eyes went and their creative output. And so that's the thing about Zoom that sort of makes it particularly unique is that it's not just an experience of talking to each other.
Starting point is 00:12:43 It's actually a physical experience where the physical experience of consuming information is different. And for some tasks like creative idea generation, that can potentially have an important. influence. So if I'm a manager in an organization and I'm trying to evaluate when Zoom is okay and when Zoom is not okay or whether in person is much better than Zoom, we know the creativity based on your research. Those should be in person. How do we differentiate other things that we might do on Zoom and how would that relate to maybe making an overall evaluation on when people should be at work can be remote. Yeah, so there was another result that we found in our experiments that was weaker than
Starting point is 00:13:28 the creativity results, but still there, which is that in addition to generating ideas, the pairs of participants had to select which idea they thought was the best. All of their ideas were then submitted to an external jury that judged it on novelty and usability. So if we think about an innovative product, it's both novel and useful. usable, right? And so we could measure how accurate each pair's decisions were with respect to this external standard. So let's suppose we generated 10 ideas and our best idea was rated a 6. And the idea that we submitted was in fact rated a 6, then we made a quote unquote perfect decision.
Starting point is 00:14:09 Had we submitted the idea that was rated a 5, then we would have scored a minus 1, right? That's the size of our error. So you can have a small error, you can have a big error. And so what we found is that actually the groups working on Zoom did a little bit better at the decision-making task than at the creative idea generation task. And if you think about the psychological requirements of the decision-making task, it makes some sense. Because to make a decision, I have to narrow down on something. I have to be analytical. I have to be focused.
Starting point is 00:14:37 It's the exact opposite of the expansive thinking that's required in creative idea generation. And so that sort of gave us the hint that the story here isn't Zoom versus Zoom is bad or Zoom is good, is a different modality. is that different modalities are matched to different task requirements. And so that's a roundabout way to get an answer to your question, which is, look, what matters isn't? Are you working at home? Are you working in hybrid? Are you working in the office? Is what are the psychological requirements of the task?
Starting point is 00:15:05 And so if it relates to expansive thinking, you want to be in an environment that doesn't force you, force this kind of cognitive narrowness. And if you have to be analytical and so in focus, then that cognitive narrowness actually might help you. our colleague Nick Bloom, who studied this for a very long time and the econ department has a pretty famous paper that shows that call center workers, I believe it was in a travel agency in China, were 12% more productive when they worked from home than when they worked at the call center.
Starting point is 00:15:35 And so the conclusion from that for many years was, yeah, you're more productive when you work from home. But it turns out if you think about what that task is, it's not that you're at home that makes it, that made you more productive, is that the task requirements match the kind of environment that you have at home. What do I mean by that? If I'm a customer service agent and sitting in a call center,
Starting point is 00:15:59 I have to do two tasks, actually. The first one is to listen to the customer. And the second one is I have to suppress all the noise that's around me. Maybe there's not a ton of noise, but there's some noise. I've got to suppress that. So now that's going to naturally hurt how productive I can be because my attention is split. Now imagine I go work at home.
Starting point is 00:16:20 At home, I can actually control the volume of the environment around me. Usually I'm working in quiet, right? And because I'm working in quiet, I don't have to suppress these other noises, and that allows me to give more attention to the customer. So it's really about what does the task require and how the requirements of the task match the modality of the work environment. And so that's what managers have to do.
Starting point is 00:16:45 they have to ask themselves, okay, what really requires us to be in the office because it does require expansive thinking, because psychological distance does matter for that kind of stuff? What could be done better at home? Like something like that, where actually being in the office could be a distraction rather than an aid. And what type of things does it not matter? And then I can let the employee really decide whatever it is they prefer. Right? So I don't know if I'm doing my taxes, it might not matter, right, where I am.
Starting point is 00:17:15 as long as I can handle some distraction while doing my taxes. Right, right. You're listening to If Then, a podcast from Stanford Graduate School of Business. We'll continue our conversation after the break. So we're starting to see companies and tech companies in particular, starting to try to pull people back in, in some cases, for a third day, for example. Yeah. What is there any evidence or are you aware of conversations, policies that are happening in these organizations
Starting point is 00:18:00 about what the criteria is for that, or is it more about they think for some reason philosophically that it's better to have people in the office than not? I don't know of any systematic study that looks at various categories of task requirements in the workplace and matches them to workplace modality. So right now all we're seeing is basically a tension between employers that want to have control over the production function
Starting point is 00:18:28 and employees who would prefer to avoid commutes and wear and are more happy to work in pajamas than they are to like get dressed in work clothes and they would rather be able to go to the gym at 11 o'clock in the morning as opposed to at 6 p.m. after they leave work. Right, and you put your finger on what that tension is. In one case, it's kind of lifestyle. And in the other case, it's production and religious belief,
Starting point is 00:18:55 if that's the case. So assuming that organizations want happy employees, they want to retain them, and maybe in all cases they don't, but let's assume for a moment that they do, what are some ways they can convince people to come into the office rather than just sort of stating three times a week for reasons that may be nebulous? Yeah, so there's a little bit of an underlying assumption of what you're saying is that what I want is I want to keep all the employees that I have because I'm motivated to retain my employees. And I think that's only a partial yes. I think that what we're going to find
Starting point is 00:19:34 is that there's some employees that maybe they just don't fit the workplace modality. Like if I'm a fully remote company, it requires a certain type of employee. And if I'm a kind of company that wants to have people mostly in the office, then you have to have people who are willing to do that and who actually prefer it or who embrace it.
Starting point is 00:19:54 And so I think that you can imagine over the next couple of years being like reshuffling depending on people's preferred work styles. Now, there's no doubt that it's more convenient for me to stay at home than it is for me to be in the office. So I think that what employers need to start thinking about is to ask themselves, what's the job that being at home is doing for people,
Starting point is 00:20:15 that they're so rabid about it? And I think that job is convenience. It's avoiding commute. It's flexibility. It's a sense of familiarity and comfort and safety. And so you have to start thinking it as an employer. How do I provide that in alternative ways? So right now, a typical office, a day starts at 8 or 9 o'clock.
Starting point is 00:20:35 But guess what else starts at 8 or 9 o'clock? Schools, which means that there's always going to be more traffic around 8 or 9 o'clock, which means something that should take me 15 minutes, can take me 45 minutes or an hour. in some cases an hour and a half. So maybe we have to start the workday at 10.30 or at 11 or some kind of staggered form. Okay, maybe if we know that people like the flexibility of being able to go to a workout, go to their Pilates class at 1 o'clock, actually make that part of the workplace norm and say explicitly, you know, we want, almost expect you to go exercise once a day whenever you want,
Starting point is 00:21:12 as long as it fits your workday. here's a gym membership that allows you to go at any number of gyms in the area. Right? But the kind of task that you engage in really requires you to be in the office. We want to have a nod towards the things that made home such a hospital in such a convenient place for you. We'll be right back to finish our conversation. But first, a quick word from one of our sponsors. Their support allows us to bring you this show free of charge.
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Starting point is 00:22:22 with confidence. It's a simple way to focus your time where it matters most. Visit upwork.com right now and post your job for free. That's upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's upw-w-rk.com. And now back to our conversation. What would you advise a manager or a senior leader who's trying to find that sweet spot between the mix of office and work and what should they be thinking about when their people are remote? I'm going to give you an unsatisfying answer, which is an answer that's actually going to require you to answer some questions, not you specifically, but the listener. And so the thing that people have to understand is that all those things that. that you learned about how to lead in a face-to-face environment pre-pandemic, right?
Starting point is 00:23:20 Because everything we're talking about now is pre and post-pandemic. That skill set and those norms that were developed in the workplace, that culture, those forms of communication, those habits, that kind of transfer of knowledge, you kind of have to relearn it and redo it for the remote, in the remote work experience. And what you have to do, actually, is you have to engage in a process that says,
Starting point is 00:23:46 okay, what were the elements of the culture that I had that were critical to me? What were the things that we did that were carriers of that culture? And then say, okay, if I'm in a hybrid environment or a remote environment, what do I have to do in order to be able to create that same kind of culture, that same kind of style or whatever, that same kind of workflow? So if before, like one of the ways we used to connect was everybody went and up going to coffee at 9 o'clock, we kind of all converge for coffee at 9 o'clock. Now that we're working far away, we actually have to deliberately set up an alternative. In March 2020, we moved from working phase to working from home.
Starting point is 00:24:26 We just kept on doing the same stuff, except now we're talking to each other through a screen. But no, but then there's all these other things that we did around that were essentially the scaffold around which work was done. that then kind of fell by the wayside. And we actually have to need to actively replace those because it's all those scaffoldings that actually make the work environment meaningful for people. And so I can tell you, like teachers here at Stanford, I remember we essentially, one day I taught face to face,
Starting point is 00:24:56 and then the next class I was showing the same slides and doing the same things online. And it doesn't work. It doesn't work because when you're online, people tend to drift. When I'm face-to-face, I can see when they're on their phone. I can see when they're on their email because I know where their eyes are going. Right?
Starting point is 00:25:12 But when I'm working on Zoom, now, like, nobody's really looking you in the eye on Zoom because the camera is in a different place. It's a different place than the screen. So it always looks like you're not looking at me. Even though you might be looking at me, right? So we're always miscommunicating and kind of there's no way to fix that unless some kind of AI fix the gaze. But at some point I learned that, wait, if my class is all about engagement
Starting point is 00:25:34 and engagement is important to me, When I was face to face, I could create engagement by walking towards somebody, by a change in inflection in my voice, by moving my arms in a certain way that would make people understand, you know, just like a conductor that wants that uses his arms or her arms in order to be able to kind of really move the orchestra. I can do that face to face on Zoom. I can't do it. Sometimes you don't even see my hands. So I had to make a transition. I said, you know what, if leaning in is such an important element of my class environment, I'm just going to call. And I would have entire 80-minute pairs where I would call-call exclusively.
Starting point is 00:26:10 There was no hand-raising. And what that meant was that people knew that at any point in time I can call on them. So then they had to lean in. But that was an adjustment I had to make. And I had to make a conscious change. You can't just default into it. You have to make a conscious change. And so to really manage in this new environment, you have to stop and say, okay, what are the things I care about?
Starting point is 00:26:30 Okay, now, how do I enact those in this remote situation? because what you used to do, it doesn't work, right? It's not the same stuff. There's not the same features of the environment. Right. So let's pivot just a little bit. You've done a lot of research on consumer behavior, how to influence people decision-making.
Starting point is 00:26:52 Sure. Are there any parallels from that research to what we're talking about now with respect to managing a team and incentivizing or getting them to sort of make decisions or think about something differently. How does creating a situation where they are evaluating this thing as compared to that thing as an option,
Starting point is 00:27:15 what's the process that they are engaged in their decision making and how can that be manipulated if that's the right word or changed or how can you lead them to a decision that you want them to make? Ah, so what you're describing is something that in literature is called choice architecture. And the idea in choice architecture is that you think about it broadly this way. You have two choices. Suppose you want to get someone to engage in a certain behavior. You can either try to convince them to engage in that behavior and then hope that when the decision point comes,
Starting point is 00:27:50 they choose the option that's congruent with the thing you try to convince them to do. So that's call that the persuasion approach. The other approach, the approach of choice architecture says, wait, if I designed a decision environment taking into account people's psychological tendencies and the way the mind works, then I can influence people's decisions by virtue of the situation.
Starting point is 00:28:13 I don't have to, sometimes I tell my students I don't have to admonish them to do something. I put them in a situation where the decision I want them to make that's better along some dimension that I'm trying to maximize is a natural outcome of the psychological process. And I do that.
Starting point is 00:28:31 that, and it's not that I'm incentivizing to do one thing versus do another, but I'm creating a situation where they're more likely to do one thing than another. One of the philosophers of business that I love quoting in my class is the rapper Snoop Dogg. And Snoop Dog says that it's too easy for kids to join gangs and do drugs. We should make it easy to do football and academics. And he's absolutely right, right? He's a really good, he has the intuition for choice architecture. Make easy the decision that you want people to make. And then they're more likely to make it.
Starting point is 00:29:07 If I tell people that it's really important to recycle, but to recycle, they've got to go to their garage to throw something out. They're not going to do it. But then when garbage can manufacturer started doubling up the cans, right? So now you have a can for trash and a can for recycling. Now of a sudden people recycle. Why? Because you've made it easy. That's the idea in that sort of body of research.
Starting point is 00:29:29 So you talked about, and you used to, Snoop Dog, as an example, make the decision easy. Yeah. How do you make the decision easy for people to come back to work? I think that if you make work be a place of greater meaning for people above and beyond the actual work itself. People search for meaning in their lives. They search for connection. They search for relationships.
Starting point is 00:29:56 They search for opportunities to express their identity. they search for opportunities to express their individuality. They search opportunities to show off. They search for opportunities to relate. You want work to be the place that they naturally think about as the outlet for all those desires. And so you have to build the work environment with those desires in mind. And so then you become easier.
Starting point is 00:30:26 Then you also become easier on some issues like conveniences, right? If it's, if it, if my commute to work is short as opposed to long, now all of a sudden it's easier. I've lowered the cost of going to work. If work provides me things that I can get at home, right? So we talked earlier about gym memberships, right? So if, if work gives me that or has a gym in the office, now of a sudden I don't have to interrupt, I don't have to leave the place where I'm at in order to be able to get a workout in, assuming that's my value, the time, the ability and the time to exercise, then that makes it easier. I think tech companies did that to some extent with food.
Starting point is 00:31:08 For a long time, the food experience that a lot of these companies was extraordinarily central, right? So it makes it easy to sort of, that solves my lunch problem or my dinner problem, my breakfast problem. Right. So those are ways, those are ways to make the office decision an easier decision. Yeah, yeah. You talked about working from home in your pajamas. I showed up once in a workout pants because I went to exercise and forgot to bring something else. And my boss said, nobody cares.
Starting point is 00:31:34 Yeah. And by the way. And that's great, right? So now he allowed you or she, I don't know, to express yourself in the way you want. And so now he's made being you easy. So you're you vis-a-vis other people. When you're at home by yourself, there's no other people. Right.
Starting point is 00:31:51 And so at least the office now is kind of an easy way to be able to express yourself. What interested you in this kind of research in the first place? Why are you studying the things you're studying and why did you choose the career you chose? So it's a funny story and it goes back to my mother. But not my mother, and my mother inspired me to do it. But I called my mother when I was a junior in college considering what I was going to take in the spring semester.
Starting point is 00:32:18 And I was going to take five classes and I had chosen four. And I called her and I talked to her and she says, well, what classes are you taking next term? And I said, well, I'm taking. Can't remember one, two, three, four. And the fifth one, I'm not sure if to take this one or this other class. And I don't remember, I honestly don't remember which two classes I was considering. But one of them was a class called the Psychology of Decision Making and Judgment.
Starting point is 00:32:39 It was PSY 321, WWS 312. That was the code. And she said, who's teaching that? And I said a guy named D. Conneman. She goes, Daniel Conneman. Oh, you should take that class. He's really famous. So my mother is.
Starting point is 00:32:53 Okay. You're going to tell me why she knew that. So my mother's a neuropsychologist. And she said, yeah, he's really famous. And I was like, so what do you do? I was like, sure, I'll do whatever my mother tells me. Right? And so I took that class, literally because my mom said, you should take that class.
Starting point is 00:33:07 That guy is really famous. And so I took that class and I just loved it. It was the first, I believe, yeah, it was the second year that the Connaman taught at Princeton. What's the next question you want to have answered? What's the next thing you want to study? I don't know. But I think, listen, I'm going to, the obvious thing is, listen, the next great revolution of our time is artificial intelligence. And I think that once we get past this like, oh my God, wow, look what Chachipit just wrote for me phase.
Starting point is 00:33:40 We're going to have to start understanding the psychological interface between the human being and the machine. And so we talk a lot about copiloting. And co-piloting can mean a lot of different things that can affect us psychologically and a lot of different ways. And by the way, when I'm in a cockpit of a 737, there's two pilots, right? There's a captain and a first officer. Is the machine going to be the first officer or is it going to be the captain? Right? And how does that change? And how does that and when? And kind of how does that change things? So that's clearly one place. Another place that we really want to keep pushing is hybrid work is here to stay and remote communications are here to stay and want to kind of dig in further
Starting point is 00:34:22 into that. So we're studying a bit now about sort of people's emotional responses to each other, face-to-face versus on video. And eventually what I want to really do, I want to study networking. Because a lot of what we do at work is network. And if the type of information that we exchange differs when we're face-to-face versus over video, then it can change the type of relationships that we build. And so the question is, how does that change those relationships? How does that change the information that's exchanged? Who does it affect the most? And in what way? So I think those are the directions that I'm going to go in. But we'll see. I'll ask chat GPT.
Starting point is 00:34:57 Or your mother. Or my mother. Who, by the way, at 79 soon to be 80, still works for full time as a neuropsychologist. Yeah. Thanks, Jonathan. Pleasure. If Then is produced by Jesse Baker and Eric Newsom of Magnificent Noise for Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Starting point is 00:35:19 Our show is produced by Jim Colgan and Julian Nat. Mixing in sound design by Kristen Muller. from Stanford GSB, Jenny Luna, Sorrel Husbands Denholz, and Elizabeth Wilesik-Sern. If you enjoyed this conversation, we'd appreciate you sharing this with others who might be interested and hope you'll try some of the other episodes in this series. For more on our professors and their research, or to discover more podcasts coming out of Stanford GSB, visit our website at StanfordgGSB.edu. Find more on our YouTube channel.
Starting point is 00:35:53 You can follow us on social media at Stanford.gsp. I'm Kevin Kuhl. Before we wrap up, I just want to say thank you for listening. It really means a lot to hear how people all over the world are using these ideas in their own lives. It inspires me and the whole team that brings you this show. If you want more episodes and resources, feel free to follow, subscribe, and explore past conversations. We're grateful for your support of Think Fast Talk Smart.

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