I got a lot out of Barry Schwartz’s book, ‘The Paradox of Choice’ which I read a couple of years ago and the phrase has become one of our household’s verbal shortcuts.

He didn’t talk about this research though at TED.  Rather he talked about moral virtue and the need for this to go hand in hand with practical wisdom which is moral will plus moral skill, especially:

• Knowing when and how to make exceptions
• Knowing when and how to improvise
• Knowing how to use moral skills in the service of the right aims

Reassuringly, apparently one doesn’t need to be brilliant to be wise.

The combination of rules and incentives are not enough to get a job done.  Scripts are insurance policies against disaster but they also ensure mediocrity.  Too many rules prevent improvisation.

The keys to remoralising work are to celebrate moral exemplars and to combine will, skill and people knowledge in taking action at work.

Liz Coleman - argued that our eduction system has not been preparing people to be good citizens.  She related this to the increase in specialisation arguing that the value of the educated generalist has declined.  I have considerable self-interested sympathy for her argument.  I often wonder whether, if I had a more specific and technical skillset, I would make more money and increase my work satisfaction…but that’s an aside….

She stated that there is a combination of 5 things that together have not served us well:

• Fragmentation of knowledge
• Technical mastery
• Neutrality of values
• Oversimplification of civic engagement
• Idealisation of the expert.

Instead she advocates an action oriented curriculum that blends disciplines in the service of solving the problems that really matter.  Examples of the disciplines that are required include: rhetoric, design, mediation, improvisation, qualitative reasoning and technology. 

This should be supplemented by practitioners joining the curriculum and students moving outside the classroom.

I hope this talk goes up the site soon as there are a number of people I know who would find it both interesting and challenging.

Nate Silver - what we can predict we can design to influence.  Examples from the U.S. election

Alex Tabarrok - the theme of this one seemed to be ‘all is not lost’.  While the world is currently in financial turmoil we are in a unique position in history because at the start of the 21st Century growth extended to almost all parts of the world.

New ideas drive growth and larger markets save lives as they increase the incentive to product new ideas.  One world market gives us many more idea creators.

Bruce BuenodeMesquita -this talk was all about using game theory to predict how people behave. He gave us predictions for Iran but his insights are applicable to much more than just politics.

Game theory is based on the assumptions that:

• People are rationally self-interested
• People have values and beliefs
• People face limitations

When we are trying to understand and predict decisions we make a mistake if we just pay attention to the person at the top of the power ladder.  There are lots of people shaping decisions.

In order to make predictions we need to ask the following questions:

• Who has a stake in the decision?
• What do they say they want?
• What priority does the issue have for them - how are they on this issue compared to other issues?
• How much influence could they bring to bear.

In making decisions we all care about two things: the outcome and the credit for the outcome. Different people trade these off in different quantities.

Choices, changes, values and beliefs are all we need to know to predict a person’s actions.  When this analysis is created across all influencers in a particular problem them the outcome of most complicated negotiations is predictable.  Situations can then be engineered to get a better result.

I think there are fascinating implications for change management and influence in this paper….especially the information about the particular things to focus on when trying to understand someone elses motivation.

Dan Ariely had several fascinating anecdotes…so much so that I stopped taking notes so my comment on this paper is brief.  I have bought his book though and am very much looking forward to reading it.  The main takeaway for me is the reinforcement of ’social proof’.  Social proof is a term coined by Robert Cialdini in his seminal book ‘Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion’ and relates to the fact that we are much more likely to do the things that our peer group is doing,  Dan Ariely demonstrated this with reference to cheating showing that cheating rose or dropped significantly if a group had clear, visible social proof that this was the norm among their peers.

Rosamund Zander was not given long enough - seemed like about 12 minutes, and she took a little while to get going because her chair wasn’t available to start with.  Despite these constraints she gave a good talk which was something of a tease.  I would have loved to have heard what else she had to say.  Her theme was ‘human virtuosity’ and she talked about how the safety instructions that we construct when we are children then impact our behaviour as adults.  Her 5 tips for dealing with this:

• Frame upsetting experiences as memories
• Take responsibility for everything that happens to you
• Seek out help in all directions
• Embrace different patterns - be the person you were called to be.
• Abandon the search for approval - you’ve already made it through

Willie Smit’s talk is one I’m looking forward to hearing again.  Although it was ostensibly about reforestation it encompassed a whole range of different disciplines in order to save forest habitats.  Most important seemed to be listening to the local people and designing interventions that really deliver for them - so the model is not ‘one size fits all’ but really needs to be tuned to the requirement of each unique area and peoples.