This post is about how our incorrect assumptions can limit our worldview. It’s a bit more personal than most of my posts (and it doesn’t have any charts), but it details an important and fairly transformative experience I had that influenced my decision to start Lying to Ourselves.
This experience made me realize that my thinking was often too small and too myopic. As a result, I strive to be more open-minded, particularly in regard to how I think and evaluate talent. My experience also has some pretty good lessons for our new era of remote work.
I hope you like it,
Ben
Getting it Wrong
Mason and the Experts
Years ago, I was on a moonshot-style project for a large company that wanted to decentralize some of its services. I can’t get too far into the details, but the gist of what we needed to do was find thousands of contractors to handle tech support chats 24/7.
We sold the project to leadership by telling them that we’d find a bunch of experts who we generically called Mason. We defined Mason was defined as an early 20s male, college student, who was majoring in a science-related field. We figured that there were lots of Masons out there who could use some extra cash and knew enough about tech to be helpful for our customers.
The basic idea is that we’d find, vet, and onboard a few thousand Masons onto our platform, where they would take chats from our customers. After each chat, the customers would rate their experience. If an Expert fell below a certain rating we removed them from the platform. If that sounds like “uber for tech support,” you’re right. That’s exactly how we pitched it!
Anyway, we ran some early tests, and they worked better than expected, so our Exec team decided to ramp up the program. My job was to run ads and build the vetting and onboarding flow for the Experts. It was a wild and frantic time, but in less than a few months, we had successfully found and onboarded all the Experts we needed to handle hundreds of chats a day.
One day, after things had calmed down a bit, an engineer on my team came up to me and said, “Hey, we have demographic data on our Experts. Do you want to know what it says?” I’m not proud of this, but I had been so invested in getting the plane off the ground that it had never occurred to me to check our assumption about who Mason actually was.
The engineer pulled the data. The story it told was very different from the story we had been telling ourselves. It turned out our best Experts weren’t like Mason at all. They were:
Overwhelmingly female (70%+)
Older than college age. I can’t recall the details, but many were in their mid to late 30s.
They lived in rural or exurban communities.
Most were current stay-at-home moms.
Education level was all over the map, with no clear bias towards technical schooling.
In short, we had totally missed the mark on WHO we thought would be best for the job.
In the following months, we spent a lot of time interviewing the best Experts to learn more about them so we could build a better experience for them and our customers. These were, overwhelmingly, women who had been dealt a rough blow during the Great Financial Crisis. Many of them were just starting families in 2008 when all of a sudden, they (or their partner) lost their job, a family member got sick, or they had to make some other major life adjustment that took them out of the workforce.
Many of them had made personal sacrifices that I found admirable (and if I’m being honest, I’m probably too selfish to make). Ten years after the GFC, these Experts hadn’t lost their curiosity or desire to contribute to society and, with older kids less dependent on them, now had the time to work. The problem had been that there weren't many flexible work opportunities until we came along.
What I Learned
I think about my experience with the Experts a lot. Not just because I was so wrong about something I was so sure of, but how often I see other people making the same mistake of overlooking, underestimating, or worse, denigrating, entire swaths of the workforce that they should be celebrating.
And I see this misjudgment happen all the time. It’s not uncommon for some of the world’s most visible leaders to have a negative view of remote workers:
Elon Musk’s comment that remote work is “phoning it in”
Sandeep Mathrani, CEO of WeWork, “Those who are least engaged are very comfortable working from home.”
David Solomon, CEO of Goldman Sachs, “[Remote work is] an aberration that we’re going to correct as quickly as possible.”
Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan, working from home “doesn't work for those who want to hustle”
These men are talking about a group of workers I’ve found to be the exact opposite of what they assume.1 The Experts I interacted with were engaged, they hustled, they outperformed, and they had more integrity and conviction than many of the in-person, 9-5 coworkers I’ve had.
The majority of the Experts who were on our platform had sacrificed so they could live their values. Every business leader loves to talk about their company values, yet here they are completely overlooking a talented group of people who have made the hard choices to support the same values they claim to celebrate. If you ignore, denigrate, or talk down to people who made significant sacrifices to live the values you claim to celebrate, what does that say about you?2
Lunch last month
Last month I got lunch with one of my former colleagues who’s still working on a version of our Experts project. I’m proud to report it’s going well!
He told me that they recently did a survey of the Experts, and the demographics haven’t changed much. He did say that they recently learned that 55% of the Experts were “military-affiliated” - meaning that they or their spouses were active military and likely stationed overseas.
This colleague had lived abroad and said, “I know how hard it is to get work visas, so I’m happy we found these people.” Yea, me too.
And yes, the “remote work is for lazy people” crowd is made up (almost exclusively) of men.
This isn’t a rhetorical question. It says that you are full of shit.