Work In Progress

Bill C-18 & The "Will" and The "Way" to Behavior Change

In Canada, Meta is no longer showing news on its platform. The hardline move is a defensive play to try and prevent further legislation around how social media companies deliver and monetize publisher content that is shared on their platforms. Granted, most everyone is favor of NOT seeing news when they log-in to their social accounts. But that does not make people's existing viewing and reading behavior any easier to unseat. Here, we will look at behavior change and review Berkman's framework for the "will" and the "way" problems that make behavior change difficult.

LK-99 & Lessons in Product Delivery

LK-99 drew the excitement of the scientific community and then drew its ire. Promoted as the highly improbable and equally sought-after room-temperature superconductor, replication studies quickly found blatant errors in the study design and data collection of the initial research team. Beyond the immediately obvious lessons, the story of LK-99 can teach us a thing or two about proper product delivery.

What Barbenheimer Teaches About Our Strengths and Opportunities

Barbenheimer has become an internet meme sensation for the stark differences of its two titular characters. In truth, the movies and its protagonists share striking similarities as they respectively explore their theme of internal conflict. For us and our teams, the movies highlight a universal struggle that we all face - how can our strengths also present us with problems and opportunities for development. In this post, we will explore that idea to better understand how a single behavior can be both a strength and a weakness and we will look at tactics that can help us minimize those downsides without sacrificing our max potential.

Record Heat & Our Short-Term Thinking Demise

Across the globe, billions of people are experiencing a heat wave. June was the hottest month on record and July looks like it will warm up even further, with day-after-day of record high global temperatures. Climate scientists are consistently highlighting the cause - weak effects from an emerging moderate El Nino and strong effects from human-influenced climate change. Despite nearly universal alignment on the problem, a myriad of potential solutions, and high degree of support for implementing those solutions progress is slow. In part, the hesitant pace of change is caused by short-term thinking that preferences immediate and known value over longer-term benefits of more ambiguous proportion. Here, we will dive into some of the cognitive biases at play and discuss tactics to implement in our teams that help overcome these pitfalls.

Threads vs Twitter - How & Why to be a Good Copycat

Last week, amidst more troubles at Twitter, Meta released its twitter-killer alternative. Threads, like other apps that have already hit the market, mirrors many of the key features and the app interface of Twitter. As we look through history, we see plenty of stories of competitors copying from each other to win market share. But we also see that copying is only half of the battle. In this post, we will look at how the timing of the Threads launch has helped to separate it from the pack and discuss why imitation can often be a superior strategy to innovation.