Tanya Menon

THE FUTURE OF WORK: Deciding faster, smarter, and more wisely

As our machines and models become smarter, the future of work depends on how our uniquely human wisdom keeps pace. Tanya Menon’s book Stop Spending, Start Managing (Harvard Business Review Press, 2016) focuses on intractable problems at work. These typically take the form of Wicked Problems—defined as complex problems without precise answers (think: managing diversity, pandemics, climate change, or inequality). AI certainly helps us navigate complex challenges—but it also reveals gaping holes that human wisdom must fill. The future of work depends on how you will choose to use human wisdom to harness the AI and gain traction on your most wicked problems.

Tanya Menon is a former member of Center for Decision Research at the University of Chicago and she consulted for nearly a decade with a Fortune 500 financial services firm’s data and analytics group. Tanya’s talk will draw from the example of hiring decisions—a top money waster for organizations. She begins with the known limitations of ‘intuition’ in hiring, and how data/analytics—along with other design elements—offer a promising corrective to human bias. We’ll also see the challenges that still remain—that force us to think beyond the models:

Understanding the what. We hope for the model to spit out a solution—but have we asked the right questions? Have we truly understood the problem? The first type of wisdom lies in finding the problem before entering problem-solving mode.

A key challenge occurs when the models anchor on the past—and the past doesn’t predict the future. What are the scenarios for your future—and how do you hire for those? This involves learning from the lessons of the past, getting un-stuck from them, and envisioning new possibilities.

Understanding the why behind the answer. We get the ‘answer’ from the analytics, but rather than revealing deeper truths and root causes, it simply reflects superficial biases. The second type of wisdom allows us to see the limits of our data, correct its biases, and think more deeply about the hidden stories that explain the data.

Understanding who we are and who we will become: It’s often said that we’re merely the sum of our choices—so what does it mean if a machine is driving our choices? The third type of wisdom lies in the power of our identities and guiding values. In hiring, it emerges in how you handle ambiguous (and value-laden) words like ‘merit’ and ‘fit’ that can become a source of bias—if you don’t surface and define them. By clarifying and anchoring your choices in your values, you will control the model, and the choices that create your identity and future.

Potential learning objectives

1. Defining how the AI/human partnership will emerge
2. Understanding what makes problems intractable—and how to break through them.
3. Wisdom and Strategic thinking (problem finding/solving)
4. Value clarification to define problems and priorities

TURN SMART PEOPLE INTO SMART TEAMS

This session is for anyone who’s suffered through too many hours in unproductive meetings or on teams that don’t reach their potential. How can we stop squandering collective talent and start creating high value collaboration? And how do we should we think about collaboration today, as our work arrangements have been transformed?

Tanya’s an award-winning professor who’s taught tens of thousands of MBA students and executives for over two decades in some of the top business schools worldwide, and has consulted and given keynotes for numerous Fortune 500 companies. Her TED talk was one named one of the most popular of 2018.

Based on her co-authored book (Stop Spending, Start Managing, Harvard Business Review Press) and her research, Tanya’s information-packed sessions are designed to make collaboration fun and productive. The sessions are interactive, humorous, and full of memorable stories, but the star of the show will be the evidence based approaches proven to help you collaborate better. Her goal is to transform how you think about organizing—so that your smart people can become smart groups. She’s run this session for both large groups of 100s of participants—and small C-suite teams.

The session will be highly interactive with short group exercises. The topic could be a one hour intro or 20 hours! Regardless, it will surface the dangerous processes that squander your group’s talents, and provide you with immediate fixes that transform the way you work.

Potential learning objectives:

1. What are your assumptions about teams?
2. The two most dangerous people in groups—the persuasive idiot and the quiet expert—and how to foil them.
3. What norms that have implicitly shaped how your group functions—and can you be intentional about setting more productive norms?
4. Knowing when to be a group and when to be an individual
5. How do you maximize the diversity of voices that are heard?
6. How do you organize the confusion of perspectives—and then pick the best ideas?
7. Remote work

HIRING FASTER, SMARTER, AND MORE FAIRLY

Rather than focusing on people’s ‘biases,’ Tanya’s work is about creating great systems where diverse talent can be seen and can thrive. How do we broaden networks to hire beyond the traditional talent pools? How do we de-bias gut-feel hiring practices? What are best practices in performance management? These are in fact all the topics that PSA Security Network happened to list as critical topics for the engagement. While we can’t talk about all of these areas in a single talk, we can deeply examine a few. The conversation will lie at the fascinating intersection of human decision making and the organizational practices that can ideally defend against bias.

Tanya’s spoken on the topic of Hiring Better at industry associations, businesses, and to hundreds of alumni at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Managers surveyed for her book, Stop Spending, Start Managing, reported that hiring mistakes were the largest source of waste—costing their companies millions!

She divides the hiring problem into two challenges: (1) Having too narrow of a pool, and (2) Biased filtering of the pool. For the first part, she considers how narrow networks, a rigid checklist mentality, and failure to recognize the subjectivity of meritocracy all inhibit our chances of seeing diverse talent in the pool. (And, they also lead to unpleasant hiring meetings too!)

To explore the second challenge, Tanya plays an interactive game so that you’ll get individualized feedback on your intuition—and a sense of its limits. She then breaks down the hiring process to help identify cues that predict good hires and those that don’t; the power of algorithms and the biases they perpetuate; specific interview questions that yield good data, and how to interpret them; and specific de-biasing processes that allow you to capture the advantage of both the algorithm and the human decision maker.

You will leave the session with a checklist where you can assess your own hiring processes. She will also share cutting edge resources, all based on data/research, so that you can study these topics further and identify tools needed to make better, faster, smarter, and fairer hiring decisions.