 |
|
|
|||||
As a manager, its easy to get caught up in the day-to-day grind of fixing processes, eliminating bottlenecks, and streamlining workflows. We focus on reducing frictionthe things that get in the way of people doing their best work. And sure, thats important. But heres the thing: Reducing fear is just as, if not more, important. A comprehensive two-year study by Google identified psychological safety as the most important factor in high-performing teams. This environment allows team members to take risks and be vulnerable without fear of negative consequences. Harvard Business School professor Amy C. Edmondson emphasizes that psychological safety enables employees to speak up, make mistakes, and learn from them, which is essential for innovation and growth. Lets face it. The best processes in the world wont help much if your team is afraid to speak up, take risks, or challenge the status quo. Fear can stunt creativity, shut down communication, and make people avoid the very risks that lead to growth. So, as leaders, we need to think beyond just fixing processes. We need to also focus on creating an environment where people feel safe and confident enough to acteven if it means making a mistake along the way. Why Fear Matters More Than You Think Fear is a powerful force. It can make people double-check their work, avoid taking risks, and be extra cautious. But when fear becomes the driving force behind decisions, it also leads to silence. When people are afraid to speak up, they hold back good ideas, overlook problems, and avoid making necessary changes. Neuroscience backs this up. When we experience fear, our brains go into fight or flight mode, which limits our ability to think clearly and make rational decisions. When were scared, we become reactive instead of proactive. This is why a culture of fear isnt just uncomfortableits downright unproductive. As a leader, its your job to create a culture where people feel safe to speak up, ask questions, and challenge the status quo. Thats why reducing fear should go hand in hand with reducing friction. Fixing Processes Doesnt Fix Everything Lets look at a real-world example: the United States Postal Service. In the early 2000s, the USPS faced a significant drop in productivity, rising operational costs, and declining employee morale. To address these issues, management introduced new technology, upgraded processes, and streamlined workflows to improve efficiency and reduce errors. They invested in automated sorting systems and revamped scheduling to make operations run more smoothly. However, despite these process improvements, the results werent as dramatic as expected. Productivity wasnt increasing, and employees still seemed disengaged. The reason? Fear was still very much present in the workplace. Employees were afraid to speak up or share concerns about the new processes. If workers noticed something wrong with the new systems or had ideas to improve efficiency, they didnt feel comfortable offering suggestions or challenging the way things were done. This is a perfect example of how reducing frictionby fixing processesdidnt have the full impact it could have had because fear was still holding back the team. How could USPS have tackled both issues at once? They could have started by actively working to reduce fear within the organization. Management needed to create an environment where employees felt safe to make mistakes, raise issues, and offer constructive feedback. Employees who feel safe and supported are more likely to speak up when somethings not working and more likely to suggest creative solutions. They become partners in progress rather than passive participants. Balancing Both: Reducing Friction and Fear SEB, a Nordic financial services group, implemented a five-month training program focusing on psychological safety and perspective-taking for its investment banking leadership team. This initiative aimed to overcome transformation challenges and foster open communication. As a result, the team achieved revenues 25% above their annual targets in a strategically important market segment. A multi-industry case study followed businesses whose team members were hesitant to voice concerns. All participants implemented psychological safety workshops emphasizing active listening and constructive feedback. This initiative led to improved conflict resolution, enhanced communication, and increased productivity, positively impacting the company’s bottom line. To be an effective leader, you cant just focus on fixing processes. Thats a quick fix, but it doesnt address the deeper issues that impact team dynamics. Reducing friction is important, yes. But reducing fear is essential if you want to create a truly high-performing, innovative, and engaged team. Simon Brown, global learning and development leader at EY, has spent years building critical skills and behaviors in high-performing teams. He shares: You cant automate courage. While systems help things run smoothly, its the culture that inspires people to run toward challenges instead of away from them. Real-world application So, what does this balance look like in practice? Reduce friction: Simplify workflows, cut out unnecessary steps, and ensure your team has the tools and resources they need to do their jobs efficiently. Reduce fear: Foster a culture of psychological safety, where mistakes are treated as learning opportunities, where feedback is welcomed (not feared), and where team members feel confident enough to take risks and innovate. You/me/we: Adopt a decision-making framework that defines what decisions employees can make on their own without fear or reprisal. This cuts down on back-and-forth decision-making bottlenecks and helps people feel more empowered in their roles. Model a hands-off approach: Is your leadership decreasing the number of mandatory meetings but still attending themselves? Making outdated rules optional instead of obsolete? Without buy-in from the top, team members will be too afraid to take action on simplification initiatives that can free up time and decrease unnecessary mental distress.Leadership isnt just about improving processesits about improving peoples ability to act within those processes. If you want your team to truly thrive, youve got to focus on both reducing friction and reducing fear. When you do, youll create an environment where people feel empowered to make decisions, try new things, and speak up when somethings not working. Thats when the real magic happens.
Category:
E-Commerce
Loving Pinterest has long been a part of my secretly middle-aged personality. I have 16.1k pins to my name to prove it. I started my account in middle school eight years ago, and Pinterest has been a dear companion to me ever since. I used to log on every day to tuck away precious ideas and artworks into my boards, which I could take out to admire every time I needed advice, a joke, or a drawing lesson. I am not alone in this. Pinterest says that 42% of its global user base is Gen Z. I think Gen Z has really latched onto Pinterest as a safe platform to use, especially with so much happening around other social media platforms, says Lois, whose Tiktok videos about Pinterest under the username dandydemon have garnered over six million views. Pinterest is a very atypical social media platform. It’s not like Instagram, it’s not like TikTok, where youre actively scrolling. It’s a very personalized social media platform, and it feels almost like a journal of sorts for people. But for many users like Lois, a worrying pattern has emerged over the past couple of years. There is so much AI on the platform . . . that it’s hard to determine what [posts are] AI, and where it is coming from, she says. Other people like Reddit user InterationInternal agree. I was looking for hair color inspo and it was all AI. I couldn’t find a single human!! Then [I] typed in nail inspo, interior design – same thing. Is this platform dead? they wrote in a thread titled Pinterest is 100% AI now? R/Pinterest hosts hundreds of posts with similar complaints. Frustration over AI content and the recent mass deletion of user accounts is boiling over to the point where many users are leaving the platform for alternatives. Andy McCune, cofounder and CEO of the curation app Cosmos, says that after launching in August 2024, Cosmos has already gained millions of users. And, in the couple of days after Lois shouted out the platform as a Pinterest alternative in her a video discussing the Pinterest bans, McCune noted that Cosmos saw tens of thousands of new users join the platform. Pinterest says AI slop is not a problem on its platform. Pinterest’s systems are designed to prominently surface high-quality, inspirational content says a spokesperson for the company. Low-quality Gen AI content is therefore not broadly recommended by our systems or widely seen by users. Still, to help address user concerns about the presence of AI generated content on the platform, Pinterest rolled out a new feature to tag AI content in April. To help people determine whether a post contains AI-modified or generated content, Pinterest now analyzes the metadata of its images to look for AI markers. For those that fall through the cracks, Pinterest has also developed classifiers to detect AI generated content automatically. If Pinterest determines that an image is AI generated, it adds an AI modified label when users view it in closeup. As we refine these classifiers, our labels will become even more helpful and accurate, says the spokesperson. Not everyone thinks this fix will be enough. Lois believes that the existence of the AI pins in the first place undermines the utility of Pinterest. I use Pinterest for home decor reasons, she says. I love to imagine what my future home would look like, and also get decor items from Pinterest, and there’s no way to get a decor item that was made by AI . . . the whole point of Pinterest, to me, as far as the commerce side of it is seeing products that I can buy because they exist within reality. Pinterest is piloting a solution for this as well. The company is currently experimenting with a see fewer option for Gen AI pins in categories prone to AI modification or generation such as decor and food. We believe that AI should enhance, not replace, the value provided by our creators. Pinterests algorithms will continue to prioritize content that is inspirational, actionable, and most relevant to individual users, says the spokesperson. Deeper questions about AI on Pinterest Although these features may help users declutter their homepages of AI content, the overall amount of AI generated content on Pinterest will likely keep growing. After studying Pinterests monthly data and trend reports for January through April 2025, the technology-focused newsletter Garbage Day wrote for Sherwood News that every trend that Pinterest has specifically reported as growing since January 2025 has been saturated with pictures created by AI models. In fact, the article asserts that all 16 trends in Pinterests April trends report contained multiple AI generated images in the top 20 search results. The continued encouragement of AI generated images is worrying for many people working in the arts. It’s the sort of indiscriminate use of [AI] that bypasses the very valuable and hard work and the very sophisticated and complex work and creative processes of artists says Robert Brinkerhoff, Department Head of Illustration at RISD. I think one of our chief worries is that visual culture will diminish ultimately because with capitalism as a driving force, quality is not as important as money. Brinkerhoff notes that it is getting more and more difficult for artists to compete with the speed and increasing accuracy of AI generated content. For instance, an exploding area of practice for illustrators in recent years has been in visual development for film, for games, for animation, and many of our students are interested in that, he says. But those industries . . . are losing jobs and they’re being replaced by AI because it’s quite easy to generate that stuff and [AI is] very readily capable of creating stuff quickly. This concept is exactly what AI slop farmers on Pinterest such as Jesse Cunningham bank on. Cunningham openly admits to flooding Pinterest with AI content to make revenue. “I’m talking $10,000 per month on Pinterest . . . using AI images, using AI text,” he says in a YouTube video explaining his process. “On my page, we do 50 to 80 [posts] a day,” he says. We are presenting Pinterest with unique images every single time. This is why its hard to compete with AI. Not to mention that despite launching their new filters on AI content, Pinterest itself continues to use users’ information to train their own AI models. When you save or upload content to Pinterest, we may use it to improve the accuracy, safety and overall performance of Pinterest Canvas, says Pinterest on its Help Center website. What happens when a platform uses AI to train tself to better help people find inspiration to create a life they love, when an increasing number of uploads are AI generated? The more you subtract human beings from making things like art . . . the more dehumanized we become as a society, I think, says Brinkerhoff.
Category:
E-Commerce
At the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG), a team of scientists just published an interactive map that explores what all five boroughs of New York City looked like 400 years agoand you can search for your own block. The map, called the Welikia Project, was made by the NYBGs Urban Conservation team. It takes the city block by block, uncovering the history of flora, fauna, and Indigenous people that once lived in each area before it became an urban environment. The name welikia is borrowed from the Lenape people, who lived in whats now New York City for 8,000 to 10,000 years before European settlers; it means my good home. Viewers can use the tool to look at almost any area in the five boroughsincluding Grand Central, Yankee Stadium, and individual streetsto see what kinds of trees might have grown there, whether the area was host to any particular species of animals, and how Indigenous people may have used the lands resources. The project was spearheaded by Eric Sanderson, a historical ecologist and vice president of urban conservation strategy at NYBG who has studied New Yorks ecology for over two decades. Sanderson says the map has a range of uses, from helping New Yorkers feel more connected to their city to offering new insights to city planners and urban flood prevention experts. [Screenshot: welikia.org] A decades-long project Sanderson has been studying the historical ecology of NYC since the early aughts, after moving to the city in 1998 to work at the Wildlife Conservation Society. His years-long deep dive began while browsing through used books at The Strand: He came across a book full of historical maps of New York City. One particular mapthe British headquarters during the American Revolutionshowed Manhattan when it was a fledgling city at the very southern tip of the island. The rest of the map was hills, streams, wetlands, and beachesnot what we normally think of when we think of New York City,” Sanderson says. “So I georeferenced that map, and I started to think about how the streams and the wetlands and the beaches related to the modern geography of the city today. That initial spark of curiosity ultimately became the 2009 bestselling book Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City, which reconstructed the flora and fauna that once made up Manhattan. The book went on to become an exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York, a National Geographic cover, and a TED Talk. After that, I was kind of looking to go back to my conservation work, Sanderson says. And yet, people kept asking me: Aren’t you going to do Brooklyn? or, Don’t you live in the Bronx? or, Have you ever been to Staten Island? So I started pulling together pieces of information, doing more reading, and looking at historical maps. Eventually that led to [the Welikia Project]. [Screenshot: welikia.org] The Welikia Project Currently, Sanderson is working on another book called The Welikia Atlas and Gazetteer: A Guide to New York Citys Indigenous Landscape, slated for release in 2026, that maps the historical ecology of all five New York City boroughs. In the meantime, he and his team at NYBG have spent the past year and a half assembling the Welikia Project website, which compiles all of Sandersons new research into an easy-to-parse interactive map. Sourcing the historical map data to build a recreation of early New York presented a host of challenges. Whereas Sanderson had the British headquarters map as a touchstone for his Mannahatta work, he says this larger project was much more piecemeal. When we moved to the scope of the whole city, there was no one map that was very early and showed me all [the things I was looking for], Sanderson says. We spent a large part of the project just going to map archives, like the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, and the British Library in England, as well as many others. In all, Sandersons team georeferenced more than 600 maps from the late 18th century to the late 19th century, analyzing hundreds of puzzle pieces to assemble an overarching view of the city pre-urbanization. Using this influx of data, they then built a digital map by layers, creating one layer illustrating all of the streams, another for the topography, another for the marshes, and so on until the bigger picture began to take shape. Another branch of the project entailed sifting through biological data, as well as plant and animal surveys, to understand the flora and fauna that would have inhabited the region 400 years ago. Then, Sandersons team used a kind of prediction tool called a Muir web to take both the topographical data and the biological data and produce an estimate of what the habitat most likely looked like on every NYC block. According to the map, Grand Central Station was once home to white wood aster plants and green frogs; Staten Island Mall hosted red-backed salamanders; and Yankee Stadium was a low salt marsh community inhabited by eastern gray squirrels and passenger pigeons. Future applications Sanderson says the Welikia Project could be used for a number of practical applications, from helping landscape architects understand the native environment to giving urban planners a better sense of the citys makeup. Currently, he’s working on a follow-up study to assist in urban flood planning. According to a recent study from the Regional Plan Association, as many as 82,000 housing units in and around New York City could be lost due to flooding by 2040, and that could double to 160,000 by 2070. Sanderson plans to map all of the places that were historically aquatic ecosystemslike streams, wetlands, and beachesin order to produce more accurate predictions of future flood patterns. For the everyday New Yorker, Sanderson hopes that the Welikia Project provides a chance to better understand the landscape that serves as their home. What I really want people to do is to zoom into their block where they live, and to see that it was a forest or a wetland, and to think about what that means for them, Sanderson says. For some people, I think that’s a testimony to how much the world has changed over the last 400 years. One of my colleagues said, somewhere between Mannahatta and Manhattan is the story of every place on Earth. In some ways, that is the case.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||