Brett Rutledge Editorial October 2011

Welcome to October! That whistling sound you have been hearing all week is the world’s largest collective sigh of relief as 4,500,000 New Zealanders celebrate a Rugby World Cup victory. Congratulations to the All Blacks and congratulations to les Bleus who proved once again that past form is completely irrelevant when it comes to the French National Rugby Team.

This month I go swimming with sharks, examine the OCCUPY Movement and highlight a couple of observations about the biases that exist within mainstream media and government circles when it comes to statistics. What sort of bias you ask? Well let me give you one example – the official rate of unemployment (commonly called the U-3) in the USA is about 10%. Sometimes though, we hear reference to the underemployment rate or the U-6 rate. The U-6 rate currently sits at 17.3%. This measure encompasses those individuals who desire more hours, are working below their skill set, or are discouraged and have exited the labor pool.

But the U-6 only includes short-term discouraged workers because the long-term discouraged workers ceased to exist in US government modeling in 1994. If you add those guys to the picture the unemployment rate in the US could be as high as 22%. This rate is known as the U-Have Got To Be Kidding! Sadly, however, I’m not. What is the correct rate? I have no idea. Welcome to the October Editorial and vive la revolution!

OCCUPY – What Is It and Who Is It?

In mid-2011, the Canadian-based group Adbusters Media Foundation proposed a peaceful occupation of Wall Street to protest corporate influence on democracy, address a growing disparity in wealth, and the absence of legal repercussions behind the recent global financial crisis. According to the senior editor of their magazine, “[they] basically floated the idea in mid-July into our [email list] and it was spontaneously taken up by all the people of the world, it just kind of snowballed from there.”

The ongoing series of demonstrations started in New York City in the Wall Street financial district. They are mainly protesting social and economic inequality, corporate greed, and the power and influence over government of corporations, particularly from the financial service sector, and of lobbyists. The participants’ slogan “We are the 99%” refers to the difference in wealth between the top 1% and the other citizens of the United States.

By October 9, similar demonstrations were either ongoing or had been held in 70 major cities and over 600 communities in the U.S. Internationally, other “Occupy” protests have occurred in over 900 cities worldwide. The participants themselves are very diverse including young and old, trades and professionals, unemployed and beneficiaries as well as political and social activists.

What is most interesting about the OCCUPY Movement is that it does not appear to have leaders. There are certainly organisers who facilitate the aims of the movement but no clear leaders as such. According to Fordham University communications professor Paul Levinson, the Occupy Wall Street and related movements represent a resurgence of direct democracy where people collectively make decisions for themselves without having elected leaders. This could mean that what we have here is the beginnings of a real revolution because if there is no head then how do you kill the beast? Watch this space – I don’t think this is going away and it taps into a real sense of frustration with our financial institutions and their regulation.

What If The Statistics Are The Lies?

One of my very first tasks when I joined the workforce was to explain to my boss, and then a client, why a piece of research that client had commissioned was fatally flawed in its methodology and the results therefore complete rubbish. As you can imagine, it was a fun meeting as I pointed out that the $100,000 they had spent with a well-known research firm had yielded a result that was about as flakey as a freeze-dried leper. I always considered this a kind of one-off event but the month of August made me question this.

As you all know my wife runs a little baby gift boutique by the name of ‘Tiny Polkadots’ that, since it opened 2 years ago, as always had month on month growth. That is it did until August. August was the first month that we did not get the growth we were used to. Fortunately, sanity was restored in September and October is already ahead. I was prepared to consider it a one-off until I saw an article in the paper that quoted statistics showing that retail sales grew in August. Why, I wondered, was our personal experience so different from the official position? It lead me to wonder about the so-called official position and what methodologies they employed to get to these outcomes. What I discovered, as I mentioned in the example used earlier, was that official statistics have a habit of only reporting what they feel like reporting. Methodologies are often arbitrarily changed – in the US for example the CPI (a primary measure for inflation) methodology has been changed in favour of a lower result at least twice in the last 20 or so years. In Australia the governments in every state reported decreased hospital waiting lists because the measure of what constituted a waiting list was changed. Real estate agents organisations regularly report on artificially enhanced auction clearance rates in Australia and New Zealand because they only include the auction results reported to them rather than the number of total auctions conducted.

Now before you conspiracy theorists out there get excited, I am not suggesting that our Governments or anyone else is trying to lie to us. Changes made to methodologies are often the result of attempts to improve accuracy and gaps in data are often more to do with practicalities than they are with subversion. However, it does serve as a reminder that we need to be open about the pro’s and con’s of the methodology used in deriving our statistics if we want people to trust our results.

Swimming With Sharks

I had a fantastic experience at the Melbourne Aquarium when I got to spend some time on the other side of the glass amongst the sea creatures. It was very professionally run and I had a great time watching sharks, manta rays, sea turtles and fish of all shapes and sizes swim around me for 15 minutes. I had such a great time that I was even willing to answer the little survey they sent to me afterwards. It was just 15 questions and because I had fun and was feeling kindly disposed towards them I thought I would share some feedback. The last question was “Do you have any suggestions as to how we can improve the Shark Walker experience?” I didn’t have any suggestions so I left the box blank and hit submit only to have an error message come up telling me I had to answer the last question. Because I didn’t have an answer I closed the window and gave up. Why do organisations do this? If the last question is really the one you want an answer to why bother with the first 14? If the answers to the first 14 questions are important to you, why risk losing that information by forcing people to answer a 15th? Why are surveys so poorly designed that they themselves often leave the customer with a negative impression of the experience they are being asked about.

Seriously…get in touch

Whomever you barrack for the best of luck in your sporting team and/or idols endeavors over the next month and I hope it is a successful one for you. Feel free to drop me a line to crow about your vicarious victories!.

See you next month.

The Articulate CEO’ is continuing in 2011 with a mix of podcasts, video and blog to highlight communication successes as well as mistakes in the business world and what we can do to learn from them. If there is anything you would like to see highlighted in terms of content then please let me know and I will do my best to address it for you.