Breaking Out of Your Internet Filter Bubble

In today's business world, leaders need to get ideas, opinions, and perspectives from diverse sources. In particular, there are times when we need to tune in to people and sources of information that contradict our prevailing view of the world.

Unfortunately, many of the online sources we turn to for information are surreptitiously moving us in the opposite direction.

According to political activist and former executive director of moveon.org, Eli Pariser, Internet giants like Google, Yahoo and Facebook have begun using algorithms to determine what we see and hear online. He discovered this when he realized that Facebook had removed all the links to conservative people from his Facebook page - without his permission or knowledge.

Is some evil conspiracy afoot?

Probably not. What these companies want to do is maximize advertising revenue while making it easier for all of us to access the content we want. Only now they have taken it upon themselves to decide what we want to see, and that's not a good thing.

As Pariser explains it, when Google uses complicated algorithms to determine the results of online searches, it creates a "filter bubble" that screens out everything the search engine thinks we don't want to see. Or at least buries it so deep in the search results that we don't bother clicking on it.

Put together all the algorithms (which deliver information to your Internet doorstep based on what you click on most often) from all the prominent online information sources and you end up with your own unique online universe of information. The information that populates your universe depends on your filter bubble, which, in turn, depends on who you are and what you do online.

The problem is that we don't get to decide what gets through our filter. Yahoo, Google, and Facebook are now doing that for us. More important, we don't see what gets edited out, so we don't even know what we're missing. This moves us all to a world where the Internet shows us what it thinks we want to see, and not necessarily what we need to see.

The solution, suggests Pariser, does not require eliminating the filters. After all, we need some tools for sorting through everything on the Internet. The answer is for Google, Yahoo, and others to give us a healthy degree of control over the filters, so that we determine what gets screened in and what gets screened out.

Why do we need many diverse sources of information?

From a practical standpoint, it just might keep us from going out of business. These days the new product or service that turns our industry upside down often comes from way out in left field. We need to continually scan the world beyond the walls of our business to detect these kinds of threats.

At a deeper level, it has to do with the way our brain works.

The human brain is an amazing organ, especially the newer areas with their higher-level reasoning abilities. Yet we're still stuck with the "old" brain that helped us survive back when we had to quickly recognize and respond to predators and other threats.

The old brain is a superb pattern-recognizer. Consequently, it tends to look for information that supports what we already know to be true about the world. In doing so, it actively rejects information that contradicts our view of the world. So we get caught in a double-whammy of seeing things the same old way while actively avoiding new information that doesn't align with what we already believe to be true.

That's how we can get caught totally off guard when our best customer defects to a competitor. And that's how we never see the outsider who sweeps into our market and steals our market share with a new product or service we never even imagined.

These old brain tendencies wouldn't pose such a problem if the world didn't move so quickly. But it does, and we need to move just as quickly in order to keep up with it.  Consider the following:

Facebook, the leading social networking service, has yet to reach its 8th birthday. As of July 2011, it had more than 750 million active users.

YouTube, founded in 2005, now uploads 24 hours of video every minute of every day. Its company blog claims that the site receives more than three billion views per day.

The baby of the group, Twitter started out as an R&D experiment in 2006.  A recent count had them at 200 million users and 1.6 billion search queries per day. I suspect the number of users has grown significantly since the last count.

Ten years ago, who could have conceived that we would be able to post promotional videos of ourselves, at no cost (other than to produce the video) for the whole world to see? And five years ago, nobody in their right mind would have dreamed that we would be communicating our products and services through short, concise "tweets" with a maximum 140 character count. At that point, we were still trying to figure out how to build effective web sites!

That's how quickly our world changes. And that's why we can't afford to let anyone else decide for us what we see, hear and read on the Internet. If we don't stay current with emerging ideas, trends and technologies – especially those that contradict our prevailing view of the world -- we put our businesses at risk.

As business leaders, we need to make a habit of exposing ourselves to divergent points of view. We need to set up systems and processes that expose our employees to new and different ways of thinking. And we especially need to make sure that we don't let others dictate or control our sources of information. To do so limits our ability to make informed decisions and puts us at risk of letting others control our destinies rather than making our own.

Google, Yahoo, Facebook – are you listening?

P.S. - To hear Pariso's 9-minute talk on this subject click on http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html

Ted.com is one of my favorite sources for hearing thoughtful, informed and divergent points of view!

About the Author

Holly G. Green is author of "More Than A Minute," and the CEO and Managing Director of The Human Factor, Inc. She has more than 20 years of executive level and operations experience in FORTUNE 100, entrepreneurial, and management consulting organizations. She was previously President of The Ken Blanchard Companies, a global consulting and training organization as well as LumMed, Inc. a biotech start up. For more information, visit her at http://www.thehumanfactor.biz and http://www.morethanaminute.com

Not enough hours in your day? Make better choices

Feeling a little pressed for time these days? (Who isn't!) It turns out you have more time than you think.

In fact, that's the title of a great book new book by journalist Laura Vanderkam - "168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think."  (168 = the number of hours in a week.)

According to Vanderkam, the issue isn't too few hours in the day; it's how we choose to use those hours. In fact, her #1 time management tip is this: minutes and hours are choices. If we don't like how we're spending our time, we need to change our choices and priorities. Granted, choices bring consequences. But it all starts with recognizing that time does not dictate our daily agendas. We choose how we spend our time.

Vanderkam believes that trying to find more time in the day represents an exercise in futility. Suppose you could magically make each day 15 minutes longer. At the end of the week you would have gained a grand total of 1.75 hours.

Instead of trying to "find" time by rearranging busy work or trying to multitask, Vanderkam suggests a different approach. Start by filling your weekly allotment of 168 hours with the things you care most about in life. Instead of squeezing the activities that nurture your family, health and career in between all the "busy stuff," put them first!

This may require some difficult choices. It may also require saying "no" to some people and activities that are hard to turn down. But as Vanderkam points out, our options are to continue complaining about our busyness or get busy building the lives we want in the time we've got.

Which brings us to one of my favorite business leadership topics - staying focused on the destination.

Today's work world moves so fast that I sometimes think the new business attire should consist of running shorts and track shoes. With so much on our plates, it's hard not to get caught up in all the "to doing" each day. The meetings, the voice mails, the emails, the twitters, the juggling of multiple tasks and activities, the Internet and all the information that comes our way. It's no wonder that we tend to lose focus on where we're going and what winning looks like.

It's also easy to get caught up in the fantasy of "if only I had more time!" instead of taking responsibility for how we spend our time. So we run as fast as we can from one task to another, and we constantly yearn for more hours in the day when none are forthcoming.

Here are some of the ways we try to run fast in a desperate attempt to find more time: Multitasking. Working longer hours. Putting off the important for the urgent. Becoming slaves to our emails and mobile devices. Making decisions without taking the time to question our assumptions or review the data.

Intuitively, we know that these aren't the best strategies for getting work done. But running fast is an instinctive human behavior in stressful situations (fight or flight). It makes us feel like we're accomplishing our goals, or at least getting closer to them. So we continue to run as fast as we can without checking to see whether we're running in the right direction or making any real progress at all.

The solution?  Slow down to go fast.

What if you started each day by pausing to review your destination, which includes your definition of what winning looks like for your organization? And what if you then organized your day around the tasks and activities that truly help you reach that destination rather than whatever happens to jump out and land on your plate? Think that might produce a dramatic change in the choices you make about how to use your time?

I'm not talking about a lengthy process. Just five or 10 minutes each morning to review the most important things you can (and should) be doing and making sure they're first on your to-do list.

As you pause before starting your day, ask questions like:

• What are the top three to five things I need to be working on?  How much time have I committed to those activities today?

• Of all the things I think I need to do today, which will have an impact a year from now?

• Are there items on my to-do list that should be handled by someone else? If so, what do I need to do to delegate them?

• What tasks or activities do I feel compelled to find more time for?  Are they really top priority for me or am I succumbing to the urgent over the important?

• If I only had half a day instead of a whole one, which tasks and activities would I work on and why?

It also helps to keep visual reminders in front of you at all times. Put your goals and objectives on your computer screen. Carry them in your notebook. Set up task reminders to ping you. Write them on your whiteboard. Post them in the lobby of your office and on a mirror at home. Do whatever works to stage your field of vision and keep those things that matter most from falling victim to the things that matter least.

When you slow down to go fast, good things happen.

You develop criteria for making better decisions about where to spend your time. It becomes much easier to prioritize, based on what gets you closer to your destination versus what does not. And you progress much more quickly towards where you want to go.

When you focus on the activities that move you closer to your destination, you also spend less time trying to solve other people's problems, which benefits you and the organization as a whole. When you do for others what they should be doing for themselves, it inhibits their professional development while distracting you from essential activities.

"Slow down to go fast" doesn't seem to make sense. But neither does wearing track shoes to work. Stop trying to "find" more time and start making better choices about where you spend your time. You'll be amazed at how much faster it gets you to your destination!

About the Author

Holly G. Green is author of "More Than A Minute," and the CEO and Managing Director of The Human Factor, Inc. She has more than 20 years of executive level and operations experience in FORTUNE 100, entrepreneurial, and management consulting organizations. She was previously President of The Ken Blanchard Companies, a global consulting and training organization as well as LumMed, Inc. a biotech start up. For more information, visit her at http://www.thehumanfactor.biz and http://www.morethanaminute.com