David Dylan Thomas: Cognitive Bias & Content Strategy – Episode 27

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David Dylan Thomas studies human behavior to develop better content strategies. His cognitive-bias hacks help you tame counter-productive thought processes to create less biased content experiences.

David and I talked about:

• his evolution from filmmaker to content strategist
• the introduction of content strategy as a discipline at Think Company
• how awareness and knowledge of cognitive biases can inform content strategy
• the origins of his Cognitive Bias podcast
• cognitive biases that content strategists need to be on alert for: the framing effect, for example
• how insidious and persistent cognitive biases are: “Even when you’re aware of a bias, you’ll probably still do it.”
• how to slow down your thinking to have a fighting chance at eliminating bias in your work
• how to apply the scientific process to design and content strategy
• how the “Red Team, Blue Team” method can identify problems with your content strategy, before you ship it
• the importance of evidence-based design
• the benefits of a good content strategy (internal process improvements, etc.)
• the percentage of UX work that is done for internal processes vs. for end users – about 50:50 in his experience
• the three rules of productive discourse and how they can improve your strategy work
• how content strategy hacks like the “eight-up exercise” can build genuine buy-in from collaborators
• an innovative resume-blinding process to remove bias from your hiring process

David’s Bio

David Dylan Thomas has developed digital strategies for major clients in entertainment, healthcare, publishing, finance, and retail. He serves as Principal, Content Strategy at Think Company, helps organize Content Strategy Philly, and teaches content strategy for Girl Develop It Philly. The founder of Content Camp, he previously consulted at the Corzo Center for the Creative Economy and is the creator, director, and co-producer of Developing Philly, a web series about the rise of the Philadelphia tech community. He is the creator and host of the Cognitive Bias Podcast and has given standing-room-only presentations at TEDNYC, SXSW Interactive, and the Wharton Web Conference on content strategy and emerging content trends.

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Transcript

Larry:
Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 27 of the content strategy interviews podcast. I’m really psyched today to have with us David Dylan Thomas. Dave is principal of content strategy at Think Company in Philadelphia. And I’ll have Dave tell us a little bit more about his background.

David:
Sure. So, I got into content strategy in a very weird way, though I don’t know that there’s a normal way to get into content strategy, but the content part, I guess, came from being a film maker, going back to when I was in high school and just editing together movies with two VHS recorders. Very old school. And then around 2000, I started getting into distance education. Working for Johns Hopkins University’s Center of Talent and Youth program. So, college level courses delivered on CD-ROM, no less, to junior high and high school kids who tested really well for writing. I kind of fell in love with the web then, because it could connect people from all over the world. Then the content strategy part really started when I got to Philadelphia and I was working as an online editor in chief at a publishing company. Basically, the online presence of four or five different print magazines and trying to figure out what is going to stay in print, how to move this stuff from print to web, what’s going to be web exclusive. All of this strategizing around content. So even though my title wasn’t content strategy, that was very much the activity I was engaged in.

David:
And that followed me through when I was in the non-profit world, at a foundation and helping out grantees with their content. But again, it wasn’t called content strategy. It really wasn’t until 2013 when I got a job at a company called EPAM. And my business card actually read content strategist. And I was working with clients doing content strategy for them. But it was this very round about way of getting to where I am now, working at Think Company as principal content strategy. Really they’re an experience and design firm and content strategy is an emerging practice there and my job is to figure out what does that look like, what does it look like as a practice at Think, the same way that UX is a practice or visual design is a practice or development.

Larry:
Is Think a new agency, or is it a-

David:
Oh, we’ve been there for about ten years now. But it’s really the past four or five years they’ve started to really buckle down and really get serious about content strategy. They sort of like got good at it by default over time, but they didn’t have it as a formal practice there. And so when they realized this is a thing, they brought me on. And it’s been my job to figure out what does it look like as a thing, like something that we’re going to have, as part of an estimating sheet, as part of the SOW, as opposed to this thing you end up having to do if you don’t write it in at the beginning of something you’re going to do.

Larry:
I have this hypothesis that I’m testing these days that there’s a whole lot of native content strategists out there who just haven’t labeled it as such. Everything from independent website designers to the agencies that do really good interactive stuff. It just gets labeled later. I think I’ve asked almost everybody in this series of interviews at some point: You’ve been doing this a long time. When did you identify as a content strategist? So, for you, 2013.

David:
Oh, that’s funny.

Larry:
Yeah. That’s an interesting thing. Well, I’m just going to talk quickly about how I came to know Dave. I’ve been a fan of the cognitive bias podcast for several months now. I discovered it four or five months ago. I’m embarrassed to admit that I had been listening to it for three or four months, and it wasn’t until you did a talk at … I think it was a UX conference in-

David:
Copenhagen.

Larry:
Copenhagen. Then I realized that, wait a minute, this guy is a content strategist. Let me ask you about that. You talked some in that talk but maybe you can talk a little bit about how awareness of and knowledge of cognitive biases can inform content strategy.

David:
Oh, absolutely. A content strategist is, in very many ways, a designer around content. The talk you’re talking about at UX Copenhagen was called Design for Cognitive Bias. It was really around this idea that as designers, as content strategists, a lot of our work has to do with helping people make decisions. I have to decide what hotel am I going to pick or what restaurant am I going to eat at. We lay out the content in certain way to make it easier to make that decision. Cognitive bias is basically about understanding how people make decisions, and it is almost never a rational logical process. It has all these weird twists and turns built up over evolutionary psychology or any number of just different weird avenues that our brain has evolved into these shortcuts for making decisions that sometimes don’t make any sense at all. If you have an awareness of them, they’re at least consistent. When you’re creating a design, you’re creating a content strategy, you can lay out the content in a way that will either help them overcome that bias or maybe even leverage that bias for good.

Larry:
Right. I remember the way I found your podcast was I read several articles floating around about six, seven, eight months ago about cognitive biases and that sort of catalog of them, I think at Wikipedia or some place. There’s something like a couple hundred of them, and you just decided, well, I’m going to tackle all of these, and kind of went through them all.

David:
Pretty much. Basically, after seeing a talk at … Iris Bohnet gave this talk at South by Southwest about gender equality by design talking about a lot of the same thing, how sort of gender biases can be overcome by smart design decisions to some extent. That just inspired me to realize, oh, wait a minute. You’re saying that this terrible thing, this gender inequality, racial inequality, is being driven by just these unconscious biases. Well, I want to learn more about these biases. I basically sat down and said “Okay, look. I’m looking at this … I actually used Rational Wiki’s list of cognitive biases. It’s two, three hundred biases long. I’m like “I’m never going to get through this in one go so I’m just going to pick one bias a day and read about it.” And that’s what I did for about a year. I just read one bias a day. I came, as a result, the guy who wouldn’t shut up about cognitive biases. Eventually, my friends were like “Hey, just do a podcast. Just do a podcast.” I’m like “Okay, fine.”

Larry:
You’re up to, I think, fifty six episodes?

David:
Something like that. We just finished season two. Again, it’s totally predictable. If you actually go to the Rational Wiki’s list, you’ll see basically my game plan. They’re clustered into groups. The last group of season two was all about probability biases, like how we’re terrible at predicting things. That was season two. If you want to know what season three is about, just look at the next clump of biases, and that’s what season three is going to be about. I’m just literally going down the list.

Larry:
That’s a handy way to organize it. Are there families or categories of biases that are particularly germane to content strategy? I’m just trying to think of content creation content archiving, curation, all those things. I guess I’m thinking of all the different ways you could worry about this, as a content creator. Oh, I’m just confirming this hypothesis that I came with or whatever. Do you play favorites? Are there biases that raise-

David:
I think it depends on the profession. Content creators, I think what we have to watch out or leverage, depending on your point of view, is something called the framing effect. A quick example would be if you’re going through the grocery store, and you see a sign that says the meat is 95% lean. That sounds great. I could show you another section of the store where the sign says the meat is 5% fat. You’d be like “Well, I don’t want that.” It’s the exact same thing, but your brain makes a different decision because you’re framing it differently. This is extremely powerful, and you’ll see a lot of different cognitive biases all come down to making completely different decisions about the exact same scenario just depending on how I frame it. When you’re describing something or setting up a decision for someone based on content, that’s a very powerful thing. How you’re framing it could completely alter how they make that decision, so you have to be … I think it’s a great responsibility. You just have to be very conscious of how you’re setting it up, and how the way you’re setting it up could be, I wouldn’t even say misleading, but can kind of tip the scale a little bit.

Larry:
You’ve got me thinking of all the fake news that’s floating around. Even whichever bubbles you’re in … Most of that seems to be playing to some little quirk or something in your thinking, and then blowing that up, kind of showing you “I know how smart you are, and here’s a piece of evidence that bolsters your intelligence. Please share this.” It kind of reminds me … I assume you’ve read … Do you know Robert Cialdini, the weapons of influence guy?

David:
No.

Larry:
Really interesting book. Okay, wow. This is going to be fun. Robert Cialdini wrote this book. It’s called Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. He talks about six weapons of influence that you can wield. Anyhow, the thing I like about that book is that you can use that information to either defend yourself as a consumer or a citizen or whoever, or as a persuader, a marketer, somebody writing a grant proposal or whatever. You can use those weapons to build your case. I just wonder if there’s a relationship between … One of them, for example, is liking. If you just like somebody, you’re more likely to be influenced by them or be persuaded by them. If somebody has authority, they cited some research that showed that if a guy came in dressed like a doctor, told the nurse to administer a deadly dose of something. Eight out of ten times, they would do it.

Larry:
It’s kind of a long winded way of asking. Both on the content creator side, how can you take this knowledge of biases, but as a consumer of content, do you think people can do stuff to apply that knowledge of cognitive biases to be better consumers of information? Because we all are, by nature. Yeah.

David:
Sure. Unfortunately, it’s very, very hard. One of the sad lessons I learned by studying these biases is that most of the time, even when you’re aware of the bias, you’ll probably still do it. There’s this one bias called the anchoring effect. Again, it’s very similar to the framing effect. Let’s say I have you come in and I ask you to write down the last four numbers of your social security number. Then, just completely unrelated, I ask you to bid on this bottle of wine. How much would you pay for this bottle of wine? If the last four numbers of your social security card were really high, you would put your bid higher. If they were really low, you’d bid lower. That’s this weird bias. Sure, it’s weird. Yeah. The two things are unrelated, but just because it’s at the top of your mind that it’s a high number does the thing. Great.

David:
Here’s the sad part. The sad part is that I could tell you “Hey, look. There’s this thing called the anchoring bias. You’re going to write down the last four number of your social security number, and then you’re going to bid on this wine, and you’re going to bid higher. Don’t do that.” You’ll still do it. Even if I say “Hey, I will give you cash money if you don’t fall for this. I’m going to tell you exactly what’s going to happen. Don’t fall for it. I’m going to give you cash money.” People still fall for it. It’s a shortcut, and your brain just takes it.

David:
It’s very, very hard. There are very few biases that really have any kind of defense. Usually what’s happening is you’re thinking too fast, and I will plug for the thousandth time, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, where almost all of my material comes from in one form or another. It’s this idea that it’s what he calls system two thinking that just goes very, very fast. Whatever you can do to slow that process down …

David:
One example is for the framing effect, which I was talking about before with the lean and fat meat. If I were to try to make that decision in another language, right? So, I happen to know a little bit of French. I’m not great at it. If I were to try to make that decision in French, just in my head thinking it through, I would probably notice that 95% lean and 5% fat are the exact same thing. I wouldn’t be thinking “Oh, 95% lean, fat, yeah yeah yeah. That makes perfect sense. I would want to go for the lean.” I would be thinking “Wait, what’s percent again in French? Wait, lean. Wait, okay.” Then “Oh, wait. Those are the same.” I had to slow the process down so much, that it would be obvious what was going on. Whereas, most of the time when we make these mistakes, it’s because our brain is just going too fast.

Larry:
Interesting. This kind of comes around to something else we wanted to talk about today: ethics and design.

David:
Oh, sure.

Larry:
What you’re saying there is maybe my hypothesis about Cialdini’s weapons and defending yourself … We can defend ourselves against it. We’re just hard wired for these biases. It kind of falls on us then, as content creators, curators, designers, to be ethical about what we do. Are you applying that much at Think Company, or just in your work in general?

David:
Yeah, we think about that all the time. One of the things I’ve sort of been looking into is some way to apply more of the scientific process to design. Another bias that we all fall for is confirmation bias. As designers, it’s sort of our ethical duty to push back against that. I used to think that the scientific method was, oh, you have a hypothesis, and then you try to prove it true. If you prove it true, yay, you now have a law. What I didn’t realize is that the true scientific method, after actually talking to some real scientists about it, is that it looks a lot more like, hey I’ve got this hypothesis. I’m going to see if it’s true. Okay, it looks from the evidence like it might be true. Let me go spend the rest of my life trying to prove it false. Let me now think, if I’m wrong, what else would be true, and then try to prove that.

Larry:
I also hang out with scientists, and I think … Is that sometimes phrased as you’re disproving the null hypothesis? That’s the phrase, right?

David:
I think that’s the phrase. Yeah.

Larry:
That’s one of those loopy brain things … double negatives …

David:
Yeah, exactly. I sort of had that in mind as a thing that I wanted to tackle in design because often we will come up with a content strategy we think is awesome, and we just do it, but we never ask “Well, if I’m wrong, what else would be true?” And then try to prove that. We might leave good content strategy on the table if we don’t rethink the way we do things. I had that in my mind. Actually, when I went to UX Copenhagen, there was a guy there who works for the British lottery. His job is to figure out how to best spend their money on tech for good programs. After enough of those tech for good programs kind of failed because they weren’t well thought through, he decided to adopt something called red team blue team. This is something that the military uses, that newspapers use.

David:
The idea is that you have a blue team that goes in and tries to come up with the design, the content strategy, the idea, whatever it is. They do research, and they basically get it to a place where they’re ready to sort of start creating it and actually implementing it, but they haven’t done anything yet. They haven’t bought the stuff yet. It’s just ready to go. It’s ready to be looked at. Then, the red team comes in for one day, and their job is to go to war with the blue team. Eventually, they’ll say “Look, have you considered this? Have you considered that?” They’re trying to prove the null hypothesis. They’re trying to say “Okay, if you’re wrong, what else would be true? We’re going to try to figure that out now.” They challenge them on all these things where “Hey, you think this might be doing good, but here’s a situation where it might do harm. Have you thought of that?”

David:
That becomes a cost effective way because, remember, all these people are being paid money. All of this is happening in the real world where things cost money, and time is a factor. If you only have to hire that red team for one day, suddenly, it’s this much more cost effective way to test whether or not what your planning actually has merit or if it’s going to bite you. You don’t need me to go through all the examples of content strategies or apps that have had horrible public crash and burns because no one in the room though “Hey, have you considered this?” Or, to be frank, no one in the room was of the gender or color that was going to be offended by the thing that was put out in the wild. Having that red team blue team thing becomes a way to operationalize a bit more ethical design.

Larry:
Interesting. A big part of ethical design, I think especially these days, is inclusion and accounting for diversity everywhere, on the team and in your audience and everywhere else. This sounds like this could be another way to … There’s plenty of evidence now that inclusion is a good strategy, that all the results are better when you include more people in it. Is this becoming easier? I’m thinking of the Think Company. It sounds like this is kind of baked into how you operate and you run the content strategy team there, so there’s not a lot of convincing that has to go on there. But in other contexts, for example, the budget implications of having the red team come in and tear apart the blue team. You’re going to get a better result, but are you finding that the results are validating that for the decision makers and the people writing the checks and setting the budgets?

David:
Oh, sure. I haven’t actually implemented that strategy yet. But, in general, we always do design validation. One of our tenants at Think is evidence based design, and that’s baked into our content strategy too. It’s evidence based content strategy. We’re not going to come up with a strategy for an audience unless we’ve talked to them first. We want some information from them. As we roll things out, we try to work very closely with our safe holders, so we’re always kind of saying “Okay, this is our assumption. Let me talk to the people that we’re trying to build this thing for, and find out did it actually work.” Even after we’ve talked to them and done the research, and say “We think this is the direction you should go.”, we come up with some kind of prototype, take that out into the field again, and say “Hey, look. You said this is the itch you were trying to scratch. Does this thing we made actually scratch that itch? It does here but not there? Great. Let’s go back and fix the part that doesn’t work.”

David:
We try to be very thoughtful about testing the evidence and making sure that we’ve really got it right. No, have we really got it right? Wait, have we really got it right? Let’s keep testing. I think that the clients really do kind of appreciate that because you see it in the results. They’re finding that they’re getting their stuff to market faster. They’re finding that they’re getting more of whatever criteria they’ve set up, that they’re getting more of an acceptance rate of the thing that they’re trying to optimize for. I think because we’re always able to point towards the evidence when we’re kind of questioned on a design decision or a content strategy decision, it makes it easier for our stakeholders or, to be frank, the people the stakeholders are trying to convince, because, oftentimes, that’s really what’s going on. They and we can point to, well, here, look, we talked to actual human beings.

David:
My favorite is when we can actually play audio because sometimes we’re allowed to record some of our research session and kind of say “Hey, look, this is so-and-so and they work here and they’re your core audience.” We’ll listen to them talk about this thing, and just hearing that one solitary voice ends up being as convincing as twenty minutes of a PowerPoint presentation saying here’s why you should do this.

Larry:
Yeah. That kind of gets at – when you say evidence-based, here’s qualitative evidence. And that kind of thing, just one little powerful story is Super powerful. Are you doing quantitative stuff as well, just kind of measuring the success of content in some way against the KPI or other metric?

David:
Yeah. What’s funny is that often it can be an internal KPI. A lot of the work we do at Think can be employee facing, as much as consumer facing or business facing. Content strategy in particular, one of it’s greatest selling points isn’t necessarily so much “Oh, your sales are going to go up this much.” Which they may very well. Your employees are going to get their content created this much more quickly, or it’s going to get through legal this much more quickly, or whatever that sort of bottleneck is in your content creation process. We’ve gone and thoughtfully rethought how you’re producing or displaying content. Yeah, we can point to things and say “Hey, because we organized the content better, 22% more people actually booked a trip on this website.” We can also say “Hey, because we’ve organized the process better, instead of taking six months to get your content through review, it’s only taking a few weeks.” We’re able to really trim that kind of fat. That’s almost as rewarding for a client to see as the monetary gain because that’s their lives. They have to go to work. Their work life is better. Who wouldn’t want their work life to be better?

Larry:
Exactly, yeah. You’ve got me thinking now about the percent of UX work that is happening internally versus customer facing. You tend to think of it as “How readable is this? How usable is this? How convertible?” All the user facing things. Do you have a feel for the estimate, like just at Think Company or in general, of what percentage of usability research and activity and focus is on internal processes and getting those better versus the actual end-user experience?

David:
It really depends. We do a lot of work with internal clients where they’re having to have some sort of app that makes it easier for them to talk to a customer, or sign someone up for something, like someone working in a retail store with those little iPads they have to carry around, and those interfaces. It’s some of that kind of work, which you never even think of, but somebody’s got to build that. We’re just as often doing stuff that’s going to be facing our B-to-B clients, their audience, or B-to-C clients. It really varies. I’d say it’s probably about an equal split, if I had to guess. It’s funny. You learn a lot for both those processes.

Larry:
Yeah. Speaking of processes, there’s something else I wanted to ask you about. I came across a TEDx talk you did … I forget what about, but the three rules for productive discourse. What you were just talking about, a lot of that stakeholder alignment and a lot of what you were just talking about getting everybody on board and online. Are you applying that? I don’t know the context of that talk that you did, but I think … The three … I jotted them down. Nobody’s going to change their mind, or something. What were the three?

David:
This was a TED New York City talk I gave last year, a very short talk. The basic idea was that if we can agree to like three rules of productive discourse, you and I can have a conversation, even if we’re on completely different sides of an issue, and still get closer to arriving at a solution, as opposed to just, well, I walk away from this knowing we’re on completely different sides, which we kind of knew when we started. I think the first rule is that neither of us will win because winning isn’t what we’re here to do. We’re actually trying to create something. Neither of us has the answer, which, if we did have the answer, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. If one of us was demonstrably right, we wouldn’t have to argue if the sun is out. The sun is out. Then, we’re here to create something new. It makes the project of us talking together not one of us convincing the other. It makes the project of us talking together trying to solve a problem. We’re fighting the problem, not each other. That’s the context of that.

Larry:
Right, right. There’s so many other models like that floating out there. That just seems like a really productive one. It seems like it requires … A lot of those other ones require an up front buy in from folks. Do people seem amenable to that model?

David:
It surprising, especially if you aren’t terribly up front about it. What I mean by that is a lot of what I’m talking about when I talk about those three rules is it really just comes back to basic design thinking. It’s the basic idea that we’re going to try to work the problem. We’re not here to fight each other. We’re here to build something new, and we’re going to try to be creative and open about it. What I’ve found is if you frame it that way, like, “how might we” as a phrase becomes a very big deal in design thinking. It’s how a lot of brainstorming sessions are kind of fashioned.

David:
If you bring people from, let’s say, marketing and legal and all these other groups that are often at odd with each other to a table and say “How might we do a better job of supporting customers through this journey?” Well, all of a sudden, it isn’t about marketing, selling more widgets, or legal, making sure they don’t get sued. It’s about the customer, trying to fix a problem for the customer. Okay, well, we can all agree that that’s a good thing to do, right? I have my own knowledge about how to do that, so let’s work on that. All of a sudden, you have people who are usually at odds and tense working side by side, and excited about working side by side to get something done. You’re kind of redirecting all the energy towards something else, which really is why you’re there in the first place. It’s why legal has their job and why marketing has their job. It’s because they’re both trying to get to this endpoint of doing something to make the customer’s life easier.

Larry:
Right. That reminds me. I did a workshop in Seattle several months ago. It was a design guru from one of the schools there. He was talking about when everybody’s problem solving, to physically sit next to the person. What you’re talking about, there’s sort of an analogy to that. What can we do here? Sitting there, noodling things out together. Do you have any other tricks up your sleeve? Because so much of content strategy is about getting people on the same page, and you understand how people’s brains are ticking with cognitive biases knowledge. Do you have any other sort of practical tips about how to accelerate… Like you said earlier too, time is money and people are concerned about that. Everybody’s looking for content strategy hacks, how to push things along quicker. Are there any kind of applications of that or applications of other knowledge of cognitive biases and stuff that allow you to do things more… Do you have any, not to give away your trade secrets, but do you have any sort of ideas about how to advance? You know, like getting people on the same page.

David:
Sure. This is a design intervention that I find very helpful for coming up with new ideas I kind of got from this guy, David Fiorito, who’s just fantastic UX professional that I know. I think he got it actually from the inner workings of Comcast. It doesn’t actually have a name. I just call it the eight up exercise.

David:
Let’s say you have a problem that you’re trying to solve. Let’s say the problem is, I don’t know, there’s not enough female filmmakers in the world. You frame a question around how might we find and hire more female filmmakers, just as a design question, a design challenge. Let’s say I’m trying to get buy in from lots of multiple different parties around that and come up with a good idea. Let’s say we have eight people in a room, and I say “Okay, how might we find and hire more female filmmakers? Okay, each one of you eight people write down three ideas, you have three minutes, for we might do that.” They scribble scribble scribble. The three minutes are up. Okay, great. Person number one, turn to person number two and show them your three ideas. They are going to show you their three ideas. You’re going to take those six ideas, and whittle them down to two. Great, and they do that. Time passes. You time box it. Time’s up. Okay. That group of two, take your ideas, show them to the pair next to you. They’re going to show you their two ideas, and you can see where this is going, right?

Larry:
Yeah.

David:
Take those four ideas. Whittle them down to two. After, I think, three rounds, you’ll have eight people sitting around a table taking four ideas and whittling them down to one. That one idea A, is scientifically proven to be a good idea, like they tried this before, and given the alternative of saying “Hey, eight people write down ideas and we’ll vote on the best one.” Hey, you’ll get a mediocre idea. Or “Hey, eight people, we’re going to lock you in a room and not let you out until you come up with a great idea.” You’ll get a mediocre idea. If you slowly combine ideas over time, you get a really good idea that’s enjoying the diversity of all the people in that room because, again, that’s another situation that benefits from having people from diverse backgrounds and diverse lived experiences. And, that final idea has the DNA of everyone in that room so when you present it back to them and say “Hey, is this what we’re going to work on?” Everyone feels bought in because they can see themselves in that idea.

David:
That’s a lot of what getting people to work together is about, is give them something, give them a vision that they can see themselves in. If they see themselves as opposed to it or they can’t relate to it, well, then they’re going to make it their mission to fight it. But, if they see themselves in it, they’re going to fight for it, and they’re going to do everything they can to make sure it happens.

Larry:
That’s brilliant. I love that. I think so many of these new methodologies that are coming along are just kind of cracking the old unproductive ways we used to operate, like voting and powers and hippos and all that stuff. Hey, I just noticed we’re coming up close to time. I always like to give everybody at the end of the podcast a chance to … Is there anything last? Is there anything we haven’t talked about? Anything that’s on your mind? Any ideas? It doesn’t have to be related to content strategy, but is there anything that’s on your mind these days that you want to share with my folks?

David:
There’s one more hack that comes to mind. Again, it’s around content strategy. It is nothing new. It’s been around for a while. It’s called blind resumes. It’s this idea that if you want to hire more equitably, sometimes you can run into a problem. Let’s say you’re trying to hire a web developer. Even if you are as open minded as hell, it is very possible that you’ll have some implicit bias. If you want to depress yourself, take one of those implicit bias tests online, and you’ll see. Over time, you’ve been shown this image of, well, a developer. It’s some skinny white dude. That’s what’s in my head when you say the word, developer. It pops into my head unbidden. If I see a female name at the top of that resume, even without wanting to, I’m going to evaluate it differently than if I see a male name. They’ve tried this. They’ve had identical resumes with different names at the top, and, if it’s a male name, it’s more likely to get through.

David:
What you come to realize is, well, wait a minute. Why do I need to see the name? What does seeing the name doing to help me make the decision? You just remove it. You omit it. The city of Philadelphia actually created … They, for one of their hiring sessions, said “Look, we’re going to do this blind.” They discovered, one, the best way to blind a resume is to actually print it out, have an intern who has no say in the hiring process actually redact it with magic marker or whatever, and then pass it on. The other thing they discovered, because it was developers they were hiring, was as soon as they saw a resume they liked, naturally, what you do is you go to the GitHub. The second that GitHub page loads, oh, here’s all the personal information. So they actually wrote code – I think it was a Chrome extension – that blinded the GitHub page before it loaded so it wouldn’t spoil the process. They actually posted that to GitHub, completing the loop.

David:
I like that intervention because it is based on sound content strategy principles, which are: signal to noise. I want to reduce the noise. Well, the name in that situation is noise. It’s not telling me if you’re qualified. It’s not telling me what experience you have. All it’s possibly doing is adding noise that might summon some bias I don’t even know I have. So we get rid of the noise. Just present the information that’s necessary. That’s pure content strategy.

Larry:
Nice. I love that hack. Thanks so much David. This is great. I appreciate having you on the show.

David:
Oh, great to be here. Thanks.