Psychology

Success stories reported as failure

Jul 30th, 2012

Something I often see happening in the media is the reporting of success stories as failures.

The scenario is this:

Something unfortunate and unpredictable happens.
The authorities / people responsible clean up the mess and few-to-no parties are harmed, physically or financially.
This major success is reported by the news as a failure.

Today’s story about the keys at Wembley going missing was a great example of this phenomenon. Something very unfortunate happened – a set of keys went missing at a major Olympic venue. But here’s the thing: this fact was discovered instantly, and security protocol was initiated which resulted in all the locks being changed before there was any chance of security being compromised. This proves the security systems are working! A failure would be that the loss wasn’t noticed until it was way too late to know if anyone had got in. And yet the media reports this with headlines like “Wembley keys loss embarrasses police”. Why not “Wembley keys loss demonstrates police efficiency”?

It happened last year with the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Safety systems at a nuclear power plant failed, and a number of meltdowns occurred. But due to the huge number of safety measures, no one died and only 2 people suffered radiation-related injuries. This was a huge success story – something went massively wrong with an incredibly dangerous piece of equipment and no one died.

I think it’s the public’s ability to remember and latch onto the bad things and not to celebrate the good ones, and the media doesn’t help with this.

Think of the Manchester bomb in 1996. People remember there was a terrorist attack that wiped out a large part of the city centre. What they don’t remember is the amazing effort by the emergency services that resulted in not a single life claimed.

And how about the Y2K bug? The number of times I hear people say “well that was a big fuss over nothing, wasn’t it?” No! It was a potential major international disaster that was completely averted by thousands of engineers tirelessly working to fix all the broken code before it became an issue. But of course “Y2K bug fixed; no one hurt” is not a great front page headline.

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Thought for the day: Andy Murray

Jul 9th, 2012

by Rich.

2 comments

I don’t normally write about sport (or indeed, anything, these days) but I thought this was worth a moment.

The BBC is reporting today that Andy Murray’s defeat in the Wimbledon final was his “biggest disappointment yet” because he played better than ever before. And I have no doubt he feels that way.

That’s our culture that does that, not logic or common sense: the better you do and the harder you work, the bigger a disappointment it is when you fail.

Why? Is this a good thing?

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69 Love Songs and the working day

Jul 31st, 2011

by Rich.

2 comments

As an extravert¹ I find myself in situations at work where interactions with others dominate my day. Whether it’s meetings, asking people questions, answering other people’s questions or simply reading and sending emails, there’s always some interaction going on.

I really love that aspect of my job, which means it’s somewhat frustrating during those times when I have to sit down by myself and work alone, which do happen quite regularly.

When I have to work alone, I find that listening to music, especially music I know well, allows me to concentrate by providing a backdrop that goes some way towards replacing the interaction that drives me.

And this is where 69 Love Songs comes in. The 1999 classic by Stephen Merritt, aka The Magnetic Fields, is a collection of songs in every musical style imaginable and poking at every aspect of love and romance with an irony-shaped stick. If you’ve not heard it, give it a listen – I think there’s something there for everyone. Its relevance here, however, is that the album is almost three full hours long.

Three hours is a great length of time to set myself this simple challenge: Finish the album in one working day.

Those of you in roles like mine might find this surprisingly difficult – three hours is not even half a normal working day but the time escapes from you so fast during interactions you might find that 3 hours of uninterrupted solo work is actually quite a goal to achieve!

Any other extraverts reading my blog? Any tips for how you cope with work that demands solo attention?

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