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Is your focus on noise or the essential signal?
From hotel lobbies to high-tech boardrooms, the battle to cut through the “noise” and focus on true signals could decide who thrives—and who quietly fades away.
“Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, and expecting different results" is often attributed to Albert Einstein.
Distracting ‘noise’ may be the reason we repeat our mistakes. Why is it that iconic CEO’s focus on the idea of noise to signal? In the hotel and hospitality sector, is the yellow flag signal – How does the guest feel? Can competent, highly trained professionals give a radically different assessment of the same situation? Does a lack of control of digital infrastructure signal the risk of a new colonialism?
What are the critical things you need to get done in the next 12 hours? Effective managers are productive – they get things done. No soap opera like stories about the inevitable “this happened and that happened”.
Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, was famous for his focus on the noise to signal ratio -- by asking what are the three tasks that absolutely need to be addressed in the next 18 hours. Then he would spend 80 percent of his time focusing on the signal, the essential.
Elon Musk is ruthless about pure signal. Often ignoring his direct reports, he would go directly to the shop floor, at all hours, to try and solve the fundamental constraint problem on the ground.
Focusing on signal makes sense, but the catch is that ‘noise’ includes all those family commitments, like attending your daughter’s school play. When all is said and done, it’s balancing act between the essential signal and the inevitable, often well meaning fuzzy noise.
How does the guest want to feel?
Acacia View is a small 90-room boutique hotel set in Nairobi’s trendy tree lined Lavington. Once the place to stay, occupancy and revenue per available room was plummeting.
Previously reliable repeat corporate clients were making a quiet exodus to the ‘chrome and marble’ hotels that Marriott and Radisson ran on management contracts. Noise about Acacia View on social media was a boring constant, with influencers extoling it’s virtues.
Looking at the data, and guests reviews, realising something had to shift, Sarah, the newly installed general manager started to notice the signals. Front office staff were self-absorbed, ignoring guests, playing, with their mobiles and had a “Have a nice day” robotic air about them. Security staff at the entrance were downright rude.
Finance got the billings wrong, and the once tasty food was now both expensive and bland.
Realising it’s all about how guests feel, Sarah focussed on the signals, hammering home the message in her daily morning briefs with department heads. How do guests want to feel? What needs and problems do they have? How can we make their value for money guest experience genuinely warm and inviting? With the noise fading, and the red flag signals addressed, Acacia View’s became the place to be.
Same situation, radically different assessment
Often when faced with exactly same [facts and figures] situation, professionals will make profoundly different assessments. Any notion of independent objectivity frequently goes out the door.
Noise in human judgment is the reason this happens, the "undesirable variability in judgments of the same problem".
Noise: A Flaw in HumanJudgment by Nobel Prize winning Daniel Kahneman and academics Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein published in 2021 examines 'noise' in human judgment and decision-making.
In an insurance company, the median premiums set by underwriters independently for the same five fictive customers varied by 55 percent, five times as much as would be expected by most underwriters and their executives.
Two psychiatrists independently diagnosed 426 hospital patients and agreed on which mental illness the patient suffered from in only half of the cases. In another example, French court judges were more lenient if it happened to be the defendant's birthday.
Kahneman, Sibony and Sunstein make the case that noise in human judgment is more common than we think, and is an insufficiently addressed problem in matters of judgment.
A legion of cognitive biases - someone’s mood at the time, group dynamics, and just plain emotional reactions- are the reasons we make these ‘noise like’ errors in decision making.
Who controls the digital infrastructure?
Business platforms of, for instance, Meta, Google, Microsoft, Palantir, Amazon and others dominate both the global scene and the phone in your pocket.
One of their main income streams is user data, with an ability to separate the signal from the noise, profitably selling on the data and insights. This signal data harvesting may be the ‘new colonialism’, being dependent on an tech infrastructure out of one’s control?
“Imagine a situation – in 20 years, say – when somebody in Beijing or San Francisco possess the entire personal history of every politician, journalist, colonel and CEO in your country: every illness they suffered, every sexual encounter they enjoyed, every joke they told, every bribe they took. Would you still be living in an independent country, or would you now be living in a data colony? What happens when your country finds itself utterly dependent on digital infrastructures and AI-powered systems over which it has no effective control?” writes Yuval Noah Harari in Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI – his thought provoking book published in September 2024.
