Welcome to The Spark, bringing you the world's best behavioral science. 

We’re going to focus this edition of the newsletter on one topic. And it’s a really cool topic. Drumroll please…the topic is…Boundary Conditions!

Ok, admittedly, on the surface, this is probably the least exciting topic of the next twenty we plan to write about. But when you look closer, there’s something deeply interesting about boundary conditions. Let’s take that closer look.

In plain and concise language, we like to think of boundary conditions as any information that helps us understand the impact (or lack thereof) that different approaches or concepts might have in different teams or organizations. Armed with this knowledge around boundary conditions, we can make better initial hypotheses on what might work for the challenges and contexts we’re facing. 

Here's a relatively straightforward example: I'm hiring for a new role and I'm wondering if conscientiousness would be valuable for performance. Generally speaking, the highest quality way to think about personality is the Five Factor Model (aka Big Five, aka OCEAN, and pretty much aka HEXACO). One of those five factors is conscientiousness, which measures one’s tendency to be organized, responsible, diligent, and goal-directed. Conscientiousness has long been associated with higher workplace performance. And that’s the common narrative that you’ll find out there - higher conscientiousness means better performance, averaged across many contexts and many roles. So if I’m searching for the next CEO, I might want to think about their tendency for conscientiousness.

But what if we pause here and ask about boundary conditions. Maybe something like: “ok, I get the general idea that conscientiousness is a good thing, but under what conditions might conscientiousness have no impact? Or dare I say (audible gasp), when might high conscientiousness be a bad thing?” 

Now things get interesting. There’s emerging evidence that conscientiousness can be harmful to performance in volatile and uncertain environments. This makes sense - if you give someone with high conscientiousness a plan, they are more likely to put a ton of energy into executing that plan to completion. And that level of diligence and goal-orientation might blind them from the need to adjust course. I remember this BCG study from 2020 catching my eye about the potential negative impact of high conscientiousness in CEOs. (Side note: Since we focus on high-quality peer reviewed research, we will not be making a habit of sourcing from BCG. But the part about Big Five personality and natural language processing in this article was well done).

Even with just one example, you can start to see how valuable boundary conditions are for those of us who are serious practitioners in the Talent and People space. Are you sure you want to hire that super duper conscientious CEO when adaptability and strategic changes might be critical to the business’s success?

Let’s add one more example before we move on. In 2016, Google published the results of a seriously impressive internal research effort to identify the characteristics of the top performing Google teams (if you’ve heard about this one 100 times already, sorry, but stick with me). From this research, the key factor for the performance of Google teams was psychological safety. The concept has become super popular since then. The common narrative is that increasing psychological safety in any organization or team is one of the best ways to improve performance. A universal positive good.

But wait! Do all those people know what the teams at Google within the study looked like? They were engineering and sales teams full of highly educated, highly motivated, incredibly skilled, and very well paid individuals. So yes, psychological safety was the most important factor for team performance in 2012-2014…at Google…for educated, motivated, skilled, well-paid engineers and sales teams. Let’s take a wild guess at how many teams in other organizations and businesses look like that. Very, very few. Yet, here we are, in a world where almost everyone is pushing psychological safety like it’s some universal miracle cure for team performance.

Whether it’s conscientiousness or psychological safety, context and boundary conditions matter deeply for these types of behavioral science concepts. Simply put, boundary conditions are essential knowledge to create impact in teams and organizations. Naturally then, we should expect there to be A LOT of discussion around boundary conditions within the Talent and People space, right? Right? Not really.

This is one of the immediate areas where we think Applied Scholar can help serious practitioners, by making it much easier to understand the impact of different behavioral science concepts across different organizational contexts. Is this an organizational context where emotional intelligence is important? How about growth mindset? Psychological safety? Conscientiousness? IQ? That sort of information isn’t widely accessible right now and we are leading the effort to change that. That’s why we’re in love with boundary conditions.

SPOTLIGHT

Growth Mindset

For a specific example of how we’re making this type of information more accessible, we recently recorded a ten minute primer on growth mindset through this lens. The video answers the question: if you’re serious about the People and Talent space, what would you want to know about growth mindset? The video is now posted to the Vault and accessible here to Vault subscribers. One of our long-time collaborators recently watched this video during editing and told us it was the best summary he’s ever seen from us. I hope you find it equally as valuable!

FEATURED RESEARCH

Let's dig into the research.

Heterogeneity: One approach researchers use to better understand boundary conditions is called heterogeneity. Essentially, researchers are trying to do a better job sharing how outcomes vary across settings and individuals, as opposed to just reporting the average result. Growth mindset appears to be particularly volatile to contextual variations, so heterogeneity is likely to matter a lot here. To give you a better sense of how this looks in practice, here’s a paper exploring the heterogeneity of growth mindset (FYI: the authors of this paper are generally pro-growth mindset).

PERSPECTIVES TO SHARE

High-quality commentary from the world of applied behavioral science. 

Cartography for the win! Right around the time we were thinking deeply about boundary conditions, we came across this wonderful article, The Behavioral Scientist as a Cartographer by Dilop Soman. We found it quite interesting to draw a parallel between cartography (maps, terrain, contours) and the issue we too are seeing in the Talent and People space. This line had us nodding our heads: ‘Key ideas from cartography might allow us to reframe the question. We can shift from asking, ‘Which intervention is best?’ to, ‘Given the conditions I am operating under, what intervention holds the most promise?’” We love it.

LAST BUT NOT LEAST

Progress towards the launch. 

We continue our big research and content creation push as we build out the videos, materials, and resources in the Vault. It is both awesome and quite the intellectual challenge. We’re happy to report that we’re on track to move out of our Beta Test and launch the full product in the July-August timeline. 

For Vault subscribers, be on the lookout for an update email with a holistic summary of the content we’re adding, like the Growth Mindset video mentioned above. 

If you haven’t yet subscribed to the Vault and you’re interested, you can get access for free for the duration of our Beta Test. 

We hope that you enjoyed this edition of the Spark and that you’ll be thinking a lot more about boundary conditions in the coming weeks.

See you again soon!