Fantasy Finance Postscript

So the game is over - I didn't win the bazillion dollars. I managed to finish in the top 11% and only lost around $3,000. The statistics from my earlier post held true - I made more/lost less than most other players 28 days out of 48 , roughly 60% of the time, and I made more/lost less than the S&P on 23 days out of 48. I was approaching half for beating the market - may be I can trade as good as the market - but that still doesn't change the analysis - I should buy a market based mutual fund.

Search or Derive

I was helping my son study for his Standards of Learning tests (known affectionately as SOLs - who thought that was a good idea?) He was a bit concerned because the study was around using Celsius instead of Fahrenheit. So, we went through different ways you could navigate the problems. Here are three of them:

• You could go with intuition - you could think in Celsius. Having lived in Europe - this is fairly easy for me - single digits is cool; 20° is comfortable; 30° is hot; 45° drink plenty of water and take steps to avoid heat prostration. If the temperature is below zero wear a coat.
• You could use derive a heuristic to get the temperature in Fahrenheit - double the temperature in Celsius and add 30° will get you close enough for temperatures in weather reports. You can derive the exact conversion formula if you know the freezing point and the boiling point of water in each scale. (The formula for the conversion is  F° = 9/5C° + 32°)
• You could look up an answer on the Internet.

We did not use the third method. So, thinking about Knowledge Centered Support:

• On every contact there is a decision point - do I search for an answer or do I derive an answer? 

When your body of knowledge is stable, your inquiries predictable, and your search tools are effective a decision is easy - search and only start deriving when you can't find the answer. When all three of these are present the decision becomes different - deriving may actually be the better approach. I know this first hand from supporting Macintosh products. 

At that time, Macintosh computers were losing market share. The Macintosh teams had a couple of teams of ten to twenty agents. There were dozens of windows teams. The knowledge base was predominantly windows solutions. (Apple snobs would point to the superiority of the Macintosh Operating System.) I didn't search much for solutions - I derived them. I had a mental check list of things I could do to isolate and diagnose a problem, and more than likely find a solution. In rare instances - mostly printing issues, I knew I could find a solution in the knowledge base and I would search. For the most part, I knew in 95% of my calls, I could derive a solution 100% of the time. At best, I could find a solution 30% of the time - the content was limited, the search engine was tricky, and I couldn't contribute to the knowledge base, and  there was no way to flag content gaps.¹ I really had only two choices: derive the answer or find a subject matter expert to ask.

Effective agents derived answers. The others struggled. Ironically, there was a woman who was struggling that I admired. She had derived her own rudimentary form of KCS - each time she encountered a call where she didn't know the answer, she would ask for help and carefully write the answer on an index card that she kept in a rolodex. She drove the subject matter experts nuts, because she was always asking for help - but she never asked the same question twice. If the answer was in her rolodex she used it.

If you are in an environment where agents or engineers need to derive answers because of the body of knowledge what should you do to encourage knowledge sharing? My best guesses at this time are:

1. Acknowledge the value of deriving answers - your new solutions are going to be derived. Reinforce the rewards for contributing creatively derived responses.
2. Remove obstacles to searching effectively, make sure your agents and engineers can easily give feedback, and communicate back the changes that are being made.

Is there anything I've missed?

¹ To be fair there was one feedback method - an annual survey sent out by the database administrator. I was very open with my critiques of the knowledge base. When I met the database administrator he recognized my name. Fortunately he didn't take the critique personally.

A Different Kind of Diversity

I've been reading a lot of job requisitions lately. I've noticed they tend to be narrowly focused. The educational background is limited to a narrow range of related degrees and experience. This being the United States - that last statement is always "this company is an equal opportunity employer and hires with out regard to" followed by the list of protected classes. Companies need diversity of out look to make good decisions. They need people with diverse experiences who can bring in different ways of looking at things. Diversity matters - it helps uncover blind spots in the way people view the world. Differences in religion, ethnic background, and region can be a proxy for differences in worldview. So is education and experience. My impression is back in 1950's and 60s, there was a different kind of diversity in play. I read somewhere, back in the sixties NASA was in many ways more divers than it is now. NASA is currently a very diverse place in terms of protected classes, but for the most part all the employees went to the same schools and received the same degrees. It is self selecting for a certain type of worldview. Twenty years ago, I knew corporate managers who had Fine Arts degrees, English degrees, and History degrees. In this day and age, you could get a job as a store clerk, not as a corporate manager. These days, you need a business degree. And that poses a problem. If everyone of your managers has the same education, the same type of personality, the same worldview - how can they expose blind spots in the corporate plans? How can they create the contingency plans that ensure success? Does it really matter if they all look different, but they all think the same?

Fantasy Finance

I've been playing the Fantasy Finance game on Yahoo Finance sponsored by Ameritrade. The rules are simple - start with 100k in play money, buy publicly traded securities traded on the big exchanges, make the most play money in 12 weeks, win $5000, and Ameritrade reaches a large group of potential customers. Easy? Right... I started in the middle of week 3 with $100000 in play money a proceeded to lose money climbing into the 40th percentile with a fairly conservative strategy. So how am I doing? I've lost money - I would have done better with just the 100k and the $100 per trading day you can earn by answering questions about market history. I'm in the 122 percentile. I've done better than most of the other players 60% of the time. I've done better than the S&P 17 times or 40% of the time. So short answer - I can beat most aggressive day traders. I can't beat the market. I should probably invest in an index fund and move on.