Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Why what is good for B. Shruthirai is not good for the content team as a whole? a.k.a Fallacy of Composition

Shruthirai works as part of the EDP team in ANSR’s content development division. What’s special about her is that she sends these great (at times) “good morning:)” e-mails with a message/picture every day. She’s been doing this religiously for years, and her practice has been so institutionalized that some of us refuse to believe it’s morning yet till we get that e-mail from her. She receives around 5 responses on an average to these mails. It’s feel-good for her and it is feel-good for the other 99 recipients working in our Domlur office in Bangalore. No one’s complaining.

Which brings us to a classical question - what if, everyone starts sending good morning e-mails? It means that you will have 99 good mornings in your inbox every morning. Clearly not a good thing, especially if you woke up on the wrong side of the bed! Add another 5 mails that you receive in response (to your thought-provoking good morning mail), and we are talking about per-capita good morning e-mail count of 104 in every inbox. That’s a lot of content, and assuming a short e-mail takes about 45 seconds to digest, every person on average, needs around 78 minutes for this courtesy. 16.25% of our work day! In other words, about 130 hours lost for all the people in the system put together.

Which brings us to the concept of the fallacy of composition – something works for a single unit does not mean it will work for all the units together. Your view of the match is improved if you stand up in the stadium, but if everyone stands up, we’re more or less back to square one. In the case of good morning mails, it goes beyond this fallacy, and the system as a whole ends up a lot messier. So Shruthi, keep doing what you’re doing. The rest of us – sit tight and wait for that e-mail, and while you’re at it, create some rocking content.

P.S: And don’t get us started about forwards.

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