A Day in the Life of a Senior Leader

Chapter 15. The Contagion

In the hallway, late on Thursday, someone tells you a bit of information about your product that is 100% provably not true. You laugh, wink at the person, and say, “That’s goofy. What reasonable human would believe that?” And that conversation moves on.

Two hours later, different locations, different humans, and different contexts. Same exact piece of provably false information is shared with you. Your brain perks up because here’s this laughable bit of data you’ve heard twice in the same day. Now you’re curious. Now you ask questions: “Weird. Where’d you hear that?”

To which they honestly say, “I don’t know.”

Twenty-four hours later, this silly bit of information is your entire life. It’s all you are focused on. You’ve had two meetings with stakeholders to strategize how to counteract this immortal lie.

It’s a Contagion, and while I cannot tell you how to fix it, you must understand the personalities, behaviors, and rules influencing and contributing to its creation and why it thrives.

Network Nodes

To understand how information moves around a network of humans, you need to understand the constituent parts of the network: the humans who compose the network. I see four types of nodes:

Basics

The majority of the nodes. A human who is capably receiving, interpreting, creating, and transmitting information in any direction. Good job.

Our next three are exotic nodes, and they exhibit very specific behaviors worth understanding:

Gossips/Mutators

These ...