The Proposal Guys Jon and BJ's proposal blog
  • Home
  • About
  • SP Website
  • Contact
  • Subscribe
  • Home
  • About
  • SP Website
  • Contact
  • Subscribe

Mood swings and proposal teams

11/16/2011

0 Comments

 
Posted by Jon
Outside work, I’m an avid user of Twitter – finding it a great way to keep in touch with my geographically-diverse friendship group, especially when I’m off travelling for work. (I’m a more recent convert to Facebook, too, and I’m still rather wrestling with the relative roles of the two systems).
​
I was therefore fascinated to read of a recent study by sociologists at Cornell University, reported in the New York Times:
Drawing on messages posted by more than two million people in 84 countries, researchers discovered that the emotional tone of people’s messages followed a similar pattern not only through the day but also through the week and the changing seasons.
Use of positive words and phrases:
  • crested around breakfast time (6 a.m. – 9 a.m.)
  • fell off gradually until hitting a trough between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m.
  • then drifted upward, rising more sharply after dinner.
Particularly interesting was that tweets followed broadly the same pattern at weekends as on weekdays (albeit around two hours later). As the researchers commented:
“This is a significant finding because one explanation out there for the pattern was just that people hate going to work. But if that were the case, the pattern should be different on the weekends, and it’s not. That suggests that something more fundamental is driving this — that it’s due to biological or circadian factors.”
I wonder if there’s any learning in this for proposal managers? I guess it suggests that if we’re trying to engineer creativity or secure commitment from people, we’re best doing that earlier in the day than later. Organise a review meeting at 3 p.m. – and you’re potentially going to get people at their most downbeat and negative: not necessarily the ideal mood for constructive input.
0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    Articles by Topic

    All
    APMP & Accreditation
    Interviews And The Panel
    Musings
    Processes & Best Practice
    Proposal Guys News
    Proposal Panda
    Proposal Training
    Purchasing Insights
    Word Play & Writing

    Authors

    BJ Lownie and Jon Williams are the co-founders of Strategic Proposals.

    Subscribe



    * Required fields

    SP News

    Strategic Proposals News

    RSS Feed

Picture
Website by Digital Media Design, Inc.