Clear Mountain Leadership Retreat: musings on gearboxes and transformation

Another weekend, another workshop…. It’s unusual that I book back-to-back weekends with professional development courses, especially when I’ve got significant client work in between. For this one, however, I could resist neither the topic – an intensive look at integrated leadership styles through application of the NeuroPower framework (as developed by author and strategist Peter Burow) – nor the location: Clear Mountain outside Brisbane in Queensland.

So I’ve been sitting atop a mountain surveying the vistas of the river valleys spilling out to the sea, in a quest to “rediscover the leader within.” I’ve also been mindful of the line from my favourite novel, The Razor’s Edge: “It is easy to be a wise man on the top of a mountain.” The point for me in such courses is in the practical application of insight and knowledge and the task is therefore not merely to go up the mountain in search of wisdom, but to bring one’s integrated perspective back down from the heights and help others along their own path to insight, knowledge and wisdom. And since arguably corporations are the cathedrals of today inasmuch as many people want to derive meaning and purpose from the work that they do, I like those insights to wherever possible have a business application.

The limbic reaction: fight/flight/freeze revisited
All forms of change, be they in work or relationships, whether in the areas of learning, shifts of mindset, altered circumstances or new developments, will provoke a limbic response. Whether we ultimately perceive the change to be positive or negative, the immediate response at a very basic level of the brain will be “something is changing the status quo, what does this mean?? Am I under threat?? Am I going to be OK??”

You have probably heard of this as the fight-flight-freeze response. It’s a critical part of our survival mechanism. It’s hardwired into our neural circuitry and happens even before we’re consciously aware of it. This is to the good: it’s the reason your distant ancestors dodged threats (like Australia’s infamous three S’s: snakes, sharks and spiders) and defended their turf long enough to produce the people who, in turn, eventually produced you.

The fight-flight-freeze or limbic response gets some bad press because it can lead to really dumb decisions. The point is, it’s not the place you want to make all your decisions from, but without it you can’t make decisions at all. Let me explain.

Your limbic responses are absolutely not the noble, rational, thinking part of your brain that goes so far toward making you uniquely human and particularly you. Still, I’d like to revisit the limbic/fight-flight-freeze response and suggest a bit of a reframe, a more nuanced understanding of what this part our brain is about.

The parts of the brain responsible for this automatic, seemingly knee-jerk reaction that happens beneath our conscious awareness are also the bits of the brain that provide the energy required for your higher brain functions. These higher functions are the ones that help you to define what you feel about the reaction you’ve just had and in turn what you think about that feeling about what’s just happened.

For example, the unconscious reaction when you first meet someone might be strong attraction, which produces a feeling of both pleasure and embarrassment (perhaps because this person happens to be your boss’s new wife) at which point your thinking brain comes up with a story to explain the situation to yourself in an acceptable fashion (“she reminds me of an ex-girlfriend,” or, “she must have been flirting with me somehow”).

The mental gearbox

People who’ve had the limbic part of their brains surgically “shut off” end up being incapable of making a decision – they simply can’t be bothered about anything in particular because they can’t decide if they want to fight it, flee it, or freeze. You could therefore think about this function in less sinister, life-threatening terms, by simply understanding them as gears that you switch in your mind depending on whether you need to go forward, be in neutral, or reverse.

You may be thinking, “OK, forward makes sense, that’s how you get stuff done, but why on earth would I want to be in neutral or even reverse!?” Well, think of a conversation between two people constantly in forward – they’d be talking over each other and not hearing anything the other person said. While you may well have engaged in conversations like this in the past (or even today) you’d probably agree that it’s not a very useful means of two-way communication. So “neutral” in this context is the part you play in the natural flow of conversation when you let other people take their turn to speak and have their say.

What about reverse? Think of reverse as the reflective gear, where you withdraw to gather your thoughts, make new connections and create knowledge out of the raw information that you’ve gathered.

We all need reflection time – it’s the key to developing awareness of oneself and others. Hence my decision to spend time this weekend on the mountain, learning (among other things) how to manage my own mental gearbox of limbic reactions and becoming attuned to what gear other people are currently using so as to have more successful interactions with them.

When people have developed this capability and happen to be in an organization, this function is the key to achieving transformational leadership, which (in a triad along with management and leadership) will be the theme of future postings on this blog.

For now, I appreciate your taking the time in neutral/reverse gears to read/ponder my musings from the mountain, and encourage you to get into forward gear to seek out my further posts on this subject…

TM

Sleep on it...and be smarter

Here I am in the Qantas Club lounge at Brisbane airport. Through a combination of lost baggage (thankfully refound) and cancelled flights I’ve been enjoying the dubious culinary pleasures on offer here for nearly seven hours. And having dozed twice on the plane and once here at my makeshift office-on-the-road, I’ve been put much in mind of the idea of sleep…

A longstanding devotee of the "power nap" (15 minutes usually does the trick for me) I was utterly chuffed (or stoked, depending on your geographical linguistic preference) to find this little gem on one of my favourite blogs.

The highlights:

…we live in a 24/7 world, fuelled by ever-present deadlines, demands and responsibilities. With so much to do and so little time, it seems tempting, or perhaps even necessary, to shave off a few hours of sleep in order to get things done. Given this chronic shortage of shuteye, wouldn't it be wonderful if a quick nap could refresh us mentally and improve our memories? Results from a recent study suggest that a mere six-minute nap may be able do just that.

More than just a pleasant diversion (or a way to keep from crashing your car on the highway during long trips) sleep plays a key role in learning:

Sleep has been shown to promote consolidation of various kinds of memory, from procedural skills (for example, learning to play a musical instrument or mastering a sport), to episodic memories (such as remembering facts and experiences learned during the day).

So, whether you’re in Australia heading into the long ANZAC day weekend or elsewhere in the world enjoying the onset of spring/autumn, my counsel to you would be: get some rest, you probably need it!

TM

Michael Rennie – McKinsey, meaning-making, mindsets and more…

It's been a week of serendipity...while researching something else entirely I came across this interview with Michael Rennie, whose name resonated because of a conversation I had on the weekend. His point of view converges entirely with the ideas I want to promote with this blog and deserves the widest possible audience, hence this post.

Rennie's a remarkable individual. Diagnosed at the age of 31 with terminal cancer and given at most 12 months to live, he embarked on both an inward journey (remember yesterday's post about the value of plumbing the depths...?) and a process of connecting outwardly with others.

He beat the cancer and now over a decade later has taken the lessons he learned in the process about meaning-making, meditation and changing mindsets into the world of large organizations. Today as global co-leader of McKinsey & Company's Mindsets and Capabilities practice he specializes in performance culture improvement and behaviour change in large organizations, working closely with Chairmen and their top teams on leadership performance.

The result is a compelling vision of transformational leadership for the 21st century.
Hope you enjoy what he has to say as much as I did.
TM


Michael Rennie: Head & Heart

Needs-based communication can save your life

This past weekend I attended a workshop on “needs-based communication” (a.k.a. NVC) which encourages people to get clear on the difference between needs, thoughts and feelings and learn how to formulate strategies to get needs met, typically through clear requests of oneself and/or of others.

What I noticed in particular was the importance of accurately distinguishing between feelings and thoughts. In everyday English usage people frequently say things like “I feel you’re being disrespectful” or “I feel this is unfair” or “I feel that you’re not listening to me.” Strictly speaking, these are judgements and evaluative thoughts, not actual feelings (which tend to fall into the broad categories of mad, sad, glad or afraid) and you ought to be saying “I think you’re being disrespectful, this is unfair, you’re not listening to me.”

So is all this just wordplay? What possible difference could it make?

Well…learning these communication skills might just save your life.

Brain function and stress chemicals

Brain research has shown that there are dedicated areas of the brain that serve different functions. The limbic system, for example, figures highly in emotional reactions and their associated feelings. Stressful emotions trigger the body to pump out cortisol and epinephrine (a.k.a. adrenaline) in a fight-or-flight reaction. In small doses, these hormones and neurotransmitters saved your ancestors’ lives by helping them to avoid danger and/or defeat enemies. They’re part of the reason they survived and that you are here today.

Now the kind of energy needed to outrun a tiger or defeat a club-wielding aggressor is not really required anymore in most of our daily lives. Yet when ongoing stress and anxiety or anger reactions in our lives cause our bodies to be continually flooded with these chemicals the result can be damage to internal organs and wearing out the body’s tissues.

What all this means in simplest terms is that when you use sloppy language to mislabel your feelings and then wallow in anger and negativity, your brain releases chemicals that wear your out body and that can even lead to chronic illnesses like cancer.

An effective way to moderate the limbic function that governs fears, anxieties and anger (that is, the knee-jerk, emotional part of the brain) is to engage the frontal and prefrontal lobes of the brain – the higher “rational brain” functions that are more developed in humans than in any other animal and that enable second-order thinking.

Using your NeuroLimbic/NeuroRational Types

In NeuroPower terms (the framework developed by author and strategist Peter Burow), each individual’s behaviour will be influenced by interplay of your NeuroLimbic Type (NLT) and your NeuroRational Type (NRT). Your NLT is indicative of how your particular brain’s limbic system engages the emotional fight-or-flight-or-freeze reactions to external stimuli, while your NRT is the type of rational response you are capable of choosing when you are able to engage your higher intelligence centres and tap into your particular gift and noble qualities.

Needs-based communication theory tells us that no one is able to give empathy to others when their own emotional needs for empathy remain unmet. This makes sense: when a person is highly emotional and reactive it’s impossible for them to engage the higher thought processes required to imagine what another person may be experiencing, which is the hallmark of empathy.

The ultimate goal, then, is to use your NeuroRational Type to govern your NeuroLimbic Type, and to do so as often and as swiftly as possible. Put another way, you want to be in control of your emotions rather than your emotions being in control of you.

When you are able to engage the higher rational brain to creatively solve problems, create meaning, choose different ways of reacting to stimuli, and empathize with others, there’s a payoff: dopamine. This powerful neurotransmitter and hormone rewards positive behaviour, enhances motivation and can counteract the effects of harmful stress hormones.

There’s good news here: you’re not “broken.” You have everything you need to be happy and to get your needs met. The trick is to identify what those needs are and tap into your NeuroRational Type’s gift to develop a strategy that gets your needs met. So if it’s that simple, why don’t more people do it?

Stay on the surface, or enter the depths…?

Cheers to Sonny Navaratnam for the following useful metaphor: people are like the ocean.

On the surface of the water it may be sunny and calm, windy and blustery, or stormy with huge waves. Conditions can change in an instant and unleash tremendous energy and destructive force. This is the realm of emotions: volatile, unpredictable, intense.

At a deeper level there are movements and currents but these are more enduring and less changeable and momentary than what is at the surface. At base, all people have the same basic needs and when we plumb the depths of ourselves we can identify what it is we need. To do so, however, we need to go beyond the emotional turmoil at the surface. And it can often be a journey into the unknown, a place where >cue pirate’s voice< “Thar be monsters…!!”

Many people avoid grappling with these depths for fear of what they might find; because the surface is stormy and difficult they may assume that’s all that life has to offer and rather than seeking to understand the source and nature of their needs they try to avoid and outrun every storm that’s blown up at the surface. As a result their lives are tossed around like ships on the open sea. Only when people do the work of self-awareness to accurately identify their feelings and underlying needs will they be better placed to get those needs met, as captain of their own ship.

Observation - Feeling - Need - Request

The needs-based communication approach is simple, yet challenging to do effectively.

1) Observation: this involves making an objective statement about a behaviour or event, one that is separate from the associated emotions, feelings, evaluations or judgements.

2) Feeling: identifying the feeling that was evoked. Again, as a rule of thumb, feelings tend to fall into the category of mad, sad, glad or afraid.

3) Need: feelings are simply expressions of unmet needs; in this step, identify that unmet need.

4) Request: make a request that gives the opportunity to get that need met.

An example might look like this:

O: “When I heard you say, That presentation was really pretty average.

F: “I felt irritated and anxious…

N: “because I need to be competent and respected by my peers…

R: “so would you be willing to provide feedback about both what you liked and what you thought I could do differently next time?”

While it has offered a fairly rudimentary overview of the needs-based communication method, my hope is that this post has highlighted the value of effective communication by putting it in the context of brain function.

When you are emotionally reactive and operating only from your NeuroLimbic Type your body is flooded with stress hormones that prevent you from getting your own needs met, let alone being of help to others.

On the other hand, when you access your NeuroRational Type to accurately identify your feelings and needs, make clear requests and connect empathically with others, your body is bathed in positive and motivating chemicals that might not only save your life, but will improve the quality of relationships you have in that life.

So take the plunge…there are some truly beautiful things beneath the waves if only you have the courage to integrate them into your worldview.

(Hat-tip to Sakyakumara as sounding board for this article.)
TM

Group Genius and the genesis of ideas

To continue the Book Review post below of Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration, here are the 10 factors that Sawyer suggests enable Group Flow:

1) Group has a well-understood goal

2) They engage in close listening

3) People have complete concentration

4) Being in control – having a sense of autonomy, competence and relatedness

5) Blending egos – working collaboratively not competitively

6) Equal participation, informed by comparable skill levels

7) Familiarity with performance styles of other group members

8) Communication that’s spontaneous and ongoing (i.e. café/lunchroom talks)

9) Use “Yes, and…” thinking to accept offers and extend and build on them

10) The potential for failure and the value of rehearsals

And in answer to the question, “what is the best balance of planning and improvisation?” Sawyer devotes a chapter to “Organizing for Improvisation,” where he offers another top-ten list of the secrets of collaborative organizations:

1) Keep many irons in the fire – innovative companies experiment with lots of low-cost projects on the go, responding to what emerges

2) Create a Department of Surprise – look for ways to repurpose apparently failed experiments by finding them a home elsewhere in the organization

3) Build space for creative conversation – more on this below

4) Allow time for ideas to emerge – deadlines amp up stress and kill creativity; you can’t rush creativity because it needs incubation time

5) Manage the risks of improvisation – define the right amount of time taken away from other projects, the sheer number of ideas generated and balance with the need for structure and planning

6) Improvise at the edge of chaos – not too rigid to prevent creative emergence, not too loose as to results in complete chaos

7) Manage knowledge for innovation – capture the innovations that emerge improvisationally and make sure other parts of the organization can benefit from the creative sparks

8) Build dense networks – keep groups small enough to effectively interact, ca. 150-200 people (the size of the earliest human societies, and still the ideal size of group to effectively manage changes, including those required in creative processes)

9) Ditch the org chart – break down the silos and get people working across business units to cross-pollinate ideas and discover latent creative forces

10) Measure the right things – instead of spend on R&D or number of patents registered, measure the health of your social networks in the organization to find out just how well people are interacting and how well information is diffused.

I would flesh out a couple of these points in particular as follows. On point #3 (building space for creative conversation), it’s absolutely crucial if you expect people to be creative that you give them an environment that says to the brain: “it’s OK to be creative here”. As an example, Google got this right in their Zurich office design. As the waggish final slide suggests, creativity rarely emerges from cubicle farms.

One other idea that I think is worth highlighting from the list is a combination of points 2, 7, 8, 9 and 10 – the concept that innovative solutions created in one part of an organization can have unexpected and novel applications in other areas to solve problems that would otherwise go unsolved. To put it in a wider context: When I interviewed the Dutch cross-cultural business thinker Fons Trompenaars he pointed out that a surprisingly large number of innovations come from other countries and only appear new because no one ever thought to view things quite that way before. One of the best examples I've seen lately of this kind of innovation came from author Dan Pink, who's understood the lesson well with his latest book, Johnny Bunko published in the manga format popularized in Japan, a first in the English-speaking world and a product perfectly pitched for a the meaning-hungry Gen-Y market:

Johnny Bunko trailer from Daniel Pink on Vimeo.

Book Review: "Group Genius" by Keith Sawyer

In Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration, Keith Sawyer has woven together a range of disparate threads of thought into an enjoyable and practical book on the creative process. He’s debunked several myths regarding creativity and synthesized ideas from several different worlds in a way that left me thinking, “Yes, I recognize everything you’re saying and I’ve seen much of this before, but never so well organized and neatly presented in one place.”

The book has received many reviews since its publication last year and a two awards as well so I won’t offer an overview. Instead I’d like to draw out one thread in particular that informs the majority of Sawyer’s book: the idea of improvisation.

First, some background. For some years I’ve been involved with the Applied Improvisation Network (AIN), whose aim is to “spread the transforming power of improvisation.” The AIN is a collaborative “community of practitioners and clients who value the use of improvisation skills in organizations to improve relationships, increase authenticity, promote spontaneity, foster trust and build communities of practice.”

Improv enthusiasts have every reason to be ecstatic over Sawyer’s book, since it echoes what they have been saying for years and lends to their arguments the triple weight of his academic research (professor of psychology and education at Washington University in St. Louis, he took his Ph.D. in psychology studying creativity with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, originator of the concept of “Flow”) his practical business savvy (following his computer science degree at MIT he designed video games for Atari and then did management consulting on innovative technologies with Kenan Systems) and his artistic flair (he is himself an improviser as a jazz pianist for over 30 years, spending several of those years playing piano with Chicago improv theatre groups).

In contrast to the traditional notion of the “lone genius” being responsible for great creative breakthroughs, Sawyer’s thesis is that all creativity is actually collaborative and that improvisation is the ideal format for getting the creative juices flowing. To understand and promote successful collaboration, it pays to focus on the moment-to-moment interactional dynamics. Innovation emerges over time as team members practice deep listening, build on each others’ ideas, allow for emergent meaning creation, create room for surprising (and unanticipated) questions and allow the process the time and space it requires to unfold according to its own pace and flow.

In an organizational setting there is an clear need for structure and strategic planning. Yet he gives real-world examples to show that improvisation is often more responsive and effective than heavily scripted approaches. So what is the best balance of planning and improvisation? The answer (expanding on the concept coined by his former supervisor Csikszentmihalyi) is what he’s termed a state of Group Flow, enabled by 10 key conditions that he describes in the book.

OK this posting is a long one and I want to discuss more thoughts prompted by this book, so I’m going to extend this review over a few posts…and why not. For now it’s good night from Melbourne.
TM

What's coming up on the tmc blog

Today I'd like to give you a glimpse of some ideas I've formed during conversations and experiences over the past two weeks and give you a preview of blog posts that are coming up.

I had a conversation with my friend Sakyakumara in Cambridge, who's generously shared his thoughts with me on the subject of "MAGIC" negotiation and whose workshop rolls out next week in the UK. Our chat provided the prompt for me to explore further what happens with the brain when we're told to do something (à la command-and-control style management) vs when we're asked to be part of the decision-making that results in a decision. Watch for a post on this subject soon.

I've also spoken to Melcrum Australia , an conference organizer and publishing house working in the domain of effective internal communications. We discussed the subject of online social networks and wondered out loud: have we hit "Facebook fatigue" or are these networks still relevant today? The fruit of those discussions will, I hope, be a weeklong series of articles appearing here and possibly on their members-only blog, The Internal Comms Hub.

Working this week with a very bright bunch in the Human Capital team at Australia's largest professional services firm highlighted a couple of themes that I look forward to writing about in the weeks to come: first, what are the significant differences between the male and female brains and second, what in neuroscientific terms is the value of providing affirms and positive feedback to people?

While compiling a project proposal last week for one of Australia's top global investment banks I became familiar with Keith Sawyer's terrific book Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration. Watch this blog for a review of the book this weekend, part of a new series of book reviews.

Next week I'll be in Melbourne working with a group of senior partners, again at Australia's largest professional services firm. While I'm there I plan to connect with my mate Adrian Cropley to discuss holding a NeuroPower information session/workshop to be held in Melbourne looking at how neuroscience and brain research offer insights into the area of Change Communications. More info to come on that one, watch this space!
TM

Mintzberg’s Five (plus one) Minds of a Manager

The business website BNET recently offered a useful summary of the classic HBS article, The Five Minds of a Manager co-authored by Henry Mintzberg (management theorist and professor at my alma mater, McGill University).

The article outlines five mindsets for managers to cultivate in order to cope with the often conflicting demands of their jobs.

I noticed that these five mindsets line up with five of the six intelligence centres (ICs) of the brain as described in the NeuroPower framework (developed by author and strategist Peter Burow). To explore the parallels, I’ve therefore added to Mintzberg’s five the “clarity” mindset, which corresponds to the sixth IC and in a sense completes the set.

Six mindsets, six intelligence centres – how do they match up? Read my full article comparing the two theories.

Just to give away the ending: I think The Five Minds of a Manager theory aligns quite well with what NeuroPower has to say about brain function, which is why when we read Mintzberg’s article it is easy to say, “Yes, that all makes good sense to me, I want to start doing more of those things.”

In fact the great advantage to the NeuroPower framework is that it makes no claim to “replace” other frameworks and theories. Rather, it lays out a powerful explanatory method describing how our brains work in certain predictable ways. And because everyone's brain functions in remarkably similar ways, any other framework or theory that produces positive change and possesses real explanatory power will do so in the exact degree to which they line up with what we now know about brain function.

NeuroPower therefore provides an overarching brain research-based framework into which so many other models can be readily integrated without people needing to “un-learn” what they have previously learned. Quite simply, if it works, it is because it aligns with how our minds are working.

What is more, NeuroPower is a profoundly practical framework that can help turn the best theories from Harvard and elsewhere into real results based on a common language and explanatory system that everyone can understand – from the boiler room to the boardroom.

TM