2010: New thinking for a new year

Summary: 2010 is the UN's International Year of Biodiversity and a great moment to learn from supposedly "dumb" animals, forget our arrogance, and remember our connection to everything that happens around us. Read why thinking holistically will help your organization in 2010 and how, paradoxically, leaders who change as little as possible in what people are doing are more likely to meet with success in their overall change initiatives.



The UN has designated 2010 the International Year of Biodiversity and I think the timing couldn't be better.

Human beings are profoundly out of touch with the world we live in and that sustains our very existence. We act as though we're above and separate from it. We even act surprised and almost personally offended when natural disasters demonstrate our vulnerability and how dependent we really are on our environment and planet.


Who's the "dumb animal"?

Human beings can be over-fond of the label "unique" as relates to our species. And nowhere is our arrogance better demonstrated than in our attitude towards other animals. Ever since Aristotle put humans at the top of what became the Judeo-Christian "Great Chain of Being" we've regarded ourselves as not just different from all other creatures, but superior.

Over the holidays I read the fascinating and very funny book Alex & Me: How a Scientist and a Parrot Uncovered a Hidden World of Animal Intelligence--and Formed a Deep Bond in the Process. Up to his untimely death, Alex the African Grey parrot provided tremendous insight into the world of animal cognition.

Consider for a moment that we commonly say bird-brain to describe someone's stupidity or lack of thought. Similarly, we use the word parroting to indicate simply repeating after someone else without understanding what they've said.

Yet this non-primate, non-mammalian creature with a walnut-sized brain learned elements of communication at least as well as a chimp (our nearest animal cousins). And Alex certainly possessed what you would call a personality, as the book repeatedly and hilariously describes.

His obituary in The Economist (no less!) summarized his many accomplishments:

By the end, Alex had the intelligence of a five-year-old child and had yet to reach his full potential. He had a vocabulary of 150 words. He knew the names of 50 objects and could, in addition, describe their colours, shapes and the materials they were made from. He could answer questions about objects' properties, even when he had not seen that particular combination of properties before. He could ask for things—and would reject a proffered item and ask again if it was not what he wanted. He understood, and could discuss, the concepts of “bigger”, “smaller”, “same” and “different”. And he could count up to six, including the number zero (and was grappling with the concept of “seven” when he died). He even knew when and how to apologize if he annoyed Dr Pepperberg or her collaborators.*

Dr Pepperberg summarized Alex's legacy as follows:

Clearly, animals know more than we think, and think a great deal more than we know. Alex taught us that our vanity had blinded us to the true nature of minds, animal and human. [...] Alex taught me to believe that his little bird brain was conscious in some manner, that is, capable of intention. By extrapolation, Alex taught me that we live in a world of thinking, conscious creatures. Not human thinking. Not human consciousness. But not mindless automatons sleepwalking through their lives, either.

How much more disgusting and shameful it is, then, that we treat animals so badly. We have long known of the intelligence of marine mammals, yet Japan secretly slaughters dolphins at Taiji and whales in the Antarctic with its illegal hunting program. Graphic videos of Chinese fur farming and the Canadian seal hunt depict sickening cruelty that can only be inflicted by those with the callous view that animals are things, not thinking, feeling beings.


The Big Picture - it's all connected

The reductionist scientific approach has traditionally sought to understand the world by looking at it from outside, breaking it down into composite parts to see how it works. Despite our arrogance in viewing humans as unique and apart from the world, the work with Alex and other similar research shows that we are not superior to all other creatures and the idea of humans' separateness from the rest of nature is no longer tenable.

Remember the Butterly Effect? This metaphor suggested that small effects in one part of an interconnected ecosystem (say, the movement of a butterfly's wings in Brazil) can produce large effects elsewhere in that system (for example, a tornado in Texas).

Chaos/complexity theory and quantum mechanics have similarly challenged the reductionist scientific view by demonstrating the interdependence of multiple forces and undermining the notion of an objective outside observer.

In short, we are a part of nature, not apart from nature. If we reckon we're the smartest of the animals, it's about time we started acting that way and pay attention to the state of our planet and fellow furry/feathered/fishy residents.


New thinking for the workplace

The lesson in 2010 for people in organizations: think holistically. Changes in one part of an organization will have knock-on and ripple effects elsewhere. Everyone is part of something bigger, and in a company you're all in the same boat - so it makes good sense to communicate with each other to ensure that boat stays afloat and on course.

With change initiatives, some leaders adopt a "change everything" approach to organizational development, seeking radical and widespread change in very short order. These leaders quickly face predictable reactions and resistance. These are the "fight/flight/freeze" responses as follows: with FIGHT people exhibit outright hostility and seek to sabotage the change efforts; FLIGHT means people pay lip-service and seem hyper-compliant but are not engaged and have effectively disconnected from the process; and in FREEZE people are overwhelmed and paralyzed, hoping it will all just go away.

By contrast, there's a positive application of the Butterfly Effect that you can use to your advantage. Since small changes can produce quite large results elsewhere over time, if you can find the right place to make a change it can often create the desired results.

So paradoxically, the leader who changes as little as possible in what people are doing is more likely to meet with success. Small changes are less scary and much less likely to evoke a fight/flight/freeze response. Successfully making a few small changes in key areas will, in turn, actually make a big difference to the organization - and do so without unleashing debilitating anger/insecurity/fear.

To find out more about how tmc can help you identify your key areas ripe for successful small changes, contact me directly.


*-On the subject of parrots, coincidentally over the holidays I also watched the documentary film The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill and was moved by its story of "An uncommon bond between man and nature." A great follow-on to Alex and Me, highly recommended.
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Story conference: habits, corporate culture & stories for change

Summary: An article based on content presented at the Celebrating Story conference held last week in Melbourne, Australia. The post talks about how individual habits form, how organizational habits are the corporate culture or "the way we do things around here" and how, during culture change projects, stories can be used to mediate the tension between individual survival responses and participation in the larger (organizational) group.
NB: This post is an abridged version of an article on transformational culture change in organizations due to be available later this month - to request a copy of the article upon its publication, email the author.

Habits are handy

Remember when you first learned how to drive a car or ride a bike?

In the beginning it took a whole lot of conscious, focused attention to learn this new task. Quite soon, though, the movements needed for that activity became more or less automatic. So much so, that sometimes you (like most people) will drive somewhere you've been to many times before and, upon arrival, have no recollection at all of having made the trip.

Similarly, if you try to explain in words to someone how to ride a bike, it's a really hard thing to do. Your long repetition of bike-riding behaviour has turned it into a habit and actually put it outside your conscious awareness, into an automatic set of movements.

The mechanics behind this process work like this. When you first sat astride that bike or buckled up in the driver's seat of a car you engaged in some pretty serious and focused attention, so as not to either scuff your knees or wrap your dad's car around a tree. At times like this, you're consciously engaging your cortical brain - that's the part which engages in complex tasks by weighing different options, considering evidence and laying down the new neural pathways required for learning and skill acquisition.

This is the "heavy-lifting" part of your brain; a processing powerhouse, the possession of which separates we humans from other species. It's hugely expensive to operate in caloric energy terms: it takes about 25-30% of the body's available energy to engage in sustained cognitive activity, like that required to learn a new complex task. That's why after a long period of intense concentration like studying for a test you're exhausted. Even though you were not very physically active, you probably demolished a big meal soon after and had a nice long sleep.

In order to manage your body's resources most efficiently the brain automates as many cognitive activities as possible. New learning is swiftly turned into automatic patterns of behaviour. They become habits and, as you have probably experienced, they can be very tricky things to try to change. As they become simply "the way you do things," they drop out of your conscious awareness. You find you have "imperfect introspective access" to your habits, making them hard to shift and a very powerful force for the maintenance of the status quo.


Vive la différence

Eating the same evening meal day in, day out can be comforting habit. It's efficient, no thought is required and it probably saves time and effort that you can expend on other things.

However, it also means you'll miss other experiences and culinary opportunities. It leaves you exposed if the ingredients for your favourite meal are suddenly unavailable. Your body may rebel against this monotony and develop an intolerance for some of the foods. The point is: the efficiencies that habits can bring can also stand in the way of the flexibility needed to adapt to internal and outside changes.


Organizational habits: Corporate Culture

A similar process happens on a wider scale in organizations. They can be said to have "habits" too, ones that, taken together, form the corporate culture - a concept that is most often described simply as "the way we do things around here". Corporate culture can therefore also be a powerful force for the maintenance of the status quo and, as with the dinner example above, most of the time that's OK.

However for an organization to be flexibly adaptable (e.g. for the organization to move from where it is now to where it needs to be in order to deliver on its strategic goals) many of the habitual patterns wrapped up in the corporate culture will need to change as well.

Now mention “corporate culture” to people in an organization and most will return a blank look, an uncertain smile, or a tentative nod. Having a conversation about culture is a bit like trying to talk to a fish about water - the awareness level is just not very high, because everyone is so completely immersed in the culture.

Any organizational change initiative will very quickly run smack into habitual, automatic patterns of behaviour. The way that people are invited to take part in that change process will therefore determine from the very start how successful the shift will be, and what results will be achieved as the new strategy is executed.


Change can unbalance "The Battle inside your Brain"

Since the habits of corporate culture are powerful forces to maintain the status quo, you need equally powerful countervailing efforts to shift these habits. The thorny question is: will making a powerful case for culture change encourage people to rationally evaluate new ways of operating using their cortical brain networks, or will it represent a source of disruption, insecurity and distress that's seen as a threat and triggers a limbic survival response in each individual?

The way that a change initiative is launched and managed will determine how well you set people up to be on the productive side of The Battle inside their Brain.

Remember that the limbic emotional brain network is where you see the classic knee-jerk reaction - act first, then consider - as it makes decisions first, then seeks justification (or rationalization) for the decision after the fact.

Meanwhile the cortical rational brain network is built to weighing options and alternatives, gathering data and information and then make decisions based on careful analysis and thoughtful debate - consider first, then act. It's in this latter part of the brain that our better nature and true talents as functional adults is located. During a change, you want people to be spending lots of time there and as little time as possible in their limbic survival mode.

What's tricky is that the limbic survival reaction produces powerful emotions and reacts faster than the cortical rational brain. Here's why.


Survival strategies and the Individual

When any change happens in their environment, people will have an immediate response at a very basic level of the brain, the limbic system.

This is a survival response and one that is deeply hardwired - essentially it provides the motivation to focus your attention and assess the situation that you now face in terms of what threats may be present and whether there's action that needs to be taken to ensure your survival.

These survival responses are made up of something that you've no doubt heard of before: the "3 F's" of fight-flight-freeze response.

The limbic system is much older in evolutionary terms than the larger cortical brain, which means that these emotionally-fuelled fight-flight-freeze reactions happen even before we’re consciously aware of them. Now, these reactions have to be fast or they wouldn't be of much use to keep you alive in threatening situations where instant action is required.

The price you pay for the limbic system's speed is that it bypasses the rational cortical brain. Because your rational cortical brain is the part which enables you to consider evidence, weigh alternatives and make well-thought-through decisions, it means that pre-cortical, unconscious reactions can produce some really dumb decisions. Also because the limbic system is a critical part of our age-old, hardwired survival mechanism there's no way to "turn it off". That is to say, you can't NOT have a reaction to things.

The question is, what you do with the emotional energy that results.

Managing this energy requires that people know their most frequent survival strategy: fight-flight-freeze. To use less provocative terms, think of them as gears that you switch depending on whether you need to go forward, reverse, or just be in neutral.

• Forward (fight) is all about action, but it can't be your only survival mode; faced with something bigger and toothier than we are, it makes sense to have other reactions to fall back on.
• Reverse gear (flight) is the withdrawal mode, where you disengage to observe the surroundings for signs of danger and decide whether to re-engage or flee still further.
• Neutral (freeze) in this context is the in-between mode, staying put and being mostly non-threatening and compliant.

These reactions are reactive, not thoughtful. Fighters will unthinkingly attack a change initiative, Fleers will unthinkingly withdraw either mentally or sometimes even physically from the environment, while Freezers will unthinkingly agree and be compliant, but not have any capacity for real engagement with the change.

People in survival mode are in a emotionally high-strung state of limbic lock-down. They will be barely functional as rational adult individuals and even less inclined to participate in groups. Since each person's limbic behaviour tends to trigger a limbic response in others, teams devolve into an animalistic battle of each-against-all.

As each person's limbic response ricochets and intensifies that of others, the group's level of emotional reactivity rises and other team members come to be viewed one of two ways: as competition or food. In such a setting change becomes impossible and people long for the safety and familiarity of habitual patterns - hence why so often a few months after a change is introduced, people revert back to pre-change behaviour patterns.


We live in tribes and tell stories

This may all sound quite grim, a bit like an organizational Lord of the Flies (a.k.a. The Apprentice TV series). Thankfully, two characteristics of human beings offer a way to mediate this state of high tension between individual survival and group participation: 1) we are inherently social animals and 2) we are meaning-making machines.

1) Our social brains. There's something called the default mode network in the brain, which is "what the brain does when it is doing nothing in particular" and involves primarily two areas of the brain.

Researchers don’t agree on all the components of the default network, but consensus is growing that it has two major hubs: the posterior cingulate cortex, or PCC, with the precuneus, and the medial prefrontal cortex. The functions ascribed to those two areas may give clues to what the default network is good for. The medial prefrontal cortex is involved in imagining, thinking about yourself and “theory of mind,” which encompasses the ability to figure out what others think, feel or believe and to recognize that other people have different thoughts, feelings and beliefs from you. The precuneus and PCC are involved in pulling personal memories from the brain’s archives, visualizing yourself doing various activities and describing yourself. [...] Together, these hubs give you a sense of who you are. Their prominence in the network has led some researchers to propose that the function of the default mode is to allow you to internally explore the world and your place in it, so you can plot future actions, including contingency plans for various scenarios you might encounter.*

So it seems that when you're not thinking of anything else, you're thinking about yourself - as defined by your social relationship with others. In other words: as defined through interactions with the group.

2) Stories. A good deal of research has confirmed the human predilection to make characters and narratives out of whatever we see in the world around us. Put simply, we are meaning-making machines. In keeping with the above, it's also interesting to note the role that stories play to promote social cohesion among groups and serve as a valuable method for passing on information. Moreover, stories and narratives play a key role in persuasion: people accept ideas more readily when their minds are in story mode as opposed to when they are in an analytical mind-set.** (Hat-tip Shawn for this article.)


Practical takeaways

God turns you from one feeling to another
And teaches you by means of opposites
So that you will have two wings to fly
Not one. ~ Rumi

Illustration credit: Simon Kneebone, Cartoonist & Illustrator


Our default mode is to define our selves in social terms through relation to others and we tell ourselves stories to make sense of the world around us. We're naturally tribal, storytelling creatures. In this tension of opposites, between the individual's concern for survival and his/her desire to belong to a group, there can be found both the high energy of the emotional limbic survival response and the amazing human capacity for complex thought and meaning-making.

From the very start of a change process, leaders need to use stories and encourage people to channel their emotions into productive behaviours. This can be successfully done in two practical ways:

1. Help individuals to recognize and manage their own limbic emotional reactivity, through awareness of the nine predictable limbic types (see below, Workshop).
2. Engage the group with story, with a narrative journey of change that sets the context, lays out the strategy, invites participation, shows the benefits, engages at an emotional level, outlines the detailed plan, and finally looks forward to positive future state (see below, Consultancy).
   

Are you a slave to your emotions or is your emotional energy serving you?

Workshop: The 9 Survival Strategies - which ones you use and how to put them to work for you (as presented at Melcrum's Strategic Comms conference Sydney, and used by Deutsche Bank, Lloyds TSB Bank, AMP, and other organizations in Australia and the UK).

What's the story of your next organizational culture change project?

Consultancy: To learn more about how tmc helps leaders to effectively engage their teams through times of change, email Todd.



References:
Peter Burow. "The Art & Science of Transformational Leadership."
**Jeremy Hsu. "The Secrets of Storytelling: Why We Love a Good Yarn - Our love for telling tales reveals the workings of the mind," Scientific American Mind, August/September 2008, 46-51.
M.D. Lieberman, D. Schreiber & K.N. Ochsner. "Is Political Cognition like riding a bicycle? How cognitive neuroscience can inform research on political thinking," Political Psychology, 24(4) 2003, 681-704.
*Tina Hesman Saey, "You are who you are by default," Science News, 176(2) July 18th 2009, 16.
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Movement, meditation and "Conversion" of problems into nobility

Part of the richness of the English language is that we can have equally compelling sayings which advocate opposite forms of behaviour. Consider:

ACTION
Fortune favours the bold.
He who hesitates is lost.

CONSIDERATION
Look before you leap.
Measure twice, cut once.

A short article appeared recently on the Sydney Morning Herald's "Enterprise" blog that stated: "When it comes to making decisions in business, motion is better than meditation."

My take on the author's position is that, essentially, action is better than inaction and getting stuff done accomplishes more then procrastination - which seems quite straightforward and sensible, rather like the "Action" proverbs offered above.

I think, however, that meditation is here miscast in the role of inactivity or of simply putting things off.

To this I would have to argue, in line with the "Consideration" sayings also listed above, that without reflection one risks action for action's sake and going off half-cocked all the time with a trail of destruction left in one's wake.

Then again...self-indulgent navel-gazing doesn't get you any closer to where you want to be either.

So, how to strike the balance?


Conversion

One possible answer is provided by the process of Conversion (as detailed in Section Four of the NeuroPower handbook, written by author and strategist Peter Burow).

The process, briefly stated, is a powerful yet elegant means of converting problems into opportunities for growth, development, insight and even nobility.

It's something that you can learn to do for yourself and which also works very effectively as part of a coaching process to help resolve thorny issues and get past deadlocked situations.

Here's how it works.

When confronted with problems, there are various tensions at play which serve to keep us stuck and temporarily unable to see the solution.

(Note that this approach presumes that a solution exists, that we already know it in some form, and are simply unable to access that knowledge and wisdom in our current "stuck" state.)

Confronted with these tensions, we have a choice. We can hold the tension and use it to resolve the problem, or we can collapse into one of the fight-flight-freeze modes of our Core Belief Types as a means of avoiding the issue. Some signs that we have collapsed are when we:

• continue to be stuck in the problem (that is, remain unable to access the solution)
• experience strong, sometimes overwhelming sensations of anger, hurt or fear
• tend to blame other people or external circumstances for our plight, unwilling to take responsibility ourselves
• over-identify ourselves with the problem, merging with it so that it is an integral part of our self-understanding; this ensures the problem will remain unsolvable because to solve the problem would be to give up a part of our own identity
  

Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them. - Albert Einstein


Find the level of thinking

Once we are aware that the problem exists externally to ourselves but is producing internal tensions, and that these tensions are subject to our influence, we then need to know in what level of thinking the problem sits so that we can rise above it to find the solution.

To begin, we identify whether the problem has to do with either:

personal agency (the drive towards autonomy, desire for independence and the will to preserve oneself in the face of a hostile environment), or
communion (the drive to be part of a larger whole, for interdependence, bonding to or relating with another).

Examples of agency include personal identity and self-expression, or personal success.

Examples of communion include collective survival of one's own family/tribe/community, finding a sense of purpose/destiny located in the greater good, or gaining a sense of communal connection and egalitarianism.

Find the internal tensions

The level of the problem thus established, we return to the internal tensions to determine the nature of the problem. To effectively triangulate the nature of the problem we need to know the following:

1) Is this something that has to do with me as an individual and what I want to do/have/be (my own performance, priorities, achievement, success, values, beliefs and the results I want), or with my place in relation to the group/collective/system (family, colleagues, sequential processes)

2) Does this problem concern subjective reality (interior dimensions of intuition, feelings, emotions), or has it more to do with objective reality (exterior data and facts)?

With one answer for each of these, we know in which quadrant* the problems falls, giving us insight into its nature. The tensions thus identified, we are one step closer to finding our solution.


Apply creativity

Carl Jung tells us that creativity gives the opportunity for the individual to reach a new level of consciousness - which is a way of saying: we rise above the problem to a higher level than the one that produced the problem, thereby addressing Einstein's dilemma.

Once these dimensions are clarified, it then becomes a question of what form of creative thinking (visionary or spontaneous) we need to apply in order to find a resolution to the tensions at play:

Is it something that we want to think through and come up with a solution on our own (meditation, in a sense) or do we want to talk it through with others and find a solution interactively (motion and activity)?

And so we've come full circle to our original debate of whether motion really is better then meditation when making business (or any other) decisions. The answer is: it depends on the nature of the problem that the decision seeks to address.

To recap the Conversion process:

1. Find the (external) problem's level of thinking
2. Identify the internal tensions being produced by the problem: individual vs collective, interior vs exterior
3. Apply creativity (visionary or spontaneous) to the problem
4. Identify the noble quality needed to rise above the problem and access its solution
   

Noble qualities are portals of insight into our own knowledge and wisdom

"So what's this noble quality business?!" I can hear you exclaim.

Well once we've effectively triangulated the level and nature of the problem and decided which creativity is required, we now have the coordinates we need. Using the NeuroPower framework, we can now locate the exact noble quality that will dissolve the tension and solve the problem. A few examples of noble qualities that can be usefully applied to problems (there are 54 in all) include integrity, inspiration, diplomacy, courage, discernment, responsibility, objectivity and drive.

Once we can see beyond the tension of the polarities that are pulling us back and forth (a duel of dualism, if you will) and have gotten above and outside it, we are then able to delve deep into our own character and access a deeper wisdom than what's available in our everyday life.

From this vantage point, it's like viewing the problem through a portal of wisdom and insight - one that rewards us with both a set of actions to take and the energy to carry those actions through, without procrastination or prolonged inactivity.

So while all this talk of nobility, character and wisdom and the like might seem quite esoteric and mystical...the fact is that in my experience and that of the people I've worked with, the Conversion process produces real, practical solutions to really thorny and seemingly intractable problems.

That's because, although noble qualities like integrity, inspiration, diplomacy, courage, discernment, responsibility and others may seem at first glance to be too generic to be helpful, the Conversion process is about finding the exact noble quality that will make sense to the person stuck in the problem and help them get above it, to a place where its solution becomes apparent.

And when it comes to making business decisions - that's what it's all about.
TM



*-Note that this lines up with the four quadrants of Ken Wilber's Four Faces of Truth, defined by the polarities "individual vs collective" and "interior vs exterior".

Are you ready...for the UPturn?

A city broods in the dark...but the dawn will come again.

Greetings from Hong Kong, where, to be frank, things seem a bit grim. Here in the world's third-largest financial centre, banks are busily making cuts to staff and rolling back their recent expansion.

Speaking to one senior VP at a multinational bank here, the thing I noticed was that he seemed less concerned about the volatility of the markets than he was about the impending layoffs...and the rounds of political infighting and bloodletting that have intensified as a result.

A global economic shift is taking place, that is clear. There's nothing like large-scale uncertainty and financial instability to drive people straight into their limbic "lizard-brain" of emotional reactivity - a trend not discouraged by media outlets that seem to want to frighten, not inform. Even the business press is glutted with articles on "surviving the downturn" and "managing through a recession" and "leadership despite layoffs".

As people are driven into survival-based fight-flight-freeze responses, the practical results are: teams fall apart; bad behaviour becomes the norm; secrecy, infighting, politicking and point-scoring become the order of the day. Productivity - the very thing needed to pull a company through these times - plummets and it's every individual for him/herself.


Are you ready for the upturn?

At this point I want to suggest another point of view - being ready for the upturn.

To counter the divisive trends noted above and steer the ship toward calmer seas, it makes good business sense to get people out of their lizard-brain mode and find a way to get their rational minds back in the game.

To put it in a broader context, what's happening now in the economy was largely inevitable. Securitization, the separation of lender from risk, and other speculative and highly leveraged transactions had become unsustainable practices. We have lived through - and enjoyed - a long period financial success - and excess.

These financial practices have arguably been the logical outgrowth of a mentality and societal goals that are shaped by the ceaseless and senseless focus on profit at any cost. Not only are individuals and companies now paying the financial piper, the planet is suffering from our myopic mania for short-term gain.

On the long view, this correction of excesses may even be timely - otherwise as a species and a culture we'd have careened happily over the edge, setting in motion cascades of consequences that would doom the planet and ourselves.

As the pendulum swings back in the other direction, will it be a pleasant process? No - it has the potential to be a unpleasant as the other extreme was excessive. The process of creating balance and reintegrating a broader view, though difficult, is as necessary for society as it is helpful for individuals.

The long-term, rational policy suggests we get into the best possible position in our organizations and companies to be successful when the current period ends and things have shifted. The current climate (economic and environmental) won't last forever; we face an important turning-point.

At this stage there's great potential here for far-sighted companies to create the high-performance, humanistic and productive environments that will be needed to take us forward into the future.

These are not decisions you want to be making using your panicked limbic lizard-brain in knee-jerk mode, but rather your rational brain seeking signs of resilience and hope.

So although the night seems to be getting ever-darker, keep your eye on the brightest lights as they show a way through the darkness. The dawn will come again...
TM

SFC Day Two, plus: "Lord of the Skies"

It's struck me over the two days I spent at the Singapore Facilitators Conference (SFC) 2008 that the theme neuroscience everywhere continues.

Several of the sessions talked about tapping into people's different functional styles in order to facilitate the energy of divergent worldviews and perspectives in (sometimes quite large) group settings - helping to achieve strength from diversity and a rich tapestry of thought and opinion rather then a shouting match of adversarial position-defending. Two of the process tools - Open Space Technology (OST) and the World Cafe - are designed in particular to foster the cross-pollination of ideas across large numbers of people in a moderately structured format.

A few sessions spoke specifically about brain function and how the rich interplay of nurture/nature shapes how our minds make meaning and sense of the world around us. The focus was largely on getting people into a functional, rational space (their NeuroRational Type as I would term it) so they can access the best in themselves and be more open to the opinions of others. Interestingly, I gained further insight into human emotional, limbic responses from quite another quarter on my trip home.


Social Behaviour under Stress

On my way back to Sydney I was unexpectedly part of what I thought was an interesting experiment in social behaviour under stress.

My 7.5 hour flight from Singapore was on board the Qantas "flying art" aircraft Wunala Dreaming, a beautifully decorated 747 with Aboriginal depictions of Australia's best-known icon, the kangaroo.

The flight was tracking for early arrival in Sydney, but due to bad weather was diverted to land in Canberra. There for a variety of reasons we proceeded to spend a further 7 hours sitting on the plane parked next to a disused RAAF hangar, finally being evacuated to hotels at 3AM.

To say the process was chaotic would be to engage in mild understatement, but that's not what I found most interesting. First, some context: there were people on the plane who had come from various places in Europe, which meant flying via London-Singapore and had already been in planes and airports for upwards of 30+ hours before finding themselves locked in a 747 in Canberra.

Nerves were on edge.


Lord of the Skies

What ensued was a small-scale version of Lord of the Flies...in an airplane setting. By this I mean that an already long journey, made longer and more stressful by this diversion, provoked a variety of responses from people.

Stripped of comforting social and cultural conventions and further stressed by fatigue and environmental factors, people's behaviour began to revert to quite an emotional (limbic), even primitive state of being.

While our lives were cleary not in jeopardy - quite the opposite - our brains could not tell that was the case. For tired people in a harrowing situation, the limbic reaction was one of life-or-death. The focus was on survival and people's behaviours began increasingly to reflect their Core Belief Types.

As I've written previously, there are nine Core Belief Types, or basic survival strategies. They consist of three different groups; each group includes the three modes: fight-flight-freeze. So that as the night wore on to become early morning and different versions of a solution were mooted, only to be found impractial, I watched with fascination as people in the plane (including yours truly!) freely shifted gears between the three modes of fight-flight-freeze or, to put it another way, their forward-reverse-neutral gears.


Spiralling down, climbing back up again

Within each of our Core Belief triads, each of us has a default mode. On the plane, some people's initial response was flight (reverse gear) not in that they tried to break out of the plane, but they simply put in their headphones, nodded off or passively watched the situation unfold. Others were in freeze (neutral gear) or compliant mode: although they may have been increasingly annoyed by the mounting inconvenience, they did not act - choosing instead to have a whinge about it to their neighbours or sigh heavily in frustration. Still others were in fight mode quite early on, taking action by using their mobiles to inform local journalists about the situation, speaking directly the the chef de cabine, even demanding answers from the beleaguered cabin crew members.

So what kept us from savaging the crew and one another like the ill-fated boys on Golding's island? A couple of things.

We were given semi-regular updates on the progress that had been made thus far, which lessened the sense of helplessness that we felt in a situation whose solution lay quite outside our control. This, in turn, helped people to better manage the things that were in their control and develop a useful explanatory style based less on emotionally-reactive views and more on a rational (cognitive) view of the situation.

As often in these situations, I observed a sense of community form within the plane. There is nothing like a shared crisis to get strangers talking to one another. People shared stories of the destinations they had hoped to reach, the obligations or opportunities that await them when they finally arrived and generally expressed themselves. A sense of "making the best of a bad situation" arose which I think people found quite hopeful and suggested that there was a way through, it remain just to get it identified and carried out.

After a nosedive (or two) into survival-based and reactive Core Belief (or NeuroLimbic) types of the so-called "lizard brain," I credit the majority of people on that flight with climbing back up into their more powerful rational brain and accessing the particular gifts and talents of their NeuroRational profiles to foster a sense of community and personal connection that saw us all through. It also beats being emotionally jangled and miserable for 7 hours - with negative long-term effects on your health in the that entails.

And so it was that this Dreamtime journey on the Flying Kangaroo had many lessons for us all...

TM

Comments, connections and cheek

A loyal blog reader has gently chided me for the recent post on Framework Fatigue..."cheeky" was the word he used, in fact. I believe he was most likely referring to my high rating of the NeuroPower framework as compared to the many others listed.

Since this same reader had previously requested more details on my post about the nine core belief types, I shall now strive to substantiate my evident passion. Starting today and through the month of November, I will provide more indepth content about the NeuroPower framework.

NeuroPower basics

As I've suggested, the NeuroPower framework (as developed by author and strategist Peter Burow) integrates many components and is both comprehensive and holistic. Nevertheless, it can be boiled down to four basic principles, or maxims:

1. there are six intelligence centres that are the neurobiological basis for human personality and behaviour - tapping into these centres dramatically improves the quality of communication and understanding in human interactions
2. these six centres combine to produce NeuroRational Types, or archetypes, which describe your particular gifts and genius - the thing you were born to be able to do really well and that you are able to manifest when you perform at your best
3. your survival strategies, or core belief types, are deeply rooted in your "lizard brain," the brain's limbic system that governs both memory and emotional reactions; knowing the blindspots the result from your own particular fight-flight-freeze reactions is key to getting them under control (so that they don't control you) and fostering personal success
4. the developmental aspect of NeuroPower is focused on character - helping people get their emotional reactivity under control so they are able to tap into what's best in themselves, integrate the diverse talents of their Master and Mirror archetype profiles, and choose their behavioural set-point to reflect the desired outcome, context and other factors
   

Links to NeuroEducation

In a separate note, another visitor alerted me to the possible connection between the themes of the Framework Fatigue post and Jenifer Fox, a prominent figure related to the Strengths Movement in the US. I suspect that this reader is, like me, a connector and just can't resist making a good connection when there's one to be made. Thanks for that - there will certainly be a lot of overlap to discuss between Jenifer's work and the growing movement to bring brain-based parenting into the mainstream of Australian education as part of the NeuroEducation program.

Getting LinkedIn

Finally, regular readers know that I frequently link to people by using their LinkedIn profiles, which is a shorthand way of putting their own bio front-and-centre. I've also made good use lately of LinkedIn to develop contacts and explore markets in Singapore, Hong Kong and the UK - which, along with Xing (formerly OpenBC) and ecademy, has produced tremendous results.

So successful has this connecting been, in fact, that there are plans underway to launch intensive NeuroPower training programs in all three of these markets in the first half of 2009, starting with London in April. Watch this space for more details!
TM

What motivates you to grow…?

A colleague of mine once offered a line that’s stuck with me ever since: “In life, most of us turn our fundamental character flaws into careers.”

You may know someone who grew up in a dysfunctional home and later became a social worker, mediator or psychologist (or even a cop) in an effort to bring order and harmony to the world around him or her.

The kid who’s allergic to chlorine becomes a superhuman swimming champion while the painfully shy kid becomes class clown and then an internationally famous comedian and actor.

Or as my talented and insightful friend Andrew once exclaimed: “Sometimes I don’t know why I work in 'change management' – personally, I hate change!!”

Similarly, when I train teams and coach individuals on conflict resolution I often ask: “So…is there anyone here who likes conflict?” I can tell you, not many hands go shooting in the air.

That’s the point at which I feel comfortable admitting that I am frankly terrified of conflict – and that’s precisely why I’ve made a career out of learning about human interaction and offering that expertise in my work training and consulting.

Homeostasis

The human need to achieve homeostasis is hardwired into our brains, and so we strive to compensate for and correct perceived imbalances in ourselves and our surroundings.

In everyday language we have the metaphor of the swinging pendulum to describe how one extreme often produces a movement in the opposite direction. Newtonian physics tells us that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. In philosophical terms, think yin-yang and the eternal dance of counterbalancing opposites.

This tendency can also have pernicious effects, as the drive to compensate tumbles into pathos. Pacifists become militant, right-to-lifers commit murder, communists become fascists. Men of a certain age buy red sportscars or Hummers and women inflate some body parts while deflating or de-wrinkling others.

So how do you know if you’re on the track to a successful career or just kidding yourself?

Motivation and growth

Clearly the compensatory drive behind the quest for homeostasis is a powerful motivator. And as I’ve described above, it also needs a reality check to keep from becoming absurd and overshooting the mark into extreme compensation.

In a previous post I talked about the concepts of change vs. growth. Since then many people have told me how useful they’ve found that distinction, since there’s no quicker way to get someone’s back up than by telling them, “you really need to change,” while by contrast most people are interested in – indeed quite enthusiastic about – personal growth and development.

What I would therefore suggest as a useful corrective is to ask the question, “Am I heading away from something I don’t want, or toward something that I do want?”

"What do you want...?"

Put another way: answering the fundamental question “What do you want?” is a great way to develop insight and ensure you are on the path to positive growth rather than engaging in a dodgy process of resisting change.

This question encourages a frank assessment based on its four component parts:

What – be specific about exactly what you’re after

Do – think of what you do want as opposed to what you don’t; when you state your outcome in the positive it triggers the brain’s creativity and drive

You – ensure that your goal is something that you actually want, not what you think other people think that you should have/do/be

Want – as opposed to what you’d like, if someday maybe it were possible…this needs to be an act and expression of your will if you are going to successfully harness your willpower and motivation to get what you want

I invite you to take a moment today to think about whence you derive your motivation and whether its based on a desire to survive...or to be fully alive. Raw survival is driven by the fight-flight-freeze response of the emotional or limbic brain, while being true to yourself and creating the life that you actually want means you need to tap into everything that is best in yourself.

It's a challenge not everyone is willing to undertake; if you're going to be truly happy in this life, it's one you need seriously to consider.

TM

Hong Kong - millions of people, 9 core belief types

(Photo credit: Base64, retouched by CarolSpears)

I've spent the latter half of last week in Hong Kong learning more about the nine personality styles, which I've previously referred to within the NeuroPower framework (as developed by author and strategist Peter Burow) as Core Belief Types or NeuroLimbic Types; "core belief" because these styles act as the filter through which each individual views the world and him- or herself, and "neurolimbic" because these reactions tend to be immediate, knee-jerk, and located in the limbic or emotionally reactive centres of the brain (which you'll recognize as the place where our fight-flight-freeze response originates, which I've also referred to as the "mental gearbox" of forward-reverse-neutral).

When you speak to people in the language they understand, you get results

I'm always impressed when I can go out and immediately make practical application of new learning, and that was what I was able to do this week with what I learned in the workshop.

The situation: I'd been trying to have a successful conversation with a friend for some weeks now and she had proven unresponsive to my overtures.

Applying this knowledge, I noticed that I was speaking to her from MY perspective rather than hers - so in a sense I was speaking my language rather than speaking in her language. Once I was able to write something that made sense to her in her own terms I received an immediate reply and satisfactory resolution of an ongoing concern of mine.

This seems quite a commonsense thing - if you try speaking Hindi to a bunch of Germans, chances are we won't get very far. Sometimes our solution, like that of some monolingual tourists travelling abroad, is to SPEAK EVEN MORE LOUDLY AND SLOWLY in the hopes that these "foreigners" will understand.

Well just as no one is a foreigner in their own country, likewise each person's personality style makes perfect sense from their point of view. So I suppose I've learned a little more about the nine languages that people use to make sense of themselves and the world around them, as well as a bit of proficiency speaking the other eight that aren't my "first language".

What was particularly impressive to me is that around 75% of the participants in the workshop were from Hong Kong and another 15% or so were from countries across southeast Asia, yet the core belief types held true across all cultures. Since these types stem from the limbic brain centre of all humans, this makes sense at a scientific level, but my sceptical side was gratified to see that this is a system with such broad-based applicability - not just among the millions living in Hong Kong and the billion-plus in China, but all over the world...

More to come!
TM

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