Apprentice week 7 analysis, RWA: Authentic Emotional Intelligence

Summary: Today's post reviews episode 7 of The Apprentice Australia and offers a Real-World Application (RWA) in building Authentic Emotional Intelligence.

Question: Does your organization currently use an Emotional Intelligence framework to help people increase their EQ and people skills? Read below to find out more about Authentic Emotional Intelligence and how to get the most from your investment to develop the EQ of your team - and yourself!


Review of episode 7: The art exhibition

In this episode's task of selling artworks at exhibition, all-girls Team Eventus dealt all-boys Team Pinnacle a resounding defeat with sales totalling $30,130 against just $5,300. Tactically, the wise use of artist's own client list helped Eventus to victory, while Pinnacle's over-analysis and commodification of the art they were selling badly undermined their efforts.

In the Boardroom specific mention was also made that the girls managed to connect emotionally with their chosen artists, while the "just the facts" approach used by the boys failed to develop the needed rapport and relationship. The "soft stuff" had a real bottom-line impact on Pinnacle's choice of artists and ability to sell convincingly to buyers - both of which were decisive drawbacks. Unable to connect and form real relationships, Pinnacle failed to produce the required results.


Failure to connect

Gavin was squarely in the firing line this week, but had Eventus not won the challenge then Sabrina would have been in the crosshairs, not just as project lead but due to her lack of results. These two individuals share many characteristics - which Sabrina had previously expressed during the pie challenge as "Gavin gets me and I get Gavin" - and these are the very reasons they are now both in danger.

In the art sales challenge Gavin was shown several times saying "selling art is essentially the same as selling cars," which revealed a lack of understanding of his product and was the basis for the disastrous "businesslike" approach to the artists that cost Pinnacle the victory. We've seen this lack of good judgement before, when Gavin chose the performers for the dance show at the Mudgee Pub Night that decidedly underwhelmed the audience.

Meanwhile Sabrina's focus in the art challenge appeared to be on being liked, not on making sales. She seemed to be bluffing her way through and was smiling a lot but remarked herself at the exhibition that it was "two hours in I've not sold anything!" Her performance both as project lead and team member was criticized as indecisive by Mary-Anne who remarked, "I'd like to wipe that phoney smile off her face."

We've seen dramas with Sabrina's behaviour and decision-making in the past as well. Doubtless in her role as Miss Australia she's become highly adept at performing before cameras and speaking with assurance. Yet I'd suggest there's evidence to show she's better in the role of figurehead than action hero. This week, hers was a stellar performance (in the theatrical sense) but one with little substance to show for it, that is, performance in the tangible results sense.

Recall as well during the hotel challenge when at checkout time she offered a hotel loyalty membership to a departing guest who was clearly still irate and whose concerns she'd manifestly failed to address with empty words, smiles and platitudes. This demonstrates a clear lack of ability to read and respond to another person's emotional state.

Both Gavin and Sabrina are very physically attractive, polite and well-spoken. They're both successful in their careers and intelligent (Sabrina makes specific mention of her high-IQ Mensa membership). Based on their facility for interacting and making an initial connection with people it would seem they also both possess a lot of Emotional Intelligence.

So what's going on here?


Emotional Intelligence

People who rise to the top of their field most often possess a combination of smarts, experience and emotional savvy, though it's often difficult to put a finger on this last bit.

I think Emotional Intelligence passes a fundamental requirement for being a "useful theory": it lays an interpretive framework over our experiences to neatly capture what we've all seen happen in the real world. What's more, we can employ the structure this framework provides to take action and change both our circumstances and behaviours.

There's a saying among executive recruiters and HR professionals: people are often "hired on experience, fired on personality."

Supporting this adage is a study of 500 managers on 3 continents, which found that despite their exceptional IQ scores and experience, unsuccessful managers lacked emotional intelligence.

In fact research by psychologist Daniel Goleman (author of Emotional Intelligence) discovered that emotional intelligence skills account for an astounding 90 percent of the success of senior leaders.

This suggests that traditional cognitive intelligence measured as IQ is a necessary but not sufficient requirement for success as a senior leader.* Dealing with people also requires a high EQ: the emotional intelligence needed to effectively manage negative feelings such as anger and self-doubt, and instead focus on positive ones such as confidence and congeniality.

Clearly IQ is not the only measure of intelligence (see my previous post on Multiple Intelligences) and the "soft skills" measured by EQ are needed to connect with people. Yet as the troubles experienced by Gavin and Sabrina suggest, there's more to relationship-building than high IQ and EQ.


What's difference between sincerity and authenticity?

There's an important distinction to be made between these two terms, and not just a philosophical or linguistic one. Rather, I believe it's one that will help resolve our dilemma over Gavin and Sabrina's behaviours and give insight into the real utility of EQ.

While sincerity and authenticity are often used interchangeably, a closer look at both words reveals helpful distinctions. (Note: longer definitions of each word are presented at the bottom of this post).

Sincerity rules out unwarranted dissimulation, intentional deception, hypocrisy, duplicity, bad-faith commitments, and double-mindedness. It often retains the positive connotation of purity derived from its Latin word sincerus, which means unadulterated. Talk about sincerity usually presupposes some positive standard for good motives, intentions or attitudes against which insincerity is condemned.

Authenticity, in contrast, is captured by the idea of genuineness rather than purity. So the authentic is the bona fide (insurance policy), real (Chinese tapestry), official (commemorative stamp), or authoritative (executive order), as opposed to the fake, imitative, unofficial or unauthorized. For example, an authentic compliment is one that succeeds in praising someone, in contrast to a sincere compliment, which need only be intended to express feelings of admiration.

In addition to distinguishing genuineness from purity, it's necessary to distinguish the internal consistency, or congruence, that accompanies authenticity from that which accompanies sincerity. While consistency is a part of authenticity, it doesn't cover the full meaning of authenticity. Sincerity, however, can be viewed as an unmitigated consistency that limits a full exploration of self and world. Instead of asking what is really going on it says, "be true to yourself," ignoring that the self may be unreflective, insensitive or even destructive.

Take an example from art history: Rousseau and some others in the Romantic movement viewed sincere artists as those who accurately revealed and expressed what they felt. In practice, this often inspired narcissism and exhibitionist displays of the sordid aspects of life neglected by conventional artists. The ideal of sincerity with oneself as congruence allows that the motives for the congruence may have little to do with striving for significant truths or an honest understanding of one’s present attributes.

In other words, it's possible to sincerely wear a mask that is internally consistent; one that you show to everyone around you and that you may even accept as real yourself. While sincere, that mask is, however, not the authentic you. Its purpose is to protect you from interaction with others. In this case, that which protects also prevents you from self-reflection and from deeply exploring your own identity - actions that are terrifying in their potential to undermine the protection offered by your carefully-fashioned mask.

Following the above line of reasoning, the virtue of authenticity is not identical with sincerity and personal acceptance. Authenticity requires interpersonal recognition and group participation. We cannot be authentic in a vacuum, for the very dynamic of authenticity requires that others recognize our authentic identities.

And so for all the protection that we believe they afford us, masks are in fact one of the greatest obstacles to achiving genuine connection with others. Unable to authentically share who we really are, our efforts produce the unintended consequence of alienating us from the very people with whom we seek to build our relationships.

If you wear a mask, no level of EQ will help you in the long run. People know when they're not dealing with the "genuine article" and this can feel like a betrayal, a lack of good faith that may provoke sadness, fear, even anger.


Will the authentic Gavin and Sabrina please step forward?

This is where I think it falls apart for Gavin and Sabrina. They both have highly-developed skills at "performance," at being "on display" and a natural talent for charming that initially woos people ("woo" in the sense of "Winning Others Over").

As mentioned above, they have a facility for making a connection with people...it's the nature of that connection that seems to cause them dramas.

Both are sincere - in fact Gavin's reaction to high-stress situations is to present a mask of such earnest sincerity as to be painful to behold. The problem is, I don't have the impression that either Gavin or Sabrina are being genuine and authentic.

Despite the charming demeanour, they hide their real selves. Evidence of this: in the Boardroom Mark Bouris has repeatedly said he wants Gavin to "stop playing the game," that he wants to know the "real Gavin" - as clear a request to drop the mask as is possible. And irritation with Sabrina's "phoney smile" seems to be growing for what I think are the same reasons.

One possible motive for so closely guarding their selves from others could be that at some point they each came to the belief that they're only valued for what they've achieved, not for who they are as people. Whatever the cause of this belief, the end result is the same: their knack for sincere charm soon turns into to inauthentic schmarm - the kind of slimey, sickly-sweet sycophantic behaviour whose objective is not so much to connect but to ingratiate...and is experienced instead as disconnective, grating and phoney.

Both Gavin and Sabrina possess the gift of connecting with others; it's their own protective mask that causes them to extend only so far...and no further. More's the pity, because I bet their close friends and confidantes could tell us what warm, kind and lovely people are hiding behind the masks they're wearing.

Both could therefore benefit from the spirit that informs this insightful bit of commentary from an article written by Sabrina herself:

Although we're born with our appearance, we have been gifted with the remarkable and somewhat humbling task of creating our identity. It is time to learn who the people around us really are, regardless of their respective packaging.

The developmental point for each of them is therefore to a) realize how their behaviour is unintentionally alienating people; b) create a safe space for them to cultivate self-awareness and separate the mask (which is nothing more than a limbically-based survival strategy) from the genuine gift of being a "people-person"; and c) help each of them to engage with this self-identity, rewriting the narrative so they can engage from this genuine self rather than the dodgy, and ultimately unconvincing, mask-self.


RWA: Authentic Emotional Intelligence

Does your organization currently use an Emotional Intelligence framework to help people increase their EQ and people skills?

If so - well done! And...it pays to ensure that the people you're training are on the right side of the Battle inside their Brain while they're learning Emotional Intelligence skills.

That is, you help them to operate from their cortical system (cognitive: reasoning, reflective, considerate) rather than their emotionally reactive limbic system (emotional: fast, reactive, habitual). Or to put it briefly: that they're rationally engaged adults learning useful skills rather then reactive little kids viewing important Emotional Intelligence information through the distorting lens of their own survival strategies.

For more information on how tmc can help you to best develop these valuable skills in your team members (and yourself) contact me directly and we'll talk it over - authentically as well as sincerely!



Note: For those of you outside Australia who wish to view the episodes of The Apprentice Australia that I'm discussing in this series of posts, you can find them on YouTube here. Meanwhile if you're in Australia you can see not only the episodes to date but also post-episode video diaries on the Nine website here.

Word Origins:
SINCERITY - The Oxford English Dictionary and most scholars state that sincerity (from sincere) is derived from the Latin sincerus meaning "clean, pure, sound" (1525–35). Sincerus may have once meant "one growth" (not mixed), from sin- (one) and crescere (to grow).

AUTHENTIC - mid-14th century, "authoritative," from Old French autentique (13th century), from Middle Latin authenticus, from Greek authentikos "original, genuine, principal," from authentes "one acting on one's own authority," from autos "self" + hentes "doer, being." Sense of "entitled to acceptance as factual" is first recorded mid-14th century. Authentic implies that the contents of the thing in question correspond to the facts and are not fictitious; genuine implies that the reputed author is the real one.


Related previous posts:
Analysis of episode 1, RWA: Foundation & Force
Preview of episode 2, RWA: Conflict Management
Apprentice week 2 analysis, RWA: Giving/Receiving Feedback using Head & Heart
Apprentice week 3 analysis, RWAs: Team Leadership and Setting a Team Culture
Apprentice week 4 analysis, RWA: Coaching for high performance

Apprentice week 5 analysis, RWA: "The Relationship is the Customer"
Apprentice week 6 analysis, RWA: The FIT model

Photo credits: Gavin, Morello, Heather, Mary-Anne, Gavin with moustache, Sabrina. I'm indebted to this article on Authentic Leadership from the Action-Wheel Leadership website for useful insights into defining the differences between sincere and authentic.
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Apprentice Australia - Episode 1 review, RWA: Foundation & Force

Summary - an introduction to a series of blog posts that I'll be writing about episodes of the TV series, The Apprentice Australia. Each will include Real-World Applications (RWAs), so you don't have to watch the TV series, or even be in Australia, to benefit from the insights on offer.


The Apprentice Australia kicked off last night. In the next few weeks I'll post a series of comments on the series. I think there's a danger in presenting, as this series can do, primarily the negative and emotionally reactive side of human behaviour in organizations. While it makes for "good" TV, I think it can also have a depressing effect on viewers who may conclude that people are pretty much rubbish all the time and there's not much to be done about it.

I therefore want to use The Apprentice Australia episodes as behavioural "case studies" and, acting in the role of shadow external consultant or coach, offer a useful counterbalance as I share my hypotheses on the group dynamics and individual personality preferences.

I'll going to suggest some ways that things could go differently and more productively if, instead of being in the decidedly unreal world of "reality TV", these people's behaviour were taking place in a real team, in the real world. Each post will therefore offer a Real World Application that you can use even if you don't follow the series or are not in Australia.

The Apprentice format

As anyone who's watched the series in the US or UK will know, the interview process used to find a new Apprentice is necessarily artificial and made-for-"reality"-TV.

Contestants are typically given short timelines to accomplish very broadly-defined tasks, all with the same goal: make maximum cash. For the losing team, it's back to the Boardroom where the knives come out and someone's sent home. In other words, these are "teams" in name only, since in reality each participant looks out for him/herself.

Welcome to the corporate dogfight pit.

Now, reality TV shows are rarely instructive. So are there any lessons about human behaviour that we as viewers of The Apprentice can learn and relate to our own workplace on a daily basis?

Well I think there are. Despite the artifice of the show, it does offer a prime example of what happens when high-pressure scenarios trigger reactive emotional responses and actions that are not well adapted to the situation...in other words, really pretty rubbish and childish behaviour.


The Battle inside your Brain - balance or blowout?

Moment by moment there is a battle being waged inside your brain. Your limbic system (emotional: fast, reactive, habitual) is producing knee-jerk impulses driven by the survival instinct, while your cortical system (cognitive: reasoning, reflective, considerate) is doing its best to apply your brain's vast ability for mental processing to the effort to modulate, consider and channel this tremendous emotional energy into productive and adaptive behaviours.

Or to put it another way: you've got a fast-acting part of you that's a bit like an impulsive child, and a slower, wiser part of you that guides you toward making the smart move...but can often be subverted in times of high stress and perceived threat. Balance is the key; blowouts can also results. The Apprentice interview format specializes in scenarios geared to produce more blowouts than balance, as this week's episode has already shown...

Episode 1 review

This week we were introduced to all 12 contestants along with the Boss, Australian businessman Mark Bouris, and his two advisors in the series, Diane Stone and Brad Seymour.

As a relatively new arrival in Australia I'm not familiar with the track record of either Mr. Bouris or his advisors (one an ex-footie player, the other his PA). So in this post I'll just look at what happened with the losing team and who heard the famous phrase, "You're fired!"

Let me set some context. In this series of posts I'll not make any predictions about who will be the winner. This is because practically speaking, it's impossible to tell which person has the "right" traits and personality preferences to win the competition, because "right" (in terms of adaptive and effective, producing the desired outcome) will vary tremendously according to any number of factors, including:

• makeup of the team - and as a function of that, quality of reactions/interactions with other team members
  
• degree to which the person's talents and abilities (to the degree he/she can successfully deploy them) are a good match for the task undertaken; not everyone's cut out for every type of task, and it's in these situations when the team must pull together and complement each other's skills
  
• seeing someone's "intro" interview tells you very little about how they will cope under real pressure; what's key is their ability to self-manage and stay focused/productive when faced with real-life dramas
  
• and many other variables...people are complex adaptive creatures so making predictions based on extrapolation of a few data points is nearly impossible

An additional, decisive variable is that the choice of who stays and who goes ultimately rests with Mr. Bouris, who will not directly observe contestants' behaviour during the tasks (depending on his advisors for second-hand information). He will make his decisions based almost exclusively on behaviour he sees in the Boardroom - a high-pressure, politically-charged, personally threatening and therefore survival-mode-triggering setting.

Moving on to assess this week's results, I would argue that it was a lack of political savvy that cost Jane her spot in the competition and saved Carmen from certain elimination for her incompetence as project leader.

Carmen's leadership style is a classic example of Commanding/Coercive, a style that demands immediate compliance and says, "Do what I tell you to do." Furthermore,

If a leader always and only uses only the commanding/coercive style, the overall impact on organizational climate will be negative. While the team will feel the pressure and drive to complete tasks, there is a risk they will ultimately feel alienated and uninvolved by the coercive leader's tendency to create the entire plan without any input from others, then expect others to follow and not ask questions.

Carmen's own awareness of her style and impact on others is minimal. She tended to steamroll others with a powerful ego and drive - one that unfortunately for her is not paired with little self-awareness of how she comes across to other people.

When queried on how things went with one task, for example, she replied that she "put on my power hat" and charged through to an outcome. This is illustrative of her emotional reactive (limbic) style: focused on Power, with her as Protector and taking any dissent, criticism or rejection as an excuse for aggression and revenge. Asked in the Boardroom by Mr. Bouris how she performed as project lead, she confidently stated: "Extremely well!"...which occasioned immediate looks of surprise and disagreement from her team, and tears from her.

Carmen honestly felt that she was driving ahead for the greater good of the team and must have felt betrayed by the sudden realization that they did not see, or value, her role in the same way. This dose of reality for her was as unexpected as it was unwelcome and hurtful. Here we could see some of the vulnerability that her hard outer shell and relentless drive is meant to keep hidden from others.

Nevertheless, the facts are as follows: as project lead Carmen charged ahead with little consultation with her team, poor understanding of the task, grossly underestimated the work required for the projects, underquoted on the projects and then - abandoning all integrity and accountability to the client - tried an 11th hour renegotiation when it was clear that they would struggle to deliver the agreed project on time. These factors, particularly the underquoting, cost her team the victory.

In his assessment of the girls' team, Mr. Bouris accurately observed, "as a team you are completely dysfunctional." Despite the clear evidence for why this was so, he chose not to hold Carmen as team leader accountable. Instead, he placed the responsibility on the team: "right now there's no accountability, it's all down to the project manager, she was too bossy and told us what to do," and further, "there's no room in my organization for a shrinking violet."

On this basis - largely, I would say, based on the single exchange that took place between Carmen and Jane in the Boardroom, Jane was fired, for allegedly not "using her additional experience to hold Carmen to task."

So the lessons from this week's Boardroom:

• charging ahead and doing lots of things (even if quite badly) is less harmful to your survival chances than being more considered and less combative, and
  
• the implicit message of Mr. Bouris's decision to fire Jane not Carmen: when it comes to accountability, leaders don't make mistakes in my organization, underlings do...and will take the fall for it (take note, future Apprentice!)

I've written elsewhere about the need for balance between bold action and considered planning. Popular wisdom provides phrases in favour of both functions, so that while "Fortune favours the bold" and "He who hesitates is lost" are sometimes true, there's also the fact (as this week with Carmen's team) that she should have "Looked before she leaped" into underquoting jobs and she ought to have "Measured twice, cut once" when it came to assessing how much work was truly involved with each project.

Instead, Carmen's team was unified only in stating there was no plan or strategy in place. To paraphrase Canadian political economist and humourist Stephen Leacock, as leader Carmen just "flung herself upon her horse and rode madly off in all directions."


Real-World Application (RWA)

What sort of behaviour is most often rewarded in your organization?

1. Is there a bias for action over planning, with the result that you sometimes put a lot of effort into something only to discover you've headed off in the wrong direction to begin with and that effort is now wasted?
2. Or is there a great tendency to plan and "strategize" endlessly, awaiting new data and ensuring all available information is gathered and options are explored...resulting only in analysis paralysis and inactivity?

To create high performance teams and ensure effective execution on strategy, it's vital to strike the right balance between Role and Reward:

ROLE you do successfully by A) establishing a sense of community (with shared values, a code of conduct, and understanding of how the group adds value in a wider context), and B) letting people know how and where each individual fits into the larger group. Clarify the roles, goals and expectations so that each person's individual efforts are contributing to the group objectives and goals. Build a solid, agreed-upon foundation at the outset to provide an underlying source of enduring continuity in the face of transition, change and even crisis periods to come.

REWARD is about motivation, action and reward - the drive to achievement that comes from the healthy expression of ego and answers the question "what's in it for me?" to tap into the passion and drive of each team member. It is results-focused and promotes action over words, performance over process. To keep people on track and productive, it's important to phrase performance measures in positive language that motivates, rather than coercive language that triggers emotional reactivity and fearful anxiety. This step is about getting things done, the achievement of aspirations.

Look for Monday's post, when I'll provide insights on the remaining 11 contestants - what to watch for in Monday night's episode as their mettle continues to be tested and their personality preferences and reactive styles come to the fore.
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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