Social animals, status chimps, clever humans

We are social animals. Our sense of self develops first in relation to our environment and immediate caregivers, then the others in our family unit, our clan, our tribe or our village. Our identity involves a complex dance between the polarities of being grounded as a part of something larger (relatedness to others) and the expression of self (individuality).

This dance is described in psychological terms as the interaction of the superego (parental and societal rules), the id (self-expression) and the ego (sense of self and of personal agency).

The ego helps us to set our individual goals and identify our motivation to achieve them. And because of our social nature, we also discover that in order to accomplish many of the tasks in our lives we require the assistance, support, and cooperation of others.

Like our nearest animal relative, the chimpanzee, our social relations are encoded with status, with games and a pecking order – literally the “who’s who in the zoo”. Status helps lend some structure to our interactions with the other members of our group and, in evolutionary terms, helps to ensure the survival of the group entity. As an individual, status can be simultaneously reassuring (we know where we fit in) and tremendously threatening.

To illustrate the point, look at the picture below, and imagine that you are the orange circle in each of the two groupings.

From the work of German Psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus.

What feelings do you experience when you imagine your position in the group on the left versus the group on the right?

Is your ego telling you that one situation is acceptable and the other is not?

Do you take comfort from the fact that in both groups, you are actually at the centre of a group of others?

Most interestingly, did you spot that in both groups, the orange circles are in fact exactly the same size…?

The point is this: we are animals and therefore social. We are (essentially) chimps and therefore have status in our groupings. Yet we are more than our animal origins.

As humans we can apply our larger brains and evolved minds to define and shape our own reality. This enables us to keep our ego-based fears from getting in the way of our relatedness to others.

Now this is not to demonize the ego (which is a normal and necessary part of who we are) it's a call for a reality check. And a reminder that we have the choice to define our own reality such that, no matter the “size” of those around us, we are less concerned with the relative differences in size than with striving to be the best orange circle we can be.

Abraham Lincoln is reputed to have said, “People are just about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” If you define your happiness as always relative to those around you, it will remain always beyond your control.

On the other hand, if you choose to define happiness for yourself then you will always be the best measure of its accomplishment – and you will be better positioned to reach out to others to help you get there, since you’ll have nothing to fear from them and everything to gain.

Choose wisely, it’s your life after all!
TM

On the Road – insights from training and travels

Hello from the city of Cairns in tropical north Queensland. I’ve completed four days of training with Unique People on the application of the NeuroPower framework (as developed by author and strategist Peter Burow) to one’s personal development and in working with clients.

The workshop looked in-depth at how neuroscience and neurobiology offer the "hard science" behind the traditionally "soft" concepts of human behaviour and interactions. I've learned a lot about the tremendous integration of knowledge across a wide variety of disciplines to produce both hands-on consulting/coaching tools and processes for personal growth.

It’s great to be in Cairns. Up here you have Australia at its most diverse: the Reef, the Rainforest and the Red of the Outback. My new colleague and friend Joe Foster put it well I think when he said “You know, I half expect to see dinosaurs roaming through the valleys here.” There’s an ancient and primordial feel to the environment here and, as a boy who grew up in landlocked diary-farming country, I find it exotic, fascinating and – at the moment – quite grounding.

For the next several weeks I will be On the Road, and as that phrase evokes the great Beat spirit of Jack Kerouac I thought I’d share a quote of his that relates to the feeling of this place that I’ve described above:

I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling. Ecstacy, even, I felt, with flashes of sudden remembrance, and feeling sweaty and drowsy I felt like sleeping and dreaming in the grass. (from Dharma Bums, 1957)

In the same novel Kerouac writes, “I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted.”

What a great insight. You are the master of your own destiny, and your life is the canvas upon which you can write and paint the adventures of your choice – according to your rules, by your own lights. It begs the question: how many of us are willing to take full responsibility for our lives, accountability for our actions, and deal with the outcomes that arise from them?

It’s a skill not all of us have developed. Yet it’s absolutely vital, for there can be no greater responsibility than the one you take for your self. I’m not talking in the Gordon Gecko “greed is good” way, I mean in the “ensure your own oxygen mask is in place before you assist others” sense.

After all, you are the only vessel you have to take you through your adventure on the planet, yet so many people live as though they have no choice in what they do every day. And there are few things more debilitating than feeling like you have no choice in any situation - the result can be learned helplessness, depression, resentment and emotional lashing-out. So why continue to be unhappy, or play the victim?

I reckon we shy away from responsibility because it sounds scary and we might fail. So how about a reframe…Steven Covey suggests we think of it as our “response-ability,” which takes us back to Kerouac’s metaphor of a page full of our responses to the challenges and adventures of life.

When you live according to your own standard of success (rather than what you imagine everyone else is thinking) you will be happier and healthier in life.

OK let’s leave it there for now and I’ll post more insights and thoughts as my travels continue.

On that note, I’m in Cairns until 28 September, in London from 30 September -07 October, then in Canada (Montreal, Halifax and Toronto) until 16 October, followed by Hong Kong 18-21 October and finally Singapore 21-25 October before I'm back to Sydney again.

During the coming weeks I look forward to meeting more fellow travellers and friends, both On the Road and virtually, as an outgrowth of this blog.

In the meantime, travel well!
TM

Great Expectations = Great Results

Most of us are familiar in broad terms with the placebo effect, a case of mind- over-matter whereby pills or treatments with no medicinal value produce results that are experienced by the patient as real.

Is it the pill, or the person? Medicine...or mind?

A recent New Scientist article, “The power of belief,” (23 Aug 2008) described some recent research on the placebo effect that I believe effectively points up the power of the mind to produce results based on the power of expectation.

The article outlines the role that expectation and the mind play in the physiological processes that have traditionally been the exclusive domain of evidence-based (and fairly mechanistic models of) medical and pharmacological practice.

“The very act of administering a drug activates a complex cascade of biochemical events in the patient’s brain,” states the article, whereby a drug interacts with “expectation-activated molecules.”

In one case a painkiller was administered without the patients’ knowledge and actually had no effect – the speculation being that the administration of the drug actually requires a reaction whereby the mind stimulates the production of the body’s own natural painkilling endorphins.

Even with drugs that do have direct effects independently of patients’ expectations, the strength of these effects can be similarly influenced by expectations. For example, if you do not tell people they are getting an injection of morphine, you need to inject at least 12 mg to get a painkilling effect, compared to a much lower dose if you tell them what they are getting.

And in an experiment based on reported experiences of pain sensations along a spectrum from mild to severe, the subject had been conditioned to expect that all shocks administered in conjunction with a flash of green light would be mild while shocks with a red light would be severe.

At the end of the experiment, he reported all shocks – even those at the severe end of the spectrum, to be mild because they were accompanied by the green light. His expectation had been set by the positive suggestion and in the end produced results that he experienced as real. Bear in mind: this effect took place even though the subject knew that the experiment concerned the placebo effect.



In a scenario closer to home, my brother Trent in Canada told me today that he had tried something new with his son. Before his son’s recent hockey tournament, Trent told his son that he believed in him, that he knew he would do a great job and would play his absolute best, and that no matter what the outcome, he was proud of him for being in the tournament.




His son Mitch went on to play his best games ever during a series in which his team was undefeated. A coach remarked that Mitch should have had the tournament puck and been MVP for the calibre of play he exhibited – like nothing he’d ever seen Mitch do before.

Contrast this with the dads you see screaming at their kids from the side of the football pitch, telling them everything they’re doing wrong and how they should change. I can tell you which dad most kids would rather have at their games – and I think most of us would feel the same.

The lesson seems clear: focusing on what people do well and providing an expectation of a positive outcome engages people’s brains and minds in the task at hand, helping them tap into their full potential to produce great results.

TM

A personal commitment - and an invitation to others

When a guy who writes a business book called Let My People Go Surfing has an idea, I'm all ears.


Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard has put his name behind the one percent for the planet initiative and now so have I - this year toddmontgomery consultancy's business strategy will include a 1% donation of its gross revenues in support of environmental organizations around the globe.

Moreover, my personal commitment is to spread the word to others.

I'm setting myself the goal of persuading five other like-minded businesses to sign up for the one percent pledge to help ensure that the lakes, rivers, oceans, forests, wildlife, sealife and other forms of natural beauty that we enjoy are better protected - now and in future.

So I invite colleagues, clients and friends to visit the one percent for the planet website to find out more and sign up today!

And when you do sign up, let me know so I can add your name to my "list of the like-minded"...because while I'm aiming for five, I'd really like it to be ten, or twenty, or more!
TM

Change, innovation & global opportunities

In the run-up to the workshop I’m running next Tuesday that asks, “Is your organization change-ready?” a bit of recent research suggests a growing realization among global senior leaders that their organizations are not as change-ready as they would like.

The “Global CEO study” by IBM is based on interviews with 1,130 CEOs, general managers and senior public sector and business leaders from around the world.

Here are some highlights:

• Eight out of ten CEOs see significant change ahead, and yet the "change gap" between expected change and the ability to manage change has almost tripled since the last Global CEO Study in 2006.

• Nearly all CEOs are adapting their business models and two-thirds are implementing extensive innovations. More than 40 percent are changing their enterprise models to be more collaborative. (And I would suggest this is not just with customers as the IBM study suggests, but also with employees as the Mercer Workplace 2012 report has persuasively argued.)

• CEOs are moving aggressively toward global business designs, deeply changing capabilities and partnering more extensively; organizations of all sizes are reconfiguring to take advantage of global integration opportunities.

An increasing number of senior leaders are coming to the realization that a different approach is required if they are to successfully manage change, develop sustainable innovation and succeed in a global context.

How does your organization compare?

According to the IBM report, the predicted Enterprise of the Future is change-ready, radically innovative, accesses active (not reactive) creativity and is comfortable with the realities of global business across cultures, able to work virtually and beyond the constraints of traditional “9-to-5” thinking.

So how does your current organization measure up to this predicted future?

Are there structures in place to manage the inevitable conflict created by change? Is there a healthy corporate culture in your own organization, let alone the expertise to manage the cross-cultural challenges of global business?

If not, what steps are being taken to foster the development of trust relationships? Is it a project devised by an external consulting firm and done TO your people, or process created collaboratively and interactively WITH your people – who are after all the ones who will have to carry on long after the consultants pack up and head out?

Does your organization have the management capacity to deal with complexity, the leadership ability to guide through change and – crucially – the transformational skills to overcome natural resistance to change by channelling that energy into engagement to produce positive growth and development of people, teams and organizations?

Useful questions to consider, whether you are a senior leader making your way in the current global business climate or a staff member making decisions about the sort of company where you want to spend the majority of your productive waking hours.

If in your opinion the answers to those questions fall short of the mark, the good news is that there is a way forward: an integrated, holistic approach to improved business performance that offers people a common language to structure their experience of change, helps to effectively engage stakeholders cognitively, emotionally and behaviourally, and enables organizations to communicate in a structured, effective, managed and phased way to enhance strategic alignment and produce high-performance cultures.

Email me for details.

TM

Sydney workshop: Is your organization change-ready?

On the morning of Tuesday 09 September I’ll be presenting a half-day workshop on communications and change in Sydney at Melcrum’s 5^th annual Strategic Communications Management Summit.

Is your organization change-ready?

A change initiative - whether a merger, acquisition, restructure, change in leadership or other shift in strategy - is typically undertaken for practical business reasons. A change that makes sense on paper, however, can fail to deliver the expected value if the change process is not supported with tangible actions in the short term.

People issues once were considered “soft” issues, but organizations have learned there are hard consequences to mismanaging people issues during a change, including employee disengagement, dropped productivity, decreased revenue and loss of competitive advantage.

In this informative and interactive workshop you will learn how to use communications as part of a holistic strategy to shape organisational culture and mitigate the people risks in the change process.

Using client examples, I will describe an approach to culture change that features proven models and offers practical tools to identify, prioritize and address these risks. Participants will leave the workshop with new insights on how to help their organizations to be “change-ready”.

For more details download the summit brochure.

Go here for registration options for this pre-summit workshop and for the full two-day summit on 10-11 September.

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

Employee Engagement - interview podcast now online

Alex Manchester of Melcrum Australia recently interviewed me after I chaired the Melcrum Employee Engagement conference a few weeks ago here in Sydney. The interview is now available - you can listen to the podcast here and read coverage of the conference highlights on the Melcrum internal communications Hub.
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

Have the respect to be direct in your communications

Hi, I’m back.

A friend predicted that I would become “time poor” during my first weeks in the new role at Mercer and he was (as he so often is) correct…hence my lack of posts.

Part of the issue is that I am a bit of an idea magpie, collecting, connecting and considering interesting insights and odd bits until I’ve come up with a tapestry that I think is ready to be unveiled to the world. People have told me they enjoy and value this approach and I’ll admit it’s my preferred way of synthesizing and opining about things.

Trouble is, it makes for fairly lengthy posts and it time to gather the threads and to weave my tapestries. And of late, on the subject of time, see above…

There is, however, a matter that I can be silent about no longer, hence this brief outburst that I deliver coupled with the promise of more considered work in the weeks to come.

Passivity and Politics

I have noticed a pattern in the language used by some people who facilitate workshops, in particular certain kinds of communication workshops. In a desire to offer no possible offence to anyone at all (fuelled, in my view, by a pronounced vein of political correctness) I’ve heard the most roundabout constructs being used in settings that are meant to foster authentic and direct communications about what people want and expect from one another.

Examples of this pernicious pattern of passive parlance include:

“I am wanting to move on with this session.”
“I am thinking that there’s another view to consider”
“I am needing some more clarity around this issue.”
“I am feeling uncomfortable with this situation.”

The passive voice can be useful in English usage, but I find here it is not. I think the motive for passive use in this way stems from the desire to be “nice” – that is, to be excessively indirect and offer no offence to anyone. This is, however, an action that a) contains the arrogant presupposition that you can predict how the person will react and b) the manipulative desire to control how he/she will react – neither of which are positive and authentic approaches to communication.

In my view it’s more authentic, honest, and frankly respectful to be direct and speak your mind plainly. Maybe the other person will be offended and get highly precious (gosh I love that word!) about your interaction. Guess what? That’s their prerogative, and now you’ve got something authentic to work with.

To close, I want to give credit to Rafe Spies of Sydney's Straight Media, who reminded me in a conversation last Friday evening of George Orwell’s 1946 essay Politics and the English Language, which is I think a terrific tract on defending plain usage from the twin threats of barbarism and jargonism (itself a bit of jargon I’ve invented, but nevermind). I refer in particular to Orwell's rule number four from that essay: Never use the passive where you can use the active.

I want to be clear about this: people create more than enough misunderstanding and confusion even when you use the active, direct voice…there’s no need to worsen matters by being indirect and passive in a misguided and manipulative desire to be “nice”.

TM