The Hawthorne effect refers to a study in 1924 on the effects of the changes in working conditions (lighting/ cleanliness etc.) on the productivity of a set of factory workers. One potential conclusion from the study was that the biggest impact on productivity was the act of being studied. Productivity slumped whenever the studies concluded.

Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell in Human Givens argue that the giving and receiving of ’attention’ is a basic human need. They refer to Idries Shah and his studies when they note that ‘many social and commercial transactions are in fact disguised attention situations’. Shah suggested that humanity could benefit enormously by ’studying the attracting, extending and reception, as well as the interchange, of attention’:

‘If individuals are unaware that what is driving them in certain circumstances is the demanding, extending or exchange of attention, believing they are engaged in something else – such as learning, informing, helping, buying or selling – they are likely to be less efficient in achieving their ends’

So by remaining mindful of the currency of attention in your interactions with others, you can achieve your goals more effectively. Since I read this, it’s had a big impact. Rather than necessarily re-interpreting all situations – I think we are well developed in understanding clear attention needs and giving – it has made me more aware of how to respond better to the clear ‘needy’ situations (mine and others). I have tried not to interpret the interaction as being anything other than need driven. I have found that subtlety unlocks  a much better response in me to both my own needs and others. The act of focusing on the ‘attention transaction’ has also has enabled me to better understand what’s really driving my needs. And then do something about them.

Where the whole area gets really exciting is when you consider it within this context of learning. Griffin & Tyrrell argue that it is clear in the attention exchange that we suspend our critical faculty. It is something we have to do if we are consider and absorb new patterns of information:

‘When attention is focused and we grasp what someone is telling us in an uncritical way, we have absorbed a pattern at an unconscious level. Its full meaning and ramifications may not become apparent at once but, once the pattern is in the brain, it will affect future actions and add to the sum total of our knowledge. Knowledge only becomes real in action, when it is experienced. This is how we learn’

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Films are successful only if everyone, from key grip to leading actor, shares a common understanding of what the end result must look and sound like.

Harvard Business Review’s Bendapudi & Bendapudi use Limited Brand’s CEO’s Les Wexner’s citation of Sidney Lumet’s book Making Movies to make the point about the role of leadership; to use language that employees get to get them to achieve things together.

The idea of leader as director and the company’s strategy as a movie is fantastic. The role of communication and engagement of the participants in the creation of a future reality (what consumers will buy) is a wonderful mindshift of the normal things leaders consider important.

For all the talk of the evils of the web in terms of driving us to attention deficit/ dispersal, a few areas I’ve been reading have glued together in my head which may make a case for the opposition:

First, in a fantastic book on writing powerfully for business: We, Me, Them & It,  John Simmons makes a point, ‘For as long as I can remember I’ve used writing to sort out my thinking’

I’ve been toying round with a way of prioritising my time – personally and at work – around 5Cs: Create, Connect and Collaborate, Communicate and Consume. So in that order, I try and allocate any time I have to ensure I’m not just consuming or communicating. Since I restarted writing and refocusing on creativity nearly sixteen months ago, I’ve probably never been happier. I’ve argued to others that it makes my brain feel fresher and more flexible. The act of creation is satisfying, and I feel that I think better as a result of forcing myself to articulate things better – even when I play with words or ‘dump’ thoughts without much structure. I find this unblocks my thinking.

I then thought about WordPress.com’s ‘freshly pressed’ stats today: ‘The best of 233,618 bloggers, 225,512 new posts, 302,519 comments, & 54,364,681 words today on WordPress.com.’ and was just left with the simple thought: surely all this act of creation – even factoring for a high % of dross (mine included) – is a development on nothing. Add in the forums, commenting, reviewing and straight building of sites and content.

Then taking it a step forward, tonight I read an article in the Rotman magazine by Gregory Berns, Chair of Neuroeconomics at Emory University, called ‘Iconoclasts (his definition: people who manage to achieve things others say cannot be done): Great Minds Think Different‘. He identified three roadblocks that exist in the wiring of the brain to stand in the way of truly innovative thinking:

1. Perception to come up with a new idea: ‘even though our brains are fed information at the same rate through our eyes, this is not how we see the world, because the brain is constantly making predictions and interpretations about what it sees. The problem is that these predictions are based largely on past experience: our brains make their best guess as to what they are seeing based on what we have experienced up to that point’. Iconoclasts’ key insights tend to be triggered by visual images that ‘enable them to see things in different ways (to) increase the odds of new insight’

2. Overcoming the human fear response: the fear of failure/ fear of feeling stupid

3. Social skills to persuade others of the strengths of your new idea

I was struck by how the use of the web assists each of the above. See what the following lead you to in terms of interpreting the web as a fomenter of iconoclasm:

1. Berns refers to ’seeing like an iconoclast is to look at things you have never seen before’….. ‘new acquaintances can often be the source of new perceptions’

2. ‘It was very important for our ancestors to belong to a community, both for the sake of survival and reproduction’.

3. ‘Social skills come into play because our brains were built for social environments’

How writing enhances and promotes thinking and innovation is obviously massive, but from simple seeds of thoughts grow…….

Daniel Schacter Functional MRI Scans

The scans to the left look virtually identical.

The furthest left brain actually shows the bits of the brain that fire when, given a cue word, the subject remembers something that has happened: a memory.

The closest brain shows the bits of the brain that fire when the subject, given the same cue word, was asked to imagine a future scenario.

So the fact that the brain, for purposes of evolutionary efficiency – or through evolutionary limitations (depending on your view) – uses the same tools to remember the past and imagine the future, throws a fantastic light on the power of vision and goal setting.

On the basis that you believe your memories because your left brain gives you permission to do so, the only thing limiting a more ‘creative’ use of vision and goal setting is your logical/ analytical side. Looking at the argument from another perspective, do you believe that you are what/ who you are through a sum total of your nature and your nurture? Do you accept that a component part of what affects your nurture is a sum total of your experiences? Do you then accept that how you act in the present is influenced by the sum of what you believe to be you: your values, beliefs, experiences etc.?

If you’re still with me, then allow yourself to imagine the impact of acting in the present not just based on your past, but based on a future that you desire and have spent time imagining in detail.

What resources would this bring to bear? What focus would this give you? What opportunities would you take?

Work has been undertaken which suggests that the behavioural and emotional qualities of leadership can be traced to neurological activity in identified regions of the brain.

In a really practical step, Pierre Balthazard at Arizona State Uni. is then working on linking this activity with the qualities that best benefit those at the top of a company to create training techniques that develop effective leadership abilities.

The FT reports on this in their article ‘A Brainwave in the Study of Leadership‘, noting that more recently leadership research has focused on more complex issues, ‘how to develop traits such as authenticity, charisma and visionary and inspirational leadership in less talented leaders’

Everything centres around evidence and belief that training (and subsequent scanning and rescanning) can show evidence of changes in signature brain patterns for certain behaviours: ‘neuro-feedback training can develop the behaviour individuals want to optimise’

Balthazard has gathered evidence he believes to be 100% accurate in determining who is  a strong leader (a bold claim….). He has also discovered that leaders with ‘high psychological capital’ – such as hope, optimism and resilience – display different brain activity.

Applications are obvious, and the US Military Academy at West Point and global management schools are looking at patterns that can be copied. It’s not surprising however that funding has been hard to find, and that there are obvious detractors (quoting 1984/ Orwellian Big Brother nightmare scenarios….)

For me, I feel intuitively that making such fundamental changes can’t be as simple as learning how to make lights flash differently on one screen to match a prescribed ‘best’ pattern on the other.

Apologies to Balthazard and his team for making such sweeping conclusions with such little evidence.  I’m sure it’s probably because I don’t want to admit that we’re absolutely as simple to change as all this. For me however, understanding; appreciation of how things overall ‘fit together’ and underlying values seem like bigger pieces of the equation of leadership excellence that cannot be trained so easily.

A human’s answer to this question will, I think, always naturally bias towards more ‘intelligent’ or sophisticated interpretations. Like an onion with many layers, I’m sure that most things we come up with as explanations have a place and play a part in the overall picture.

Arguments about how early human’s brains developed further within a social/ community context to help them interact, plan and understand the mental worlds of others (and thereby understand intentions) feel like a solid layer toward the centre of the onion.

So too is our ability to plan for future needs, fantasising about future scenarios and creating an ‘inner world (which) develops into a ‘mirror of the future’ in which we can simulate the consequences of alternative paths of action instead of proceeding by trial-and-error, which is far less effective.’ [Eva Krutmeijer text in an article about philosopher Peter Gärdenfors on the Carl Linnaeus website]

I have sometimes marvelled personally at the gap between my own personal plans and intentions and the actual physical action to make them real. The role of energy and physical movement or action to catalyse a planned process is obvious, but I think telling; I can remember times in the past when I’ve sat in a comfy chair or lain in bed, with the act of standing up and doing all the things I need to do to leave the house and enact the day’s plans seeming like an insurmountable mountain of activity. There is an interesting correlation between mental health, the symptoms of depression and tell-tale signs in prolonged periods doing nothing/ staying in bed, as well as reduced social interaction.

I had stalled in reading Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell’s book, Human Givens. Reviewing my notes before restarting the other night, I came upon my early highlighting of ‘movement is fundamental to the very existence of brains, which developed primarily to control movement, to predict the outcome of movement and remember the result of past movements’. They use the example of the tiny marine sea creature, the sea quirt, which early in its life swims like a tadpole with a brain and nerve cord to control its movements. When mature it attaches to a rock, stays in one place, and digests its own brain and nerve cord because it no longer has a use for them.

Over the last 3-4 years the amount of physical activity I do has increased significantly. So too have my levels of happiness and contentment. I find myself structuring my days to front load physical exercise and activity as a real kick-start to the day. Even without physical sport, I now find that what feels like an internal binary switch of satisfied/ not satisfied with my day is directly connected with being out and about and active.

Energy, and the food intake to fuel it, obviously plays an important supporting role in this whole discussion, but I wanted to leave this piece with the following couple of areas of thought:

• ‘The mental faculty for controlling movement is crucial to daily life. It is involved in conceiving and idea of what to do, planning a response, and then carrying it out. (Literally, when we think about getting a book down from the shelf, our brains stimulate the movement’ [Griffin/Tyrell, Human Givens]. This highlights two things: first, when we mentally plan and visualise something that we create as a goal, we prime the same areas of the brain to engage in the activity to deliver into reality: ‘the primary motor cortex and the premotor cortex are both located in the frontal lobe…..which…determines where we direct our attention. It also appears to direct our consciousness itself’ [Griffin/Tyrell, Human Givens]. The second is that, arguably, we have the ability to kickstart our journey towards our plans and goals by just starting. The very act of movement and action should very quickly overcome any mental resistance to the enormity of any task
• The above isn’t rocket science. And that’s kind of the point that ties me back to my opening line. We are endowed with a higher level of consciousness that bestows many benefits, but I would argue a tendency to overassess the complexity of what’s really going on in our brains, and under-estimate how easy it is to ‘hot-wire’ or hack ourselves to achieve our desired results. Movement is increasingly feeling like a universal ‘backdoor’ or master override key or code to ourselves.

Yep. I’m talking to myself more and more these days. I’ve even started emailing myself. The onset of madness, or management for a healthy mind?

In fairness, I’ve not yet got to the stage that others I know have. I’m not giving myself pep talks or motivating myself with inspirational statements. I’m not even really chastising myself for thinking unproductive/damaging thoughts.

No, it’s more of a pressure release valve. For the last year or two I’ve been trying to listen to myself. I’ve been trying to get good at picking up on the signals (for me, normally tension or lightness in my middle chest: the place you feel when you breath in deeper than you normally do….)

Why am I doing this? Mainly because I’ve realised that I’m a very simple creature. I’ve spent the last few years putting in place trusted systems, and learning some perspectives and processes (plus the pop-neurological background….), that have enabled me to strip myself back to my kind of core ‘operating model’

Sounds a bit up it’s own arse I know. It’s just meant to highlight my view that certain things work for certain people. For me, if I take an action when the middle chest place feels blocked or tense, I immediately get back to lightness in that place. That lightness stops me being distracted from the here and now. And as long as I make sure I spend the here and now doing as many of the things that I really want to do, then my happiness is optimised.

The actions I need to take to alleviate the tension are invariably for the future, rather than immediate. Using the trusted systems, I give myself an action, send myself a message (or send someone else a message or action)

So. My advice? Talk to yourself more often.

What do The Dog Whisperer and Forest Gump have in common?

Both cause reflection about how the average human’s sense and awareness of past and future can be debilitating to performance in the present (if your mind makes the random connections that mine does)

In my post, Our Simple Minds: Mind Tricks, I explored a simple view that if we remove the conscious barriers or layers between identification of the need for the action, and the action itself, then it appears that we get more done with less resistance.

Drill Sergeant: Gump! What’s your sole purpose in this army?
Forrest Gump: To do whatever you tell me, drill sergeant!

If we remove the conscious resistance to the task and just do, then we’re focusing on our own drill sergeant of task completion.

What occurred to me watching The Dog Whisperer is how we as humans debilitate ourselves by carrying our baggage of history in our heads, and the blanket of stress of expectation and future fears. We bring this to bear on our treatment of dogs, and they don’t know why. They live in the now. Yes they have programmed responses, but as soon as these are removed then their only concern is the here and now. We’re the ones who often screw them up by bizarre behaviour tainted by how they were previously, or our concerns about how they’re going to respond. We miss the mindfulness of the here and now.

It’s very easy to ignore the work you should be doing when you’re rambling with something pleasurable or distracting: the reading, exploring the web, or online conversations. Most of us can lose ourselves in something for minutes if not chunks of hours.  The great thing is that we can lose ourselves in work and task completion in exactly the same way by just tricking ourselves into action. Even just reversing the above pleasurable rambling scenario would work. Rather than ignoring the work you should be doing; ignore the distractions by planning a whole days worth of reading, exploring the web, online conversations etc. etc. Then just ramble with a bit of work. Just start something knowing that you ’should’ be reading/ surfing/ chatting etc.

The strangest thing happens: you start work without resistance. It flows until you’re a bit spent. Then you can force yourself to start ‘work’ on what you have planned to do……… just see how long it takes you to get distracted by work again though ;-)

A very personal conflict reflected in recent 360 feedback I received from my managers and fellow directors is well covered in Harvard Business Review’s June 2009 leader: How to Be a Good Boss in a Bad Economy

Robert Sutton found that people placed in authority become less mindful of others’ feelings and needs whilst those in subordinate positions devote immense energy to watching and interpreting the actions of leaders.

He suggests a useful framework to get bosses focused on what their people need from them: predictability, understanding, control and compassion.

1. Predictability: as much information as you can. Preparation reduces suffering and they can relax in the meantime

2. Understanding: explain why changes are necessary, and how it will affect routines. Internal communication should be simple, concrete and repetitive

3. Control: don’t frame an obstacle as too big, too complex, or too difficult to overcome: people will be overwhelmed and will freeze in their tracks. Break down into less daunting components

4. Compassion: tend to peoples’ emotional needs, however hard you are finding the process as a leader

What is the psychology behind our use of Twitter? Why does it work for its increasing millions of users?

I love the fact that there’s already a fair body of analysis already. John Grohol does a great initial post on the Psychology of Twitter and a follow-up Psychology of Twitter Part 2, that nicely summarises some other thoughts. I’m pleased to flag that my post here is one of those that applies the Psychology 101ish Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in a blunt way as an introduction. Moses Ma does a far more advanced analysis than me with Understanding the Psychology of Twitter and goes on to analyse More on the Psychology of Twitter, including neuroscience and psycholinguistics!

This is quite a functional post I’ve had in bits of draft for a month or so, and is a bit of a sledgehammer analysis I want to refine over time. The thing that’s nagged away, and eventually pushed me into pulling this together is because my tiny amount of knowledge about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs comes back to me whenever I see a comment from someone who ‘doesn’t get’ Twitter (or those of us who use it at varying levels of intensity, and wonder why)

It is a theory in psychology, proposed by Abraham Maslow in a 1943 paper. I’ve always liked it particularly in a work/management context as a really simple guide to assessing the needs of individuals I’ve been managing. I also like it because of how well challenged it is.

Looking at the layers in the diagram from bottom to top, the first four are known as deficiency needs. The top layer often referred to as the only real motive: the aesthetic need. The aim of realizing one’s own maximum potential and possibilities. It was originally argued that needs are fulfilled sequentially from bottom to top. Subsequently this has been challenged and embellished: particularly using the concept of the ’starving artist’ who ignores deficiency needs for the aesthetic.

As a full set of human needs I think it works quite well. None obviously come to my mind that ’modern society’ is causing to advance or mutate (again, one of the arguments against the theory). Quite simply, I think it can be used as a needs checklist to assess an individual’s status. I use the word status to deliberately not apply either the subjectivity or judgement of using the word ‘deficiency’, and to avoid presupposing that an individual wants a need fulfilled (the starving artist point)

So to Twitter.

Well, for whatever grand claims, your ‘Physiological’ and ‘Safety’status are unlikely to be directly impacted by Twitter (although I suppose any communication medium can aid relationship forming  and the subsequent ‘physical’ side that could come with it…………..). Your ‘Safety’ status, particularly in relation to employment and resources, could be argued to be being increasingly impacted by Twitter as business and recruitment tools and self-branding methodologies are developed.

Without meaning the statement to be over sensationalist, or over-extending for the sake of a blog post, I think ‘Love/ Belonging’, ‘Esteem’ and ‘Self-actualization’ are facilitated by the nature of the tool itself (in terms of its ease of use, immediacy, 140 character limitations/ opportunities and multiple channels/ mediums): you don’t need to invest much to get a return if you have a need.

As best illustrated by two statements in the Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell book, Human Givens:

‘we cannot be mentally healthy if we’re isolated’ and ‘one human given is that we are social creatures and need connection to a group of people who accept us’,

whether you have a deficient need or not, Twitter breaks down the barriers. It opens up a global set of conversations. Whether you’re alone or engaging in a different conversation than the people surrounding you at that time, it enables a connection. Your perceptions of others and respect from others can shift tremendously with the right contribution: but globally. The boundary-less relationships speed up. As with many aspects of online life,  preconceptions, limiting beliefs, filters, restricting values and predjudices can be effectively removed by the substance of someone’s contribution. This recognition or engagement in turn can drive self-esteem, confidence and sense of achievement.

Spontaneity and creativity of thought are massively facilitated if you choose to participate with any expectation of engagement/ popularity because your balance of contribution has to be the same as in any successful interaction within a social grouping: both personal and valuable. Mass morality has been let further off the leash via the rapid feedback and ‘wildfire’ nature of the tool. Social media loosened the collar and now live feed and interaction is taking participation around common human values to the next level.