Automate and Simplify

In his excellent book How the Mind Works, Stephen Pinker lays out everything we know about how humans navigate the world. His descriptions are accessible, if a bit complicated by virtue of their topic.

 I’ve always been fascinated by the brain, and this book is a great starting point to learn more. One topic Pinker covers is how we manage to see in such a complex world. All the tasks that vision completes are difficult. One small example is perspective. One problem with perspective is that an image on your retina could be big or small either because it is close to your face, like a finger, or because it is far away but very big, like a giant statue of a finger.

Solving this problem seems simple to us because we see naturally. We aren’t privy to the behind the scenes work that our brain puts the world through before presenting it to us for scrutiny. In fact we don’t actually see the world as it is, we see something that is processed by our brain to pick out the important features to allow us to get around.

 ‘We see the world not as it is, but as we are’ – Anais Nin

The tasks our brain completes are too complex to have a jack-of-all-trades do. Instead we have a team of experts who solve problems using specific skills sets and specific types of information. The problem with these experts is that if they are left to their own devices - that is if you leave them in isolation to solve problems like vision - then they will come up with all sorts of outlandish ideas about how the world must be working.

 I once met a woman who was just getting into the Secret, the book/DVD about how you can manifest what you want by thinking about it. She explained everything in life as a result of the secret. She was like the expert that couldn’t see outside of their own field.

“I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” – Abraham Maslow

They way the brain solves the problem of the experts is to have some form of co-ordination that drives the experts to take the most likely option in the world that we live in.  

This is a great model developed by natural selection, the best engineer we’ve got. It would be a good idea to consider this in our everyday lives, that taking expertise too far can lead us to make false explanations about the world. It doesn’t mean that expertise is bad. We need all the experts in the brain because the problems we face are too difficult and different to be done by an all in one system. But we need to keep Occam’s Razor in mind. That is the principle that “entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity” and the conclusion that the simplest explanation or strategy tends to be the best one.

Imagine the moment energy from a sound wave vibrates the tiny hairs on your inner ear, just enough to send a spark of electricity to your brain. In NLP they call that first access. The very first time your body picks up some information about the world is like the Adam and Eve of sensation. Naked, pure. You haven’t yet processed it and decided to ignore the voice of your spouse, or run from the alarm. All is harmonious.

You get this type of first access with all things in the environment that you can sense, as soon as it becomes loud, bright, hot, cold, hard, soft enough for your senses to pick up.

The interesting thing is that there’s more to it than whether the stimulus in the environment reaches a threshold that sets your nerves-a-tingling. You also have what they call top down influence. It’s like a company’s board of directors deciding to ignore a marketing report that doesn’t fit their plans, or the figures that they don’t want to see. Try this: If you tear your attention away from this blog, and cast your attention out like a net, you will notice things you haven’t noticed before.

Directing your attention is a technique that can be very calming and bring you into the present moment. It’s used to start inducing high performance states, and hypnotists use it to help induce trance. As you lay back in your chair, consider the classic hypnotist’s line ‘…and as you hear the sound of the waves crashing, you begin to feel very relaxed…’

What you are paying attention to can change your perception of the world, and is a very powerful thing to manipulate.

All this lends some meat to the idea that you get more of what you focus on. It can be all to easy to see reality as fixed, and laugh a bit at the new-agers who talk about the power of consciousness flowing through the world. I agree that phrase puts me off too.

But have you ever learned a new word and then heard it everywhere all of a sudden? Or bought a car and noticed that everyone else has it too?

Maybe you could use your top-down ability to direct your attention, and control what nerves-a-tingling messages get the most say in your brain.

The crux of the post is this: What information does your board of directors pay attention to? Set your intention. You can literally notice more. Information is power. Turn up your radar.

I watched the movie Man on Wire recently. It traced the path of a French man, from the moment he first saw the Twin Towers in a newspaper, to the moment that he strung an illegal wire between them and walked across it. Afterwards he was arrested. People were appalled, excited and confused. He’d done it with no safety net, no rope around his waist, and no parachute. As he walked across the wire, back and forth for 45 minutes, he laughed and smiled. If he had fallen he would have died. Later when the police had him they asked ‘why did you do it?’, and he responded with a smile and a shrug of his shoulders. The beauty of that shrug and sense of adventure really struck me, and I started thinking, have we lost our sense of adventure? And if so how can we find it?

I think adventure has three features, they are:

• Adventure is bigger than you, and it expands your world.
• It requires courage. You face danger. There is a chance of failure.
• You either use your strengths or develop them along the way.

I started thinking that maybe we have lost our sense of adventure. Things seem very normal nowadays. I guess I always felt that in the past adventure was easy, you could float out onto the ocean and never know what was over the horizon. People used to think it was the end of the world. Or you could walk over the hill to the next town, and it would take three days of seeing no one.

Today we have the internet to tell us what is at the end of the horizon. We can access everything and everyone from everywhere. I can twitter to Bruce Willis while I Skype my sister in London and Google what exotic meal to make for dinner.

Today we have more of everything, to the extent that we are killing the planet and ourselves. I have more stuff than I can poke a stick at. And more sticks to do it with. The sickness of the Western world is obesity, while people starve on the other side of the planet. We have so much that it is easy not to focus on what’s important.

Today we are obsessed with safety. Not just physically but in other ways, emotionally and socially too. So how do we find our modern day adventures?

It struck me that there are ways we can find adventure in our everyday lives, like our friend who wandered between the twin towers 400m above the earth. Firstly we can simplify our lives, and prioritise. Tear our eyes away from the latest episode of someone’s life I don’t care about, and look around our own living rooms. Being mindful about what we do helps us see the excitement in the world.

Secondly we can challenge ourselves and fight mediocrity. It may mean speaking up in a meeting, or pushing ourselves rather than not. It may mean chasing your dreams, or even looking like a dork.

And finally we can take a chance. We can take a chance that we might be wrong, or right.

We learn by failing. A good outcome makes links stronger, and a bad one makes links weaker. And we need that negative feedback. If all we ever get is good feedback, then we are slower to master tasks, and more susceptible to crumbling under pressure. When Netball NZ made refs not keep score for young netball players, there was an uproar.  It was shortsighted and a waste of everyone’s time. Sport is competitive. How do you know if what you are doing is right, if you get no feedback. Kids get undirected play from other areas of their lives, whereas when they come to play sport they are there for a reason. We all need to lose sometimes!

The paradox is that to be successful at anything, we need to also be bad at it. We need to make bad calls at work, we need to answer questions in exams in the wrong way, and we need to say the wrong things sometimes. We need to get into sticky situations, so that we know where they are and learn how to avoid them. What Netball NZ did was remove the feedback that told the kids if they had done good or bad. If you’ve ever been in a work situation where you get no feedback on whether you are doing the right thing, then you will realise how fruitless that is.

Getting cosy with failure is a sure fire way to succeed, and often the price of failure is lower than you think. I’ve been in a new job recently and have faced many challenges. One of the challenges is the very different culture that I want to get involved in. I had been putting off attending regular lunch meetings because I didn’t feel comfortable. Then one day I realised, that the rewards of going to these meetings were huge. Job and life success awaited me. What was putting me off? I realised that I was scared I would look like a dork at the meetings by doing something wrong. Once I realised that the prize for looking like a dork was realising some of my dreams, (and the price I paid for not looking like a dork was those very dreams) I started to bite the bullet and face my fears.

Our fear of failure often stems from the social side of screwing up, it stems from not wanting to look stupid. Studies have recently shown that social rejection lights up the same parts of our brains as physical pain. Being shunned hurts! But maybe it’s true what they say, no pain = no gain. In Tim Ferris’s book “The Four Hour Work Week” he ascribes readers exercises to make them feel uncomfortable. I believe that his aim is to get you feeling ok about looking like a dork. The exercises include staring at people for longer than is socially acceptable, and lying down in the middle of crowded places like cafes and supermarkets. Maybe you don’t have to take such extreme measures to get comfortable with the social side of failure. Just try speaking up in the next meeting, or questioning someone rather than agreeing.

Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. The tale goes that when asked how he persevered after failing so many times, he responded by saying that he hadn’t failed, he’d just found 1,000 ways that didn’t work.

So how do you know when you have a good idea, and execution is  your problem? And how do you know when you just have a plain old bad idea?

My worry is that I see people working on things, and the idea seems sound. But the execution is poor. The good idea gets sent to the scrapheap, or we get mediocre results from what had great potential.

How do you know if your problem lies with your execution or with your idea?

This question is exciting, and is probably a good place to start before going around telling people that they suck at doing things, but their ideas are good.

In NLP (which is a bit controversial) the focus is always on how people are doing things. So for example if a patient presents with a fear of flying, the practitioner doesn’t try to go back in time to figure out why the person is scared. Instead they ask themselves the question, how are you doing that? How are you being afraid of flying?  The same can be applied to success. How are you being successful at work? And more importantly, how can I get some of that?

There is a distinct focus on dealing with process, and then repeating or disrupting it. Content is relegated to second place, and that’s important in our goal of discerning whether to blame the idea or the execution. This lower importance of content can help us see that content (or idea) is ruled by process (execution). Execution is what brings the idea to fruition.

An idea is a map to a destination. Like asking, hey what if we did this? Execution is ‘doing the idea’. In a good incremental learner, who is happy to fail, execution develops the idea. By the time you get to the end, you often have something different from what you expected at the start. But it probably works. So what keeps you sane while you fail 1,000 times?

Intention 

Intention will guide your execution while you ‘do’ your ideas. If your intention is off, or more about looking good, or maintaining the status quo, then your idea won’t develop so well. To bring it all together, an idea is only as good as your execution. And the compass of execution is intention. Keep your compass true, and in your hand at all times, and your idea will develop and grow into something great.

Comments on these ideas are greatly appreciated. What do you think?

At its very worst, science is the act of giving complicated names to things to try and sound intelligent. At its best it is an investigation of how things work, leading to insights and developments.

The new field of neuroleadership is teetering between the two at the moment. Cynics accuse neuroleadership believers of dressing up the labelling of pre-existing notions of how we think, as groundbreaking science. The believers however, think that applying neuroscience to management and leadership will revolutionise human interaction and achievement at work.

The problem neuroleadership has is that over our long history of human civilisation we’ve actually worked out a lot of the ways that we think. It has become common sense that you don’t give people the answers if you want them to learn. Instead you guide their thinking. Good leaders and managers already operate this way. And good trainers and consultants teach people to do this too, they didn’t need neuroleadership to point it out. At its worst neuroleadership falls into the trap of labelling these ways of operating, and presenting it as new amazing learning.

For example:

“Cognitive scientists are finding that people’s mental maps, their theories, expectations, and attitudes, play a more central role in human perception than was previously understood… This can be well demonstrated by the placebo effect… the mental expectation of pain relief accounts for the change in pain perception… ”

We already knew that.

Two great hopes for brain science and neuroleadership

1. Credibility

Neuroleadership can give credibility to formerly ‘touchy feely’ interventions that actually work. Neuroleadership can show the reasons behind things like emotional engagement, and the reasons behind the techniques that build that. A new book by neuroscientist Dr. Kerry Spackman rehashes ideas that have been around for a while. I compare a lot of his new book to works like Shakti Gawain’s Creative Visualisation. But Dr. Kerry has the scientific research and ‘intellectual background’ to support his ideas. He’ll have you making scrapbooks and cutting out pictures of yourself and your goals. And you’ll feel almost like a scientist too.

As neuroscience catches up with our civiliations’ history of working with our brains, there is more evidence for the efficacy of techniques that have been considered a bit strange. Drivers for personal change may shift from tapping into the universal consciousness, to hard and fast fMRI research. And if that leads to more credibility for things like mindfulness, creative visualisation and engaging with our emotions, then that’s a good thing.

2. Picking what works

Neuroleadership can help us cut out the chaff in people development. Hopefully it can let us focus more on what works. And in doing so, perhaps it can increase the quality of trainers and consultants working with organisations. Some trainers are just loud extroverts looking for a stage, rather than thoughtful practitioners helping people to think better. It also gives us the opportunity to see the actual results of a training intervention, or learning exercise. The question you can ask is this: how has your training changed my brain?

Into the future

We are still a long way from practically being able to  look at the real-time brain changes from our learning and development interventions. But the future is bright. Neuroleadership has its detractors, as does any good scientific field. So while we should be keeping the scientists honest when they try and look smart, we should also consider that this young field is starting to pay off, and in time brain understanding will be an important part of much of how we live our lives.

In NLP the brain is often referred to as a difference detector. It is easy for us to become very quickly accustomed to our environment, leaving us sensitive only to news of difference.

I recently bought shares in Xero with some friends. We bought in at $0.90 and shares rapidly went up to $1.30. We felt that $1.50 would be a landmark price for us, and we were excited about getting there. Over several weeks the price crept up slowly, suddenly it jumped to $1.47 and our excitement was palpable. A few days later the price hit $1.52. One of my friends was so excited he rang me at work and yelled at me down the phone.

The Drop

The price sat at $1.50 for a week or so and we settled in to a glow of contentment. I was surprised at how rapidly this turned into apathy. The next goal of $1.60 soon became apparent. Then disaster struck. Shares dropped to $1.47. How could this happen? I was forlorn and waited desperately for the price to go up again.

The Realisation

What went wrong? A few weeks ago $1.47 held all the promise of the world for me. And now two weeks later, it was the total opposite. It had become an empty thing. Forlorn and grasping at its former glory.

This phenomenon gave me pause to think about other areas of my life where the $1.47 effect was in action.

I used to live in an awesome flat. It was a dream flat. It was huge and different and exciting. After six months or so all I noticed was the peeling paint and the boiler that didn’t work.

No matter how good a situation is or how bright a goal is: Once you get there, the location gets boring. You grow accustomed to it and your brain yearns for news of difference. Not only that but the steps along the way that were once great leaps, lose their appeal. We cannot go back.

“Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.” - Anais Nin

“Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.” - Helen Keller

The $1.47 effect illustrates to me that it’s not what we have in life, but who we are that’s important. And that to focus on the journey is where the real pleasure lies. Henry Ford once said, you can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do.

I met a marine biologist recently. She was busy completing a PhD. We started talking about evolution. She says that natural evolution for humans no longer exists. Instead we are now immersed in directed evolution. Directed evolution is where because we have neutralised the trials and tribulations in our environment, we no longer evolve in response to them. Instead of our bodies and brains evolving to be bigger or stronger or faster in response to the environment, we build cars and trucks and computers. These things then give us the advantage that normally evolution would have figured out for us.

I don’t beleive this and argued that we are still evolving, we are evolving in response to the environment of technology. And no matter how much of a hand we have to play in that environment, we still must respond to it. Those who respond better that others, will perpetuate their genes better too. The rule has always been that individuals don’t evolve, populations do. So while we see ourselves dominating the world with technology, it can be hard to step outside of ourselves and see a picture a million years wide.

Another interesting ethical aside to the evolution argument is this: as we create technology to support ourselves, we actually become weaker. We contrive to perpetuate weaker sets of genes that would not otherwise survive. But then the argument stands, have we not evolved to develop technology to support ourselves?

I’ve messed around on the guitar for years, and I always considered myself to be learning the guitar. Then one day while I was on the bus I realised that if I wanted to be good at the guitar I had to become a guitarist, rather than someone learning the guitar. I felt a change from being a struggling learner, to being much more content with the instrument and my practice. I started to take my guitar with me and it became part of my identity. Unfortunately I haven’t yet become a famous rock star, and in honesty I’m not that good. But I’m totally happy with that, I’ve apprenticed myself to the guitar and I don’t struggle with it like I used to.

What we believe about ourselves and the world, shapes our world. Our ability to examine, and tinker with our beliefs about the way things work is a mainstay in many religions and self-help books. But I don’t think we are as aware of this ability as we could be. Perhaps if we spent more time having a look at what we are thinking, and what rules we are abiding by, then we could change things for the better.

If you consider this quote:

‘We see things not as they are, but as we are.’

Then perhaps the most powerful force for change lies with our perceptions and the unwritten rules we hold to be true.

Toastmasters is a pretty well known format for practicing and improving your public speaking skills. In the process you develop better overall communication skills, leadership skills and self confidence. As with anything you get out what you put in, and the format may not work for some people. But I’m suggesting it’s the best self-directed group learning around. And I think if we could harness the power of the Toastmasters format for other learning we would be on to a winner.

A Toastmasters meeting lasts from one to two hours, and has a set fomat. There are a number of roles that people can have, there’s no one person in charge and the roles rotate each week. Each session has people getting up and doing prepared speeches of about seven minutes, and an impromptu speaking section called tabletopics where you speak for two minutes on a topic given to you when you stand up. The session is run by a chairperson and each speaker is evaluated, and also the overall session is evaluated at the end. Here’s a brief overview of the roles.

Chairperson - Controls the session, keeps it to time, introduces each speaker, makes jokes

Speaker - Does a prepared speech from a list of projects designed to target specific speaking skills

Speech evaluator - Does a 3 - 5 minute evaluation of the speaker

Table topics master - Comes up with some impromptu speech ideas and dishes them out during the table topics part of the session

Table topics evaluator - Evaluates the table topics speakers

General Evaluator - Evaluates the whole session at the end

Timer - Times everyone

There are a few other roles, and it varies by club, but those are the basic ones. The idea is that everyone will get up in front of the group and speak every session. Every speaker except the general evaluator gets evaluated. When you join you get given a book with ten speaking projects in it. Each one is a speech of about seven minutes that has a certain focus. The projects focus on things like speech structure, using your voice and doing research. If you finish all ten there are other books you can move on to.

So what makes Toastmasters so effective?

Self-directed

You progress through the projects at your own speed, doing speeches when you can or when you feel like it. Also the meetings are run by the group, everyone has to contribute to a good meeting, and everyone experiences each role. There is no leader as such, it’s a group effort to keep the club going. This gets people engaged in their learning, it’s not a case of turning up to a classroom and having a teacher hand out materials and run you through them. There is the workbook provided with details of the project, and that’s it. It’s a case of just enough to get you going, but you have to put in the rest. The rest really comes from the other people in the group. More experienced members help you out, and each session you watch someone else speaking and then hear the feedback.

Group Learning

There is a learning theory called Vygotskis Theory of Proximal Development (something like that anyway, feel free to correct me). The theory is that when you work as a group you get into the zone of proximal development, where more is capable than if you were by yourself. Essentially you learn the skills and knowledge of the other people, and contribute your own. At toastmasters there are people who have been there for years, so you get to see all the skills you are trying to learn demonstrated. These are the same people who will evaluate the way you speak, and you in turn will evaluate them. You learn from the good speakers, and they learn from the not so good speakers. There’s nothing quite like a stellar demonstration of what not to do from an amateur speaker.

Totally supportive environment

There is a total environment of support. It’s a case of everyone commiting to improving themselves and others at the same time. It’s so critical to the learning process and I believe it stems from the self-direction. It doesn’t fall to one pre-defined person to be the seat of all knowledge, like with a trainer or teacher, so instead everyone shares what they know.

Strict time keeping

There is very little time wasted at a toastmasters session. There is a timekeeper timing each speech and it’s up to the Chairperson to keep the meeting to time. This is considered crucial to the whole meeting. It may not seem as important as it actually is, but you need this discipline. It’s a way of saying that everyone’s time is valuable and that what happens in the session is important. I’ve been to too many meetings, training sessions and classrooms where time is wasted for no good reason.

Ritual

Ritual is a powerful tool for learning. Its probably the most rapid way to get people in the ‘zone’ or the right state for learning. The second you get up to speak you get an applause. It’s a sign of respect from the group, it gets you used to hearing an applause and I believe it helps get you into the zone. Ritual also contributes to the safe environment, you all know what is going to happen and so can focus on your speaking.

Regular practice of key skills

This is a biggie and it’s something I want to bring into my own training programmes. Many of the things we teach managers and business people are skills that you need to practice, not knowledge that you need to know. You can tell someone how to give effective feedback, and then they need to practice that skill regularly. When you attend rugby training, you start of with a warm-up and then do some key skills, passing, tackling and other ball skills. You don’t get told how to pass a ball and then be considered proficient, returning to the book for a quick refresh when you next need to pass a ball. At every session you speak, and at every session you learn. If you look at the way the skills are practiced, it’s close to perfect.

1. You do the skill

2. You experience the application of the skill yourself

3. You watch others using the skill and see the results of that

And you do it all regularly.

Giving and receiving critical analysis

Each session you get feedback on your speaking, what was good and what was bad. And at many sessions you will also give feedback. You also get to watch other people giving feedback. This is a huge part of any toastmasters session, and is one of the most important parts of learning. I haven’t engaged actively in critical reflection enough in many learning activities I’ve experienced. The clear structure of the session, the ritual and the invovlement of all the members of the group makes the evaluation you receive much safer than in other environments.

Skills broken down

Each project follows sound training principles of focussing on only one part of the overall skill of good public speaking at a time. As you progress you bring all these skills together.

What does this mean for us?

It’s a great example of great learning. Toastmasters is a bunch of people developing and growing, using public speaking as the tool. I beleive it sets a great example of a learning environment that works. I’m looking at ways of bringing that style of self determined learning into people’s lives in other ways. I love the way toastmasters gives you just enough to get you going, and no more. There aren’t huge stacks of resources. What they are saying is that you have everything you need, now get going. It’s a pretty deft approach and is hugely empowering for the learner. It also means that as you learn the skills, they are already internalised. You are carrying them around with you, they aren’t represented by a book, or chart that you need to refer to.

‘The things we have to learn before we do them, we learn by doing them. - Aristotle.’