Guerilla Project Management Interview. Leading Projects with the Brain in Mind The Neuroscience of Leadership with Dr. David Rock

Transcription

1 Guerilla Project Management Interview Leading Projects with the Brain in Mind The Neuroscience of Leadership with Dr. David Rock To listen to or download the audio, please visit: David, welcome. Thank you. Good to be here. David, how did you get interested in the topic of the relationship between neuroscience and leadership, and why should people leading projects pay attention to this topic? Well it s kind of a long story, but I d always been interested in the brain. And I d been reading privately about neuroscience through some general easy-reading books, but also starting to read some of the more technical books for about 20 years. And what happened was I was working with organizations around developing leaders. And I was finding that the larger the organization or the higher up I went in an organization, the more people were conceptual and cerebral, and really wanting a theory to get their head around. Especially if you were doing anything that was in any way challenging, they really could challenge you conceptually. And so I spent some time fishing around trying to understand how to explain the kind of work I was trying to do, which involves developing self awareness and developing an ability to coach other people more effectively. And I kind of discovered by accident, I started teaching a class and I started to include brain research in the class. And I got such a positive response that I started including it a little bit more, and a little bit more. And it went from literally two quick handouts to an entire three days of learning. So it sort of happened by accident originally where I found people were really paying a lot more attention when ideas were presented from a brain perspective. And people were also making more sense of ideas when there was brain research involved. Somehow being more tangible, people could get their head around the ideas. Page 1 of 9

2 David, define for our audience the idea behind NeuroLeadership, and what makes it different from other leadership models that you have researched and experienced? Well I wouldn t so much say it s a leadership model. I d say it s a way of understanding leadership. The field first of all is about the underpinning neuroscience beneath leadership activities. And we ve broken it up into four categories. And that s Decision- Making/Problem Solving, Emotional Regulation, Collaboration, and Facilitating Change. And so we think that the kind of activities that a leader does are broken up into these four different domains. And what we ve done is pulling apart the research within each of these areas and saying, Okay. So, what should leaders know about the brain to be effective at decision-making and problem-solving? What do we need to know about self-regulation or collaboration? And so it s not so much a model as dividing up the activities of leadership and then looking at insights from the brain. Now, some of those insights turn out to be really useful and really important. And many of them are surprising. But the field itself is about understanding the practice of leadership. And very much focused on the practice. Talk to me a little bit more about the four domains of focus that emerged as the central organizing principles for the NeuroLeadership field. Yeah. Sure. We actually were trying to find these at the first summit in 2007 and we had a different structure. In the second summit in 2008, we tried one frame which didn t really work. In the third summit we got close to settling on these. And then finally at the fourth summit we really settled on these domains. So it took awhile of thinking and getting feedback from the community to really settle on what we were doing. And these domains really carve up the activities that a leader does into somewhat evenly divided buckets. The Decision-Making/Problem Solving is huge. That can be a bigger bucket. The Emotional Regulation is a huge area of research and really important, and Collaboration is a really big field. You know, talking about how we know other people, and how we accurately understand other people s intentions, and how we automatically read people s biology. And the Facilitating Change is probably one of the smaller buckets at the moment in terms of research we have, because it s the more complex one. So it s dividing up the practice of leaders into those four domains. And how does The NeuroLeadership Institute and Summit, which you have founded, contribute to the advancement of this field? Well, the field really emerged because of wanting to get the summit together, or wanting to get neuroscientists together with leadership people. It literally was just this insight that I had in 2006 that, if I forget leadership research, just to talk to neuroscientists. Page 2 of 9

3 Good things could happen. Because they're kind of working on the same issues from different angles. And leadership researchers are working on, how do people make decisions? And neuroscientists are working on, [Laughs] how do people make decisions? And finding some really interesting things. And the neuroscientists find things that leadership people should know about, and vice-versa. So initially the whole field emerged just out of wanting people to get together. And we put on this summit in northern Italy in 2007 and it was really successful. Very interesting conversations. And so from that, we said, Okay we ll run another one. In 2008 we had a couple of summits, actually. One in Sydney and one in New York. And from that it really became clear something bigger was happening here. And in 09, we started to set up a formal institute. And now the institute itself runs the summit. We also publish a journal which we re kind of pulling together all this research and putting it in one place. So we re about to publish our third journal. And now we do postgraduate education as well. We do a postgraduate degree and a master s degree in the Neuroscience of Leadership, which is a one or two year program. And there's already 120-something students in those programs in the first couple of years. So it s been very popular. So yeah, the institute is an independent institute. It s a for-benefit structure in terms of, it s not a commercial venture. The idea is any profits go back into research and education. And we re really focused on those three main areas. O the journal, the summit, and postgraduate education and the synergies between those three. Yeah, it s amazing what happened just in the last four years. It s just an incredible amount of work that s being accomplished. You say in SCARF, a brain-based model for collaborating with and influencing others, that Much of our motivation driving social behavior is governed by an overarching organizing principle of minimizing threat and maximizing reward. And you developed the SCARF model as an easy-to-remember framework for understanding and becoming aware of five core concerns that drive human behavior when we are collaborating and influencing others. Give us a brief overview of the SCARF model and its five core domains. Yeah. So the principle behind all behavior is, minimize danger, maximize reward. That s what determines everything. And literally every fifth of a second, five times a second, our brain looks for danger and reward, and focuses our attention and biology away from danger and towards reward. It s constant. And it turns out that social issues use this same system. The same primary threat, primary reward system. And in putting together the summits over a few years and in writing my book Brain at Work, I found this pattern where many, many social Page 3 of 9

4 interactions were generating this threat-reward function. And so I put together a framework that summarizes the main social interactions. Or the main behaviors. So the first one is Status. And Status is a feeling of being better than or worse than people around you. And when you feel better than, you get a reward, and worse than, you get a threat. Certainty is the second one. So, the ability to read other people, know what's happening. And it occurs more broadly than just in social situations, too with certainty. Autonomy, which is a feeling of having some control and having the ability to choose. Relatedness, which is a sense of being in the same group with someone. And Fairness, which is a feeling of fair exchange, a fair and ethical exchange. So those five domains Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, Fairness each one of those could create a threat or reward at any time and you can get combinations of them as well. If you fire someone unfairly, you can activate a threat in all five of those domains, for example. And you get a very strong threat response. Strong reward responses are when we tend to get what I call the multiplier effect. You get many of these all at once. If you get a raise in Status in a way that gives you more choices and more Certainty and you feel is Fair, you can get a really nice reward from that. So that s the framework. And it s been really, really helpful for people to understand social behavior. Whether it s why your kids act so badly [Laughs] when they think that something s unfair, or why organizational change is so difficult. Right. Right. Organizational change for example can create a threat in all five very easily. Speaking of the brain being a social organ, you say in Managing With the Brain in Mind that: The brain experiences the workplace first and foremost as a social system. And you go on to say that: If you are a leader, every action you take and every decision you make either supports or undermines the perceived levels of Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, or Fairness in your enterprise. I would like us to go over each of these domains briefly and talk about each of the implications for collaboration and influence in the context of projects as a micro-social systems. Let s start with the Status. Page 4 of 9

5 Status is certainly one of the bigger ones. And people do things to look good. [Laughs] People do work simply to look good. And we avoid work if we won t look good. We don t like to be wrong. Being wrong is a big Status drop. And there's a large number of the cognitive biases. There s about 48 cognitive biases that incorrectly perceive the world. And a large number of them come back to Status. That people don t like to be wrong. And so in a group situation, you ll also see someone attacking someone s Status very subtly. Or someone feeling their Status is attacked, especially in a group. And what happens is you get a big flare-up of reaction. And that flare-up kind of it s almost like a sudden bubble in a stream of conversation. It s this big bubble that takes focus. And the person who s feeling a Status threat starts to defend themselves, and then other people start to defend them as well, and then other people start talking about what's going on. And it s a threat response that ripples through a group. And so you ll see Status taking over a conversation very, very easily. And it s always just being concerned for it. So those are some examples, yeah. The second domain, which is about Certainty, we definitely see this in projects. As we introduce change in our organizations we are constantly creating this sense of uncertainty and people have a threat reaction to that. Talk to me a little bit about what you're finding about this domain. Yeah. Well, Certainty is one of the big drivers. These are all key drivers but Certainty s something we re all craving all the time. And when you gain information that you didn t have, even if that information s not particularly helpful, you get a reward response in the brain. We like the perception of certainty. We like information. And when you experience uncertainty, so when you become uncertain about a situation, you experience a threat response. And in a social situation it plays out in many, many ways if we can t read people s intentions, we can t read what people are trying to say or do, even if it s just a few words we don t understand, if someone has a different accent, we tend to pull away and have an uncertainty response. So it s very easy in social situations for the uncertainty response especially to take over. And the threat response is usually the one to watch out for. It s the stronger response, more so than the reward response. And I remember reading about what you're finding is of breaking projects into small pieces that can be manageable enhances that sense of Certainty. And we re definitely seeing that in project management with the introduction of new ways of developing for example software called the Agile method where Agile is breaking the work into two week kind of iterations. Which again is supported by the work of neuroscience, where when people feel a little bit more certain about what they're doing there s much more productivity levels. Page 5 of 9

6 Yeah. Absolutely. You think about Project Management, it s a huge Certainty-creating exercise, as is Change Management. And entire industries are built on trying to increase people s perception of Certainty where there isn t any, really. [Laughs] [Laughs] Right. Right. But it just increases a perception. Now, that s a good thing. Because an increased perception of Certainty increases cognitive resources. And with those increased cognitive resources, you can make better decisions, you can have more insights, and you can actually tackle the problems that are facing you right now. But if you feel overwhelmed and you feel like the whole world is too complex, you can t tackle what's in front of you right now very well. Project management kind of helps people settle down into the present and be able to increase their cognitive resources, because the feeling of uncertainty has been reduced. Now, the next one is Autonomy, which is all about giving people a sense of independence and a sense of control over the way they do work. Tell me a little bit more about that. Well, Autonomy is something that s been written about for a while. It s a feeling of control. And if you look into something like the Positive Psychology work Seligman s work was originally founded on his work around control and learned helplessness. And he got into this whole area of positive thinking through looking at negative thinking, and how you can learn this helplessness. And that learned helplessness comes from feeling that you have no control. And the issue of control is a really central thing in psychology, has been for a long time. And it occurs as a feeling of having some kind of choice. And the research is interesting. When the number of choices you have decrease you ll tend to get a threat. And when the choices increase you ll tend to get a reward. Now, I say tend to because there s some boundary conditions and some disclaimers to that. But for example you can have too much choice. You know, if you re trying to choose a car to buy, then choosing from 10 different cars is going to overwhelm you because it s too much uncertainty. So there's a dynamic between these things. But in any given situation you ll tend to get a reward from more Autonomy and a threat from less Autonomy. But there are some other conditions involved. What you ll see overall is when you put the five domains together that there s dynamics between then that are a bit more subtle. You can t maximize all of them all at once. It s more about identifying what's being threatened and how you might offset that. And with the next one, Relatedness, again this is proving itself in the context of projects. That the more project team members feel a rapport and camaraderie with each other, the more productive and the more collaborative they are. Page 6 of 9

7 Absolutely. So Relatedness is an interesting one. Relatedness is a decision that we make about everyone. And the decision is to classify someone as in your in-group or your outgroup. And when you classify someone as in your in-group you're much more likely to share information with them. More likely to collaborate. You're actually more likely to think about what they say to you. You actually think their thoughts. Someone who s in your out-group you don t really process what they say, you don t feel their pain or their emotions, and it s different. So, we tend to classify people as in our out-groups than in our in-group. And from a leadership perspective you want people in that in-group if you want collaboration, and sharing, and working together. Because the alternative isn t pretty. Tell me a little bit about Fairness in the context of Collaboration. Yeah. The surprise here is that Fairness is intrinsically rewarding. The surprise is that Fairness is something that is rewarding irrespective of what you're being fair about. If you ve got pieces of paper and you're sharing those between two people, if you give one person quite a bit more than the other you ll get an unfairness response. And quite a strong response. But the opposite is true. If you share resources between people, even if those resources are irrelevant, you get a reward response when there s a fair exchange. And the reward or threat response from the actual exchange is more significant than the resource. So you can give someone money and that money s not necessarily rewarding if it s given unfairly. Money s not inherently rewarding, it s got to be fair when there's people involved. And so there's this inherent reward or threat function around social fairness. It s very interesting and it really drives a lot of behaviors that we ve not thought about around the law, politics, and many of the more complex social situations we re in. And if our listeners want to know more about NeuroLeadership, what resources would you recommend, David? There's quite a few. NeuroLeadership.org is the site for the field. And you ll find the summit, and the journal, and all of that there. You can download some of the key papers in the field, the papers introducing the field, and that kind of thing. If you go to my website, DavidRock.net, you can see a page on resources there. And all the papers that I ve written or been involved in are all there. You can view those. And I ve got other audio and video on my work as well that you can link to from DavidRock.net. David, the theme of the 2010 NeuroLeadership Summit in Boston was Rethinking Leadership. What were some of the key takeaways from the summit and what should we look forward to in the 2011 summit in San Francisco? Page 7 of 9

8 I ll answer the latter question first. The San Francisco summit I m working on at the moment. And so we re still really getting our head around how to focus the event and what the big ideas will be. I can tell you we ve got some of the biggest names in research in particular from that region. We ve got the founding father of Emotional Regulation, James Gross presenting. We ve got one of the biggest researchers on Belief, Carol Dweck presenting. So we ve got some really interesting and important thinkers coming along this year around Rethinking Leadership was a powerful year. And I think one of the things that we rethought very, very well was how to design a conference, actually. And we worked out a whole different way of organizing and running a conference so that people could digest the ideas. And a big part of that involved really connecting with a lot more people. So there were about 250 people in the group and everyone would have had conversations. Unless they all sort of hid in the corner, the design was that everyone would ve had conversations with at least half the group. Which is a really rare thing. Normally you go to a conference and you end up speaking to just a small number of maybe 10 or 20 people. Right. But actually conversations, and interactions, and discussions with about half the group. So a huge amount of interaction, and in some ways the participants are just as interesting as the presenters. Because the participants are from 20-plus countries and they're in charge of Leadership Development and Change Management, and Project Management. They're involved in these kinds of things throughout the world. So it s really about maximizing the connections between people as well as the scientists. But this year some of the really big things for example this year was around feedback. We got to the bottom of how feedback actually works and how to do it. We got to the bottom of how you design learning experiences so that they actually stick, and looking at the research in that. We looked at the neuroscience of intent intention, and how that works. So, the few really important ideas. And probably the one on making learning stick is probably the one that will stick the most. Every year it seems like a big idea emerges that has resonance throughout. Some of the bigger sessions also have been published in the journal. There's a paper coming out in the third journal. So that s a way for people to dive further into that. Well it is definitely my goal next year to go to the summit. [Laughs] This is one of my all-time plans, to be able to do that, since the first one that you have organized in Italy. I know that one was only by invitation, but I have been definitely following the progress. And again I m just in awe of how fast this field has developed and the great job that you're doing with these summits. Page 8 of 9

9 Dave, could you tell us a title bit more about some of the interesting projects you're working on these days? Well, the institute takes up about half my time, just under half my time. And the other half I m working on my global consulting practice. And in that area, my organization has operations in 24 countries. And we work on organizational change and leadership development. And we re working on some fabulous projects. The big mission usually is changing culture, increasing engagement. And we do that in a whole lot of ways. But personally, I run two or three projects and I look at how you design a change initiative to really work, to really stick. And there s a lot of interesting challenges in that. I m also doing research still and collaborating on a number of research studies. And at the moment I m designing research for next year, looking at different studies we might do around Insight, around Status. I m really interested in the domains of SCARF and how we can research some of the domains of SCARF. So I ve got some studies I m designing. But still at the early stage for that. The biggest project I have to be honest is [Laughs] running the summit every year. It s a huge creative project to convene a three-day event at this level. Very demanding audience too. So that s my big project and each year I ve very relieved when it s over on one level. [Laughs] [Laughs] But very excited to be starting again as well. And I m sure it s a very rewarding experience. Indeed it is. David, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today on the Guerilla Project Management podcast. I really appreciate. My pleasure. Thanks for your interest, and hopefully it s been helpful to other people. So, thanks very much. Page 9 of 9