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This is your IdeaShape newsletter, July 2003, with ideas on leadership
and life for executives, managers, consultants, and executive coaches.
By Pam Fox Rollin, IdeaShape Coaching & Consulting
http://www.ideashape.com

Contents
A. Big Idea
B. Action Challenge
C. Resources
D. Note from Pam

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A. Big Idea:

"The basic, plain truth is that we enter the century of
interplanetary exploration with an original Paleolithic mind."
-- Col. Fernando Giancotti

"The key to understanding how the modern mind works is to realize that its circuits were not designed to solve the day-to-day problems of a modern American."
-- Leda Cosmides and John Tooby

"Your first job is to be a good mammal -- eat, sleep, mate, play."
-- Laura Day

Have you ever stopped in the middle of scanning 300 emails, juggling your
calendar around yet another moved meeting, ruminating on how to vet
scores of potential vendors, ignoring the blinking light on your phone,
while throwing back your third double latte, and thought,
"Maybe I'm just not cut out for this?!"

Of course not. None of us are. We evolved to survive and reproduce on
African savannahs, not to scrutinize spreadsheets or delegate effectively.

Evidence is mounting that our problem-solving horsepower depends
less on general intellectual capability than on modules that handle
very specific cognitive operations, such as recognizing faces or
navigating certain types of social interactions. As Bjorkland says,
if all types of learning were equally easy, we would be overwhelmed
by stimulation. Instead, we come into the world with distinctive
abilities to acquire, store, and process information relevant for solving
very specific problems... problems faced 50,000 years ago, which
map imperfectly to challenges today.

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B. Action Challenge: When would it be useful to remember you're dealing
with humans?

1. When you're tempted to turn up the heat

We all know that fight, flight, or freeze are typical reactions to sudden
unwanted stress. These are a useful suite of responses to threats by lions, tigers, and bears, far less useful to attacks from bosses, customers, and competitors. Emotional stress causes cognitive narrowing -- failure to notice peripheral data and reliance on existing beliefs. On a group level, this "threat rigidity" tends to decrease intergroup communication (e.g., with other functions) and emphasize same-team relationships, but with pressure for uniformity (groupthink). So, if you want your team to act thoughtfully and creatively -- to activate higher parts of their brains -- use your own emotional intelligence to create sufficient perceived safety for your team to respond thoughtfully to legitimate performance stress.

2. When you need to work through a conflict

Our ancestors lived close to the edge of survival (as do millions of people
in the world today). Any small calamity -- a delay in the rain, a bad fall --
could mean death. So, we are primed to look for the negative and get busy
averting any possible loss. Sound like any meetings you've attended lately?
Furthermore, our wiring is "open-loop"; moods are contagious. All it takes
is one foul mood (especially the leader's) to make the herd skittish.
Our conflicts rapidly escalate beyond what "the facts" would warrant --
alert to a potential loss one person takes a negative tack, triggering fear
in the other, priming both to narrow their perspectives and rigidify their positions, and soon you've got fight, flight, or freeze, rather than a mutual exploration of interests. On the other hand, it takes two to tango. Research shows that if one person stays calm and open, changes are much greater that others will become constructive.

3. When you'd like to learn something

Our brains evolved to adapt most readily in childhood, to accommodate a
wide range of possible physical and culture environments. We CAN learn
"new tricks" as adults, but that learning requires more energy -- especially the "soft skills." The parts of our brain that handles purely cognitive processing learns very quickly. However, rewiring our emotional reactions and behavioral responses is more difficult. What's needed are positive alternatives (imagining how else you could handle a situation that typically "hooks" you) and practice. As Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz observe, top athletes spend a lot of time practicing and little time performing, while business leaders spend no time practicing and all of their time performing. Here's where a coach can be especially useful in helping you identify triggers to behavior you'd like to change, consider alternative responses, visualize your preferred response (as an athlete visualizes a race), set up a discipline of practicing the new way (even though it feels awkward at first), and dealing with other people's responses to your new behavior.

4. When you need to make decisions quickly

There's a huge literature available on what our brains tend to do to manage
the complexity of decision-making. The Giancotti and Nicholson articles below highlight some of the typical challenges for leaders, including
- classifying problems (and people) prematurely
- ignoring indirect consequences
- weighting confidence over reasoning
- neglecting to look beyond our habitual frames of reference

5. When you're looking for allies

The good news is we're hardwired to make allies. Alliances were absolutely
critical to our ancestors for hunting large game, sharing food, etc. Alliances
strengthen through process of exchange, especially exchange that depends on trust to be fulfilled. For example, I support you on your job req... will you support me the next time I want to hire into my group? Yet some of the success factors for paleolithic alliance-formation may translate poorly today. For example, we're wired to like people who seem like us and make very fast judgments about whether people we meet are "in" or "out". That may lead us to prematurely write off potential allies or hire people who look and think just like us. 

6. When you want to get the word out

Humans are primed to hear and remember stories. Gossip was a survival
strategy (it helped to know who found the hot fishing spot), and stories are
the currency of gossip. Despite our modern fondness for hard data,
stories are what race through an organization. Again, extensive research
demonstrates that short stories are the shortest distance between your mouth and your team's ears. Plus, when stories and data conflict, people are more likely to believe the story. So, if you want to make your case,
go beyond the data to craft the story -- characters, plot, twists, moral.

7. When you want to replenish your energy

The stress produced by living in the modern era with an ancient brain
means we need to take even better care of ourselves so that we can handle
challenges productively and avoid the proven damaging consequences of consistently elevated stress. When our Paleolithic ancestors needed to recharge, they were likely to grab a fruit, drink from a stream, get extra sleep, or enjoy some laughs with sympatico tribemembers. So, how smart is it for us to grab a bag of chips, chug a coke, stay up with artificial light (after being inside all day), and catch up with friends by email?

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C. Resources

"Strategic Leadership and the Narrow Mind:
What We Don't Do Well and Why"
by Col. Fernando Giancotti
www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/au-24/giancotti.pdf
-- Excellent brief summary of the challenges of 21st century
complexity for our pre-agriculture brains.

"How Hardwired is Human Behavior?"
by Nigel Nicholson, HBR, July/Aug 98
http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/b02/en/common/item_detail.jhtml?id=98406
-- Wide-ranging invitation to the intriguing applications of
evolutionary psychology to modern organizational life.

"How Evolutionary Psychology Can Contribute to Group Process Research"
by Joseph M. Whitmeyer, 2002
www.uncc.edu/jwhitmey/EP_for_GP.pdf
-- How ancestral patterns around status, identity, and exchange
are expressed in teams today.

"Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence"
by Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee, 2002
-- This easy read makes the case for emotion-savvy leadership.

If you're interested in delving into the fascinating and contentious world
of evolutionary psychology, here are a few starting places:
http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html
www.pitt.edu/~scherf/Develop_032/Bjorklund.pdf
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/listmania/list-browse/-/UF9GLQNJQZR/qid=1058935970

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D. Note from Pam

My first introduction to this topic came many years ago from my dad.
Recently retired, for 48 years he was a developmental optometrist,
a specialist in how children and adults perceive and process visual information. Highly respected professionally, his greatest joy has been invitations to the college graduations of children who, at some point in their schooling, were considered too stupid, disruptive, or lazy to finish grade school. 

Instead, my dad saw in them visual systems well-adapted for another era.
Their processing was just not well-adapted for making meaning from
small static squiggles on paper, chalkboard, or screen (such as you are reading now). That meant failure at school, with the accompanying hit to self-esteem. Often, these "slow" children proved bright, focused, and energetic when engaged to learn in ways that suit their perception and processing capabilities. About 15% of the population have similar, mostly undetected, visual processing difficulties, defective relative to the set-up of modern classrooms and workplaces. When detected in children or adults, these deficiencies can often be successfully addressed.

How is this relevant to you as a leader? Quite directly, figure that some
portion of your team, clients, and colleagues experience difficulties in
visual processing; for starters, you can ask whether they prefer to receive
written materials or to talk through the issues. Also, more broadly, be aware
that you probably handle some types of perception and processing tasks
a little differently from the rest of the people in the room... yet another reason to get curious when others disagree with your perspectives.

Finally, how my father treated his thousands of patients would make
emotional intelligence guru Daniel Goleman cheer: he believed passionately
in their capabilities and worth, he challenged them to imagine and pursue their highest aspirations, and he worked very very hard to give each of them the best professional expertise his field could offer. Sure makes me proud
as a daughter and humble as a coach. Thanks, Dad.

You receive this email every month or so with ideas and resources
you can use to shape your success. Some of these ideas may
strike you as obvious... I invite you to step back and look at
how this is actually working in your life. Others may seem
far out... I invite you to consider how much choice you
actually have. If you'd like to get in touch about any of this,
please email me. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Warm regards,
Pam

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