Archive for the ‘personal change’ Category
Thursday, August 6th, 2009
By Rick Grbavac
An article by science and tech writer Jonah Lehrer in the online Boston Globe describes studies that point to the fact that grit and perseverance are better predictors of success than intelligence. I found it interesting that, because IQ is relatively quick and easy to identify, researchers focused their attention on raising IQ and disregarded focusing on values of long-term development of talent.
Carol S. Dweck, psychologist at Stanford University, has said, ” One of the most important elements is teaching kids that talent takes time to develop, and requires continuous effort.” She refers to this as a “growth mindset.” Dweck compares this view with the “fixed mindset,” the belief that achievement results from abilities we are born with. “A child with the fixed mindset is much more likely to give up when they encounter a challenging obstacle, like algebra, since they assume that they’re just not up to the task,” says Dweck.
“..talent takes time to develop, and requires continuous effort.” If you want to develop the high-performing organization, it is not done with the fire hose approach. It takes some time to develop the skills, grit and determination to be successful.
Lehrer goes on to say that praise for determination, trying, effort and grit are much better in the long run rather than praising for intelligence. This research has great relevance for our education system and for our business talent development. It also supports Cerebyte’s drip approach to becoming great at just about anything.
Posted in US education, neuroscience, personal change | No Comments »
Wednesday, June 17th, 2009
By William Seidman
We have observed that there is a noticeable change in the speed and quality of learning when people are feeling good about themselves. Kim Cameron in his book Positive Leadership: Strategies for Extraordinary Performance supports this.
Now there is more specific research that shows that a good mood makes learning more effective . A University of Toronto study by Drs. Taylor W. Schmitz, . Eve de Rosa, and Adam K. Anderson, “Opposing Influences of Affective State Valence on Visual Cortical Encoding,” strongly suggests that “seeing the world through rose-colored glasses is more biological reality than metaphor.”
The study team used functional magnetic resonance imaging to look at how the visual cortex processes information when the subject is in a good, bad, or neutral mood. Good moods enhance the size of the window through which we see the world. A bad mood shrinks creativity and productivity. This information is critical in terms of creating an organizational culture worth having.
For the good of your organization, learn to think positively!
Tags: Adam K. Anderson, creativity, Eve de Rosa, functional magnetic resonance imaging, Kim Cameron, organizational culture, positive leadership, positive thinking, productivity, rose-colored glasses, Taylor Schmitz
Posted in affirmations, business, management consulting, neuroleadership, neuroscience, organizational change, personal change, positive leadership | No Comments »
Monday, June 8th, 2009
By Michael McCauley
As we work with companies to maximize their performance we often encounter a rather odd phenomenon: once the people in an organization have changed their behavior and internalized the new way of doing things, they deny ever having done things the old way. Even when we show them data that clearly illustrates the way they used to do things, they still deny that they ever engaged in the old, now outdated, behaviors. They claim that they have always done things the “right” way - i.e., the way they do them now. How can that be?
I’ve been reading an interesting book, Why We Make Mistakes by Joseph Hallinan . Hallinan finds that this tendency to see and remember our actions in self-serving ways is so ingrained, and so subtle, that we often have no idea we’re doing it. He cites a study of recent high school graduates now attending a local college. They were asked to recall their high school grades; researchers compared their remembered grades against the actual transcripts.
They found that no less than 29% of the recalled grades were wrong and far more grades were shifted up than down. This combined with other studies shows a significant predisposition for people to reconstruct their memories in positive, self-flattering ways.
These findings are confirmed by Princeton Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman . He has found that that most people, after they change their mind or behavior, reconstruct their own past opinions in such a way as to truly believe that they always thought or acted in a certain way.
So, it seems that the responses we encounter are perfectly natural - people really don’t remember ever doing things the “old” way. It seems that we all wear “rose colored glasses” -they’re probably hard-wired, and we don’t even know it.
Tags: Daniel Kahneman, Joseph Hallinan, organizational changes, personal change, Princeton, rose-colored glasses, Why We Make Mistakes
Posted in neuroscience, organizational change, personal change | No Comments »
Sunday, June 7th, 2009
By Michael McCauley
Is failure actually good for you? Recent studies by Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck indicate that it is. For forty years she has studied how people handle failure, and her research has led her to identify two distinct mindsets that dramatically influence how we react to failure. She’s recently published a new book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, which explains her findings.
A “fixed mindset” is grounded in the belief that talent is genetic - you’re a born artist, baseball pitcher, or math wiz. People with a fixed mindset believe that they are entitled to success without much effort and regard failure as a personal affront. Conversely, a “growth mindset” assumes that no talent is entirely innate and that effort and learning make everything possible. Since the ego isn’t on the line as much, the growth mindset sees failure as opportunity rather than insult.
In her studies, Dr. Dweck tracked and compared brain waves of subjects with both growth and fixed mindsets. She found that when those with a growth mindset fail at something, they actually enter a more focused mental state as they try to figure out their mistake and how to learn from it. On the other hand, those with a fixed mindset never enter this focused state of learning and show little, if any, advancement from failure. In essence, fixed mindset people don’t learn from their mistakes.
Antoine Bechara, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at University of Southern California, has gone further and actually isolated the spots in the brain that are responsible for our fear of failure and our fear of success. These are the points in the brain where we debate risk and reward. By studying brainwaves emanating from these two locations, Dr. Bechara has found that in a normally functioning brain, failure is welcomed as an opportunity for learning, and for strengthening us.
What we learn from these studies is that failure is normal, healthy and necessary to learning. Great coaches and teachers know this, and they give us the opportunities we need to fail in a controlled environment so that we can learn and grow.
Tags: brain, brainwaves, Dr. Antoine Bechara, Dr. Carol Dweck, failure, fixed mindset, growth mindset, Mindset, risk and reward, Stanford University, success, talent, USC
Posted in neuroscience, personal change | No Comments »
Saturday, June 6th, 2009
By William Seidman
Recently, I had the opportunity to work with Gerry Sindell of Thought Leaders International. Gerry is an expert at helping people transform their loose, disorganized ideas into concrete products, particularly when it comes to writing. In his blog (May 14, 2009) he writes, “I have helped a lot of smart people become successful authors and leaders, and one of my first rules for clients is: you must tell your audience as quickly as possible who you are.”
He wrote The Genius Machine about his methods; it got a great review in Time . Gerry is particularly skilled at seeing the things that others do not, and turning his visions into positive work.
Tags: Gerry Sindell, Thought Leaders International
Posted in leadership, management consulting, optimization, personal change | No Comments »
Wednesday, May 13th, 2009
By William Seidman
Recently, I had the good fortune to work again with writer and sales expert (at Portfolio Decisionware) Karen Stevens and ShadeTree Technology’s founder and CEO, Jim Banks. These are two great sales people. They are true positive deviants: they’re unusually successful at what they do, consistently outperform, and think freshly and creatively.
It is amazing to me how complete and conscious their mental models of the sales process are. I was talking with Jim while he showed me features of his technology on his website. I couldn’t follow him because he was thinking so fast and he was showing me only the surface aspects of his approach. There’s a lot to learn!
I did some Cerebyte-style Wisdom Discovery - a piece-by-piece analysis of what she does and how she does it - with Karen, and she revealed a completely different model of sales: a model based on being a detective. Turns out that detective work greatly enhances results…
Positive deviants are just incredible-they think in such different ways. Getting their mental models is not really the issue; getting others to pay attention to their thinking is the real challenge.
Tags: Cerebyte, Jim Banks, Karen Stevens, outperform, PDWare, Portfolio Decisionware, positive deviance, Sales, ShadeTree Technology, wisdom discovery
Posted in best practices, management consulting, organizational change, personal change, positive deviance, positive deviants, wisdom discovery | No Comments »
Tuesday, May 12th, 2009
By William Seidman
Last week, the New York Times ran an interesting article on attention, specifically on Winfred Gallagher’s book Rapt: Attention on the Focused Life. Some conversations I subsequently had got me thinking about attention. One discussion I had was about a teaching technique that spends a lot of time focusing on what people are doing wrong. A reasonable challenge to that theory of learning is, “If you’re focussing on what you’re doing wrong, how will you learn to do it right?” A more complex and complete response has to do with the neuroscience of attention - which magicians/performance artists Penn and Teller know quite a bit about.
Are any of you golfers? Have you ever gone to the tee and said to yourself, “Don’t slice, don’t slice!” What do you immediately do? You slice. It is the same idea for a well-known expression: “Playing the game not to lose.” In sports, and, it turns out, in inherited wealth (check out Lee Brower’s work), when you play a game defensively, you usually lose.
Why is this? When you spend most of your mental resources on what’s wrong, you are getting better at the wrong thing. Instead, we need to focus on the positive - or, how to do the job right.
Tags: attention, attentiveness, defensive play, golf, inherited wealth, Lee Brower, neuroscience of attention, Penn and Teller, Winfred Gallagher
Posted in best practices, business, neuroscience, personal change, positive leadership | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 29th, 2009
By William Seidman
Tribal knowledge is important, and important to the work of training managers. Seth Godin explains it here (the video is 12 minutes long). The transmittal of tribal knowledge was on our minds at the International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI)’s annual meeting earlier this month in Orlando, Florida. I attended a presentation by Jon Revelos . The focus of the training was the use of stories in training. There was a great discussion about the value of story-based learning when holding and delivering critical tribal knowledge. In the presentation, we talked about ways to show the value of a narrative to management by emphasizing positive deviant stories. Positive deviance stories proved increasingly valuable because they are richer in content and have a more direct connection to performance. We also talked about the use of stories when motivating and sustaining responses, which effectively connects stories to impact.
Jon is now driving a compliance training program — these can be pretty dry. He is looking for ways to bring stories into compliance training. Again, positive deviants are an opportunity because they treat compliance as a fundamental tool to achieving a greater social good. All of this is consistent with our work with positive deviance, and it was an altogether interesting and exciting presentation.
Tags: ISPI, Jon Revelos, positive deviance, positive deviant stories, Seth Godin, story-based learning, tribal knowledge
Posted in organizational change, personal change, positive deviance, positive deviants, story-based learning, wisdom transfer | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 15th, 2009
By Michael McCauley
I read a fascinating article recently by Michael Grunwald in Time magazine. It details how the Obama administration is using the science of change and behavioral economics to move the country in the desired direction. They base their approach on the latest behavioral research, including the findings behind recent best sellers Influence by psychologist Robert Cialdini, Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely, and Nudge by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman. The approach can be summarized in 4 steps:
Step 1: Make it Clear. Recent studies suggest that better information - in this case information about energy use, diet, our mortgages and credit card rates - helps people make better choices. For example, what if every public company was required to provide a standardized one-page summary of financial information, rather than the voluminous annual reports they provide now? Average people would then be able to compare one company against another and make informed investment choices.
Step 2: Make it Easy. Life is complicated and, given the opportunity, most people tend to take the easy path. For example, in one study, only 36% of women joined a 401(k) plan when they had to sign up for it, but when they were automatically enrolled and had to specifically opt out in order to decline, 86% participated.
Step 3: Make it Popular. Behavioral studies show that nothing drives personal choice quite like the power of conformity. Research shows that homeowners are most likely to save energy and recycle when they think everyone else is doing it, too. The Obama campaign’s ”Get Out The Vote” drive last summer was able to mobilize millions of people with a simple message - “a record turnout is expected.”
Step 4: Make it Mandatory. If all else fails, pass laws that mandate the desired behavior. Laws requiring efficient appliances, health insurance or limits on carbon emissions are examples. Notice that this is seen as a last resort, not the first line of defense. Numerous studies show that mandatory “command and control systems” that require certain behaviors are often vigorously resisted. It is useful only when the all other options (i.e., steps 1-3) fail to result in the desired transformation.
This behavioral approach to change is significantly different from the approaches taken by previous administrations. It will be interesting to watch the results.
Tags: behavioral approach to change, behavorial economics, Dan Ariely, Daniel Kahneman, Michael Grunwald, Obama administration, Robert Cialdini, science of change, Time Magazine
Posted in getting change to "stick", management consulting, neuroleadership, neuroscience, organizational change, personal change | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 8th, 2009
By William Seidman with Peter Guttchen
Peter Guttchen and his company, ORG, Organizational Resources Group, are long-time partners of Cerebyte. Their program “IdeaNet” was developed for them by Cerebyte. We asked him to write about his program for screening for colorectal cancer. It’s exciting and has the potential to positively affect so many lives. From Peter:
We work closely with the ACS, the American Cancer Society, to mobilize communities to increase their screening rates for colorectal cancer.
Guidelines call for people 50 years and older to get screened for CRC. In communities where screening rates are high, mortality rates from CRC is much lower.
ORG and ACS are initially targeting communities in Oregon and Washington with the lowest rates of screening.
To be successful, we must bring together community organizers, public health officials, hospitals, insurers, doctors, and others.
We are working on developing a model to support communities to mobilize these diverse (and sometimes competing) interests to take action to increase screening rates.
Once a proven model is developed, and initial results are encouraging, ORG and ACS will use its IdeaNet to support similar initiatives in additional communities.
This effort promises to save lives, reduce health care costs, and improve the quality of life for families and communities nationwide. We’re very excited about it.
Thanks to Peter for sharing with our blog’s readers this information about one of his and Organizational Resources Group’s next big projects.
Tags: American Cancer Society, Cancer screening, Cerebyte, colorectal cancer, IdeaNet, Organizational Resources Group, Peter Guttchen
Posted in best practices, digital coaching technology, organizational change, personal change, persuasive technology | No Comments »
