Dissonance Not to Be Wasted

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

The day I landed, the earthquake hit. The island is only ninety miles from Haiti and we felt the tremor.

I wasn’t in the Caribbean for a vacation. A Latin American client was looking for a place to hold an executive offsite, so I suggested the island I had lived on for four years. With tourism down, both travel and rooms were inexpensive, and the location of the island relative to the company’s offices made it very cost effective to hold our meeting there.

I had put together a very aggressive agenda for this meeting and we found ourselves working 12 to 14 hours a day. When I’m facilitating, I am totally immersed in my work and can barely even find time to respond to emails. let alone surf the news websites. So to be frank, I didn’t even realize the magnitude of what was going on in Haiti.

This island has a large Haitian population, so little by little the news leaked into our meeting room. It wasn’t cleaned our second day because the housekeepers were Haitian and too consumed with worry about their friends and family to show up for work. The third day a relief benefit was held in the building next to ours. By the fourth day, we had all had a minute or two to read about the catastrophe and were quickly becoming aware of the scope of the disaster.

I have many friends on the island from Haiti and had long heard the tales of the horrendous conditions in the country. Several month ago, I wrote a post about Charles, who had survived a harrowing boat trip as a teenager to escape the poverty. One morning two years ago, I had woken up and looked out my window, only to see the coast guard fishing a body out of the ocean. A sloop from Haiti full of people looking for a better life had capsized just a few hundred yards from shore. An estimated eighty bodies were never even found.

With our meeting over and an acknowledged success, I flew back to the U.S. Finally, I had a chance to catch up on the news I had missed. It was even far worse than I could have imagined. The numbers of the dead and displaced were incomprehensible. Gut-wrenching pictures of injured children were all over the major internet news sites. The day I returned, a 6.1 aftershock hit the island. There was not much additional physical damage, journalists reported, but the psychic trauma to an already shaken people was huge.

Such calamities stop us in our tracks. They halt the automatic processing of our brains and activate the areas responsible for seeing the whole. We’re pulled back to a vantage point that changes our perspective on everything. The dissonance primes us for a change in what we value and how we behave.

I have felt numb since my return and nothing seems quite the same. I look around my house and wonder why I ever thought I needed all of the stuff I’ve accumulated. I listen to my daughters bicker as close sibling will do, and question how I ever could’ve been irritated by it. I reflect on the worries that used to seem so all consuming and feel ashamed.

This morning I read about the debate over whether we should send more financial aid to Haiti–we currently give about 97 cents per American. Many feel the country is so far gone that it’s just a waste of money. Others write that such handouts diminish the spirit of industry needed to turn the country around.

I also read about Goldman Sachs’ near record profit, just a small fraction of which, if invested in Haiti, could transform the lives of its people.  I then thought about Lloyd Blankfein’s comment that the firm was doing God’s work.

Later when I was driving my daughters to school, I must have committed some heinous traffic sin, for another motorists made an obscene gesture. When I then pulled up at a light next to him, he refused to look in my direction. When eye contact is made, it’s hard not to empathize and see the other person as a human being like yourself.

Haiti’s earthquake is one of Obama’s “teachable moments.” It should change everything, from the tone of our political debate over issues like healthcare to the unproductive squabbling in our business organizations. We need to focus on what’s fundamentally important to us as human beings.

First, though,we need to stop and look each other in the eye.

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What Can Brain Science Teach Us About Nasal Spray and Accountability?

Sunday, January 10th, 2010

In a recent study, researchers found that the neuropeptide Oxytocin leads to more trusting behavior, even in relationships where there’s built in conflict. Subjects that received Oxytocin through a nasal spray displayed more trust in the classic game Prisoners’ Dilemma than those that were administered just a placebo.

In Prisoners’ Dilemma, the logical bet is for both prisoners to look out for themselves and not depend on the other one being trustworthy. It’s a particularly interesting game for business because it mirrors life in most organizations. Each member stands to benefit from collective action, if everyone else is trustworthy. But if they’re not, looking out for number one is often the safer strategy. Or as a client once put it, “If it’s a question of my team being successful or sending my son to college, it’s a no brainer.”

Because of this, leaders have long struggled with the issue of trust, but now through the miracle of modern science, we have a solution. Everyone just needs a little sniff of Oxytocin nasal spray, which is apparently available on the internet for as little as $29.95 for a two week supply. That’s quite a bit cheaper than hiring a team building consultant.

Tempting as it may be, this is precisely the kind of lesson we don’t want to learn from brain science. It’s not only that the same spray could be used for dishonest purposes–imagine if it were pumped into the showrooms of used car dealers, but that we’re drawing the wrong kind of lessons from the latest discoveries. The real learning is that our behavior is driven less by the nature of any situation we may find ourselves in, than by the way we think about the situation. Change the thinking and we change the behavior, and we can it do perfectly well without recourse to pharmaceuticals.

Recently, one of my clients was distressed by the unwillingness of his direct reports to be held accountable. As a result, he was focused on how to improve the organization’s measurement systems and how to establish clear consequences for non-performance. While the right kind of measures are critical for any business and while people should not be immune from the consequences of a failure to perform, accountability is less of a problem to be solved than it is a symptom of a more basic issue.

When I talked to the direct reports, they weren’t unwilling to be held accountable. They just didn’t agree with what they were being held accountable for. Their objectives were set top down, and they felt that they didn’t match the reality of their businesses. Much as they respected and even admired their boss, they were convinced he was too far removed from operations to understand what they were up against. The perceptions of each were different and in conflict.

Our logical minds are deluded into either/or thinking. In fact, one of Aristotle’s laws of logic mandates that there can be no middle ground–something is either the case or it is not.  Either the objectives are fair or they’re not. Either the boss is right or the employees are. But when we move beyond logic and incorporate how the mind works, we appreciate that both the manager and his direct reports are right, from their point of view.

The solution to this disconnect is not tighter measures and more draconian consequences. It’s impossible to build an infallible system for accountability and threats of punishment hardly motivate people to give their all for the business. Instead, the conflict should be taken as an opportunity to rethink the business from the top down.

Our ideas are instantiated  in neural networks arranged hierarchically in the brain. Those at higher levels drive decision-making and behavior at lower levels that are in harmony with them. If we get agreement at the highest levels, operational conflicts disappear.

When I pulled together my client and his team to address the conflict over accountability, we started by agreeing on a vision for the business and a strategy to achieve it.  With everyone in sync on what they wanted to accomplish and how best to do it, the objectives and how to ensure they were met just fell out naturally. Even better, the managers now worked toward achieving their objectives because they wanted to, not because they were afraid of the consequences if they didn’t. The result was a tighter and more efficient organization, and far more engagement from everyone. In just a quarter, performance improved significantly.

A squirt of nasal spray might have made the direct reports more trusting of their boss and the boss more trusting of his people. But it wouldn’t have made the direct reports able to achieve objectives that didn’t fit their businesses. The best chance of improving performance is to address how people think at the highest level.

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