Strategy. Innovation. Brand.
Brain Networks – Part 2
Everything is networked.
Yesterday (and in earlier articles here and here), we talked about two brain networks – default and reward – and their implications for organizational behavior. Today, let’s take on two more networks – affect and control – and see how they work in the office. Again, I’ll draw on a recent HBR article by Adam Waytz and Malia Mason.
The affect network activates when people experience emotions. You might think that we consciously recognize something and then feel some emotion about it. That’s true sometimes but often it’s the other way round, with the affect network leading the way. You see a snake and your pulse quickens. Your brain interprets this as fear. Your body – not your brain — reacts to the external stimulus. Your brain reacts to your body’s reaction. (Conceptually, this is similar to System 1 vs. System 2, and thinking with your body).
How does this effect behavior at the office? Well, did your gut ever tell you something? As Waytz and Mason point out, “A hunch is not some mystical sixth sense. It’s a real neurological response that manifests itself physically”. In other words, your affect network is telling you something based on what your body is telling the affect network.
I used to think that I should rationally analyze every key decision and generally ignore my gut feel. Gut feel was irrational and emotional; better to use logic and reason. But Waytz and Mason point out that, “…a mounting body of neurological evidence suggests that emotional impulses should not be ignored. The affect network fast-tracks decision making and helps us process information that may include too many variables.” It’s not obvious how your gut feel reaches your conscious mind, but it often gets there for a good reason. Don’t ignore it.
Finally, there’s the control network that helps people focus their attention and rationally consider long-term decisions. As I understand it, it seems very similar to what Daniel Kahneman calls System 2. The control network “… aligns our brain activity and our behavior with our goals.”
The control network is at the opposite end of the spectrum from the default network. Where the default network activates when you unhook, the control network hooks in and manages all the other networks. The more your have of one, the less you have of the other – similar to focus and creativity.
The control network is rational and also helps us ration our resources. In particular, it rations our attention and helps us focus on those things that are most important to achieving our goals. If you’re like most people, there’s a lot of stuff competing for your attention. As Waytz and Mason put it the control network has “…a tricky attention-management challenge…. On one hand, it needs to prevent distractions from every shiny object thrown in front of us. On the other hand, it needs to let us respond when one of those shiny objects is an opportunity or an important demand”.
The control network has a tough job and can easily get overloaded if there are too many bright shiny objects. This reinforces some traditional wisdom: to execute effectively, organizations should limit their goals to a “manageable few”. It also suggests that we should beware of multitasking. Pursuing multiple tasks at once simply overloads the control network and makes effective rationing impossible. As the authors point out, “Success as a leader requires, first and foremost, creating just a few clear priorities and gathering the courage to eliminate or outsource less important tasks and goals”.
What does all this mean? Well, it’s goes back to what your mother taught you. First, when your emotions tell you something, there’s usually a reason. Second, do only a few things but do them well. It’s nice the neuroscience backs up dear old Mom.
Brain Networks At The Office
Quick! Activate the default network!
When you’re “zoned out”, your brain’s default network kicks in and processes stuff. What kind of stuff? Well, not new stuff because you’re zoned out and no new stuff is coming in. You’ve unhooked yourself from the grid and the only thing your brain can work on is stuff that’s already in your brain. It’s like mentally chewing your cud.
It turns out the default network contributes in very important ways to creativity. As Adam Waytz and Malia Mason point out in a recent issue of Harvard Business Review, the default network is “… responsible for one of our most prized abilities: transcendence. The capacity to envision what it’s like to be in a different place, a different time, a different person’s head, or a different world altogether is unique to humans….”
To create creative environments, managers are beginning to realize the importance of allowing employees to “unhook” and activate their default networks. Unfocused free time is critical to creative thinking and innovation. As I’ve pointed out before, too much focus can kill creativity. Waytz and Mason point out that many of the “creative time off” programs at companies like Google may still miss the mark. They focus on quantity of time off, rather than quality. The authors argue that it may be better to focus on “total detachment” rather than the number of days off. The idea is to “unfocus” and activate the default network rather than to shift focus to a project of personal interest.
In addition to the default network, Waytz and Mason identify three other brain networks that can contribute to improved performance and productivity. These are: the reward network, the affect network, and the control network. Let’s look at the reward network today. We’ll visit the affect and control networks tomorrow.
Waytz and Mason compare the reward network to a hedonometer, a hypothetical instrument that could “…measure the amount of pleasure or displeasure we feel in response to any stimulus”. The reward network “…reliably activates in response to things that evoke enjoyment and deactivates in response to things that reduce enjoyment”.
In animals, the reward network activates when the animal encounters something– like food or water — that has clear survival value. The same is true of humans. But there’s more to the human reward system. Unlike animals, the human reward system activates for “secondary” rewards – those that have no direct survival value.
Money is clearly an important secondary reward, but numerous, non-monetary secondary rewards also exist. Some are obvious, like status and recognition. Others are less obvious, like fairness. Waytz and Mason argue that employees’ reward systems light up when they perceive their organization to be fair. When the organization is perceived to be unfair, the reward system dims and employees lose motivation. This is true both for employees who benefit from the unfairness and for those who suffer from it. As Waytz and Mason put it, “A fair environment is a reward to people regardless of their standing”.
So how do you fine tune the reward system? Both fairness and transparency are important. Somewhat surprisingly, so is the expectation of learning. When employees expect that they will learn something, the reward system activates and motivation rises. Goals are also important but Waytz and Mason argue that broad goals that provide employees some room to maneuver activate the reward network more effectively than narrowly defined, overly stringent goals that leave little room for judgment.
And what about money? Well, it can be useful. But Waytz and Mason conclude that, “Any number of things employers can do ‘on the cheap’—fostering a culture of fairness and cooperation, offering opportunities for people to engage their curiosity, and providing plenty of social approval—will motivate employees as much if not more [than money]”. So think about money in your reward structure … but not too much.
Will Social Media Make You Crazy?
This person has been edited.
Social media has been getting a bad rap in the press recently. First, there’s The Innovation of Loneliness, a terrific short film (just over four minutes) by Shimi Cohen. It suggests that one of the key differences between real life and social-media life is the ability to edit. We can edit ourselves on social media and put our best foot forward. Not so in real life and, according to Cohen, that’s what makes real-life superior. Simply put: you interact with real people, not edited people.
Cohen — whose film is based on Sherry Turkle’s book Alone Together – urges us to slow down and have actual conversations with others. He also explains (though never names) the concept of Dunbar’s Number – that humans naturally organize themselves into groups of 150 or less. He implies that any group larger than 150 is too much for the human mind to handle. So what’s the point of having, say, 500 friends on Facebook?
Cohen’s film reminded me of the many articles I’ve read on mindfulness recently. For instance, Scientific American Mind recently led with mindfulness as its cover story. I’ve also been reading Mindfulness for Beginners by Jon Kabat-Zinn. The common thread is the admonition to slow down and, as Kabat-Zinn phrases it, “reclaim the present moment.” These writings don’t specifically suggest that social media is bad for you but it’s an easy conclusion to draw.
A research article recently published in the Public Library of Science (PLoS) is much more specific. In fact, its title pretty much says it all: “Facebook Use Predicts Declines in Subjective Well-Being Among Young Adults”. (The original research paper is here. For non-technical summaries, click here for an article from The Economist or here for one from the L.A. Times).
The study tracked 82 young people as they used Facebook. They were also asked to report their “satisfaction with life” at the beginning and end of the study. Bottom line: “…the more they used Facebook [during the study period], the more their life satisfaction levels declined over time.”
The PLoS study doesn’t identify the causes in decline of life satisfaction. But The Economist points to an earlier study to identify a likely culprit. The study, conducted in Germany, found that “…the most common emotion aroused by using Facebook is envy”. The Economist makes essentially the same point that Shimi Cohen does:
Endlessly comparing themselves with peers who have doctored their photographs, amplified their achievements and plagiarised their bons mots can leave Facebook’s users more than a little green-eyed. Real-life encounters, by contrast, are more WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get).
So should we drop social media? As I wrote several months ago, I still think it’s a good way to stay in touch with our “Christmas card friends” – those friends whom we like but don’t see very often. For our bosom buddies, on the other hand, it’s probably better to just slow down and have a nice, mindful heart-to-heart conversation.
Brain Porn
This is your brain on brain porn.
I like to think about our brains. The way the brain functions influences our creativity and communication. These influence our ability to innovate. Innovation influences our business success. It’s all linked together in one continuum, though teasing out how the links actually work is exceedingly difficult.
Since I’m not a neuroscientist by training, I read science-for-the-layperson materials. I enjoy Oliver Sacks, Daniel Kahneman, Peter Facione, Christopher Chabris, Daniel Simons, James Surowiecki, Steven Pinker, and James Gleick to name a few. But I often wonder just how much of what I read is accurate. Is some of it dumbed down for the non-scientist? What can we trust and what should we be suspicious of?
It turns out that there’s a lot of “brain porn” out there. Also known as “folk neuroscience”, this stuff oversimplifies and gives a false sense of certitude. It seems so clear, for instance, that a man who is short on oxytocin will have a rocky romantic life. After all, oxytocin is the “love hormone”. If you don’t have enough, how good a lover can you be?
We humans love to make up stories to explain cause and effect. Some of our stories are even true. In many cases, however, we don’t really know what causes what. It’s complicated. Still, we have a deep-seated need to create backstories that explain why we are the way we are. Neuroscience fits our need perfectly; it appears to give ultimate explanations. We behave a certain way because we’re “hardwired” to do so. We have an imbalance in our brain chemistry and therefore we behave antisocially (or immaturely or irrationally or generously, etc.)
Our desire for an explanation is also a desire for a cure. If an imbalance in our brain chemistry causes antisocial behavior, then all we have to do is learn how to rebalance our brain chemistry. As in A Clockwork Orange, we might turn ultraviolent criminals into well-behaved citizens. All we need to do is understand the brain better and we can make ourselves “better”. A fundamental question is: who gets to define “better”?
So how wrong is brain porn? Vaughan Bell wrote an excellent article in The Guardian that itemizes some basic misunderstandings. For instance, it’s not true that the left-brain is rational and the right-brain creative. We really do need both sides of our brains if we want to be either rational or creative. Similarly, video games don’t “rewire” our brains into some permanently demented state. The brain is constantly changing. Video games may contribute some new connections but so does everything else we do. We can’t get stuck in video game dementia any more than our eyes can get stuck when we cross them.
Despite the brain porn out there, we can still learn a lot about behavior and creativity from neuroscience. In the next few days, for instance, I’ll review an article titled “Your Brain At Work” that really can teach us how to be more effective leaders and managers. I’ll do my best to write about neuroscience that’s well documented and substantiated. I believe there’s a lot of wheat out there. We just need to separate it from the chaff.
Beware The Toy That Destroys
It’s just a toy.
As Clayton Christensen pointed out more than a decade ago, disruptive technologies are often seen as inferior to the technologies they replace. Leading companies can easily dismiss them as toys and ignore them. That’s when the trouble starts.
We’ve seen two examples of this phenomenon in the last week. The first is BlackBerry. Just four years ago, the company had 51% of the North American market for smartphones. Today, it has 3.4%.
There are, of course, many factors behind the decline, but I’d have to guess that the iPhone is the primary disrupter. Here’s how the New York Times describes BlackBerry’s response to the iPhone, “…BlackBerry insiders and executives viewed the iPhone as more of an inferior entertainment device than a credible smartphone, particularly for users in BlackBerry’s base of government and corporate users.”
In other words, BlackBerry dismissed the iPhone as a toy. In fact, long-time readers of this website will remember that BlackBerry actually used the word “toy” in one of its ad campaigns. BlackBerry users, the ad claimed, needed “tools, not toys”. That’s when I concluded that BlackBerry’s future was dismal.
The second example this week is the Washington Post. The Post used to be one of the most influential newspapers in the world. But somehow it missed the Internet wave. I’m guessing that executives at the Post once dismissed the Internet as nothing more than fluff and entertainment. No self-respecting citizen would get serious news and analysis from such a source. It was a toy. It could be ignored.
Now, of course, Jeff Bezos has bought the Post for $250 million. (Critics say he overpaid by a factor of two or three). I admire the Post and I hope that Bezos can help save it. But I can’t imagine how. The Internet has already thoroughly disrupted the Post’s business model.
In an entirely different arena, I see another disruption looming. In higher education, Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) threaten to disrupt the genteel world of higher education. Why pay $50,000 a year for a college education when you can get it virtually free on the Internet?
Some leading colleges, of course, are jumping on the MOOC bandwagon and experimenting with different offerings. Other colleges seem to be dismissing MOOCs as inferior “toys”. Just look at what MOOCs don’t offer: a campus, buildings, athletics, football, school spirit, dormitories, etc. But perhaps that’s no longer what customers want. Brick-and-mortar colleges may not crash as fast as BlackBerry did but, if they dismiss MOOCs as toys, their future is just as dismal.
My Social Media
