November 19th, 2008
Neuroleadership’s Big Contribution to Management
Research in neuroscience has been sucessfully utilized to improve management. David Rock and Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz’s article “Why Neuroscience Matters to Executives” details important aspects of neuroscience’s contribution to our understanding of how minds work.
The North American NeuroLeadership Summit at the end of October in New York drew change agents from 150 countries - people coming together to better understand the links from neuroscience to human performance and - most importantly - the application of these findings.
Cerebyte takes these findings seriously, and applies them to the businesses we coach. Some of what we do: help create the vision; focus attention, and create useful repetition and reinforcement for long-term change. A replicable and predictable experience for hundreds of people simultaneously reaps real rewards for companies and organizations.
November 14th, 2008
The Technology of Hope and Change
One of President-elect Obama’s messages is about the importance of hope, and its importance to real change. Another portion of his message is about the importance of technology to governing and to communication. His campaign’s use of the internet underscores this idea. In fact, Cerebyte’s technology is a form of hope - a way to achieve more than the organizations we meet and work with ever thought possible.
Positive deviants seek to achieve the possible, which is similar to the idea of hope. Our technology uses positive visualization so that each person can achieve the possibilities of change envisioned by the positive deviants - so that people move into hope - often from frustration or limited vision.
Our technology enables many people at once to experience this hope.
November 4th, 2008
Organizational Urgency vs. Activity; Why You Want Urgency
I recently revisited the work of Harvard Business School Professor John Kotter. He’s a prolific author and his latest work, A Sense of Urgency, focuses on urgency in organizations. He discusses the difference between urgency and activity, and how creating a sense of urgency is beneficial to a work environment.
Dr. Kotter has interesting ideas - he points out that activity is not the same as productivity. Activity can be unfocused while urgency is the act of moving deliberately and quickly forward to a specific goal. In tough economic times, activity tend to increase while urgency decreases. Panic sets in and the sense of urgency is lost. This unraveling can be avoided, and an organization can actually come out much stronger. The key for organizations is to retain a clear approach to optimizing in the face of pressure: maintan a sense of urgency versus blind activity.
October 28th, 2008
Persuasive Technology and the Microwave Oven
Last week we met with some PR folks. Like so many people we talk with, they were compelled to categorize us. We were a “training system,” a “knowledge management system,” a “project management system.”
It’s human to categorize - but what we do at Cerebyte is both “all of the above” and “none of the above.” Remember heating food before microwave ovens? In the old days, the pot was either on the stove or in the oven. It took a while, but eventually the container got hot. Then along comes the microwave oven - which heated food nearly instantly without also heating the container.
It didn’t make sense so we had to find out how this worked! Today no one thinks twice about the way microwave ovens work - they don’t want to, and don’t need to.
Using the microwave analogy, we want to create images of what people experience with our system - which is, in fact, persuasive technology. We’d love to be the “microwave” of personal and organizational change. People won’t need to know how or just why it works - just that it DOES work. At Stanford University there’s some exciting research into captology, the design, theory, and analysis of persuasive technologies.
October 19th, 2008
Why Stop at Positive Deviance?
Why stop at positive deviance?
Positive deviants - “star performers” - bring value to any organization. Their knowledge and, often, passion can spread to others and have a marked positive effect. But what’s the value of knowledge that isn’t spread around? Not much. We focus on positive deviants and we find that passionate commitment to a greater social good is a core element of the reason they are PDs.
Capturing the passion and communicating that passion is the key to getting others to initially respond. Finally, for others to really learn and practice the positive deviance content, people have to have a focused set of experiences that cause the new positive deviant knowledge to be internalized.
October 17th, 2008
Affirming Your Values to Reduce Stress : Much More than Cheerleading
Stephanie West Allen is a tremendous source of good information about neuroscience and mediation, and has also written about the relationship between affirming one’s values and reducing work stress.
A research report that really aligns with our findings, “Affirmation of Personal Values Buffers Neuroendocrine and Psychological Stress Responses,” details the impact of personal affirmations on stress levels. The study was conducted at UCLA and UC Santa Barbara by Psychologist J. David Creswell, et al.
The research found that stress is reduced when people affirm their values before doing a stressful activity. Work is very stressful for many people, which is why we have people begin by affirming in writing and verbally their commitment to creating some type of greater good from their work. This creates engagement and stress visibly decreases. It’s a motivator, too.
We’ve also found that review of a passionate statement from the positive deviants by a user of the system creates engagement, which reduces stress, and also seem to positively motivate people. Can a mirror neuron effect occur solely though contact with positive deviant language?
October 14th, 2008
High Employee Turnover? Support - and Retain - Your Employees
Employee turnover flummoxes good (and not so good) companies. This is an interesting article on the problem, with a number of fixes that might help to retain employees. Healthcare and better scheduling might work to keep some people in a company, but the impact is rarely a sustained one. The primary cause of employee turnover is bad management - a vast area. Unclear expectations, insufficient tools and training, and insufficient support and feedback from the manager are problems that, if you fix them, you fix the problem.
We used our approach in a national fast food chain. It had much higher turnover than retail. We were able to reduce turnover as well as increase revenue for this company.
October 8th, 2008
Don’t Panic - Optimize Your Attitude and Your Company
In the midst of chaos, maybe more now than ever, attitude matters. How you handle yourself and your company in the midst of worldwide financial turmoil now matters a lot. The tendency is for companies to react by immediately and drastically cutting costs, because costs are controllable and cutting them appears to solve part of the problem quickly. This can be destructive, though : don’t destroy the assets and capabilities you need for recovery.
A better way to think about the current downward spiral is to remember that instability requires optimization. Reducing costs may be part of that optimization, but so is improving productivity. If you haven’t already, identify your best people and commit to cutting costs and improving productivity. Optimization and a positive attitude are complementary.
October 7th, 2008
Thinking About More Than Money
It might seem impossible, at this moment in our financial history, to think about more than money. But recently I conducted wisdom discovery with some great people: Lee Brower and his team from Quadrant Living; Albert Perkins and Michelangelo “Miki” Domine from CNRG Corp, and Ron Nakamoto from Strategic Financial. Our focus was to develop a program to make Quadrant Living’s program available and accessible to a wide range of people.
Quadrant Living has been very good at getting people with money to think about more than just money, by guiding them to increase the value they place on family, education, and contributions to their community. Cerebyte and QL share a positive focus and both stress gaining value from assets you or your organization already has.
September 24th, 2008
Telecommuting or Goofing Off?
I recently read an interesting article on telecommuting, which names the biggest issue as trust that people are actually working - or are they goofing off? I ran into this recently with a new company that wanted to partner with us. The company makes software that tracks the time that someone uses MS Word or Excel files in their systems.
The main target? Telecommuters. The foundation of their system is that managers don’t trust that telecommuters will work as hard as people in the office.
Putting aside the highly inflated perceptions about how much people work in an office (remember coffee machines and water coolers), the issue is trust.
If people are motivated by a commitment to a social or moral good, as they are when they work with positive deviants, they will work very hard.
When they create their own work schedule and track their own progress, they will work very hard.
We coach people remotely - from Oregon to Israel and Malaysia - and the work always gets done. Our system creates and nurtures the trust that makes telecommuting not just fuel-efficient, but sensible and easy.