Working with interruptions? Not smart!

October 20, 2008 / / No comments

As a brief departure from our current discussion, I recently heard that when we are regularly interrupted by ringing telephones, email announcements, and visitors, that our IQ drops by about 10% – the same level of impairment found in people who are under the influence of marijuana. The colleague who shared this information with me joked, “All of the impairment, none of the benefits.”   

Most of us who have worked in an environment with frequent interruptions know that it materially affects our productivity, as well as our stress levels. It is the oppositive of the flow state, in which we tend to be extraordinarily effective. 

In our current age, which has been called the information or innovation age, the success of our organizations depends on the intelligence, creativity and effectiveness of people, who are many times also the biggest investment of the firm.  How can we make sure that our organizational members are as creative and effective as possible?

Some time and activity management experts recommend that we cultivate the habit of setting aside uninterrupted work time on a regular basis, to make progress on our most important projects — that we schedule appointments with ourselves in the same way that we schedule them with others.  The key is to let people know when you will be responding to email and phone calls.

Yet, some corporate cultures do not support this practice, prefering that its members always be available for questions at any time.  (It would be interesting to compare their results with organizations that manage this issue more strategically!) 

What is your experience?  What practices work well for you?

Category: All Posts, Creativity, Culture, Design, Innovation, Leadership /

Cultivating strength

October 10, 2008 / / One comment

Especially given the turmoil in the markets in recent days, it seems to be good timing to return to the subject of how we can leap off the “hamster wheel of fear” — a self-perpetuating negative cycle — and onto our wheel of creative freedom.  Recently, I had the privilege to watch a presentation by certified hypnotherapist, Monica Justus, CHt.  Ms. Justus invited a volunteer from the audience, a local business owner with a technical background whom I would consider a skeptical person, and demonstrated the effect of thoughts and words on our physical and mental strength.

For the demonstration, she asked him to extend his arm straight out to the side, which he did. She then asked him his name, which he answered truthfully. She pressed down strongly on his extended arm, but it remained strong and in place, demonstrating strength. She then asked him to respond to the question in a way that was not true.  Strikingly, his arm weakened, and she was easily able to push it down.  I’ve since used this demonstration in a training situation — it works.

It appears that when we speak our truth, we are, in fact, stronger.

Ms. Justus went on to test the effect of positive and negative words and concepts. The words “love” and “peace” tested “strong.” The word “war” caused his arm to go weak.

We spend most of our days thinking and communicating with others. What is the quality of our thoughts? Do we think self-defeating and fearful thoughts that weaken us, or do we look for the positive in ourselves and our situation? Do we see problems or opportunities? 

And, are we living and speaking our truth or supressing our true thoughts out of fear?  (On this note, I don’t advocate reckless, controlling, or inconsiderate speech. However, if your situation does not safely permit you to express your perspective, it may be worthwhile to consider how you might alter your situation).

Choosing what makes us stronger, including our truth, and a constructive perspective is a key to shifting off the wheel of fear, and onto our wheel of creative freedom.  More on this later!

Category: All Posts, Coaching, Collaboration, Communication, Creativity, Culture, Leadership, Partnership, Vision /

Are you a professional in career transition?

October 3, 2008 / / No comments

You may be interested in Conejo Valley Career & Life Transitions Program, which provides free and low-cost support to professionals who have lost their jobs or want to prepare their next step in a challenging economy.  The program is open to professionals outside the area; however, networking events are currently only available in the Conejo Valley and Ventura County.

You can find more information and register at: www.cvcareertransitions.com/community 

As part of our outreach, my good colleague, Anthony Mitchell of Coach2You and I will be hosting a booth at the 23rd Annual Westlake Village Car Show on Sunday October 5, 2008 from 10am to 2:30 pm. The event is free to the public and will be held at:

Countrywide Financial Corp.
31303 Agoura Road
Westlake Village, CA

If you are in the area, please stop by and say hello!

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The Wheel of Creative Freedom is Powered by Positive Perceptions

September 21, 2008 / / No comments

If you’ve been following this blog, you know that we’ve been discussing tools or principles for creating our “wheel of creative freedom,” a virtuous cycle to replace the vicious cycle that master coach Rhonda Britten calls the “wheel of fear.”

So far, our review of experiments — the brown-eyed and blue-eyed children experiment, and the Stanford Prison experiment — illustrate the power of perception: 1) How perception gives rise to interpersonal dynamics; 2) How these dynamics tend to become even more stable over time once translated into rules/processes, roles and environments; and 3) How these dynamics (especially as they become increasingly structured) powerfully shape our perception of ourselves and others, and give rise to realities which seem to support the original perception.

In the first experiment, the learned perception that brown-eyed children were superior to blue-eyed children created conditions in which the academic performance of the brown-eyed children improved and the performance of the blue-eyed children declined. In the second experiment, the more the guards tried to control the prisoners, the more prisoners rebelled; this in turn justified the guards position that the prisoners needed to be controlled at all costs and the prisoner’s perceptions that conditions were deplorable, justifying rebellion…

The dynamic by which our perceptions creates reality is neither postive or negative in itself — it’s simply how we select and create (really, negotiate) one reality out of the many possibilities available to us.

In general, we might notice that negative perceptions tend to invoke negative realities and positive perceptions tend to invoke positive realities. In fact, we might observe that negative perceptions tend to fuel our wheels of fear and positive perceptions tend to power our wheel of creative freedom.

It may be useful to note that we are not talking about solipsism — the theory that the self is the only existent thing — which would imply that we are the omnipotent creators of our own realities. Rather, in each experiment, we can see how the resulting realities were shaped by the interaction (or dance) of the participants. Because participants have the power to change their perceptions and behavior, they have the power to shift the system (the sum total of the interrelationships) to a greater or lesser extent; however, they don’t have direct power over the perceptions and choices of the other participants. The power we are discussing is not absolute, but as both experiments illustrate, it is considerable.

In upcoming posts, we will consider in more depth, how our perceptions of ourselves, as leaders, shapes our possibilities, including the possibilities of our organizations. We’ll be going deep with this one, so if you want to come along, wear your miner’s hat! 😉

Category: All Posts, Leadership, Organization, Philosophy /

Want to be more creative? Reduce stress.

September 13, 2008 / / No comments

In our last post, we talked about working harder and longer as a mainstream cultural approach to dealing with a threat (or challenging environment). Those who have been reading this blog for a while may recognize this pattern as a common “wheel of fear.” This response is so common as to appear commonsensical. When the going gets tough, the tough don’t slough off, right?

This kind of response is very appropriate in certain kinds of situations. Our body-minds respond to perceived threats to life and limb by firing up adrenaline that can be used for “fight or flight” — a physical response. We draw upon our reserves to deal with the immediate threat. Organizations and nations do this as well. Of course, this is not sustainable, and if overused, can lead to personal and collective burnout. In burnout, our ability to respond becomes drastically reduced. Using the common analogy, a stress response can help a sprint and hurt a marathon.

A second distinction that becomes important is whether we are dealing with a simple task or with complex problems, which require a creative response. Our present age has been referred to as the “innovation age” in that innovation has become the engine of growth. Innovation — creative problem solving — is also crucial in an age of continous change. Under these conditions, the stress response can actual impair a creative and effective response to complex problems.

A study by David Beversdorf and Jessa Alexander in the department of neurology at Ohio State University demonstrated that people under stress perform slightly better on memory tests; however, they performed more poorly on complex problems requiring flexible thinking: “When individuals [under stress] are faced with a challenging task, they are less likely to perform well in complex situations.” (Graham qtd. in Brown, 2004)

If our “commonsensical” response to a stressor is to engage in behaviors that decrease our effectiveness, we are on our self-perpetuating “wheel of fear.” Clearly, the only way out is “counter-intuitive” behavior — our “wheel of creative freedom.” So, continuing to build our toolkit for our wheel of freedom, when under stress, we might consider and experiment with some of the following counter-intuitive suggestions:

* Make haste by not being in a hurry.
* The more we take it easy, the more we accomplish.
* The more overwhelmed we are, the more we need to take a break.

I’d love to hear your experiences …

References
Brown, Steve. “Stress Stifles Creativity, Study Shows.” The Latern (Online). 11/10/04. Retrieved from:
http://media.www.thelantern.com/media/storage/paper333/news/2004/11/10/Campus/Stress.Stifles.Creativity.Study.Shows-799647.shtml

Category: All Posts, Creativity, Culture, Innovation, Leadership / Tags:

Becoming a “human being” takes time

September 7, 2008 / / No comments

Time has flown, as it does when our schedules are full.  For me, the past three weeks have been filled with a lot of work and a some necessary relaxation, or as some call it, “human being.”  Given that, in this blog, we have been in the midst of constructing our “wheel of creative freedom” and that I’m just now returning from taking a few weeks away from my blog, it seems timely to talk about the relationship between being and creativity.

Mainstream American culture has always valued industry, and this value is reflected in the process and culture of our organizations. As Americans, we tend to link our prosperity to hard work; further, we tend to think of work as a good in itself. Work is seen as virtuous. This value is rooted in religion: The Protestant work ethic, sometimes called the Puritan work ethic, is based on the Calvinist sensibility that hard work is godly and that success is a sign of design favor. On the other hand, sloth is considered one of the seven deadly sins.

We are a workaholic culture and proud of it. And so, when we are under threat, when we have an urgent problem to solve, we tend to work all the harder. The rational ego and will override our needs for rest, for play, for relaxation, and depending on our field, we might work 50, 60, 80, 100 hours a week.

This strategy can work well in the machine age, and it can work well in sprints; but how well does this strategy work in the innovation age? in a marathon? As it turns out, it works less well. We’ll talk more about this and its counter-intuitive implications in upcoming posts…

Category: All Posts, Creativity, Culture, Leadership, Values /

The Power of Situation – The Stanford Prison Experiment

August 19, 2008 / / No comments

The Stanford Prison Experiment was conducted by Professor Philip G. Zimbardo in 1971 at Stanford University to explore the question of the power of situation to shape the moral behavior of participants. The role play involved simulating a prison in the basement of one of the buildings at Stanford. The study recruited male college students in good mental health and no history of violence as volunteers and randomly assigned them roles as guards and prisoners. The simulation was made as realistic as possible: “prisoners” were arrested by actual police officers, the guards were given uniforms and the prisoners were made to wear prison attire. The professor assumed the role of prison superintendent.

The situation quickly deteriorated: When the prisoners rebelled on the morning of the second day, the guards asserted their dominance through increasingly sadistic punishments that prefigured the abuses later seen in Abu Garib. By the fifth day of the experiment, five of the students needed to be released due to extreme stress; the others collapsed into numbed and docile obedience.

Professor Zimbardo observes that his own perception also seems to have been distorted. It was only when a colleague, Assistant Professor Christina Maslach visited the “prison” and pointed out to him the awfulness of his actions in allowing the experiment to continue, that Zimbardo was fully able to appreciate its human cost. He had to pull the plug on the experiment after only six days.

As Zimbardo writes, “We had created a dominating behavioral context whose power insidously frayed the seemingly impervious values of compassion, fair play, and belief in a just world” (3).

This experiment demonstrates the enormous power of situation. We might notice that this situation included well-defined roles, characterized by a semi-permanent absolute power differential, established by a clear authority figure and reinforced with identifying uniforms. We can also notice how the setting itself also reflected and supported the roles and rules, and thus behavior.

Finally, we might notice how the setting, roles and uniforms helped to shape the perspectives that led to the behavior of both the guards and prisoners. 

So, at this point, we might observe that while it is true that perceptions shape roles, rules and settings, and it is also true that settings, roles and rules shape perception.  Together, they function as a self-reinforcing system or we can use the word paradigm. Because paradigms are “self-sealing” to borrow the term from Steve March’s blog, they seem obvious, commonsensical and “God-given.”

Our takeaway here is to notice another point of power that we have to shift off our wheel of fear and onto the wheel of freedom — to create a shift in paradigm — and that is to shift the settings, roles, and rules that shape behavior. 

Zimbardo, Philip G. “Revisiting the Stanford Prison Experiment: A Lesson in the Power of Situation.” The Chronicle Review, 53, no. 30, p. B6. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i30/30b00601.htm

Category: All Posts, Culture, Design, Ethics, Leadership, Organization, Partnership, Rewards, Values /

The Body of Sustainability Includes an “I-Thou”

August 8, 2008 / / No comments

Another valuable post from Steve March that is pertinent to the philosophy and embodiment of Partnership: http://stevemarch.typepad.com/on_living/2008/08/the-body-of-s-1.html

Category: All Posts, Culture, Partnership, Philosophy, Values /

The Body of Sustainability (A Must Read)

August 7, 2008 / / No comments

I highly recommend this post if you haven’t already seen it:
http://stevemarch.typepad.com/on_living/2008/08/the-body-of-sus.html

Steve March writes about how we inherit our ways of being, and that our ways of being are “self-sealing” — “the ways we act bring forth the world we live in.” And, at the physical, psychological, socialogical, environmental levels, our way of being has not been sustainable. So, he raises the excellent question: what is the body (or embodiment) of sustainability?

I would like to suggest that Partnership http://www.creativeleadercoach.com/2007/12/09/what-is-partnershipwhat-is-partnership/ is a philosophy and way of being is deeply related to the embodiment of sustainability — for ourselves (flourishing rather than existing, or burning out), for sustainable relationships, sustainable organizations, and of course, a sustainable economy and ecology.

Kudos to Steve on an excellent article!

Category: All Posts, Organization, Partnership, Philosophy /

What kind of dance are we doing?

August 3, 2008 / / No comments

In my last post, I succumbed 🙂 to using the dance analogy for describing how we negotiate what is taking place in any interaction or relationship. We could use the term “negotiation” or “game” but the first suggests conscious “strategy” and even manipulation, and for me, the second invokes transactional analysis, which describes some common scripts or “dances” that people tend to engage in together.

No, the term “dance” works well because while it can involve conscious intention, it’s more holistic, reflecting both the mental and physical, conscious and subconscious interactions. Given that 80% or more of communication is non-verbal, this analogy reminds us that our body language and tone of voice are conveying much more than our words do.

These dances happen on a very small scale (what kind of conversation are we having with ourselves?) to a very large scale (national and global). For example, most of us are familiar with the classic “dysfunctional family dance” in which grown children return home only to find themselves in the sway of old roles and communication patterns. There are the all-too-common painful dances of co-dependence and addiction, of victim and victimizer, and conversely, the constructive and pleasurable dances of supportive friendships and high performing teams.

The dance we do is always at least partly a reaction or response to the dance that other people are doing. Just as in some forms of dance, one person moves forward and the other moves backwards, people tend to respond to each other in complementary ways, which may evolve into more structured roles. As a day-to-day example, after dinner, I clear the table and my husband does the dishes. We didn’t plan it that way — it just evolved. Small, organic organizations typically evolve this way, and as they grow the roles become more formalized.

Therefore, one way of thinking about culture, including organizational culture, is as a dance of complementary relationships. As with families, these dynamics can be constructive or dysfunctional. Either way, the power of the situation very often leads us to react in ways that tend to perpetuate that situation.

In my next post, we’ll consider the Stanford Prison experiment as an example of how easily a professor and a group of college students were able to slip into a highly dystopian dance within a very short period of time through the power of role playing. The purpose is to illustrate the power of role playing to create rather gripping realities. We are all already doing this today, but we are not always consciously aware of it. By becoming consciously aware of these dynamics, we are better able to respond in ways that create the outcomes we want.

Practice
1. Make a list of your significant relationships. These may include work-related relationships and can include relationships with groups as a whole.
2. What role do you play in each relationship? What role do others play in relation to you?
3. Do you notice any patterns?
4. What are the outcomes for you? for others?

Category: All Posts, Change, Communication, Culture, Leadership, Organization, Teams /
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