"To lead the people, walk behind them."
-- Lao Tzu
Monday, 27 December 2010
Thursday, 23 December 2010
Wednesday, 22 December 2010
Monday, 20 December 2010
Friday, 17 December 2010
Thursday, 16 December 2010
Wednesday, 15 December 2010
Tuesday, 14 December 2010
Thanks to Kaitlyn for sending us this link "15 Excellent Movies for Psychology Majors" http://bit.ly/e2lmnr
Monday, 13 December 2010
Harvard Business Review - How anger poisons decision making and how accountability changes our approach to our anger http://tiny.cc/bzptl
Thursday, 9 December 2010
Wednesday, 8 December 2010
PCC Goes to China with our latest article featured in Lean Six Sigma Institutes newsletter - http://tiny.cc/cxkwj
Tuesday, 7 December 2010
Change Happens - Get over it, get on with it!
Change Happens - Get over it, get on with it!
By David Bovis
1. How would you feel if someone tells you that you have to change? There’s no choice.
2. How would you feel when you have sufficient experience to perceive why you need to change, how you can change and what is in it for you?
Two different ways... two different feelings!
Let’s start with a constant. Change does happen! It is inevitable and ithas been happening again and again for thousands of years. In fact, change is the only constant affecting everything, from petrol prices to theories about the origins of mankind and the planet! Nothing is excluded, everything can change - even the way we approach the management and implementation of change in business ...
In industry, change happens for many reasons; market conditions, organizational evolution, ash clouds, oil spills or even by planned ‘change improvement programs’. Sometimes we choose it; sometimes it is thrust upon us by circumstance or by leaders.
Organizational leaders understand that because change happens, their organization must constantly evolve, adapt and transform itself if it is to survive in the market place, the goal is often to grow to a position of market leadership and improve efficiency and effectiveness, 'we must change to cope with change itself, so we can 'win''.
This is why Lean, Six Sigma and other process improvement best practices are so prevalent in business today and why organizational improvement programs are constantly evolving in a quest to find a change program thatworks straight away and delivers sustainable results.
The process focused tools, techniques and strategies have been finely honed and developed to deliver results, but what has to be recognized is that it isthe people who offer the resistance to change which ultimately affects long term outcomes.
Q. Why is this and how can the problem be resolved?
Resistance happens on a psychological level.
People form personal comfort zones and if you ask them to move toward something uncomfortable, they will invariably offer resistance. Sometimes the resistance persists and in some cases, the change initiative fails before it even gets off the ground. This can be massively expensive and disruptive and I’m sure we can all recall such experiences in our own organizations.
I’m equally sure that you have felt that uneasy feeling when you have had to push your own boundaries or fully step outside of your own comfort zone (like being detoured on the way to work or your car keys going missing when you’re late). Be it in your private life or your working environment, it doesn’t take much to challenge your patterns and you may well have resisted the change in the form of anger, anxiety, frustration or any number of negative emotions.
The degree to which you resist change depends on a number of factors including: who or what you perceive to be the origin of the imposed change, what assumptions and judgements you make and how threatened you feel by the new conditions relative to the speed of exposure – to name but a few.
If the need to change originates in a person or a system you implicitly trust, you are more likely to accept and follow the 'new' course of action.
W.I.I.F.M...?
The irony here is that as humans in a world of change, we yearn for change;
we pursue it with a vengeance … but usually only 'outside' of the working environment - so whats the difference?
When it’s something we want (we've had the freedom to make a choice) and we subconsciously perceive a beneficial answer to the Question “What’s In It for Me” (WIIFM), we don’t oppose change; we embrace it.
Music!
Think of the weekly music-chart updates, most weeks there’s a new No.1. In 2000, there were 42 different number one hits in 52 weeks. Also consider how we feel when that ‘comfortable’ regular change disappears? Who remembers the 16 weeks Bryan Adams was No.1 with the Robin Hood Prince of Thieves single “Everything I do) I do it for you”? Boring right? Or maybe your example is Whitney Houston’s ‘I will always love you’ from the film ‘The Bodyguard’ which lasted 10 weeks. It seemed like an eternity didn’t it?
The evolution from Top of the Pops to live download updates reflects our desire to understand the latest situation quickly; this is largely due to the way our brains derive meaning from feedback - something our 'systems' and prevailing conditions we create at work fail to deliver.
Heroic Leaders!
Think of the hero in a disaster movie. Despite the circumstances, people are expected to do something which is way outside of their comfort zone. “Jump!” shouts the hero. The character hesitates briefly, but because the situation provides them the immediate feedback they require and the hero is consistently confident, the person jumps off the sinking ship or out of the window in the burning building. They reflect the leaders’ behavior.
These hero’s only do what all natural leaders do, they lead by example. In the world of change, this is a really big issue at a psychological level; many leaders today instruct others to change, which is a bit like telling someone to jump from the burning platform into the safety net without holding their hand or jumping with them.
Natural leaders do exist but they are few and far between. What do they do differently and why? How do they do it? Wouldn’t you like each of your teams and departments to be led by such people?
Here’s the science bit!
Assumptions occur in people when the systems & Sub-systems (ERP / MIS / Teams / Accounting or production Processes and procedures) they encounter, fail to provide relevant information in a timeframe that is conducive to theirneural requirements. We call this 'temporal detachment'.
Over the course of their lives, people are exposed to different Environmental Emotional Experiences (EEE). This results in them making different assumptions about their current environments which then results in differing opinions or ‘Cognitive Dissonance’.
Cognitive Dissonance is another name for the experience of intuitive discomfort in any given situation, which provokes people to react with an instinctive fear / threat response. They have EEE imprinted self defense mechanisms and a negative reaction resulting in blame / projection / lack of engagement, ownership and responsibility, which results in an external locus of control.
Cognitive Dissonance from assumption, in the face of a lack of timely meaning (not information transfer as occurs in I.T. systems) also results in people experiencing a low self concept, low confidence, low energy, and a lack of creativity and innovation. They fail to solve problems preferring to default to blame and other automatic defences that ultimately undermine organizational performance.
The worst thing is, people start to feel comfortable with this ‘way of being’ over time and 'we' (humans) don’t challenge what we are comfortable with, regardless of whether it is judged good or bad.
Understanding these and other psychological issues which result in resistance to change will enable a leader to act in such a way that they will consistently choose to elicit positive behaviors and avoid behaving in a way that will result in resistance. That is to say, they will have the knowledge and capacity to choose to act in a way that will get the person to “Jump!!” before the ship sinks or the building burns down.
Where leaders can understand the intricate details of the people process that culminates in the motivation of their team members to embrace change, they can realize improvement programs that will be an instant and sustainable success.
Creating heroic leaders at every level in business is about aligning beliefs and behaviors, such that they are seen in direct relationship to performance and profit. The link is absolute and is driven by a philosophy of ‘being’ as a stable foundation, that comes before the endeavour of ‘doing’.
“How we are, is how we act”.
With this awareness, making change that is primarily focused on ‘what we do’ can be seen in a new context ... doing can be seen as an effect of how we are being, rather than the cause.
If you can change that belief, (supported by the latest findings in Neuroscience and psychology) you will change the way you approach change, and change can become comfortable & sustainable, culturally.
PCC provides the context in which to perceive the origins of change as something beyond what we ‘do’ in the form of new tools, process and procedure, as is historically popular in the prevailing market. By creating heroic leaders, PCC provides 'meaning' - required for each and every individual to understand and make cognitive choices over their actions and reactions, relative to their immediate conditions and organisational objectives; this provides a vehicle by which people can emotionally function in a new and sustainable way, making a change to culture autonomous and sustainable.
Contact him at david.bovis@pcchange.co.uk
Saturday, 4 December 2010
http://huff.to/ggSPhy Huffpost - Undisclosed activity by the fed unveiled - benefactors of Trillions include some surprising names and No's
Thursday, 2 December 2010
Wednesday, 1 December 2010
Tuesday, 30 November 2010
Sunday, 28 November 2010
Saturday, 27 November 2010
Friday, 26 November 2010
Monday, 22 November 2010
Friday, 19 November 2010
Thursday, 18 November 2010
Tuesday, 16 November 2010
Monday, 15 November 2010
Sunday, 14 November 2010
Tuesday, 9 November 2010
Friday, 5 November 2010
Thursday, 4 November 2010
Wednesday, 3 November 2010
Tuesday, 2 November 2010
Monday, 1 November 2010
Sustainable change
PCC suggests that developing ‘Skills’ (imparting knowledge) as is provided and culturally accepted as ‘Good’ by all learning institutions is fundamentally too shallow and superficial. Anyone can learn the detail of a process or retain facts about a subject of interest (and sit a test to prove they can retain that knowledge in the short term), but if students fail to associate these details to their own conditions and to their beliefs and perceptions of personal benefit, they fail to ‘make sense’ of it. If they do not create meaning based on their own prior experience in the world [EEE] they will not change their behaviors (re-actions) and thus what is ‘Done’ (skills) will not change; in this way we see many millions if not billions of £ spent worldwide each year, by governments and the corporate world on education that is largely ineffective.
This is overtly realized by the market, but the belief doesn’t solidify under duress of cultural acceptance by the same market (Fear inhibits anyone speaking out to say what I’ve just said there) and despite the open market recognition that a Degree or an MBA doesn’t ‘Prove’ practical capability / competence (conscious or unconscious) in any way shape of form due to a lack of experience (long live privately run 5yr apprenticeships) these are still the outcomes revered by the world of ‘teaching’ as the trophy, regardless of how much learning is done in the process of attaining such trophies.
If we want a better world, we must focus on how people are being and what they believe, if we are to change what is done in practice, whether in politics, parenting or production.
It is by challenging fundamental beliefs in relation to
· ‘What works – what doesn’t work’ and what is
· ‘Good – Bad’
at a much deeper level that PCC delivers, with models and methods designed to help provide others a new context from which they can challenge their beliefs, that change can become much more effective, wanted and sustained.
PCC provides a Pull system for people
Pushing the links in any system causes misalignment vs. Pulling the links in any system can lead to alignment where we understand (and hold the key) to what holds them together – replacing weak links that may perish under strain.
Sunday, 31 October 2010
"Although there may be nothing new under the sun, what is old is new to us and so rich and astonishing that we never tire of it. If we do tire of it, if we lose our curiosity, we have lost something of infinite value, because to a high degree it is curiosity that gives meaning and savour to life."
-- Robertson Davies
-- Robertson Davies
Saturday, 30 October 2010
Thursday, 28 October 2010
Monday, 25 October 2010
Sunday, 24 October 2010
Saturday, 23 October 2010
Friday, 22 October 2010
Thursday, 21 October 2010
Wednesday, 20 October 2010
Tuesday, 19 October 2010
Monday, 18 October 2010
Sunday, 17 October 2010
More about confidence based Learning (CBL)
· Uninformed
This can be considered knowledge that a learner has not acquired yet. Someone who is uninformed is unlikely to act, which can result in a state of paralysis.
· Misinformation
This can be considered knowledge a learner confidently believes to be correct, but which is actually incorrect. Those who have confidence in wrong information (misinformation) will very likely make mistakes on the job, which puts companies at the most risk.
· Doubt
Occurs where a learner believes knowledge to be correct, but an element of doubt exists that may cause the learner not to act on that knowledge. Someone who harbors doubt may correctly answer in a test, but is likely to act with hesitation or not act at all.
· Mastery
This is knowledge a learner knows confidently that is correct, and which will likely be applied correctly in practice. Learners who have correct knowledge and a high degree of confidence in their knowledge (mastery) are masters of that knowledge domain. These learners are likely to act correctly, resulting in higher performing and more productive learners who make fewer mistakes. (Confidence is key and should be considered relative to positive experiential neural imprinting).
four stages of competence
In psychology, the four stages of competence, or the "conscious competence" learning model relates to the psychological states involved in the process of progressing from incompetence to competence in a skill.
· Unconscious Incompetence
The individual neither understands nor knows how to do something, nor recognizes the deficit, nor has a desire to address it.
· Conscious Incompetence
Though the individual does not understand or know how to do something, he or she does recognize the deficit, without yet addressing it.
· Conscious Competence
The individual understands or knows how to do something. However, demonstrating the skill or knowledge requires a great deal of consciousness or concentration.
· Unconscious Competence
The individual has had so much practice with a skill that it becomes "second nature" and can be performed easily (often without concentrating too deeply). He or she may or may not be able to teach it to others, depending upon how and when it was learned.
Natural language is an example of unconscious competence. Not every native speaker who can understand and be understood in a language is competent to teach it. Distinguishing between unconscious competence for performance-only, versus unconscious competence with the ability to teach, the term "kinesthetic competence" is sometimes used for the ability to perform but not to teach, while "theoretic competence" refers to the ability to do both.
Certain brain personality types favor certain skills (see the Benziger theory), and each individual possesses different natural strengths and preferences. Therefore, advancing from, say, stage 3 to 4 in one skill might be easier for one person than for another. Certain individuals will even resist progression to stage 2, because they refuse to acknowledge or accept the relevance and benefit of a particular skill or ability. Individuals develop competence only after they recognize the relevance of their own incompetence in the skill concerned.
Many attempts have been made to add to this competence model. This addition would be a fifth stage, and there have been many different suggestions for what this fifth stage would be called. One suggestion is that it be called "Conscious competence of unconscious competence". This would describe a person's ability to recognize and develop unconscious competence in others.
Another suggestion by consultant David Baume:
As a fifth level, I like what I call 'reflective competence'. As a teacher, I thought "If unconscious competence is the top level, then how on earth can I teach things I'm unconsciously competent at?" I didn't want to regress to conscious competence - and I'm not sure if I could even if I wanted to! So, reflective competence - a step beyond unconscious competence. Conscious of my own unconscious competence, yes, as you suggest. But additionally looking at my unconscious competence from the outside, digging to find and understand the theories and models and beliefs that are clearly, based on looking at what I do, now inform what I do and how I do it. These won't be the exact same theories and models and beliefs that I learned consciously and then became unconscious of. They'll include new ones, the ones that comprise my particular expertise. And when I've surfaced them, I can talk about them and test them. Nonaka is good on this
—Nonaka, I. (1994). "A Dynamic Theory of Organizational Knowledge Creation." Organization Science 5: 14-37. (David Baume, May 2004)
Friday, 15 October 2010
Thursday, 14 October 2010
Wednesday, 13 October 2010
Lessons for business from nature - Leaderless Honeybee Can Organise!
See the original article here;
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/06/070611154001.htm
ScienceDaily (June 16, 2007) — Undergraduate education generally involves acquiring "received knowledge" -- in other words, absorbing the past discoveries of scholars and scientists. But University of North Carolina at Charlotte senior biology major Andrew Pierce went beyond the textbooks and uncovered something previously unknown.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/06/070611154001.htm
ScienceDaily (June 16, 2007) — Undergraduate education generally involves acquiring "received knowledge" -- in other words, absorbing the past discoveries of scholars and scientists. But University of North Carolina at Charlotte senior biology major Andrew Pierce went beyond the textbooks and uncovered something previously unknown.
Pierce's discovery has to do with detecting a significant new detail concerning the behavior of the European honeybee -- perhaps the most studied and economically important insect on Earth. Beyond agriculture, the finding may also have key implications for understanding the dynamics of all social animals, including man.
Pierce's recently reported his research in an article appearing in the behavioral biology research journal Ethology, with co-authors Lee Lewis and UNC Charlotte biology professor Stanley Schneider, Pierce's mentor. Pierce was first author on the paper -- a rare achievement for an undergraduate.
"It was a very good work and an impressive achievement for a student researcher -- he got a publication as an undergraduate," Schneider noted. "I really like working with our undergraduate honors students -- they are so bright."
Pierce, age 22, has been working as a researcher in Schneider's lab for the past two years through a UNC Charlotte Honors College program that fosters research experiences for undergraduates.
Using an ingeniously designed experiment, Pierce and his co-authors were able to document details of bee social behavior that fundamentally confirm the hypothesis that major colony activities are initiated by the cumulative group actions of the colony's older workers, not by the queen's individual decision.
What Pierce and colleagues found was that older workers gave signals to the queen and to the rest of the colony that it was time to swarm and leave the hive. Later, they were able to observe inside the swarm itself and see workers give the queen a signal, known as "piping" that tells her to fly.
"Researchers have never reported worker piping being done on the queen before, so some of what we found was exciting," Pierce said. "It was generally surprising to see the level of interaction that the older bees have with the queen. This doesn't normally happen in the hive," he noted.
"It's interesting because it shows that though the queen has a tremendous impact on the colony, she's not the decision maker," Schnieder said. "The colony is not a dominance hierarchy and, from a human perspective, this is unusual. Our human society is very dominance hierarchy structured --we have centralized systems of control. But bee colony systems of control are very different -- they are totally de-centralized."
Schneider's lab studies the honeybee and its behavioral ecology. Like humans, honeybees are remarkable for living in large organized groups where highly developed social behaviors coordinate the efforts of thousands of individuals to accomplish complex tasks -- manufacturing, community defense, environmental control and maintenance, food production, brood-rearing and education. Like human civilizations, bee societies follow organizational principles, such as following social rules (like human customs and laws) and division of labor.
But here the similarity ends. Bees do not have large brains and are not capable of complex thought like humans. Though the bee colony is centered around the queen and her reproductive capabilities, findings by Schneider and others indicates that she does not exactly "rule." Instead, the colony appears to be controlled by the anonymous consensus of the colony's workers.
Though it is of great interest to researchers studying social behavior, a great mystery still remains regarding how bee societies effectively direct and coordinate complex operations without a central controlling intelligence. Pierce's finding is part of an ongoing research effort in Schneider's lab aimed at understanding the mechanisms of leaderless societal management -- in particular, the importance of two communication-related behaviors known as the "vibration signal" and "worker piping."
Different from the famous "waggle dance" that foraging worker bees perform to tell other bees where to find a food source, the vibration signal appears to be a more general, multi-purpose form of communication. Schneider has concluded that this signal, which consists of one bee grabbing another bee (worker or queen) and then vibrating its body, does not convey a specific message, but instead is a form of "modulatory communication" that alters existing bee behaviors (making bees perform their jobs more actively, perhaps) or changes bees response to other signals.
Pierce and Schneider have documented in their current paper how workers use the vibration signal to prepare the queen for swarming by making intrusions into her "court" and vibrating her hundreds of times an hour. She responds by changing her behavior -- reducing her food intake, slowing egg laying and becoming more active. At this point, the workers begin to send a second signal that researchers call "worker piping" at a fevered pitch. Piping, which consists of bees making contact and vibrating their wing muscles rapidly, appears to be a general instruction to fly.
The researchers document that the workers stop using the vibration signal when the queen flies and leaves the nest with the swarm. Piping, however, continues in the swarm, as the bees need to make the queen fly again once a new nest site has been selected.
"Drew Pierce did this project last summer," Schneider explained. "We constructed a special observation stand where we could actually see how workers were interacting with queens inside a swarm cluster, where they are hanging in a tree. That was really interesting, because nobody had ever really been able to look at that before," he noted.
"What was interesting was how little attention the workers pay the queen -- until it became time to go -- to become airborne. Then they started interacting with her at very high rates, and performing the 'worker piping' signal on her. This interaction is a behavior that nobody had described before," Schneider said.
Contrary to the popular conception of a colony controlled by instructions from its breeding queen mother, the research shows a picture of the queen as a passive egg layer whose own behavior is programmed, with changes dictated by signals delivered by older workers.
This does not mean, however, that the colony is controlled by a key group of experienced bees either. The worker bees that deliver the critical signals have short life-spans and tiny brains incapable of managing the colony the way a human village might be managed by a council of elders. Instead, critical strategic choices, such as the assessment that it is time to divide the colony and swarm, appear to be decided by the dynamics of the group itself. Social interactions, environmental pressures or group dynamics in some still-unknown way initiate a string of behaviors that effectively manage complex group activities.
"It is a real challenge to understand how bee colonies work, but it is also fascinating because they are so different. Evolutionarily, they got to the same point as humans -- living in these highly organized societies that function with remarkable efficiency -- but they are organized so differently when you start digging into them," Schneider said. "It's interesting that these major differences can result in the same emergent social properties. It may tell us something about ourselves."
Monday, 11 October 2010
Sunday, 10 October 2010
Lao Tzu - On Leadership
When one with the highest excellence does not wrangle about his low position, no one finds fault with him.
By being lower, rivers and seas are able to receive the homage and tribute of all the valley streams—thus they rule over them all. So it is that a wise leader, wishing to be above men, puts himself by his words below them, and, wishing to be before them, follows them.
The earliest people did not know that there were rulers. In the next age they loved them and praised them. In the next, they feared them; in the next they despised them. When rulers had no faith in the unvarying way, the people had no faith in the rulers.
How deferential the earliest rulers appeared, showing the importance they set on their words! Yet their work was done and their undertakings were successful, while the people all said, "We did it ourselves!"
A wise leader has said, "I will not try to change things, and the people will be transformed by themselves; I will be fond of tranquility, and the people will by themselves become correct. I will not pursue riches, and the people will by themselves become rich; I will manifest no ambition, and the people will become as natural as uncarved wood"
A wise leader grasps humility, and manifests it to all the world. Free from self display, he is conspicuous; free from self-assertion, he is distinguished; free from boasting about himself, he is valued greatly; free from self-complacency, he acquires superiority. Free from striving ambition, he finds none strives against him.
Thus a wise leader puts his own person last, and yet it is found in the foremost place; he treats his person as if it were foreign to him, and yet that person is preserved. Is it not because he has no personal and private ends, that such ends are therefore realized?
Seize power and try to manipulate people, you will not succeed. People have their own way and cannot be manipulated. What you attempt to seize, you destroy; what you attempt to grab, you lose.
Lao Tzu - Tao Te Ching (approx. 3rd Century BCE)
This and so much more requires psychological understanding if we are to perceive the damage 'Control systems' like ERP and standard accounting practice can have on performance when their use is not understood at this depth - Just as Taiichi Ohno promoted when trying to get the West to understand TPS - In leadership there has to be an element of 'Letting go' - and in my own words, "to gain control we must give control" and at the moment all of our logical systems 'Take control' away from 'people'.
This was posted as an answer to a question on LinkedIN - "how would a systems thinker describe the differences between a leader and a manager?" In answer to this original question, I'd suggest a 'Systems thinker' would describe the differences between a manager and a leader as; one who relies upon systems to control or understands and uses systems to get the best from those people he serves.
By being lower, rivers and seas are able to receive the homage and tribute of all the valley streams—thus they rule over them all. So it is that a wise leader, wishing to be above men, puts himself by his words below them, and, wishing to be before them, follows them.
The earliest people did not know that there were rulers. In the next age they loved them and praised them. In the next, they feared them; in the next they despised them. When rulers had no faith in the unvarying way, the people had no faith in the rulers.
How deferential the earliest rulers appeared, showing the importance they set on their words! Yet their work was done and their undertakings were successful, while the people all said, "We did it ourselves!"
A wise leader has said, "I will not try to change things, and the people will be transformed by themselves; I will be fond of tranquility, and the people will by themselves become correct. I will not pursue riches, and the people will by themselves become rich; I will manifest no ambition, and the people will become as natural as uncarved wood"
A wise leader grasps humility, and manifests it to all the world. Free from self display, he is conspicuous; free from self-assertion, he is distinguished; free from boasting about himself, he is valued greatly; free from self-complacency, he acquires superiority. Free from striving ambition, he finds none strives against him.
Thus a wise leader puts his own person last, and yet it is found in the foremost place; he treats his person as if it were foreign to him, and yet that person is preserved. Is it not because he has no personal and private ends, that such ends are therefore realized?
Seize power and try to manipulate people, you will not succeed. People have their own way and cannot be manipulated. What you attempt to seize, you destroy; what you attempt to grab, you lose.
Lao Tzu - Tao Te Ching (approx. 3rd Century BCE)
This and so much more requires psychological understanding if we are to perceive the damage 'Control systems' like ERP and standard accounting practice can have on performance when their use is not understood at this depth - Just as Taiichi Ohno promoted when trying to get the West to understand TPS - In leadership there has to be an element of 'Letting go' - and in my own words, "to gain control we must give control" and at the moment all of our logical systems 'Take control' away from 'people'.
This was posted as an answer to a question on LinkedIN - "how would a systems thinker describe the differences between a leader and a manager?" In answer to this original question, I'd suggest a 'Systems thinker' would describe the differences between a manager and a leader as; one who relies upon systems to control or understands and uses systems to get the best from those people he serves.
Saturday, 9 October 2010
Friday, 8 October 2010
Learn how large companies including Wells Fargo and SAP as well as smaller businesses such as restaurants and nail salons are using Apple's iPad to make employees more productive and keep them better connected to the office http://tiny.cc/ijrgd
With the worst of the recession behind us, workers who previously felt they didn't have options may start looking around. Keep them, advises CCL
http://tiny.cc/4qwff
http://tiny.cc/4qwff
Thursday, 7 October 2010
Jeremy Rifkin on "the empathic civilization" | Video on TED.com
This is one to watch - it's also good to see the comments below, which I couldn't help myself responding to.
Jeremy Rifkin on "the empathic civilization" | Video on TED.com
Wednesday, 6 October 2010
Confidence based learning (CBL)
CBL is a term we make reference to but perhaps reflect upon in a different way at PCC. Following are a few thoughts to consider in relation to instilling confidence in people at work and the class-room:
CBL is focused on the ‘method of learning’ (detailed below), which is similar to the Socratic method.
The Socratic method is a negative method of hypothesis elimination, which means better hypothetical solutions are found by steadily identifying and eliminating those that lead to contradictions. In CBL the method of improving the ‘method of learning’, appears to be influenced and mixed with the current cultural need to ‘Prove’ knowledge.
We suggest ‘Proof’ is required by a society that continues to lose its capacity for trust with honesty and respect, and thus, empirical studies that provide proof are often missing the opportunity to address root cause issues that reside in how people are being (Honest / Respectful / Trusting / Trustworthy), as opposed to what they are doing (Behaving).
Being unconscious of this gap between being and doing, approaches like CBL fill this gap between trust and proof by making reference to advanced statistical models which take positive hypotheses, and test them with mathematical models to try and ‘Guess’ what may or may not be the outcome before putting the theory into practice (i.e. Six Sigma), as can be seen here.
This is the Wiki intro to CBL –
Confidence-Based Learning or CBL is a methodology used in learning and training that measures a learner's ‘knowledge quality’ by determining both the correctness of the learner's knowledge and confidence in that knowledge.
Additionally, the CBL process is designed to increase retention and minimize the effects of guessing which can skew the results of traditional, single-score assessments. This combination yields a profile of the individual's knowledge base, and identifies the difference between what the individual thinks they know and what they actually know.
Once knowledge and confidence gaps have been identified, the approach in using the methodology is to create a customized learning plan for each learner in order to fix the knowledge gaps once they have been identified.
The process, similar to quality improvement processes such as Six Sigma, is continued until the learner achieves total mastery of the knowledge they need for a particular skill. The CBL methodology defines mastery as the validated achievement of confidence and correctness for 100% of the content. This means that a learner must answer a question with confidence and correctness two consecutive times. Mastery then becomes confidently-held, correct knowledge put into practice.
We acknowledge the findings of CBL but we feel the output is structured to satisfy the prevailing language and expectations in the market rather than digging deeper. In so doing CBL has missed an opportunity to provide greater value.
In regards to the workplace and to the classroom, PCC suggests that ‘learning’ efficacy (speed, sense making and longevity of retention) is increased when individuals are confident, not only in their knowledge, but in themselves.We also understand and posit that creativity, innovation, problem solving and overall organisational development and performance are improved where individuals are fundamentally more confident in themselves and in their relationships with their boss, their peers and with the inert business systems with which they are required to interact.
These relationships and inert systems should be (but seldom are) consciously designed to remove assumption and therefore eliminate blame, relative to measures and judgements against assumed targets (as current standard business systems promote and accept as ‘Good’ – i.e. conducive to control).
In missing the connection between personal confidence (Self-concept) and performance, these systems are often designed in such a way as to provoke emotional reactions based in fear (of failure & rejection) and in their use we unconsciously undermine the performance we are aiming to enhance and improve.
The same logic & systems are used to judge the workforce in Schools and factories, i.e. Teachers are under the same systemic duress as any other worker, and yet our teachers hold the responsibility of leading our children to become our future adults and workforce! In such conditions, our teachers lead by example imprinting children to accept these threat based reactions are par for the course in today’s society.
We (PCC) focus on what constitutes effective communication for humans at a psychological level, to address the issues listed by CBL (below ABCD), but we also go further, recognising the mechanics (in brackets) of existing in conditions in which we are;
A- Uninformed (transferred data is not contextualised and made relevant to our understanding. Our inherent understanding from which we judge anything new is not checked or challenged. We fail to derive meaning from Data)
B - Misinformed (logical targets and drivers are set based on assumptions, often derived from detached, educated / programmed knowledge, rather than tacit intuitive knowledge gained through first-hand experience)
C - In Doubt (Doubt being a resultant emotional condition triggered by sub-conscious fear and uncertainty, provoked by ‘data only’ relationships with logical systems, which create our prevailing conditions to which we emotionally react / behave / perform)
D - Enjoying a degree of ‘Mastery’ (because, based on our previous knowledge and experience, we enjoy a clear understanding of our environment , we are confident to such a level that we can rationalise meaning from diverse historial experience and use the meaning derived from these other experiences to correlate to the current conditions and ‘Innovatively problem solve’, we know what is expected of us and can respond appropriately, reinforcing our self-concept. We know what is coming and we know how to respond effectively (positive reinforcement).
In this way we hope to convey a challenge to the cultural need for ‘Proof’ that comes from and is satisfied by the overt reliance on logic today, (i.e. answering twice with ‘confidence’ (that can’t itself be measured) = Mastery).
In this way and at this depth, we help others understand that confidence in conjunction with and relative to conditions, has to be considered when designing and accepting the efficacy of standard business systems.
It is at this level that PCC helps organisations design their systems to maximise performance.
Tuesday, 5 October 2010
Monday, 27 September 2010
Monday, 20 September 2010
PCC - Psychology of culture change - Sustainable Organisational Change: What caused me TO THINK today? http://t.co/GYK4wkr
What caused me TO THINK today?
That 1000’s of people were affected by a fatal accident on the M6 last week – it delayed us, but that was as bad as it got, we still had our meeting (albeit late), but we saw people stranded for hours with small babies in their cars, two people are dead, their families have lost them, the lorry driver that hit them is potentially traumatised for life and has been arrested for suspected dangerous driving ….. his whole life is impacted.
We might speculate about the origins of such events …
Did it all start with some small mechanical or electrical fault in the car they were driving which caused it to stop? maybe it was fitted badly? someone in a factory made it poorly? perhaps they didn’t follow procedure because they had a row with their wife over mud on the carpet or forgetting to feed the cat? maybe they forgot because of the pressures at work …
Or it may have just been the elements corroding something, because a designer somewhere decided for one type of plating over another, or was told to design within budget forcing him to specify 3 microns on zinc & yellow passivated plate over 10 microns.
Did it all start with some small mechanical or electrical fault in the car they were driving which caused it to stop? maybe it was fitted badly? someone in a factory made it poorly? perhaps they didn’t follow procedure because they had a row with their wife over mud on the carpet or forgetting to feed the cat? maybe they forgot because of the pressures at work …
Or it may have just been the elements corroding something, because a designer somewhere decided for one type of plating over another, or was told to design within budget forcing him to specify 3 microns on zinc & yellow passivated plate over 10 microns.
Maybe the lorry driver didn’t see them because his wife had made a special packed lunchbox for their anniversary and he was reaching across the cab to grab a sandwich, ensuring he was seen to be driving on the Tachometer when he was supposed to be driving, because of the measures his company use to ‘judge’ their drivers performance?
We might consider what he was carrying, why was the trip being made? Was he transporting food, because we want everything in a packet because it’s convenient and profitable to have people gorge themselves without putting in the effort to grow what they eat ….. ???
A billion trillion possibilities and choices that span millennia sit behind such incidents – a lorry wouldn’t exist if, ..... the car wouldn’t have stopped if, ….. IF....
We might consider what he was carrying, why was the trip being made? Was he transporting food, because we want everything in a packet because it’s convenient and profitable to have people gorge themselves without putting in the effort to grow what they eat ….. ???
A billion trillion possibilities and choices that span millennia sit behind such incidents – a lorry wouldn’t exist if, ..... the car wouldn’t have stopped if, ….. IF....
The point being every thought and related action we take can have enormous consequences over time – this is what the Japanese mean by the butterfly effect – this is how we are all connected, we can see it looking backwards, but looking forwards!
This is our level of responsibility – every emotion we cause in another by our own action and choices, (as parents, partners and employers) that leads to their own emotional decision making and subsequent behaviours, may or may not affect others in turn, sometimes pleasantly, sometimes horrifically often many years later, even decades or centuries later, sometimes long after we are gone.
This is our level of responsibility – every emotion we cause in another by our own action and choices, (as parents, partners and employers) that leads to their own emotional decision making and subsequent behaviours, may or may not affect others in turn, sometimes pleasantly, sometimes horrifically often many years later, even decades or centuries later, sometimes long after we are gone.
The irony being, that we rely on logical processes like Six Sigma, design of experiments & FMEA’s etc. to ‘predict’ what might go wrong. In "mis-match of complexity" terms, this is like asking a snail to resolve the contradictions between quantum physics and relativistic physics – we ‘Risk assess’ based on logical data, but cannot start to even consider how attitudes and emotions feature in every single logical aspect of life.
On our Journey up the M6 to Manchester that day, we initially stopped approx. 2 miles behind the accident at 11:00am. The scene of the accident was still closed at 19:30 at night – driving back past the green screens covering all three carriageways for the length of a football pitch, driving on the southbound side, made me want to hug those I love and thank god they are safe … then I realised when writing this, by the time I got home, I’d pretty much put it out of my mind …. Complacency, taking people for granted, the human being can be so horrifically selfish sometimes; myself included.
We are largely pre-conditioned by the method by which we disseminate news with no meaning across technological systems we largely but loosely refer to as ‘communication’ – systems don’t communicate meaning, feelings or emotion, they disseminate logical data and we become used to it, so much so, that within the space of 3hrs I am conditioned, just like many others, to forget a double death and walk back into the house like it’s been just another day at the office – which on reflection is quite a serious social condition to address! (and I consider myself an ‘emotional’ person!).
This is the attitude toward caring for others we are up against on an international / social scale – everyday peoples lives fall apart and all that they knew yesterday will never be the same tomorrow – it’s part of life; how we react to large events like this, just as how we react to small events, defines us, and, of course, ‘life goes on’ – but I’m convinced we would be a better and wiser species able to consider our communication choices and how it shapes us neurologically as well as those we interact with, if socially and culturally we encouraged more empathy along the way.
It is ‘all of the above’ and a thousand other things I’ll never be able put into writing that I want leaders in all sectors must exist for, to help improve the level of general awareness of such things at some distant tomorrow, to a degree that levels of responsibility rise relative to educated beliefs about our interconnectedness – if we can get others to generically address ‘Beliefs-thoughts-feelings and actions’ as equal in importance to Profit and logical technical control systems, then some of these issues, which evolve to create the quality of human existence may at some point in the future feed into the prevailing and cultural degrees of wisdom with which the human race makes it’s choices.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
