I don’t need to recrunch the ’social’ thing but it is an important factor that in my mind amply illustrates the lack of intellectual rigor around solution creation. It is good to see that in the discourse even my sharpest critics have acknowledged the emphasis and use of ’social’ as a dreadful mistake.

I think the ‘social’ thing is such an issue because it is one that very few technologists are able to get to grips with. There are notable exceptions, Dennis and Stowe Boyd amongst others. In the business 2.0 context the word ‘social’ has become burdened with a whole set of meaning that has little to do with the ‘social’ (small ‘s’) or ‘Social‘ aspects of business, but it is still an essential part of the debate, as Dennis goes on to say:

Last Friday I met a pal of mine who is in the business of implementing change. He argued that people don’t like change. It is too disruptive for many. Think about all those contradictory stats that talk about dis-satisfaction with technology but then the same people would not change what they have. Familiarity is comforting. At a time when many people are more concerned about job security than shiny new toys, it should be no surprise that implementing an E2.0 project will have a slim chance of success without the sponsorship and active participation of top management.

Finally, and here I am putting on my social psychologist’s hat. The nature-nurture debate that has rumbled on for more than 50 years among socpsych types shows no signs of abating. These key concepts have a place in our understanding of what can work but are largely ignored in the discourse.

The traditional nature/nurture debate Dennis mentions has formed the basis of many an undergraduate essay over the years (“Are you a product of your genes, or of your environment? Discuss”). However, it has been replaced by the more careful study of epigenetics – understanding the way that the environment interacts with our genes, enabling and disabling them. Conversely, our genetic make-up also influences our environment in a transactional sequence that changes it as it changes us. An irritable baby that never sleeps is eventually going to have tired, irritable parents. And how those irritable parents interact with the baby and nurture it may shape which of its genes become activated or deactivated, shaping its development.

And so, back to social computing, Web 2.0 and social media in business. When Dennis’ friend cites the importance of “the sponsorship and active participation of top management” it is worth thinking about why that is so important. The reason usually isn’t the obvious. Management sponsorship is a form of social proof that taps into the social dimension of business – culture. Business culture can help or hinder the adoption of 2.0 technologies, but 2.0 technologies are disruptive to the traditional power-bases and communication structures within the business. The two things dance an intertwined-transactional dance. Social software changes the cutlure, but culture also changes the way that the software is used. For me  that creates a demand for careful ‘social’ design, to get the technologies adopted, and then careful change-management to pick up the pace and the full benefits in creating a more dynamic and innovative business culture. A place where ideas emerge, are captured and nurtured, and delivered to customers.

Lastly, back to a comment in Dennis’ post that caused a wry smile as I sat reading it: “cult-ure” versus “culture”. Some businesses have very, very strong cultures. They resist change because they are as much cult as company. When the cult is working, that is amazingly powerful – they preserve their culture even with rapid growth, and smash through any obstacles in their way. I think you know the kinds of business we are talking about. But, and this is a big but, when the market changes, and the cult does not, the business heads for the rocks. Traditional change programs almost inevitably fail, but even in these toughest of environments, I believe that ‘social’ tools can create change.

The traditional IT and management paradigm is that we are a collection of individuals using IT tools. That frame misses the most powerful forces that business leaders have at their finger tips. A business is a community, and sometimes multiple communities, that communicate and interact with each other (both intra- and inter-). That interaction is increasingly dominated by technology-mediated communication, and that communication (or collaboration) technology is less neutral than people think. It can be culture forming.

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“Britons are more willing to cut back on holidays and meals out than on spending on communication technology during the recession… … spending on mobiles, the internet and TV is regarded as a higher priority than almost anything except food.”

Time to revisit Maslow's Hierarchy of Human Needs

Curious indeed. I shared the link via Twitter and the ever provocative Camille Mendler of the Yankee Group (and I mean that in a good way) tweeted back. It struck a chord with a series of recent discussions, so I’ll share them here.

Let’s leave Maslow, just for a minute, we’ll come back to him. The way we are using the Internet is subtly changing. The study highlights a dramatic rise in the use of social networking websites. 19 milliom people in the UK, that is around 50% of the internet-using population, spend an average of six hours a month on Facebook. That is a 50% increase from four hours a month back in the previous May.

It’s not just a phenomenon among young people. Quite the opposite.The proportion of 25 to 34-year-olds claiming to have a social networking site profile grew to 46%, while the figure among 35 to 54-year-olds rose to 35%. The only group shrinking was the 15- to 24-year0old group, down by 5% to 50% – perhaps they are trying to avoid their parents on Facebook?

This shift in Internet use is relevant to Maslow’s Hierachy of needs. Just in case you missed, Maslow’s article ‘A Theory of Human Motivation’ appeared in Psychological Review back in 1943, and was the foundation of his book “Toward a Psychology of Being” (on Amazon US and UK). In it Maslow proposed a five tier model to describe human motivation. It is a theoretical approach, rather than an experimental finding, and Maslow himself revised the model in his later works. That said, it has become the foundation for a sea of thought, from sales theory to engaging employees. The five tiers are:

• Self-Actualization
• Esteem
• Love/Belonging
• Safety
• Physiological

Essential, each level of needs has to be fulfilled in order to reach the next. If needs at a lower level are left unmet, we focus back down at that lower level, so the theory goes. Taking the levels in more detail, one by one:

Physiological Needs

We all need to eat, to drink, to breathe and to sleep. Without these, we rapidly fail to function and everything else becomes meaningless.

Safety Needs

We require shelter and protection from physical harm. Exposure to the elements or attack will obviously impact on your physiological needs. Beyond that we seek longer term security, for example paid employment or knowing that we will be provided for. We don’t want just to survive, we want to know that we will survive.

These first two tiers are reasonably well served in western society, although not as universally as one might home. Moving on from the lower levels it starts to get interesting, and somewhat surprisingly, we come back to broadband:

Social Needs

We need a sense of belonging. That might come through friendships, or membership of a group of some description. Something we are part of that is a place for giving and receiving love, in its various forms, is required to meet these social needs. Think: Belonging.

Esteem Needs

We all need to feel wanted and valued, consciously or not. Simple acts, like being recognised and receiving attention from others, protect our self-esteem. A healthy self-respect, a sense of having achieved things, keeps us going. Without these, we are unlikely to feel fulfilled. There are a raft of psychological theories that exist at this level. Simply remember: Attention.

Self-actualisation

This was the subject of much of Maslow’s later work, but that is something for another time. For now, suffice it to say that at this highest level, people become motivated by more social causes and issues such as justice, truth, wisdom and meaning. Operation at this level is often evidenced by the acceptance of facts and the celebration of capabilities like creativity and problem solving.

As a side note, this model seems to hold true at a corporate level as well as a human one. I believe there are companies that achieve “self-actualisation”. They are rare, but I have had the privilege of experiencing them. I recognise themes from the periods of peak growth at both Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks. There was a sense of meaning that was common across the who;e business, and values like justice and wisdom were held in high regard.

So, back to those British broadband users… Social Networking sites like Facebook, enable us to keep in touch with friends. Remember that requirement to belong? To be needed? Simple acts like commenting on a friends status update, or knowing that others might be waiting for our next status update, tick boxes in the hierarchy of needs. For better or worse, broadband is becoming the pipe that provides social fuel on that journey towards self-actualisation.

I’m not making an argument to justify broadband as some sort of basic right, or even an essential service – that is probably a step too far. I am pointing out that broadband pipes don’t just feed us with information, they provide us with much needed social contact too. The Internet of information has become the Internet of people. In doing that, broadband has moved itself from “nice to have” to “nicer to have.”

While people said that they would cut back on going out for dinner (47%), DIY (that most serious of British addictions – 41%) or holidays (41%), only a tiny minority (10%) would be prepared to cut back on their broadband.  It would be intersting to know about more about the survey, as the identification of the surveyors may have skewed the answers.

Maslow’s hierarchy hasn’t changed, but the role of technology within it has. Businesses need to take note here. People have embraced ‘digital intimacy’ as part of their lives. Companies that don’t provide tools to support social cohesion will eventually suffer. Yes, I guess I would say that, but I’m happy to hear counter arguments.

Throwing your staff out on the road, or sending them off to work at home, without providing on-line social tools, will impact on the effectiveness of your business. Staff turnover will increase, communication will dry up, and the creativity that is so vital to innovation will disappear. Alarmist? I don’t think so. Look at how people are using technology at home. Those expectations are coming into the work place. Look at the importance people place on it. This isn’t a fad, it is a change in what the Internet is all about.

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A Tortoise Enclosure

John Cleese talks about creating an enclosure, a safe space where it is safe for the tortoise – our creative mind – to come out of its shell without its head being knocked by a passing object. An oasis in which we can be creative – free from interruptions and distractions (like the constant drip of incoming emails and other interruptions):

“You have to create boundaries of space, and you have to create boundaries of time.”

Boundaries, and the space that results from them, are essential. For me, that means taking a walk out of the office – either in my local woods, or wherever I can get away to. For others, that might be closing the office door or putting in ear phones and playing music.

After space, the other dimension is time. Creating time boundaries, a defined starting time and a stopping time, is actually great for productivity and creativity. After a brief twitter exchange with Amanda Rose (organising the Twestival for charity:water) and Bastian Lehmann  I realised I haven’t specifically blogged about time boxing (although it is the idea behind “…see what you can do in an hour“). Setting aside a fixed chunk of time enables you to focus on getting something done.

Learning New Things

The talk touches on learning, and that is really my subject here. John says:

“To know how good you are at something requires exactly the same skills as are required to be good at something.”

He then states that in reverse: if you are not good at something, you lack the skills to know that you are. A much better way of stating something I often have to tackle: We don’t know what we don’t know.

“Most people who have no idea what they are doing, have absolutely no idea that they have no idea what they are doing.” John Cleese.

The Science of Lifelong Learning

Behind his usual dry humour, he is making a very serious statement. Learning, life long learning, is an essential skill. We need to be like tortoises, not like hares, when it comes to our education. I was brought up in a generation where we hared our way through school, and for the privileged few, university. A learning sprint, then work. The pace of change in society and business, and the speed at which new knowledge is being created, means that is no longer sufficient. Learning must now be a life long process. Like the tortoise, we need to plod on, in a steady and sustainable way. As John Cleese says, again with his unique humour:

“I try, today, to learn something new. Each day I want to learn something new – because I am very, very old… and I’ll be dead soon. So, I want to be as well informed as I can possibly be, when I die.”

Part of what drove me to start Redcatco was the concept of build learning organisations empowered by technology . Disparate communities linked by what is often called collaboration or social software today.

Businesses need to be places where people learn new things everyday. The only sustainable way for that to happen is as a result of people gaining knowledge from each other by sharing it. Those learners then build on that knowledge and share it in turn. That process is at the heart of innovation and development, from design and marketing to effective sales. I believe that learning best takes place in a social context (and Bandura and a number of other Psychologists would tend to agree).

This week I attended a panel at the RSA on the subject of life long learning, looking at what new research, especially in neuroscience, can tell us. There are lots of questions: What is the scope for lifelong learning, and what are the best methods to support it? We live in an ageing society, where people are staying in the work force for longer and longer periods of time. Can we still learn, even when we are old? Is the explosion in brain training (from 10 minute newspaper mental workouts to Kawashima’s brain training game) based on good science?

The speakers included Andrew Pollard, ESRC Institute of Education; Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL; Paul Howard-Jones, University of Bristol; Usha Goswami, Centre for Neuroscience in Education, University of Cambridge; Matthew Taylor (Chief Executive of the RSA); and was chaired by Tom Schuller, Director of IFLL -  the Inquiry into the Future of Lifelong Learning. The session was recorded – will be on the RSA website in due course. You can read Matthew Taylor’s blog post on the evening too. 

From my own investigations of brain plasticity (the ability of the brain to adapt and change), I know that understanding has changed dramatically in the last few years. Developments like Project Prakash (which restores sight to people who with life-long blindness) has shown that our brains can learn and relearn significantly later into life than previously thought. 

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, UCL institute of cognitive neuroscience, asked if it was meaningful or helpful to reduce accounts of educational events to neural level. All the current “brain training products” are sold with the promise, but there have been no randomised, controlled trials on most of them. She talked about an article from Weisberg et al, “The Seductive Allure of Cognitive Neuroscience“, from 2008 which shows an interesting psychological phenomenon: we are suckers for pseudo science. We fall victim to specious explanations. Adding “brain words” into a bad explanation made people believe it more. Sarah-Jayne finished her talk with a slide of images of developing brains. While scientists used to think brain development stopped early in life, scans show that the brain actually continues to develop for decades. 

Andrew Pollard argued from a very  different perspective, saying that we need to acknowledge the place of biography and identity in the learning process. It can’t just be studied at the neurological level, although such study does help – a point that all the other speakers seemed to agree with.

Matthew Taylor hypothesised that neuroscience will make a huge difference to our lives. The only threat is that there is too much hype around neuroscience. By the way, the same could be said for social media and Web 2.0 as well. What are the things that give us a desire to learn? “Collaboration and the use of technology are the meta-learning skills that will be critical to life long learning.” We can learn from arcade games. If we get up to 85% we are motivated to try again. How many people in schools are at that point? We need to keep ourselves at the point where we are doing well, but know we could do a bit better. Then we are motivated to try.

Usha Goswami, centre for neuroscience, University of Cambridge (who specialises in developmental dyslexia) talked about the developmental origins of flourishing. It is a well know list, including warm, responsive, contingent care and a family embedded in social network. I think that actually extends out to businesses that want to be learning organisations. They need to be supportive environments, with good networks into a broad community that can support their learning.

New research will and should be more interested in the emotional self regulation system. Early capability makes later learning more efficient. So  enhancing early capability at the outset of learning also increases the complexity of what can be learned. Small differences in perceptual systems can make big differences in the developmental trajectory. Think about a ship going off course. 1 degree off course, caught early, makes little difference. If it isn’t caught for a long time, you are miles from where you need to be. Early intervention is important – something else that extends out to be a business truth as well.

The interventions which promote cognitive reserve and resilience education might surprise you. It is a case of use it or loose it, another reason that we should be lifelong learners like John Cleese – learn something new everyday. Another very significant factor is physical exercise. Yes, you heard it. Before you go chasing after those cognitive enhancing drugs, get out for a walk or a run. Neurocognitive activation or cognitive training may be useful (i.e. brain games), but it really remains to be determined. What is known is that poor nutrition and poor quality of sleep can impair cognitive function. So, if you want to learn well, eat well and rest well too.

Paul Howard-Jones,  University of Bristol,  asked if brain training can help. There is research to show that practice on a cognitive function can improve that cognitive function, the bigger question is does that generalize out to other activities. Does your executive team being great at Sudoku mean that you are going to be better at strategic planning? The ACTIVE Study (Willis et al., 2006) showed some improvement in  ”fluid intelligence.” That is a good indicator of how well you will do academically.  Jaeggi’s results showed that some training improved working memory and fluid intelligence, so there is the possibility to produce brain training products that do work, but products on the market today have insufficient published evidence. Again, Paul noted that exercise helps with learning, academic achievements and motivation. Psychology is the link between neuroscience and education.

The Q&A was lively, with Peter Cook asking about “learning, unlearning and relearning” for businesses – something institutions like banks are going to have to do quite a bit of after recent events. One point that came up is that if you believe that there are hard neurological limits, you are actually less likely to reach them. Disposition and agency (believing in and taking responsibility) are critical learning factors. Likewise, learning is better when there are discussed objectives and clarity.

The word education literally means to bring on, in the sense of “to bring out” or “lead on”. It is something that we can continue to experience, and to expect for others, for the duration of our working lives, at the very least.

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In today’s hyper-connected world, where technology lets us have hundreds (if not thousands) of ‘friends’, people are increasingly interested in understanding what the human limits on maintaining human friendships might be, and why.

Real world relationships have been studied by psychologists, sociologists and host of other ‘-ists’ for decades. However, Dunbar, who works in the area of behavioural brain science, has emerged as one of the most frequently quoted figures, in the blogosphere at least.

Where did Dunbar’s Number come from?

One of Dunbar’s papers, published in 1993, wonderfully titled “The Co-evolution of Neocortex Size, Brain Size and Language in Humans” is cited for something commonly referred to as Dunbar’s number. Shock number one: There isn’t really any such thing as Dunbar’s number, in the sense that people normally refer to it.

The common mythology is that Dunbar said that people can only sustain a network of 150 contacts. Strictly speaking that is not what Dunbar’s paper said. Think of humans as brains on legs for a minute, and put your evolutionary psychology hat on. Dundar argued that, in evolutionary terms, there may be an upper group size that animals can and will live in, determined by cognitive constraints – specifically the processing capacity of the neocortex - and selected for based on various environmental constraints.

Effectively, from an individual animal’s point of view, the neocortex size sets a limit on the number of relationships that can be maintained. That in turn limits the maximum group size for the community that individual lives within, assuming they have the same constraints. At a simple level, if a species is made up of individuals that can only sustain 10 relationships, we might expect to see groups of 10 wandering around. If another member attempts to join the group, the individuals don’t have the capacity to support that extra relationship, and the member wouldn’t be accepted, or the group would fail.

The neocortex size is driven by all sorts of ecological factors that select for group size, but we could potentially use that relationship the other way round to predict group sizes, based on the neocortex. Take one group with a known group size and look at the size of its neocortex. Work out a ratio, then take another species and look at the size of its neocortex and use that ratio to predict how many individuals it would be able to support.

Would the Real Dunbar’s Number Please Step Forward

Dunbar took existing data from a number of primate studies, where typical group sizes can be observed. He then looked at the neocortex size for those primates and projected forwards to the larger human neocortex. His calculations predicted that human group sizes would typically be around 147.8. It should also be noted that Dunbar worked with average group sizes, not maximum sizes.

Now, the maths is much more complex than this summary indicates, but I’ll spare you the detail. Even so, the statisticians out there are probably gagging on their most recent meal at this point. Hang on in there. Some statistical juggling means that confidence limits around this number can be calculated, which ends up giving a range being between 100 to 231, hence my earlier comment about Dunbar’s number not really existing in the way most people expect. Think of it as a range of typical group size, rather than a number limit. Dunbar’s work has been criticised and supported. However, it is interesting to note that his suggested number does seem to match with studies of human group size from other disciplines. I commonly read both military and business books that suggest a number in this range as the typical or maximum size for a group.

Speaking of Language

There is an interesting aside here. Dunbar and others argue that social grooming is important for maintaining relationships, and for sustaining the coalitions that facilitate large group structures. While apes might spend their time picking insects out of each other’s fur, we waggle our tongues and use our voice boxes. Evolutionary psychologists often argue that we evolved language as a very efficient form of social grooming. Well, half of them would. The other half would argue something more along the lines that our brains got so big and heavy we had to do something useful with them, and language turns out to be a rather beneficial thing to have.

Think of it this way: If a large group of apes is only able to be large because they spent their entire time picking nits out of each other’s fur, it won’t be a large group for very long. While they have the advantage of being able to defend themselves and pool resources, they don’t have any time left for finding food. They will be an extinct bunch of apes in very short order.

One of the factors that gives us large group structures is our ability to use language in communication. Language is much more efficient than picking nits out of fur. I can deal with more than one person at once, for a start. That means we can be more efficient about maintaining relationships, using quick bursts of language, rather than all of the time being taken up with social grooming. Personally I find that a great relief. I love communicating with you, but I’d rather not have you dealing with my parasites!

A simpler summary would be that available time, combined with efficiency, determines the number of relationships that can be supported. Language enables us to be more efficient with our time. That in turn enables us to build a larger social world, and still have time to do other things.

Does Social Media Make Us More Social?

One of the (many) aspects of social media of that fascinates me is this: Can it enable us to be more efficient and effective in maintaining relationships? Can computer-based tools enable our brain to cope with more than it would be able to otherwise? If so, that has social ramifications, as well as organisational design ones.

So, if Dunbar’s number (or one of the equivalents from Anthropological studies) is so small, how do we end up with significantly larger groups, like 1,000+ person companies? It comes down to rings of friendships. Think of bands of 30-50, then clans of 100-200, and above that tribal groups of between 500 and 3000. Imagine that I have 30-50 relationships, and those individuals have partially overlapping relationships with others. You can now imagine an inner group and an outer group, with cohesion maintained by those individuals holding relationships across the different bands and within bands.

The way that large groups work is significantly more complex than suggested here so far. Dunbar and others argue for these layers or rings of friendships, with different strengths at each layer. This layered structure enables sustainable group dynamics. The coalitions mentioned earlier are important, since these stronger relationships provide the individual with others to protect them from potential hostility from members of the larger group, by individuals with relationships to both parties.

Bands and clans interact in a way that protects individuals and sustains tribes and population, and reflect different types and strengths of relationship. One of the challenges of today’s social media is that it doesn’t model this subtlety and complexity. Psychologists are still trying to understand the diverse nature of human relationships, and the complex properties that they have.

The Future is Still Social

It may be many years before social media catches up with even today’s understanding, and by then that understanding may have moved on – potentially due to social media itself. Social networking tools let us understand how we maintain relationships, by giving us greater visibility into how people interact, but they also potentially change the way that we do these things, a kind of social version of the schrodinger’s cat problem.

There are still going to be psychological limits on how many relationships we can maintain, whether we fundamentally change them or not. Perhaps technology enables us to have a feeling of maintaining more relationships, or it deepens relationships that have been weakened by our modern life styles. At a more human level, it is raising the question of what we mean by  ’friend‘. It is certainly making qualitative changes to what we know about those around us, and our ability to discover new people to communicate with.

Maybe you’ve worked out your own personal Dunbar number, or found ways of recreating those different circles of friendship with social media? Do you see tribes and bands in action on-line?

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There is an Easop’s fable I rather like. It goes something like this:

Two pots, one made of clay, the other of brass, were swept down a river in a flood. The brass pot said to the clay pot, “stay by my side and I will protect you.”

“Thank you for your offer,” said the clay pot, “but that’s what frightens me. If you’ll just keep your distance, I’ll be able to float down the river in safety. If we come into contact with one another, I’ll surely suffer.”

In a business (and the world in generally), we need clay pots and brass ones. Different personality types each have their (complementary) strengths and weaknesses, but they can be abrasive to one another. The brass and the clay pots need to get along together; not by being separate, but by working together without damaging each other. It is probably one of the reasons we have culture and etiquette – some rules of engagement that help to protect us from our individual differences.

In the same way, successful social mediums have some basic rules to enable people to work together without too many breakages. Often these simply evolve over time, and they are implicit norms it has been fun as twittequette has evolved in the new communication medium of twitter. It will be interesting to see where services like plurk go, which have different communication metaphors (you’ll have to look at the plurk site to see what I mean). They might be the daftest of names, but they are the cutting edge of computer-mediated communication right now!

The most common reason I have seen for the failure of some enterprise wikis has been the failure to establish appropriate social norms, but that is a topic for another post. Safe to say that an understanding of personality (your own and others) and working social norms is a key success factor in social media and collaboration.

In Part I I mentioned that a number of Twitter folk posted their MBTI(R) in their profiles. Not really anything scientific you can tell from that (reporting bias, uncontrolled tests, and so on), but I was a little stunned to see the vast majority report themselves as introverts. As a reminder, Twitter is a service where you post short messages that the world can read. Not something that seems very introverted at first glance.

One of the wonderful things about blogs and wikis is they seem to put introverts and extroverts in a level playing field (if not unlevel in the opposite direction to the normal). Just as the introvert musician will happily get up on stage in front of a thousand people, the introvert will blog or tweet to a crowd of millions. It is a very different thing than engaging in a conversation in a crowded room, even though it is taking place in the most crowded room of all (the Internet). Just as being on stage is just the musician and their instrument, blogging is just you and your computer. Finally we can harness the thinking of the introverts as well as the extroverts in the world!

That brings me to my next point, and back to the beginning of the topic. There is some evidence that points to our behaviour being situational. Thus some psychologists have argued that all of this trait theory is just bunk, since we change our behaviour (and thus personality) according to the social context. The word “personality” comes from the greek “persona”, literally, putting on a mask or a face.

We all put on masks, to one degree or other, and understanding ours and others is helpful in getting things done more easily. We are, after all, social creatures more than we are individuals and that is even more apparent now that we have more social media to interact through.

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This post is for Lobelia and others, in response to her blog post on personality types “personality types, can you be sorted?“. The aim is to provide some background on individual differences and, hopefully, some insight in part II.

Personality type inventories seem to be one of those things that have entered into the popular conciousness – I was surprised at how many people had their MBTI(R) listed in their profiles on Twitter (Update, August 2009: There is now a Facebook application the publishes people’s MBTI as well). However, we are not normally that aware of our own personality type, and rarely have an accurate view of it.

The study of personality pre-dates psychology itself, by a long long way, but first became more academic with Jung’s work (and this is what the popular Myers Briggs MBTI(r) draws from).

There are two major approaches to looking at personality. One looks at the individual as a unique person (the idiographic approach), and is the basis for psychotherapy and self-discovery tools. The second approach (nomothetic) looks at personality across groups and populations, looking for ‘similarities in differences’. More properly, looking at personality traits that can be used to group similar personality types together.

Trait theories of personality are popular in business, since they can identify people suited to particular roles, at least in theory, by making use of psychometric tests – essentially closed questionnaires that aim to produce reliable results – ie valid and repeatable. They are built from a lexical approach, looking at the words we use to describe ourselves/other people’s behaviours and traits. Similar traits are grouped (eg friendly and sociable might be put together) into dimensions of personality. The ones that appear (by the magic of statistics) to be most significant across populations are then labelled as personality factors. These personality dimensions are the basic structure of personality.

Cattell’s16PF(r) model (sixteen personality factor) is probably the most widely used, but I frequently enounter Myers Briggs, with its four bipolar dimensions ( (I)ntrovert/(E)xtrovert, (S)ensation/i(N)tuition, (F)eeling/(T)hinking, (J)udging/(P)erceiving). When people cite results in the Myers Briggs model, they are crushed down into ‘either or’, eg I or E, N or F, resulting in 16 ‘distinct’ personalities. However, these are dimensions, and people (including yourself!) could be anywhere on those scales. My point here is that people don’t fit into neat boxes, these are just constructs to make it easier to digest the subtleties of personality. Even though Cattell used computers to identify his sixteen personality factors, it is a fairly analogue thing, and sometimes the outcomes can be surprising, if not puzzling (as you’ll see in part II).

OK, that’s the hard bit over, apart from one side note. Most of these theories were developed within the English language (an etic approach). Spot a problem? If you are Spanish, Italian, …, you might choose different words, or have different personality groupings in your culture. These could, quite literally, be lost in translation. Because of that, some psychologist have started to work within each language (an emic approach), the most famous of these is Goldberg. We’ll come back to him in a minute, as he’s a useful chap, Internet-wise.

So, what do we know so far? Well, you have your unique personality, and in that there are some key factors which you have in common with other people. The more dominant factors link to personality traits, which in turn lead to behaviours, beliefs and biases. What we are looking at is things that remain fairly consistent over time, and can form patterns across different groups of people. How did we get these personality traits, and what can we do about them?

This is the nature, nurture debate. There have been some biological theories of personality (Eysenck and Gray), with varying degrees of success. One one hand, our central nervous system might account for extroversion/introversion, and there are also theories with regard to the effect of our sensitivity to particular neurotransmitters (dopamine and the like). On the other side, there is evidence from studies of separated twins, that environment is more key – although that isn’t straight forward either, since we are partially responsibly for creating our environment, and everyone’s environment is completely unique to them as an individual.

There are problems on all sides, but it is probably fair to say our biology does not totally determine our personality. However, the heritability of major personality factors is probably around 20-30%. In other words, you can blame your parents for around a third of the nature of your strongest personality attributes (plus a little bonus responsibility for their control of the environment they put you), but the majority is down to your environment and what you did and do with it.

In our early years, personality evolves rapidly, but by the time we reach our 30′s it is fairly stable, although still open to gradual change and major life events. So, by the time someone is established in the work place, they are “who they are” – That means being aware of your own biases and behaviours, and being able to accommodate other people’s, is key to being effective and productive. You are unlikely to change them, and they are unlikely to change you, so best make the most of the situation.

A little self-awareness goes a long way (he says, knowing he has some way to go! I appreciate those that have accommodated me over the years). Now, I said I’d come back to Lewis Goldberg, so I better had do. The 16PF(r) has been popular for a long time in industry. While dealing with 16 different personality factors might be useful, having something simpler and more cross cultural would also be useful too.

Goldberg came up with a five factor model (often called the Big Five) and independently so did Costa and McCrae (the OCEAN model – for Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness and Neurotisism). While most personality inventories are closed, commercial products, Goldberg has provided his out to the world. There are pros and cons of this approach. Some would argue there is reason to control access to the tests in order to stop them being misused by the untrained, or cheated on by people trying to reverse engineer answers.

I better come off of the fence for a minute and point out that I am a bit of a fan of the OCEAN/Big five model (they differ in one dimension – openness versus intellect – but may eventually converge with more research). I can grasp the five dimensions in my head, and it is a practical way to understand how to deal with myself and others:

• Openness – How will I/this person deal with change. Will help and encouragement be needed, or is it “dive in” time.
• Conscientiousness – Will I/they get it done or do I need to flag for follow up and add gentle reminders.
• Extroversion – Do I/they need to plan in time away from other people, or is the hustle bustle needed.
• Agreeableness – What sort of negotiation is required? Am I being fair.
• Neurotisism – This isn’t a bad thing. A neurotic hand glider pilot will live longer! Do I/they need time to think it through?

You can take the Big 5 Personality Test yourself on the out of service web site (not actually out of service, that is just what it is called).

When you think about these dimensions and a team of people working on a wiki or a blog/blog network, you start to get a sense of the dynamics that can take place, and your own part in them. Before part two and some interesting stats from twitter, I’ll leave you with this quote, adapted from Kluckhohn and Murray:

“Every person is in certain respects like all others, like some others and like no other.”

Continued in Personality Sorters and Social Media Part II

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This isn’t a post on Psychodynamics for business productivity, rather a few thoughts to help in understanding ourselves and others. Internal conflict, so Freud says, is the cause of angst. We relieve it, or rather defend ourselves from it, through nine mechanisms:

1. Repression, putting things out of the concious mind. Of course, they resurface – and this is the area Freud is most popularly known for.
2. Displacement, redirecting the motivation towards something that is more acceptable.
3. Sublimation redirecting libido towards a higher, altruistic social goal. That’s sublime.
4. Projection is placing ones feelings onto another person, identifying them as there.
5. Reaction Formation defends against a repressed tendency by over compensating in the opposite direction.
6. Denial of the situation, refusing to accept it as being.
7. Rationalization involves giving a socially acceptable reason, different to the, less attractive, real motivation.
8. Regression provides a defence by returning to childhood behaviours.
9. Escape – pressing the eject button and getting out of the situation

It is amazing how many of these phrases have come into common use, although without their background and context. Whilst his theories weren’t perfect, they did come from a good deal of personal introspection, and provide a starter for ten!

Do you recognise any of those in your actions, or the actions of those around you? Being aware of why we, or others, do what we do is surprisingly fruitful.

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Take thirty seconds to watch the video now…Hopefully you are suitably entertained and informed.

So, what does that have to do with being productive? Simple: If you want to be productive and effective, you need to understand a little about how you see the world. Or rather, understand a little about how you don’t see the world.

Sensation – the information that comes from our senses – hearing, seeing and touching – is very fleeting. We can’t take it all in once, there is just far too much input. Even though about two thirds of our brain is given over to visual processing and related tasks, much of the sensory information from our eyes is already pre-processed and summarised before it gets there. Even then, there is still too much. This is where attention comes in.

As you discovered in that video clip, we direct our attention and limit what we see, and what we don’t. Attention is important. Attention is also directional. That means we have to pay attention, as best we can, and choose what we pay attention too.

Sometimes attention is directed automatically. For example, driving home in that little daydream that is the daily commute, when something out of the ordinary happens, your brain alerts and attracts your attention. You aren’t always that lucky though. Much of what we do with attention is either consciously controlled, or it is learnt. That means we have to work at it.

To get things done requires focus – directing attention to the task at hand. That focus needs to be on one thing at a time. Despite the illusions that speed and gadgets may bring, we don’t multi task well when it comes to taking things in. We just don’t seem to be built that way. Only by directing our senses to one thing at a time, can we take in the depth of detail we need to get things done well. If we don’t, we miss things.

One last thing on perception. Perception is constructed. We make sense of the waves of information coming at us from our senses by referring back to things we already know. What we ‘see’ is often more about what we ‘expect’ to see. Researchers have even found that they can change who we are talking to in a face to face conversation, and we don’t notice (see: Simons and Daniel (1998) and also Change Blindness)!

Think about it. I draw a square, with a triangle on top. I then add four more squares inside of the big square, and one rectangle at the bottom. Draw it out. What do you see? A house? That’s ridiculous! It is a bunch of lines. However, our brain knows, from past experience, that my drawing represents a house. It is able to add in the missing pieces.

When we are having conversations, making observations, and working things out, it is worth remembering that our brains busy filling in the blanks. Sometimes they are right, sometimes they are wrong. How often do you take a bunch of lines and see a house? How often do you count the passes and miss the bear?

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Three things in two days. First, I loose contact with my phone. Second, my MacBook Pro dies. Then, in a third and final twist, traffic on the blog increased by 2000% (yes, two thousand) and I get locked out of WordPress. Coincidence? Of course. I got a free lesson in personal productivity in the process; How do you survive when your options are shut down?

Day One

On day one, I headed into London, having agreed to phone everyone I was meeting when I located a suitable coffee shop to gather in. I arrived and reached for my phone. No phone in my pocket. No phone in my bag. Generally, no phone anywhere. How did we survive before we had a phones in our pockets? Perhaps we were more organized, perhaps we just wondered around lost. We only had certain opportunities to communicate, so we planned a little more and were a little less spontaneous. We certainly weren’t sending a text when someone was trying to talk to us! When we got opportunities to communicate, we made the most of them.

There I was with one pound in my pocket. Now, the way the dollar is going, one pound may be worth about $5 at the moment, but it still only gets you one phone call from a UK phone box. As I stood in the pouring rain in central London, staring at the phone box, I didn’t know who to call to sort out the mess. Miraculously, it all worked out fine. I was still glad when I got my phone back later in the day.

Day Two

On day two, I flipped open the lid of my trusty MacBook Pro to do my semi-regular backup and… Nothing. Bright light on front, but black screen. 18 months old and it was dead. Cue raised blood pressure and a trip to the Apple store. Despite mouth-to-mouth from the man at the genius bar (note to self: they really don’t like it when you call it the geek bar), there was no getting any sense out of the thing. The result? A very productive day of phone calls and ticking off items on the to do list that had been left undone because I’d been caught up in email, slide creation and the wonders of the Internet. The MacBook story is to be continued… For now, my trusty G4 is helping me through, sans Microsoft Windows.

The Psychology of Happiness

So, a little bit of Psychology, to fuzz up your day, specifically the psychology of choice and of happiness. Two gentlemen, Barry Schwartz and Dan Gilbert, have made these topics more accessible via their TED talks last year. To summarize and synthesize the two: The more choice we have, the less happy we are. When we do get choices, we don’t use them well, and when we make mistakes, we rationalize them to ourselves, but still we worry that we didn’t do the right thing.

And Finally

We are at our most happy when we aren’t given too many choices, because choices cause stress. Despite that, we always want the ability to have lots of choice, we call it freedom. We want the freedom to keep our options open. Together that creates some interesting insight into why all of this technology causes us to procrastinate. Technology creates so many different possibilities, and with it a whole range of new decisions for us to worry about.

See also: 5 Ways to reduce stress, by reducing choices.

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How often do you have a task that seems insurmountable or indigestible? Do you find that you just can’t get started on it? There is a phrase we use around our here, “have you eaten your frog yet?” Frogs are the things that you need to do, but don’t want to do, for whatever reason (for a bit of background see Watch out for the frogs and Frogs, Gnats, Butterflies and Gems).

These things get put off, because they are seen as impossibly hard to swallow. At the start of each day, pick the ugliest one and get working on it, so it doesn’t hang around.

Planning can be a form of procrastination

I used to approach things by carving out half hour slots in my diary, and scheduling various tasks across the day or week. The problem with that approach is that it creates a lot of pressure to perform, and it increases the likelihood of procrastination. Every little distraction and interuption becomes an excuse to put off doing the scheduled thing until later. By mid-afternoon, that hour’s commitment is starting to feel like a mountain to climb. We are aware when we get off-task like this, but it doesn’t help with getting back on track. So what is to be done?

Take a bite of the elephant

I hope that no-one would actually eat an elephant, but it is a common phrase and a strong image (see Chasing Mice and Eating Elephants for one discussion). The way to deal with a monster task is to take it one little piece at a time. Pick the task or project and say “Let me see what I can get done on this in the next hour.” Commit to starting on the task, and working only that task for the next hour. No more, and no less. You might even plan a reward for yourself at the end of the hour. It might be a drink, a walk or a bit of random procrastination of your choice, like a quick bit of web surfing.

Pick the task, and shut out any other distractions. Create focus for yourself. Look at the clock, note the time and set to work. Remember, you aren’t committing to an outcome or an achievement, you are just investing an hour into a task to move things forward.

At the end of the hour, let yourself loose, but first look back at what you have achieved. I guarantee that you will be amazed at the results. Celebrate the achievement. That success creates forward momentum and boosts your productivity, you’ll want to get going on more things.

Amaze yourself and let the pressure off

Note that it isn’t “I must work on this for an hour”. You are not beating yourself up or trying to put yourself under pressure. You are choosing to be creative – “let me see what I can do” – playing a game, having a little race. Say I will do what I can do, and all that will be enough. Set yourself up for success. Anything that you get done is bonus. Rather than “I must do x” which sets you up for failure and is going to trigger fear and stress responses.

Once the frog is gone, it is gone

The one hour approach makes those frogs easier to swallow. If you know the frog eating is only going to last an hour, and you are only going to eat what you can, it is that much less pressured.

The feeling of having that tasks out of the way is a wonderful boost to productivity for the rest of the day. If an hour seems like too much, try the beginners version and go for a very focussed 20 minutes. This technique has worked wonders for me, let me know how it works for you.

Related Articles: Too Much Choice – Too Little Happiness (how choice causes procrastination), Watch out for the frogs! (understanding different types of task) and The Now Habit – Dealing with Procrastination (overview of Neil Fiore’s excellent book).

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The answer is simple… It is because sometimes we make it for ourselves, let me introduce Gestalt Psychology.

Gestalt Psychology (nothing to do with the therapy of the same name) basically says that the brain tries to make sense of the things that it experiences. In fact, it is very good at it, which is why we can watch a TV screen which is really just a bunch of crude dots, and we can have a phone call even though there is lots of noise, distortion and half of the speech is missing. The brain is amazingly made! It always tries to find meaning in things – the law of pragnanz.

We have to watch ourselves with pragnanz, because we often end up justifying things that really don’t make sense, which is no way to get things done! Gestalt is the german word for form (shape). Some of the basic ideas in Gestalt systems are as follows:

• Emergence – we perceive the whole, grouping items, then fill in the details (making up the gaps if necessary).
• Reification – we perceive the parts and construct a whole to create closure (again, making up the gaps).
• Multistability – we can flip between conflicting interpretations rapidly.
• Invarience – we can reconstruct disparate images to find the similarities in them.

The wikipedia link has a couple of good diagrams that illustrate these points, for example this one on Reification. You might have heard the phrase “Escher’s world”. He was an artist that used many of these concepts to create optical illusions (nice gallery here, you can even buy Escher stuff). Illusionists and magicians also use these properties of the brain to trick us into seeing things that are not there.

The concepts seem to apply at higher levels as well, so we have to watch this in our communication with others. I’ve watched experiments that show how you can even cause someone to miss hear words if the context is wrong. If you expect that someone is going to give you a particular message, for example a preconception that someone will be calling to deliver some bad news, body language or tone of voice. When that message arrives and the tone of their voice is downcast, you may hear what they say as bad news, even if it isn’t! So, be careful out there, it isn’t all as it at seems. We need to be mindful what we communicate with our body language.

So, enough on coincidence, now you can sleep more easily, without worrying about coincidence anymore. You’ll just see it everywhere. Mystery solved. Not that marketers don’t pass on your phone number, email address and clothes size as well, of course!

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Procrastination isn’t ‘not doing things’, it can be ‘doing the wrong things’ rather than the right things right now. If we are honest, the majority of us procrastinate to some degree or other. However, highly successful people generally don’t. That makes procrastination a prime issue to tackle on many people’s self-improvement journey. I am no exception.

Procrastination is touched upon in so many books, but it is a very hard thing to deal with. A good remedy seems hard to find. So far my favourite book has been The Now Habit: Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-free Play by Neil Fiore, Ph.D.

I had not read one of Neil Fiore’s books before, but “Dealing with the Emotional Side of Cancer” had been recommended to me, so I purchased the Now Habit. Perhaps I was procrastinating?

The Now Habit isn’t perfect as a book or as a system, but nothing is. However, I and many other people have found The Now Habit remarkably helpful. It was written out of Neil’s own struggles and his work with clients.

Here is a brief overview, but there is no substitute for reading the book in full. Hopefully this will provide some encouragement to you, running through the content of the chapters:

Introduction to The Now Habit

Starting with a Maslow quote, the introduction sets out a positive philosophy for dealing with procrastination – The Now Habit. How to move from being a procrastinator, to being a producer.

1. Why we procrastinate.

The warning signs:

• An impossibly long “to do” list and talking to yourself in “have to’s”
• Being unrealistic about time and vague about goals and values
• Feelings of depression, low self-esteem and fear.

Our worst critic is ourselves. We judge ourselves a failure, before we have even started. Procrastination is inherently rewarding – you escape the object of your fear and do something that you ‘want’ to do, rather than something that you ‘have to’. Sometimes the object of the procrastination even goes away, because circumstances change, or because someone else deals with it. Procrastination is a self-reinforcing, vicious circle. It can express resentment, or it can defend against fear of failure or the fear of success. A really helpful productivity quote:

“The drive for success involves setting a goal, making it a high priority, and then investing time and energy towards its achievement.”

2. How we procrastinate

Explaining and understanding how procrastination happens, with the procrastination log. Neil suggests you just carry on procrastinating for a week, but keep a log of how you do it. This is actually a surprisingly hard exercise to do! It is always a good idea to keep track of how you use your time. Those with a background in time-billed professions are good at this, but the rest of us have a bit to learn. Start by creating safety – This is the first step out of procrastination. We naturally avoid doing ‘dangerous things’, the way to get them done is to make them less dangerous. The book gives some powerful illustrations.

3. How to talk to yourself

Avoid counter productive messages:

• “have to’s” send messages of stress. Contrasting the language of the procrastinator with that of the producer: ” “I choose”, “I decide”, “I will”.
• “should’s” are messages of depression. should looses its original meaning and instead focusses on resentment and anger, disappointment. Just like “have to’s” it is out of line with the “choice” of the producer.

The power of choice – moving from resistance to commitment. Start learning how to say no. Five self-statements that distinguish procrastinators from producers, with ways to transform your self-talk:

1. The negative thinking of “I have to.” Becomes “I choose to.”
2. The negative thinking of “I must finish.” Becomes “When can I start?”
3. The negative thinking of “This is so big.” Becomes “I can take one small step.”
4. The negative thinking of “I must be perfect.” Becomes “I can be human.”
5. The negative thinking of “I don’t have time to play.” Becomes “I must take time to play”

4. Guilt-Free Play, Quality Work

Procrastination leads us to put off living, and this is a huge tragedy. Procrastinators and workaholics have much in common. Neil introduces the ideal of the Pull Method of Self-Motivation. A sense of mission is the ultimate in the pull method. We work productively when we can anticipate pleasure, rather than just pressuring ourselves into doing things. Play is important. Guilt-free play leads to quality work. My personal version of this is to play the game of seeing what I can do in a hour.

5. Overcoming Blocks to Action

There are three major blocks to action:

1. The terror of being overwhelmed
2. The fear of failure
3. The fear of finishing.

These are three tools to tackle them:

1. Three-dimensional Thinking, the Reverse Calendar.
2. The work of worrying, worry constructively and have it over with.
3. Persistently starting, just keep on starting.

6. The Unschedule

This powerful concept gets you to look at what you are not going to do and to firmly book in play (leisure, socialising, …), to make it guilt-free. There is lots of comment on this around the blogosphere:

• On DirtSimple.
• and on Jim Gibbon’s blog in a great post on the Top 5 Productivity Tips of 2006.

7. Working in the Flow State

Learning to focus and relax, to work productively. The whole area is a massive topic in its own right, this is a great introduction.

8. Fine-Tuning Your Progress

Plan for setbacks – accept that you will fail sometimes and make a plan to get you back on track, to give you resilience.

“Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task” – Willian James.

9. The Procrastinator in Your Life

Now you are cured, the book runs through some tips on how to deal with those other procrastinators in your life.

The Now Habit – In closing…

The Now Habit is a fantastic book, well worth reading. We can feel that procrastination protects us from others judging our efforts, or from change, but actually it just holds us back. I think the net net for me is this: The secret to busting procrastination is to understand the truth, the action reality of each situation. Realise when you are procrastinating. Realise why you are procrastinating. Then confront those reasons with the truth of the situation. Also that it is ok to fail, it is ok to be human. It is OK to succeed too. And lastly, that it is OK to have things change. You have a choice, don’t be afraid to use it.

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Something I keep stumbling across is the idea of eating a frog for breakfast! It really isn’t as bad as it sounds. At home we even have a poster above the breakfast table that is a big picture of a frog with the caption “What’s your frog today?”. Eating frogs is all over the blogosphere:

- On Matt’s Idea Blog, right here (I love reading it).
- Over at 43Folders, here.
- And on the CEO Blog – time leadership.

Brian Tracy’s book Eat That Frog! 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time being a whole book on it, well reviewed on Amazon. All of this is based on an old saying:

“If the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog, you can go through the day with the satisfaction of knowing that that is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long!”

Thankfully there are more than frogs to eat in a day. Understanding the types of things that need to be done results in effective action. Tasks are a multidimensional problem space, but you can start by examining just two key dimensions:

The desirability of the task – do you want to do it? The necessity of the task – do you need to do it?

Placing tasks across each axis gives four quadrants – boy, do I love quadrants – or types task:

1. Things you don’t want to do, and actually don’t need to do.
2. Things you don’t want to do, but actually need to do.
3. Things you want to do and actually need to do.
4. Things you want to do, but actually don’t need to do.

Each has it’s own particular challenges.

1. Things you don’t want to do, and actually don’t need to do.

These are easy, don’t do them! These are ‘Gnats’, don’t get pushed into doing them by others. Squash them, bat them off, just say no! This is usually easy to do, because we are motivated to stay away from them and can see that they don’t need doing. It is generally other people that pressure us to do these things, or we accidentally commit ourselves to them. Remember that a fast ‘no’ is much better than a ‘yes’ that really means ‘no’. It avoids guilt for you and disappointment for the other person.

2. Things you don’t want to do, but actually need to do.

These are the ‘Frogs’. The ugly, distasteful things that need to be done, but tend not to. You aren’t motivated to do them, leaving them victim to procrastination. Frogs need structure around them to ensure that they actually get done. Create the motivation to make them happen, either by transforming them into something desirable or by making them subordinate to a strong habit. Eating your frog at the start of the day is just such a habit, but it is even better. Making sure frogs are the first thing that gets done leaves you free to do the things that you enjoy doing. The habit creates an inherent reward. Either way, give yourself a reward for eating the frogs, otherwise they will just sit there watching you and croaking! “If you have to eat a live frog, it does not pay to sit and look at it for a very long time!”

3. Things you want to do and actually need to do.

These are the ‘Gems’. They always appear more rare than they should be, but they are there. If you’ve eaten your ‘Frogs’, then dig out your gems. Make sure that you are being honest – are they things that really need doing? Or are they…

4. Things you want to do, but actually don’t need to do.

The ‘Butterflies’. You want to do them, because they look like fun. You chase them, because they are pretty. The challenge is that time spent butterfly chasing is time that isn’t being spent doing the things that really need doing. They are a self-justified form of procrastination. Butterflies are pretty, it is easy to see them as gems. Understand that they most certainly are not. They don’t help you with what really needs doing.

I am finding that in quickly identifying the nature of the beast before starting helps in using time effectively and it leads to a shorter to-do list, because things get crossed off.

Get to it!

- Brush-off the gnats quickly, just say no and let them go.
- Eat the biggest and ugliest of the frogs at the start of the day, then it is done.
- Mine the gems and revel in the fun and effectiveness.
- And if you find yourself chasing butterflies, catch yourself and get back to mining those gems or eating that frog.

Have a great day, right after you’ve eaten that frog for breakfast!

Related posts: How to Deal with Being Overwhelmed at Work, Frogs, Gnats, Butterflies and Gems, and Chasing mice and eating elephants.

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