Monthly Archives: March 2007

Culture or Conditioning: How Many of Our Problems are Self-made?

Reading the excellent book by James Surowiecki on the Wisdom of Crowds (see side panel for link), one of his examples when talking about the power of convention: seating in public places, got me thinking about the role of convention and norm in determining the shape and feel of our lives, jobs and even destinies to some extent. Let me backtrack slightly: in this chapter Surowiecki talks about how powerful conventions are in making society run smoothly, they maintain order and stability in addition to reducing the amount of cognitive work you have to put in to get through the day. Quoting:

Conventions allow us to deal with certain situations without thinking much about them… and they allow groups of disparate, unconnected people to organise themselves with relative ease and an absence of conflict.

So let’s think more deeply about this – how much of our lives is actually made up of conventions? How many things do we actually do and put up with, not because that’s the most logical way to approach a situation or solve a problem, but because it has always been that way or we have always done it in a certain way? Let’s take this example by Surowiecki:

Consider a practice that’s so basic that we don’t even think about it as a convetion: first-come, first-served seating in public places. Whether on the subway or on a bus or in a movie theathre, we assume that the appropriate way to distribute seats is according to when people arrive. A seat belongs, in some sense to the person occupying it. This is not necessarily the best way to distribute seats. It takes no account, for instance, of how much a person wants to sit down, It doesn’t ensure that people who would like to sit together would be allowed to. And it makes no allowances – in its hard and fast form – for mitigating factors like age or illness (in practice of course people do make allowances for these factors, but only in some places. People will give up a seat on the subway to an elderly person, but they are unlikely to do the same with a choice seat in a movie theatre, or with a nice spot on the beach).. so why do we do it? To begin with, it’s easy and it allows people to concentrate on some presumably more important things. The rule doesn’t need coercion to work, either. And since people get on and off the train randomly, everyone has a good chance of finding a set as anyone else.

Still if sitting down matters to you, there is no law preventing you from trying to circumvent the convention by, for instance, asking someone to give up his seat. So in the 1980s, the social psychologist Stanley Milgram decided to find out what would happen if you did just that. Milgram suggested to a class of graduate students that they ride the subway and simply ask people, in a courteous but direct manner, if they could have their seats. The students laughed the suggestion away, saying things like "A person could get killed that way". But one student agreed to be the guinea pig. Remarkably, he found that half of the people he asked gave up their seats, even though he provided no reason for his request.

This was so surprising that a whole team of students fanned out on the subway and Milgram himself joined in. They all reported similar results: about half the time, just asking convinced people to give up their seat. But they also discovered something else: the hard part of the process wasn’t convincing the people, it was mustering the courage to ask them in the first place. The graduate students said that when they were standing in front of a subject, "they felt anxious, tense and embarrassed". Much of the time they couldn’t even bring themselves to ask the question and they just moved on. Milgram himself described the whole experience as "wrenching". The norm of first-come, first-served was so ingrained that violating it required real labour. The point of Milgram’s experiment, in a sense, was that the most successful norms are not just externally established and maintained. The most successful norms are internalised.

This leads me to the title of this post – how many of our perceived problems exist because we have begun perceiving them as ‘convention’,  and trying to fight them literally fills us with anxiety, tension or embarrassment? This happened to me too, not that I realised it necessarily at the time. In my case our team had been together for a few years and we unwittingly became became victims of some presumptions by our boss at the time, he had made his mind up regarding each of our strengths and weaknesses and forever treated us according to these stereotypes and never would let us prove him wrong by doing something different. After a while you almost begin to believe it yourself, when you find that you are arguing a point to deaf ears. Although you persist, it is easy to gradually give up as the embarrassment of asking and labouring a point simply becomes too great and before you know it you have been conditioned to put up with it.

Someone a while ago illustrated this very well, when explaining how fleas are trained for the flea circus. This is a true story! To get fleas to jump a specific (premeditated height) what you do is you stick them in a tall tube, the height of which you would like to train your flea to jump and stick a lid on the tube. In the beginning the flea will jump as high as he likes, but hit his head/body in the lid of the tube. He will do this a few times until he learns (mainly from the pain!) that this is not a good move. Eventually he learns to jump just so high that he won’t hit his head in the lid of the tube anymore. Take him out of the tube and he will still only jump as high as the height of the tube he was in.

How much are are we victims of the same thing? How much could we in fact change what happens to us by daring to pipe up, speak our minds or even just as a difficult question? True, this will demand more labour on our behalf, but may in fact lead us to happier lives, new opportunities and allowing us to grow beyond our perceived limitations.

What drives you: Extrinsic or Intrinsic motivation?

What drives us is not just a key to the sustainability of our happiness, it also defines us as people more than we think.

What is extrinsic and intrinsic motivation? Extrinsic motivation is all that external stuff that tells us we have made it. People’s praise, a fat pay-check, a big watch, a nice car, a big house.. all those things have gained such importance in our lives these days, probably because of the advertising and marketing industry’s triumph in convincing us we are all losers, unless we have these symbols of success. These symbols have become very much what people measure themselves up against, signs of achievement and in fact rabbits, that whippet-like youngsters mindlessly chase around a track for, not because they necessarily want it, but because a lack of self-reflection and awareness has made it possible for the world to substitute individual values with collective definitions of what one SHOULD do, have or seen to be doing.

Intrinsic motivation is the opposite. It is about finding satisfaction from inner values, learning, growth as an individual, helping others, the sense of doing something useful, taking on a social cause and so on. Being driven by intrinsic motivation is also an opportunity to be authentic – think of your life as a house. Can you knock down the walls between the rooms and be the same person in each of them – if you did, would you like being the same person in all the rooms. Would that person reflect what you are all about? If you said yes to all the questions above, chances are you are an intrinsically motivated person. You have a Strong sense of values and it is very important for you not to be in conflict with those values – any job that offered you tons of money to be in conflict with those values you would feel bad about accepting, because you would feel like you are going against yourself. Maybe these things are not as clear in your mind that you could rationally explain why you said no to a tempting offer, maybe you need to remind yourself in case you are feeling foolish when friends rolls their eyes and tell you they don’t get your decision.

The extrinsic motivation is easy to get hooked on initially – the path of accumulating material wealth is clearly laid out. You know how to measure it and ironically, if you don’t pursue it people wonder what is wrong with you. The only way to avoid getting caught up in materialism is to understand where your happiness and fulfilment comes from.

The thing is that even though we are not in touch with our values, our drive can ensure our success for a while, but we will be unable to sustain it. Why? Because however we want to look at it, extrinsic motivation, although strong, will never be as strong as intrinsic motivation. As we age, we will find that something is missing in our lives and that we are holding back from being the person we want to be. We need the courage and honesty with ourselves to open up and examine our lives and ask ourselves the hard questions. As we do so we become more humane and vulnerable, but also more authentic as people. It also becomes easier to cope with times when things don’t go as planned, or the long-awaited promotion eludes us. We persist, because we are bigger than that.

Interestingly, it seems that at the heart of many successful companies lies the very notion of motivation too.  Built to Last  talks at length about what it is that makes companies great and it seems it is that inner sense of purpose, which is higher than merely the desire to be in profit. As the chairman of Hewlett Packard said on many occasions; "profit is what allows us to be here, but profit is not the reason for us to be here". Those are examples of intrinsically motivated companies and they seem to be able to stand the test of time much better than their more extrinsically motivated competitors.


I suppose serving the test of time is what all of us earn for ultimately – fashion, fads, hairstyles all change, our jobs change, even our lifestyles – but who we are, well, if that rests on a more solid foundation than simply with the size of our car and the trappings of our latest salary package, means we also have the fortitude to last through the hard times.

From Insights to Innovation

Just back from a conference in lovely Amsterdam on the subject of ‘Converting Insights into Actionable Results’, my mind buzzing with two days’ worth of presentations from the likes of Coca-Cola, Volvo, Sony-Ericsson, Procter & Gamble etc. on how they use insights in their respective companies.

In some respects it really sounds like Insights is the new buzzword replacing the now so droll-sounding ‘market research’, but in many ways people still treat it the same. They agonise over it, mine it, look for it, pay people to come up with it, talk to consumers in hope of finding it – but it seems the true gems of insight are hard to come by. They are retrospectively self-evident, as Coca-Cola likes to put it, but that statement itself makes insights hard to spot, because the ones that are really going to make the difference aren’t yet the ones that you have the luxury of hindsight to identify them with.

What also surprised me about this conference is that there is a lot of emphasis on using insights on what consumers want, need and complain about in the beginning of a process to inspire solutions, but very few, if any, have actually set up any process to detail how this feedback changes as a result of action. We use the Net Promoter Score at LEGO to drive the development of our consumer touch-points and to evaluate how successful initiatives are in improving these scores. That is a simple way of validating whether what you thought addressed a fundamental insight, actually does any such thing.

So what is the point about insights anyway? You can take a starting point in anything, to help guide a problem-solving process – but you could say there is value to be had in understanding how to better meet consumers’ needs. That in itself may not actually be something you can find out by asking consumers themselves. It is down to you to collect information, process it, digest it, sleep on it, combine it with other things and collectively emerge smarter by having a more compete understanding of the multi-faceted picture, which is the reality for us all these days.

The danger with what people perceive as insights (consumer research) is that they are confused with people’s opinion on things. Opinions can change very quickly and aren’t really fundamentally useful for anything long-term, as they hold truth only for short periods of time. This means that although you can have a quite healthy turnover and a bunch of seemingly happy customers, they may only stay with you until there is a better alternative around the corner. Their opinions are thus next to useless in telling you what you should be developing next.

A more useful area for insights is understanding people’s lifestyles. These change too, but not too often, maybe 5 times in our entire lifetime – when we we are children, teens, life after university and before children, life with children, life after children have flown the nest – the lifestyles at these different life stages are quite different and they tend to last for a few years at least, before there is a significant change. The downside is that the change can be quite radical and both opinions and preferences held whilst in the previous life-stage, may change radically as a result of moving into a new lifestyle.

The most interesting area for insights are people’s values. These change hardly at all. Children up to the age of 12 tend to mirror their parents’ values almost exactly, whereas ages of 12-25 are characterised by the deliberate experimentation with and independent (from parents) search for your own values. After your 25th birthday you are very unlikely to change your fundamental values on things, and thus – gaining insights of these will be much more useful long-term than anything else. One could argue that this very fact is what creates mid-life crises in people as earlier years of life and career may be linked to highly extrinsic motivations (proving to the world you have made it), whereas lasting happiness in life comes from satisfying your intrinsic motivation. If you haven’t discovered that, before settling on your values, you will feel a sense of conflict later on in life, but more about that in another post.

Transforming insights into innovation is another hurdle in its’ own right – on one hand it is about finding those golden nuggets, then it’s about defining and creating platforms where innovation can happen – areas where there is growth potential, where your company can bring something unique to the mix and which is in-line with where your company wants to go and its brand. After identifying these areas you almost have to start all over again – sifting through your existing body of research to work out what is relevant in the light of the platforms you have identified for innovation. Some will add more depth and relevance to what you have already identified, others will highlight areas where you need to find out more and lastly, any new concept based on these platforms may themselves end up generating more insights in the process of being developed and tested.

But in many cases we are not there yet – the community specialising in insights and research are often not the people charged with implementing activities based on the insights identified, change is hard to digest among these specialists and being put in charge of it is even harder for many. Thus we still end up in the same dilemma as before: we may know what is right, but are we capable of acting upon it?

How the Power of Imagination can Alter Your Brain

Many years ago as a kid I was confronted with a particularly grumpy old lady, whose grumpiness was not merely a set of behaviours, but had etched itself deep into to the lines of her face, her posture and general demeanour. Afterwards I told my mum ‘… that lady should think more happy thoughts!’ and we laughed together about this. Little did I know how profound this statement was until now, almost 25 years later.

What caught my eye was an experiment explained in a recent issue of TIME magazine (February 12, 2007), devoted to exploring all sorts of topics pertaining to the brain and its’ functionality. Let me quote:

It was a fairly modest experiment, as these things go, with volunteers trooping into the the lab at Harvard Medical School to learn and practise a little five-finger piano exercises. Neuroscientist Alvaro Pascual-Leone instructed the members of one group to play as fluidly as they could, trying to keep to the metronome’s 60 beats per minute. Every day fro five days, the volunteers practised for two hours. Then they took a test.

At the end of each day’s practise session, they sat beneath a coil of wire that sent a brief magnetic pulse into the motor cortex of their brain, located in a strip running from the crown of the head toward each ear. The so-called transcranial-magnetic-stimulation (TMS) test allows scientists to infer the functions of neurons just beneath the coil. In the piano players, the TMS mapped how much the motor cortex controlled the finger movements needed for the piano exercise. What the scientists found was that after a week of practise. the stretch of motor cortex devoted to these finger movements took over surrounding areas like dandelions on a suburban lawn.

The finding was in line with a growing number of discoveries at the time showing that greater use of a particular muscle causes the brain to devote more cortical real estate to it. But Pascual-Leone did not stop there. He extended the experiment by having another group of volunteers merely think about practising the piano exercise. They played the simple piece of music in their head, holding their hands still while imagining how they would move their fingers. Then they too sat beneath the TMS coil.

When the scientists compared the TMS data on the two groups – those who actually tickled the ivories and those who only imagined doing so – they glimpsed a revolutionary idea about the brain: the ability of mere thought to alter the physical structure and function of our gray matter. For what the TMS revealed was that the region of motor cortex that controls the piano-playing fingers also expanded in volunteers who imagined playing the music – just as it had in those who actually played it.

"Mental practise resulted in a similar reorganisation of the brain", Pascual-Leone later wrote. If his results hold for other forms of movement (and there is no reason to think they don’t), then mentally practising a movement, a golf swing or a swim turn could lead to mastery with less physical practise. Even more profound, the discovery showed that mental training had the power to change the physical structure of the brain.

Where does this leave us? Well, it does highlight the profoundness of statements like Be mindful of your thought’s, because according to this we, ourselves, are very much in charge and can influence how our brains will perform, by either allowing a set of thoughts to take place or consciously working to direct thinking and thus mental practise in another direction.

To bring back the grumpy lady from the beginning – it seems that many factors that contribute to this lady’s grumpiness are things that are out of her control. Fair enough, but what is in her control is how she chooses to see those things. If she indeed allows herself to become grumpy, then next time something, however small, happens, she will get grumpy that much faster than before. Why? Because that connection in her mind is now stronger than the path where she tries to look on the bright side of the problem, for instance. By continuing to allow this to happen over time, over and over again, she would eventually become grumpy and indeed stay grumpy, all the time. Her health, demeanour, physique, all of it would be affected by the fact that in the beginning – a bout of intellectual laziness meant that she preferred to think the grumpy thought and remain in that frame of mind, rather than making a conscious effort to train her mind to think in a different way.

So is the truth then that we become our thoughts? To a large extent you could say yes, but that message contains hope, because being conscious and self-aware of one’s own behaviour and thought patterns means one can also influence those. So we should indeed strive to become better by imagining ourselves not as we are, but as we would like to be and devote time to thinking about this and acting on it, rather than try to lull ourselves into some false belief that the world and our reality is what happens to us and we have no influence over it. Far from it. We may not have influence on the physical factors of this, but we certainly have a large influence over how our brains deal with and process that information and how we behave subsequently. And those behaviours may very well influence what happens afterwards, or as people like to joke ‘if it didn’t kill you, it’ll make you stronger’.