The Leader's Voice

Self-Restraint

Many people believe they have self-restraint. And many want their leaders to exercise appropriate self-restraint, especially if falling for temptation causes a group or company to fall with the leader. Research reported at the Kellogg School of Management shows however that we generally are poor predictors of our ability to control ourselves and allow temptation to interrupt our otherwise good intentions.

Nordgren, Van der Pligt, and Van Harreveld conducted four experiments on self-restraint. One involved fatigue, one hunger, one looked at smokers, and the last examined non-smokers. When asked how well people can overcome temptation Nordgren remarked, "they are going to be surprised at how powerful those temptations are."

In all cases they found that people who believe they have high levels of self-restraint will expose themselves to temptation at a much higher level and also cave more often when temptation comes calling. In the smokers case, three times as many of the high level "I believe I can control myself" group actually lit up during an experiment than those who believed they couldn't control themselves well and avoided temptation in the first place.

In a business context Nordgren concluded, "The recent lending crisis provides an exampe of how restraint bias plays out in the business world. There was quite a lot of temptation to cut corners and act shortsightedly and there weren't a lot of guidelines and restraints on people's behavior."

Images

One of my favorite podcasts is NPR's "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" a weekly news quiz oriented program. One of the features is the special guest on each week's program who has to answer questions outside his or her field of interest or expertise. Guests are usually celebrities, political figures, sports stars, musicians, or other well know individuals.

A recent guest was Secretary of Energy and Nobel Laureate, Steven Chu. He was being ribbed about speaking about global warming with people who have already decided it is not happening, including some politicians. Dr. Chu said, "It's a novel thing, but actually showing data before discussing opinion is a good way to do this."

"What if they can't read?" jested one of the panelists on the show.

"I show them pictures," Dr. Chu said, which got a good audience laugh.

Of course he's right. Dr. Richard Mayer in one of his studies concerning multimedia learning showed the following: Ask a group of individuals to remember some facts three days after hearing and seeing them displayed on a screen during a presentation and roughly 10% will remember. Ask a group of individuals to remember some facts three days after seeing them displayed on a screen accompanied by relevant images and 65% remember.

I don't know about you, but I rarely come across one idea that produces a sixfold increase if used well. 

Past Is Prologue

Remember your commute to work today? How about last night's meal with family, friends, or TV? Can you also think about the upcoming conference call, team meeting, or weekend family outing you are planning? Doing these things is engaging in the process of chronesthesia, a term for mental time travel coined by the fascinating neuroloscientist, Endel Tulving. 

What's fascinating about thinking about the future is that it cannot be done without thinking about the past. Individuals who have lost certain episodic memory abilities (thinking about the past) due to injury or disease cannot imagine themselves in the future. But to what extend is imaging the future related to remembering the past? 

There are many studies that link the two separate, but important mental circuits that allow us to think about the future. One of them was recently conducted by Donna Rose Addis, Alana T. Wong, and Daniel Schacter. They wanted to know how tightly connected the process of remembering the past was to constructing and elaborating upon the future.

They asked test subjects to think about past events and watch what parts of their brain were used. They asked test subjects to imagine the future one week ahead, one year ahead, and 5 to 10 years ahead. They watched which parts of the brain were used.

Here's what they found. When thinking about the future, both the "remembering the past" circuits and the "imagine the future circuits" were engaged and swapped and shared information. During the constructing the future phase the future circuits were slightly more independent than during the talking about the future phase. During both processes it was apparent from this study, and many others, that there is no way to consider the future without access to the past. Especially when it comes to talking about the future. In fact these researchers concluded that, "future thinking is indeed an important, if not the primary, function of the episodic system." 

This means these researchers see "remembering the future" as the reason we have the ability to remember the past, rather than the other way around. 

Leaders who only speak of the future without mentioning the context of the past open themselves to misinterpretation. We cannot think about the future without a context that includes the past and present. When leaders leave this portion of context out, their audience will by necessity have to fill in the blanks, which means they may consider different, even irrelevant, portions of the past and thus interpret the leader's message in a different way than intended.

Joseph LeDoux, another famous neuroscientist, once wrote, "One of the main jobs of consciousness is to keep our life tied together in a coherent story, a self-concept. It does that by generating explanations of behavior based upon our self-image, memories of the past, expectations of the future, the present social situation, and the physical environment in which the behavior is produced."

The past is prologue. Even if you only talk about the future, you can't do it without consulting your past.