The Leader's Voice

Cinderella for Turkish Children

Think about the following two things:

1. Imagine you had to rewrite the Cinderella story for Turkish children. What would help you do a good job?
2. Imagine you are seven years old. School has been cancelled and you have the rest of the day off and can do anything you'd like to do. What would you do?

With some provisos, both of these spark greater creativity in adults, than simply asking individuals to be creative. In the March, 2010 issue of the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, lead researcher Angel Kay-yee Leung found asked adults to write the Cinderella story after a short briefing on Turkish cultural history.

But to make this assignment a bit more interesting, the adults were assembled in five groups after everyone had been given the Turkish overview. The first group went straight away to the assignment. The second group received some additional stimulation in the form of a review of American culture. The third group was shown images and information about Chinese culture. The fourth was shown information about American and Chinese culture. The fifth was shown information about Chinese-American culture in America.

The two groups that were more creative were number four and five. The other three groups were relatively less creative. The effects of this stimulation on creativity held over a five to seven day period when the adults were tested again.

In the second study (Journal of Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts) Darya Zabelina and Michael Robinson found that merely asking adults to imagine they are a child before completing a task boosts creativity.

Play and play-time have been shown over and again to boost creativity. Yet in a productivity-minded, efficiency oriented world we are constantly confronted with mandates, inhibitions, and rules that defeat our participation in such activities. Add a downsizing recession to the mix, and you have adults with so much to do, there's not a moment to imagine how a seven-year old might solve the problem.

Maybe that's what Congress should do about health care. They are behaving like children, so maybe they should think that way about the problem.

I Will & I Have Done versus Will I? & I Was Doing

A fascinating study by Ibrahim Senay at the University of Illinois may put a dent in the way self-help gurus instruct individuals on how to use self-referential communication. Most affirmations are framed in the positive, active voice that often starts, "I will..." You can fill in the blanks with whatever statement suits your individual interests.

Senay has shown that using "Will I?" as the beginning of self-talk actually increases motivation towards task completion more than statements such as "I will." The results are suggestive about motivational language in general, but even Senay says the effects should be studied more thoroughly.

In a separate study, William Hart and Dolores Albarracin, showed that using past imperfect verbs ("I was doing research in the area of") versus past perfect verbs ("I completed research in the area of") stimulated a stronger reenactment of those memories about activities and processes a person has learned which enabled a stronger use of them in considering future contexts. 

I often use the metaphor of movie-making as a general metaphor for a great deal of mental activity in which communication plays a role. These two studies show how refined we are becoming at looking a the specifics of language in its larger roles of motivation and future planning. They both also show our commonly held biases may be less effective than we think.

Sleep and Communication

"To sleep, perchance to dream, ay, there's the rub..." (Hamlet, Act III, Scene 1)

Are the dreams we have each night what the famous sleep disorder pioneer William Dement (gotta love the last name's relation to dementia) calls, "the permission for each and everyone of us to be quietly and safely insane each night," or is there more to it than that? 

The past ten years have advanced a powerful notion about the effects of sleep on memory, problem-solving, insight, and retention of information. A number of researchers from a variety of countries have weighed in on the investigation and the research shows some remarkable results.

Sleep does appear to important to consolidating procedural memories. This means anything new you have learned is enhanced through sleep (indeed, not sleeping reduces learning). Problem-solving abilities can double after a short nap, if you reach REM sleep. Learning complex associations between groups of information is enhanced by sleep as well, as reported by Walker and Stickgold (another great pair of surnames) - "Although all subjects show improved performance, those tested after a night of sleep (as opposed to others trained in the morning and tested that evening) showed a disproportionate 25% advantage in correctly inferring the most distant relationships. Such findings emphasize the ability of sleep to link separate yet related items, producing useful and efficient unitized representations and conceptual schemes." 

Walker and Stickgold commentary concerns the decade research review by Diekelmann and Born, both primary researchers on sleep functions.

Dreams may simply be the abstractions of the information consolidation a sleeping brain churns. Our brains are as active when we sleep as when we are awake and concentrating on something. Consolidating information, learning schematic and semantic relationships about our lives, our work, our relationships, and the practical problems we are trying to solve influence the stuff of dreams.

My purpose for alerting us to this research is to comment on sleep's effect upon leadership communication. When we have consistent, clear, powerful ideas we use as leaders to aid a group's unity around work destinations, goals, and the meaning of work, sleep literally ripens the communication and fosters greater clarity and deeper associations. If we are inconsistent in our messaging or unclear about what we mean two things happen. First, constituents work overtime to try and make sense of the messages or try to gain more information so they can be clear. Secondly, over time (after periods of sleep) constituent's try to incorporate and reconcile the unclear or inconsistent messaging into some order, which eventually will happen. However, each person will reconcile the information in a potentially unique manner, which erodes a leader's need to promote alignment. In fact you can be assured the reconciliation of inconsistent or unclear messages will cause associates to create understandings in their minds that are opposed to the leader's intent.

The opening portion to Hamlet's famous, "To sleep, perchance to dream," is the more famous "To be or not to be, that is the question." The question for leaders is simple. If you are unclear what it means to lead your group, what it means to connect their abilities, or what your collective effort means to each other and society at large, constituent's dreams will not improve your chances at alignment.

But if your messages are clear and consistent (and hopefully powerful as well) then deep sleep will take these messages, as Walker and Stickgold suggest, and integrate them into longer-term memories which helps map our past and predict our future through a rich associative process of sleep consolidation.

So just think about it. Telling your folks to get a good night's rest may be the greatest boon to productivity you can make.

Talking with Hands and Face

Everyone knows a face-to-face conversation conveys more information than a phone call because we get to see body language. But this common sense experience goes deeper than we thought and bodes well for those technologies that allow us to easily and affordably converse via video-conference.

Jeremy Skipper at Cornell University has completed studies that show when a person sees another gesture (face and/or hands) while communicating a larger number of brain regions are activated. And each of these regions produce speech or symbolic oriented messages in the brain. Literally you can convey more information with fewer words, when the words are accompanied with gestures, because more of the listener's brain is engaged.

One of his studies examined full audio-visual communication versus audio only and visual only communication. The full audio-visual situations stimulated brain regions in the listeners associated with phonetic structure, syllable production, and movement - all of which promote greater comprehension and retention. In other studies, he has shown that while audio-visual stimuli activate these other regions of the brain, they actually fill-in information for Broca's area, a well known speech production region. Broca's area has an easier time understanding the message as a result.

I for one, am looking forward to technology solutions that allow for a greater number of affordable video conference capabilities on demand. A few solutions exist now, but they are not ubiquitous and the best are very costly. 

Data Tsunami

"Every field has some central tension it is trying to resolve. Visualization deals with the inhuman scale of the information and the need to present it at the very human scale of what the eye can see," says Mr. Wattenberg. This is a direct quote from The Economist's special report on the Data Deluge. 

There's a whole class of water related metaphors for an overabundance of data (ocean, river, fire hose, tsunami, etc.). The art of rendering the important facts from this stream (there it is again) of information should not be mistaken as a problem for a graphic designer. All leaders review data and use data to reason, make decisions, inform, persuade, and negotiate in all their fields of responsibility. Managers may know their data, but can they represent what they know well enough to show others?

That's where the visual display of information becomes so important. It's all about Wattenberg's quote (he is now at IBM working with data-visualization specialists) which, correctly in my view, suggests that to bring the important facts into view requires a higher level of skill than being able to produce a pie chart in PowerPoint.

One interesting place that combines the wonderful symbolism of the Periodic Chart of Elements with Data Visualization can be found at Visual-Literacy.Org, an e-learning site. Instead of showing how metals, non-metals, or inert gases relate, the developers of this site use the same idea to show how data, information, concept, strategy, metaphor, and compound visualizations can be organized. Each block of this chart reveals a method of representing data. As you scroll a pointer across the field, a sample will pop up, as shown in the video below.

Periodic Chart of Visual Literacy from Ron Crossland & Associates on Vimeo.

Nobel Symbolism

The five medals of the Nobel prize all bear Alfred Nobel's image on one side. The symbolic imagery on the reverse side was influenced by long held ideals. The medals for Physics and Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, and Literature were designed by Erik Lindberg. Each bears an inscription from Virgil's Aeneid, a cornerstone masterpiece in the Western world for ages. The Latin phrase from book (or song) six of the Aeneid reads, "inventas vitam juvat excoluisse per artes." This is sometimes loosely translated as "And they who bettered life on earth by their new found mastery." A word-for-word translation is "inventions enhance life which is beatified through art."

For me, what is more intriguing is the context of the quote in the Aeneid. In book six, Aeneas, at his father's request, enters the underworld (the river Styx, the boatman, Cerebus, etc.) and views how one's deeds during life affect the afterlife. There were many who suffered torment. But the most blessed were described in this passage:

"Lo, they who in their country's fight sword-wounded bodies bore; 

Lo, priests of holy life and chaste, while they in life had part,

Lo, God-loved poets, men who spake things worthy Phoebus' heart;

And they who bettered life on earth with new-found mastery;

And they whose good deeds left a tale for men to name them by"

Arts and sciences and new found mastery over the difficulties of life on earth were the inspirational subject matter for the medal designers.

The Peace Prize Medal was designed by Gustav Vigeland and includes the inscription "For the peace and brotherhood of men." The Economics Prize medal was designed by Gunvor Svensson-Lundqvist. It doesn't have an inscription, but the symbol of of the Sveriges Riksbank's horns of plenty is placed under Nobel's image and on the reverse side the North Star emblem of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

The imagery on the reverse sides of the medals follows the theme of the award. For Physics and Chemistry it shows a figure of Nature being unveiled by the Genius of Science. For Physiology or Medicine, it shows the figure of the Genius of Medicine with a book in her lap distilling from nature the water that will restore the young girl beside her. For Literature a young man kneels and is inspired by a Muse. And for the Peace Prize, three men clasp arms in a fraternal bond.

Our lives and work convey a symbolic meaning and these honored prize medals are emblematic in their design. It causes me to consider that leaders should be more mindful of the symbolic choices they make (or unfortunately often don't make) when rewarded constituents for their efforts and contributions that "enhance life on earth."