"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.
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