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Archive for June, 2009

Leadership By Stories – The Processionary Caterpillars

June 22, 2009

Lessons From The Processionary Caterpillars

 

A well known naturalist by the name of Jean Henri Fabre studied a type of caterpillars called the processionary caterpillars. These furry creatures possess the instinct to follow in lock step the caterpillar in front of it. This behavior gives the caterpillar its name, but a deadly characteristic too.

 

In a simple experiment, Fabre took a flower pot and placed a number of caterpillars in single file around the circumference of the pot’s rim. Each caterpillar’s head touched the caterpillar in front of it. He then placed the caterpillars’ favourite food in the middle of the circle created by the caterpillars’ procession around the rim of the flowerpot. Each caterpillar followed the one ahead thinking that it was heading for the food. Round and round went those silly furry creatures for seven days. Soon after a week of this mindless activity, the caterpillars started to drop dead because of exhaustion and starvation. They could have avoided death by stopping the senseless circling of the flower pot and head directly for the food which was less than six inches away from those ever-circling crawlers. However, the processionary caterpillars were locked into this lifestyle and could not get out of this mindless behavior.

 

Lesson Learned

Unlike animals, we have the capacity to reason, to plan and to adapt. We are therefore unique among the animals of the world. The tragedy is that we often resemble unthinking, lower forms of life.

 

Human beings are different from caterpillars.  We alone have the ability to change our direction in life.  We often confuse motion with meaning and activity with achievement.  We can all too readily get into ruts, which cause us to dysfunction at work, school, or home.  The ruts can become vicious circles, which don’t get us any further than the processionary caterpillar gets on the flowerpot.  Then we find ourselves resembling the processionary caterpillar more than we would first think or want. 

 

Applications from the Lesson learned

If you fear that you share some of the style of the processionary caterpillar, here are three things you can do so that you can breakout of that senseless circle.

 

1.    Use a different route to work, school or shopping. As you go a different way to work, look at the sights.  You will discover an entire world out there that you might not have ever seen.  After you are comfortable about changing your driving routine, dare to do other things differently.

 

2.    Be adventuresome about your approach to life.  Try some new taste of food. Go to a music concert or movie that isn’t your normal fare.  Dare to be different.  The worst that could happen is that you will learn to appreciate your tried and true choice more.  The best thing that could happen would be that you would have expanded your horizons.

 

3.    Take the first tentative steps to breaking away from your processionary humdrum of life.  Try really living.  Don’t confuse vegetating with vitality.  Set professional or educational goals for the next five years.  It looks safer to stay in the routinized ruts of life, but the processionary caterpillars show us that it doesn’t really get us anywhere.  Movement isn’t necessarily meaningful.  We are human.  We possess an intelligence that enables us to be different from all the lower forms of life.  Be all you can be by learning from the pitiful processionary caterpillar.

 

 

Cheok Kau Khoo is the Principal Trainer/Consultant for Kairos Performance Learning with working experience in education, manufacturing and service industries. He had been personally trained by Dr. Robert Cialdini who is the most cited expert in the Principles of Persuasion. He is certified in numerous training programs and is listed in the International Who’s Who of Professionals.

 

To know more about the Principles of Persuasion, kindly click on the introductory video clip by Professor Cialdini and the flyer on the left side bar. To have an in-house workshop, please contact: ckkhoo@kairospl.com or call: 6012-4019398 for a presentation. Do not let this opportunity pass as you join other world class companies to getting “Yes!” most of the time.

Uncategorized ckkhoo 22 Jun 2009 No Comments

Manager’s Toolbox – When Expert Advice Creates A Paralysis of Analysis

June 15, 2009

 By Dr. Robert Cialdini

 

Usually, a communicator’s purpose is to develop and send a message that alters the attitudes, decisions, or behaviors of recipients. The critical question, of course, is how best to arrange it. Although social psychologists have provided many important insights into this matter, one of the most valuable is offered by Anthony Greenwald in his “cognitive response model,” which represents a subtle but critical shift in thinking about persuasion. According to this model, the best indication of how much change a communication will produce lies not in what it says but, rather, in what the recipient says to him-or herself as a result of receiving the message.

 

Earlier approaches to producing change emphasized the importance of the message itself—its clarity, structure, logic and so on—because it was thought that the recipient’s comprehension and learning of the message content were critical to persuasion. Although this is certainly true, the cognitive response model added an important insight by suggesting that the message is not directly responsible for change. Instead, the direct cause is the self-talk—the internal cognitive responses—people engage in after being exposed to the message. A good deal of research supports the model. For instance, in one of Anthony Greenwald’s persuasion experiments, audience members’ attitude change on a topic wasn’t related so much to what they recalled about the elements of the persuasive appeal as what they recalled about the comments they’d made to themselves when experiencing those elements.

 

Encouraging Positive Self-talk. What are the implications of this view for the way you should fashion a persuasive attempt? Let’s suppose you want to write letter to citizens of your town supporting lower highway speed limits. The most general implication is that you would be foolish to structure the attempt without simultaneously thinking about what your audience members would say to themselves in response to the letter.

 

First, you want to find ways to stimulate positive self-talk to your letter. This means that besides considering features of your intended message (for example, the strength and logic of the arguments), you should take into account an entirely different set of factors that are likely to spur approving responses to the message. For instance, you may want to delay the mailing of your letter until your local newspaper reports a rash of highway speeding deaths; that way, when your letter arrives, its message will gain validity in the minds of the recipients because of its good fit with other information. Or you might want to increase the favorability of cognitive responses to your letter by printing it professionally on high quality paper because people make the assumption that the more care and expense a communicator has put into a persuasion campaign, the more the communicator believes in its validity.

 

Inhibiting Counterarguments. But, even more importantly than trying to ensure that your message creates positive self-talk, you should also think about how to avoid negative self-talk—especially in the form of internal counterarguments against it.

  

 

Persuasion researchers have routinely shown that the counterarguments audience members construct in response to a message can devastate its effectiveness. Thus, you might want to include in your letter a quote from an acknowledged traffic safety expert asserting that higher speed limits greatly increase automobile fatalities.

 

A recent brain-imaging study (Engelman, Capra, Noussair, & Berns, 2009) tells us why such a step would work. Participants in the study were asked to make a series of unfamiliar financial choices some of which were accompanied by advice from an expert source (a prominent economist). When the economist’s guidance was available, choices were powerfully affected by this expert’s advice. The reason was revealed in the brain activation patterns of the participants. In the presence of expert advice, the areas of the participants’ brains linked to critical thinking and counterarguing flat-lined.

These findings help explain why expert communicators are so effective. It’s not that people consider a legitimate authority’s position merely a single important factor that, when combined with other important factors, tips the balance in favor of one choice over another. Instead, especially when they are unsure of themselves, people allow the authority’s opinion to dominate the other factors—indeed, even shutting down cognitive consideration of those other factors. As one of the study’s authors said in describing how his findings challenged the traditional model of rational decision-making, “In this [traditional] worldview, people take advice, integrate it with their own information, and come to a decision. If that were actually true, we’d have seen activity in brain regions that guide decisions. But, what we found is that when someone receives expert advice, that activity went away.”

 

Project and protect. Two lessons emerge, both of which reinforce points made in previous Inside Influence Reports. First, because people frequently disengage their critical thinking/counterarguing powers and defer to expert advice, communicators who can lay claim to relevant expertise would be fools to fail to make that expertise clear early in the messaging process. Although simple, it’s surprising how often otherwise savvy communicators don’t take this step. In addition, we should be sure to make known the relevant credentials of other members of our organization with whom audience members may be interacting. Forgetting to creditialize ourselves or our colleagues before an influence attempt is launched is a serious mistake that is all-too frequently made.

 

Second, besides projecting our expert standing into the consciousness of an audience, it is as important to protect that status by conveying our background, experience, and skills honestly without exaggeration or fabrication. If we overstate our know-how and are later discovered to have been deceptive in this regard, we will likely lose the ability to promote our expertise convincingly in the future, even along those dimensions where we can fairly claim it. And, as we can see from the results of the Engelman et al. (2009) brain-imaging research, the advantage of having an expert’s reputation is much too valuable to squander in a less than truthful self-presentation. Not only would such a self-presentation be wrong ethically, it would be wrongheaded practically.

 

Source:
Engelman, J. B., Capra, C. M., Noussair, C., and Berns, G. S. (2009). Expert financial advice neurobiologically offloads financial decision-making under risk. Public Library of Science One, 4, e4957, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0004957.

 

 

If you like the above article, let Kairos Performance Learning bring this workshop to your organization as an in-house program. You will be joining the best in class companies in the world in this impactful workshop. For further details, please contact: ckkhoo@kairospl.com

Manager's Toolbox ckkhoo 15 Jun 2009 No Comments

Leadership By Stories – A Story of Empowerment

June 01, 2009

Ben Carson vividly remembers a playground conversation during which his fifth grade schoolmates selected him as the dumbest kid in their grade. In fact, after some debate, his classmates decided he was probably the dumbest kid in the world. Looking back from his vantage point as a world-renowned neurosurgeon, Dr. Carson can laugh at the memory. However, had he not been empowered as a young student, Ben Carson may never have shaken the belief that he was stupid.

 

Leaders Empower Others by Believing in Their Potential

Ben’s mother, Sonya Copeland, chose to marry at the age of 13 to escape an untenable family situation. The marriage eventually unraveled, leaving Sonya alone in raising her two sons: Ben and Curtis. Sonya noticed her boys were lagging behind academically, but she was convinced they had the potential to excel in school.

 

Leaders Empower Others by Teaching Them the Skills Needed to Succeed

In an effort to focus her sons on their studies, Sonya curtailed their television time, ordered them to read two books per week, and made them submit book reports to her. After receiving the reports, she would mark them with red ink and discuss the reports with the boys. Ben had no idea that his mother was illiterate and that she only marked up the papers to give the appearance of having read them.

Through time, Ben’s steady diet of books paid off. Thanks to his newfound study skills and increased reading comprehension, Ben’s grades improved, and perhaps more importantly his self-esteem was repaired. By the time he graduated, Ben had reached the top of his class, had received a full scholarship to Yale, and had been voted “Most Likely to Succeed” by his classmates.

 

Leaders Empower Others by Prodding Them to Take Risks

After graduating from Yale University and attaining his graduate degree at the University of Michigan, Dr. Ben Carson quickly won acclaim for his skill as a surgeon. By age 33, he became the youngest ever director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

In subsequent years, Dr. Carson empowered fellow surgeons to take risks by accepting seemingly hopeless cases. He resurrected an abandoned surgical practice of removing a hemisphere of the brain to alleviate a patient’s chronic seizures. Later, he pioneered methods to operate on brain stem tumors, and he became the first doctor to perform brain surgery on a fetus inside the womb. Most famously, he successfully separated conjoined twins in 1997. All in all, his courage led to empowering advancements throughout the field of neurosurgery.

 

Leaders Empower Others by Recognizing Their Successes

As a parent, Dr. Carson was troubled by the disparity he witnessed between the profuse accolades given to sports stars, and the near-neglect of top academic performers. In an effort to celebrate the achievements of scholars, Dr. Carson launched a non-profit organization-the Carson Scholars Fund. Each year, the fund awards nearly 600 scholarships to high school students who have excelled in the classroom and community. By honoring the dedication of students, the Carson Scholars Fund empowers kids to work just as hard on their studies as they do at their sports.

 

Summary

Had Sonya Copeland not taken the initiative to empower her son in his studies, who knows what Ben Carson’s life might have looked like? Thanks to her empowerment, Ben developed into one of the world’s foremost surgeons, and his life has added tremendous contributions to the medical community.

As a leader, your decisions to empower, or not to empower, your people have a direct impact on the future trajectory of their lives. Don’t be stingy with your investments in your team. By affirming their potential, broadening their skills, pushing them to accept risk, and celebrating their successes, you’ll propel them into stunning accomplishments.

ABOUT

Reference:
“Benjamin Solomon Carson Biography.” The Encyclopedia of World Biography. Online Webpage. Advameg, Inc. 2007. 16 May 2009.

 

 

To know more about the Principles of Persuasion, kindly click on the introductory video clip by Professor Cialdini and the flyer on the left side bar. To have an in-house workshop, please contact: ckkhoo@kairospl.com or call: 6012-4019398 for a presentation. Do not let this opportunity pass you buy as you need to use your influence and persuasion skills in this gloomy economic time.

Uncategorized ckkhoo 01 Jun 2009 No Comments



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