For more than 10 years, CIMBA has actively promoted the importance of express rational process tools as an integral and fundamental component of effective leadership, requiring all students to be proficient in Kepner Tregoe's Problem Solving and Decision Making technologies. Our initial insight evolved from seeing express rational process as a vehicle for making implicit process knowledge explicit, thereby improving group and organizational communication. In the absence of explicit rational process tools, a leader's thinking process is idiosyncratic to the leader (that is, it is implicit knowledge) and is thereby left to his or her followers to decipher or interpret it in their own ways. Later, we came to the realization that explicit rational process tools also served to both assist in overcoming the processing limits of the prefrontal cortex and increase performance within those limits. By
making thinking visible (for example, by expressing thoughts and ideas on a flipchart), individual group members are relieved from the demanding mental task of holding those thoughts and ideas in working memory, allowing the brain to reallocate scarce cognitive resources to far more productive creative or other higher-level thinking tasks. The third major insight grew from our observations that the use of express process tools served to significantly lower team member SCARF (Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, Fairness) impacts. If, as a consequence of having an explicit rational process in place, followers understand what information is important and how it is going to be used to resolve issues, then all brains can be directly engaged in the resolution process; brain resources will not, then, be unproductively allocated to the mental resolution of SCARF issues that will naturally arise when team and organizational processes are not explicit (for example, have you ever found yourself in a meeting where the objectives were unclear, the procedure for its resolution was unknown or unarticulated, and you felt too intimidated to ask? Or a meeting where the objective is "clear" but resolution is driven by another agenda?).

Our fourth major insight came at the NeuroLeadership Summit in Boston, an insight that, unbeknownst to us, was going to be particularly interesting and applicable to unrelated events that were to follow. At the Summit, we had the opportunity to meet two very interesting people: Dr. Sheena Iyengar (S.T. Lee Professor of Business at Columbia University, whose book, The Art of Choosing, we are featuring this month) and Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett (Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University, where she focuses on the study of emotion). Before turning to Dr. Iyengar, let me take a moment and discuss how Dr. Barrett provided a very interesting insight, our fourth major insight on the importance of explicit rational process tools.

To begin, it is important to note that we have been expanding our thinking on the CIMBA Knowledge, Process, Behavior developmental model after discovering its remarkable fit with the US military's Be-Know-Do model. While as members of the academic community we have placed Knowledge or Knowing first in our model, in reality we have always believed that the Behavior or Being component was unquestionably the most fundamental and most likely to define a leader's potential for success. This thinking is consistent with Be's express positioning in the military's leadership model.  I encourage you to take a look at Hesselbein and Shinseki's Be-Know-Do: Leadership the Army Way for lucid discussion of the various components). The Process or Doing component encompasses all processes and procedures the leader uses to produce results -- to make decisions, solve problems, anticipate problems, overcome obstacles, strengthen teamwork, and achieve objectives. In the words of Hesselbein and Shinseki, Doing (or, in our system, Process) encompasses everything that assists the leader in providing "purpose, direction, and motivation." Against this broader definition of Process or Doing, Dr. Barrett made us realize that a core or fundamental consequence of having explicit process was its implicit regulatory impact on team or organizational emotion. Providing teams and organizations with an express, mutually agreed upon process for issue resolution implicitly increases group member status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness (SCARF) thereby increasing overall organizational engagement. Without process, difficult decisions can be influenced by emotional contagion and all of the accompanying negative consequences that flow directly from SCARF impacts on precious organizational cognitive resources. Importantly, just as individuals who find themselves confronting stressful situations that take them into "red-zone" emotions, teams and organizations can be similarly diagnosed as being in a "red-zone" emotional state; both need tools and techniques to assist in emotional regulation in order to bring about consistent, predictable, productive issue resolution. Explicit process serves to control emotional contagion within teams and organizations.

At CIMBA, this important insight has caused us to broaden our definition of Process or Doing and to re-accentuate its importance. But it also raised another issue in serious need of addressing -- not only by CIMBA, but also by the entire leadership development community. In one form or another, virtually all issue resolution processes have both linear (consistent, systematic steps) and nonlinear (creative thinking needed to adjust the process to the unique context to which it is being applied) components. Gains in both emotional regulation and issue resolution are had as nonlinear component parts, become better understood, and are then explicated to become part of the linear component. Unfortunately, we are now beginning to also understand that much of the tested theory upon which some of our "linear" thinking has been based needs to be revisited. To explain, I would like to turn your attention first to an interesting article that appeared in the 16 November 2010 issue of NewScientist (although I may not agree with some of its politics, I find this weekly publication to be timely, quite readable, and very informative on a wide variety of research topics both inside and outside of our leadership development interest). In an article entitled "How Weird Are You? Oddball Minds of the Western World," the author (Laura Spinney) summarizes research from a variety of disciplines, all of which basically conclude that much of what we believe to be true about human psychology has been validated on the basis of research conducted on U.S. undergraduate students. As we make efforts to develop an effective leadership development system at CIMBA, it is very clear that responses from U.S. undergraduates differ from undergraduates from other countries on a wide variety of issues, to say nothing about differences between them and U.S. and foreign executives. In other words, in revisiting Process or Doing with the intend to expand it within our system, we are closely re-examining it and the research upon which it is based looking specifically for context and culture differences that may impact effectiveness and applicability.

This line of thinking brings us back to Dr. Iyengar's book, The Art of Choosing. MBA students may recall from their marketing class that she is the researcher responsible for the famous jam experiment at the luxury foods store in Menlo Park (for the rest of you, the discussion and implications of that experiment alone make the book worth reading). It is the context and cultural implications for process that she relates so very well in her book that has brought me to encourage you to take a look at it. Several of the research projects about which she writes have surprisingly important results and should form an integral part of the thinking as organizations begin to build and rebuild effective process.

To illustrate the cultural implications on process, I would like you to first consider an experiment she conducted with elementary school children in San Francisco's Japantown. From a SCARF standpoint, the experiment has strong Autonomy implications. In essence, the underlying process is a decision (I fully expect that at this moment in your reading of this column, full-time MBA students are reaching for their KT DA card -- am I correct?). She divided the students into two groups, with one group being comprised of children of Japanese or Chinese immigrants who spoke their parent's native language at home ("Asian" group). The other group was labeled the "Anglo American" group, and as the label would imply were more "typical" American elementary students.  Each of the two groups was further divided into three sub-groups. Three experiments were conducted, with each experiment being conducted by one subgroup from both the Anglo American group and the Asian group. The teacher began by showing each child six piles of word puzzles and six marking pens.  Each pile contained one category of anagram -- words about animals, food, the city of San Francisco, and other topics. Each marker was of a different color. Two of the subgroups  -- again, one from each of the two main groups -- were told to choose whichever category and marker they preferred.  Another two subgroups were told specifically by the teacher which category and which marker they were to use. With the final two subgroups, the teacher pretended to relay specific instructions from the child's mother as to which category and which marker they were to use.

The two ethnic groups reacted dramatically differently. The Anglo American children solved the most anagrams and played the longest when they picked their own markers and puzzles; the Asian children did best when they thought they were following their mother's wishes. As Dr. Iyengar points out, the Asian student preferences and their mother's wishes "were practically one and the same." In contrast to the Anglo children who viewed their mother's instructions as authoritative constraints, the Asian children felt that doing what they thought their mothers wanted was, in effect, their first choice. Interestingly, both groups reacted negatively to being told by the teacher which category and marker they were to use.

From a process point of view, the experiment clearly shows that culture matters.  The implications for process are obvious, as are the consequences of ignoring them. From a practical standpoint, revisiting existing processes to the extent they were developed without regard for cultural differences can generate surprises quite similar to the experiment above. Through other experiments and inquiries Dr. Iyengar provides important insights into research that makes it clear that in several important contexts we often habitually take action as opposed to consciously making a choice. In this sense, those habitual responses to situations are largely implicit and can be significantly influenced by emotion. The book provides compelling evidence of the importance of explicitly taking into account culture and context into Process or Doing within our leadership development systems.

Happy Holidays from all of us at CIMBA!