A-B-C's: Al's Book Club
It is difficult to conceive of an evolutionary need for leader or follower skills if humanity meant lived independently in a cave. In both its theory and its practice, the CIMBA Social Brain Theory of Leadership asserts that the human brain got bigger because of a survival need to manage its social interactions. Being part of a social group became the basis for human survival - it meant being protected from enemies, a supply of food, having a mate and children to take care of you as you grew older, and generally benefiting from the simple economies associated with specialization of labor.
The core components driving the ability for an individual to maintain their social connectedness evolved around four core psychological components for which the brain developed specialized circuitry: social awareness, an understanding and appreciation of reward and threat circuitry, self-awareness, and self-regulation. With the intent to assure survival, this specialized circuitry was influenced and guided by the brain's primary organizing principle: minimize danger and maximize reward.
In this sense, many of the adaptive challenges facing our earliest ancestors were social in nature. To be included, individuals needed the brain circuitry to adapt to the social group - or risk exclusion and almost certain death. Individuals with the additional ability to not only adapt to but to also adapt (change) the social environment for the betterment of the group were embraced and revered - as leaders. In major part, our Social Theory of Leadership is based on the work of Dr. Matt Lieberman and his brethren. In Matt's book, Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect, he discusses and documents the road and the research that has brought him to the forefront in this important area and rightfully earned him the title as one of the founding fathers of social, cognitive, and affective neuroscience.
The first neuroscientist came to CIMBA in 1997. At that time, we had been wrestling with shortcomings we saw in the way both business schools educated students and companies trained employees who could rightfully be labeled as recalcitrant. In both cases, the education and training were largely focused on knowledge -- content on the functional aspects of business. What we saw as missing were the tools to make axioms, formulas, theorems, and principles actionable: Knowing them was one thing; knowing how to use them to make decisions and solve problems was a seemingly a completely separate matter. At that time, we had already adopted the decision-making and problem-solving tools provided by Kepner Tregoe - something we refer to as the "Process" piece of effective management and leadership. It quickly became apparent there was more to the "effective manager/leader" equation. With the decision in hand, how to we then persuade, motivate, inspire, and assist others to a point of view? After considerable frustration with traditional tools provided by leadership and management scholars, which seemed to exclude either explicitly or implicitly human emotion, the neuroscientist gave us a new and intriguing lifeline. However, neuroscience at that moment was largely focused on how one brain functioned. If we were really going to talk about the science of leadership and management, we needed at least two brains in the room. Simply put: How does one brain influence the other brains in the room and vice versa? At the same time, interestingly, Matt Lieberman (UCLA) and Kevin Ochsner (Columbia University) -- who were both working as graduate students in Prof. Dan Gilbert's Lab at Harvard) -- were at the very dawn of their thinking in the area of social, cognitive, and effective neuroscience. The important question, interestingly enough: How do human brains perform when there are more than one brain in the room? Their research very quickly led to the notion that I have heard Matt say dozens of times: We are wired to be social.
My point is this: it is very difficult for me to conceive of a person in the area of organizational behavior, management, or leadership who is interested in furthering the science in those particular areas but who was chosen either concertedly or na�vely to ignore this fascinating area of hard science that brings to bear answers to questions relevant to furthering those disciplines.
In that light, everyone who has had the pleasure of going through the CIMBA unique and introspective LIFE program is well aware of the notion of social pain (Part II: Connection in the book). Specifically, recall the cyberball experiment that illustrated the brain does not differentiate between physical and social (mental) pain. As you may recall, that research was based on work that Matt Lieberman did more than 10 years ago. In the book, Matt goes into detail about how he and his wife, Naomi Eisenberger (also a professor at UCLA), developed the experiment as well as follow-on experiments that demonstrated the consistency of the result (for example, like physical pain, social pain can be reduced by taking an aspirin or by seeking the support and comfort of those who are dear to us). It was those early studies that brought Matt to our attention and through the relationship that developed we gained valuable insight into a variety of social concepts including System 1 and System 2 thinking (something Matt called our x-system and c-system; Part III: Mindreading in the book)), the importance of self-regulation (it was Matt who first introduced us to the important work of Professor Walter Mischel - recall the marshmallow, self-gratification study involving 4-year old kids; Part IV: Harmonizing in the book), goals, fairness, social cognition (recall the IKEA lamp commercial we use in LIFE) and a whole variety of other concepts fundamentally important to understanding our human social connectedness. Importantly, and fortunately in contrast to a lot of the "brain" books that have emerged more recently in the marketplace, Matt is very careful to document the research that supports his premises.
So are we wired to be social? I like the way Matt makes the argument:
You might be familiar with the claim that Malcolm Gladwell made famous in his book Outliers that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert at something. Although different people might put those 10,000 hours toward becoming a concert violinist, professional athlete, or Xbox superstar, the brain puts in the 10,000 hours and more to enable us to become experts in the social world. One study found that 70 percent of the content in our conversations is social in nature. Assuming that we spend just 20 percent of our time in general thinking about other people and ourselves in relation to others, our default network would be engaged at least three hours a day. In other words, our brains have put in 10,000 hours before we turn ten. [In Part I: Beginnings, which provides a very lucid discussion of the brain's default network and its relationship to our social cognition network]
Those of you who have had the pleasure of experiencing a Matt Lieberman presentation are well aware of the strength of his teaching skills (For those of you who have not, go immediately to YouTube and see his TEDx talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNhk3owF7RQ) . He is particularly adept at an important skill that unfortunately many scientists lack: the ability to make the complex simple and understandable. It explains why Matt is one of the regular speakers at the various NeuroLeadership Institute Summits (something I experienced firsthand both by being on a panel with Matt (positive experience) and having the unfortunate luck-of-the-draw to be scheduled to speak at the same time as he was (negative experience - both because of the attendance at my session and because I, too, wanted to be at his session). Those qualities are reflected in his writing. I am convinced that coaches, trainers, leadership instructors, and others with an interest in and an appreciation of social, cognitive and affective neuroscience will be replacing several other books on their shelves with a copy of Matt's book.
In openness and at least in an attempt to be objective about a scientist I really respect, while I was very pleased with the first nine chapters of the book, I was not particularly pleased with last three chapters. In fact, I had an opportunity to review the book prior to its publication and unfortunately sent Matt my comments a little too late in the process. I also suspect that Matt himself is probably not as pleased with those chapters. That said, the first nine chapters are without question the best lay discussion on the topic currently available. What we all can hope for is that Matt will gift us with his next book in the very near future.