A-B-C's: Dr. Al's Book Club 

When I was first introduced to Daniel Goleman's latest book Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence, my System 1 reaction was that it was yet another book on self-regulation, --which has been variously labeled self-control, self-discipline, or willpower among others. Those of you who follow the ABC regularly, as well as those of you who have been active participants in our personal development system, know that we place considerable importance on developing an individual's self-regulatory ability. In the first chapter of the book Goleman paints a picture of what he means by "Focus" (He doesn't really define it), which when applied to a leader is perhaps best summarized by the following passage:

A leader tuned out of his internal world will be rudderless; one blind to the world of others will be clueless; those in different to the larger systems within which they operate will be blindsided.[Goleman, Focus, page 4, emphasis added]

While this basic conceptualization would seemingly embrace the notion of self-regulation and self-regulatory ability, Goleman is clearly reaching beyond that concept and even beyond the psychological concept of attention. To those of you more familiar with our development system here at CIMBA, you will take note that the description Goldman proffers for "Focus" (I will use "Focus" to refer to the concept and Focus to refer to the book) is far closer to what we refer to as "Mental Complexity." Within our development system, Mental Complexity measures an individual's ability to effectively adapt to and manage social connections. The higher an individual's level of Mental Complexity, the more readily can that individual move purposefully in, between, and among social groups. It is a complex function of social, cognitive, and affective variables led by self-awareness, social awareness, and self-regulatory abilities. For a leader, it involves differentiating individuals on the basis of the relevancy of their behavior. The failure to distinguish relevancy from irrelevancy -- between more and less important social group members -- may lead to following deceptive advice or conforming with the unproductive, unconstructive, or unhealthy attitudes or opinions of individuals less likely to move the group forward. It involves more heavily weighting the preferences of key players when making group decisions, discriminating strategic actions from random behavior, and comparing oneself to more similar others among other things. At CIMBA, we see this interpersonal neurobiological ability as defining an individual's Wisdom.

To assist in drawing the parallel a bit closer, we have observed that most leaders will experience this sense of being "clueless", "rudderless", or "blindsided" during periods of social transition - changes in current, important social connections. In our experience, the author who best explains both the what of this social transition notion and, importantly, the how of going about addressing it is Dr. Dan Siegel, whose book Brainstorm: The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain we will be ABCing next month. The obvious examples from a business leader's perspective would include taking a new job with managerial responsibilities or being promoted into the same; seemingly less obvious but equally as challenging in many cases would include a change in team membership (consider the inclusion of a new team member who then brings to bear both a different perspective and a strong personality) and a change in organizational leadership, both of which would involve important adaptations for affected leaders and followers. Dr. Siegel artfully exposes the depth and complexity of social transition as he shows us the growth in Mental Complexity demanded of all members of a primary social group as a member goes through adolescence -- something to which we can all relate.

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. The repeated return of the brain to this social cognitive mode of engagement is perfectly situated to help us to become experts in the enormously complex realm of social living. [Lieberman, Social, pages 20-21]

In bringing this thinking together, the strengths (think Gallup Strengthfinder) that individuals carry from their previous social group will likely be the consequence of 10,000 hours of practice with the goal having been adaptability to for the purpose of social survival in that social group. I am comfortable saying that all parties, and particularly Dr. Siegel, would have little difficulty with this line of reasoning.

With regard to both "Focus" and Mental Complexity, while those practiced strengths may have been fundamental to survival in the individual's previous social group, they may not be applicable or function in the same way in the social group to which the individual is transitioning. In making an effort to adapt to the new social group (meeting the human need for social conformity), social anxiety often arises from the misinterpretation of the cues that had previously activated those strengths to a beneficial affect in the former social group. This consequential social anxiety in the new social group is something we refer to as an Emotive System 1 Thinking Error (as opposed to a Cognitive System 1 Thinking Error which arises from the brain's tendency to jump to conclusions based on a heuristic arising from a basis, stereotype or preconceived idea). ABC readers may also see this as something Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz refers to as a "deceptive brain message" in his You Are Not Your Brain.

A leader's responsibility is not only to adapt to the new social group (a follower's core responsibility), but also to adapt or mold the social group so that it can thrive, so it can be more successful. The ability for the individual to make both adaptations is a function of his or her Mental Complexity. In that we will talk more about this in next month's column, let me just say that our development system - the "6- Columns" - works with the individual to identify those social anxieties, to uncover the assumptions upon which they are based, and to test whether those assumptions are in fact true (Recall the December ABC in which we discussed Immunity to Change by Profs. Kegan and Lahey).

In the majority of cases, it is not the failure of the leader to use his or her strengths but rather the consequence of their System 1 thinking using them inappropriately when confronting social stimuli to which they have had relatively little experience in interpreting. The brain's System 1 will deploy a habit that was effective in the prior social group in response to the perceived or real stimulus. However, in the new social environment the same habit is having an unproductive, unconstructive, or unhealthy result, bringing about social anxiety and stress. With the solution to stress being to take on more stress, we then encourage the individual to practice in those areas where they have little experience to build resiliency and bring about the social conformity that allows them to be successful - to build Mental Complexity, to build Wisdom (Notably, utilizing Dr. Schwartz's 4-Steps as outlined in You Are Not Your Brain). In Goleman's words, they achieve a degree of functionality in the three levels of "Focus" - inner, outer, and other. In this sense, Goleman's work provides an interesting description of the consequences of making such a social transition while our system (and that of Dr. Siegel) is directed towards doing something about it. In fact, the essence of our system is opaquely revealed in the story of Katrina introducing Goleman's Chapter 9, The Woman Who Knew Too Much. Katrina is set up with a personal development coach who assists her in making sense of her social transition - building her "Focus" or Mental Complexity.

In describing the ingredients of "Focus", Prof. Goleman relies on the research we have found to be credible in building and testing our development system with one notable exception. Whether you refer to it as willpower, self-control, self-discipline, or self-regulation, it is difficult to understand how the work of Prof. Roy Baumeister would not make the list. Importantly, the works of Profs. Mischel, Davidson, Langer, Kabat-Zinn, Siegel, and others who have made immeasurable impacts on our thinking did make the cut and make important contributions to Focus. With regard to terminology, while citing Prof. Dan Kahneman, Goleman rejects the use of "System 1" and "System 2" thinking, preferring instead the use of "bottom-up brain circuitry" for System 1 and "top-down brain circuitry " for System 2. Despite having tested that and a number of other labels over the years, our students have so gravitated toward System 1 and 2 that is becoming part of their everyday language (and arguably increasing self-awareness of their thinking processes). Goleman apparently also prefers to use "empathy" instead of "social awareness" but I cannot fully understand why. I did find his separation of empathy into the component parts of cognitive empathy, emotional empathy, and empathic concern to be insightful [See page 98]. I also agree with this statement: "Our circuitry for empathy was designed for face-to-face moments" to be sadly true as we observe a steady decline in empathy in our university clients both through psychosomatic instrument measures and neurobiofeedback measures in experiential environments. Predictably, and we are in the process of measuring this empirically, there appears to be a close positive correlation between MICEIT's Understanding Emotions (a large number of students test as being at the "Expert" level) and Facebook usage. However, given that Facebook users essentially "label" the emotion being described (think wedding/happy, hospital/sad), those same students test at the "Improve" level in MISCEIT's Using Emotions. Making this a matter of considerable concern, the overwhelming majority of our students are majoring in business. Are these the (potential) leaders to whom Goleman refers?

McClelland argued that once you were in a given job, specific competencies like self-discipline, empathy, and persuasion were far stronger forces in success than a person's ranking in academics. ... [Organizations used] hard business metrics for success and failure, and knew that people's grades and the prestige of the schools they went to had little or nothing to do with their actual effectiveness. ... As the former head of a major bank told me, "I was hiring the best and the brightest, but I was still seeing a bell-shaped curve for success and wondering why." ... But [McClelland's] article was controversial among many academics, some of whom could not grasp that doing well in their classes had little to do with how their students would perform once in a job. [Goleman, Focus, pages 233-234]

We could not agree more. And our discussions with those involved in the NFL Combine (who employ our same Zephyer technology) and the Navy Seals would indicate that they do as well. While we have faced a similar resistance to our personal development system in the academic community, that resistance is beginning to slowly subside as (1) the business community makes their concerns known and (2) the use and measurement of emotions in research published in peer-reviewed academic journals becomes more accepted. Importantly, we are beginning to see a growing interest in developing students beyond traditional axioms, theorems, formulas, and principles to encompass the ability to actually do something with that traditional knowledge -- something that we at CIMBA refer to as "Fluid Intelligence." We are pushing our students to move beyond axioms, theorems, formulas, and principles to embrace critical thinking skills in the form of express decision-making, problem-solving, situation appraisal, and potential problem analysis thinking processes with the intent to bolster their resistance to brain's natural tendency to jump to conclusions - to reduce Cognitive System 1 thinking errors. Goleman makes much the same argument implicitly in Chapter 18 (Witness the interesting discussion on "Organizational ADD" on page 210). Still, Goleman, and the CIMBA personal development system, are intent in moving even further to embrace the important notions of "Focus" and Mental Complexity in that personal development equation.