Your thoughts are like commuters on a bus. You are the driver of the bus. The passengers may make critical, abusive, intrusive, distracting, and shouting directions as you drive. You can ignore these comments.  You can allow these passengers to shout noisily while keeping your attention focused on the road ahead.  You can focus on keeping the bus heading towards your goal or value.

©lewis-barr (Adapted from Hayes et al 1999 and Carol Vivyan 2009)

Lately, I’ve been thinking about intuition and Emotional Intelligence. Writers such as Malcolm Gladwell and António Damasio have explored how “hunches” come from unconscious processes that involve our emotional brain. These intuitions provide extremely valuable information. Emotional Intelligence helps enhance this faculty.

Here’s a lengthy quote from Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline, on this subject.

Bilateralism is a design principle underlying the evolution of advanced organisms. Nature seems to have learned to design in pairs; it not only builds in redundancy but achieves capabilities not possible otherwise. Two legs are critical for rapid, flexible locomotion. Two arms and hands are vital for climbing, lifting, and manipulating objects. Two eyes give us stereoscopic vision, and along with two ears, depth perception. Is it not possible that, following the same design principle, reason and intuition are designed to work in harmony for us to achieve our potential intelligence?

Systems thinking may hold a key to integrating reason and intuition. Intuition eludes the grasp of linear thinking, with its exclusive emphasis on cause and effect that are close in time and space.  The result is that most of our intuitions don’t make ‘sense’ – that is, they can’t be explained in terms of linear logic.

Very often, experienced managers have rich intuitions about complex systems, which they cannot explain.  Their intuitions tell them that cause and effect are not close in time and space, that obvious solutions will produce more harm than good, and that short-term fixes produce long-term problems.  But they cannot explain their ideas in simple linear cause-effect language.  They end up saying, ‘Just do it this way.  It will work.’

As managers gain facility with systems thinking as an alternative language, they find that many of their intuitions become explicable.  Eventually, reintegrating reason and intuition may prove to be one of the primary contributions of systems thinking.

What is your experience uniting reason and intuition?

Working with Emma (my daughter, now 9) – she’s cutting out cupcakes for her science fair poster and cuts too much off:  “I wish there were a control-z for real life.”

I so agree!  Think of all those “emotional intelligence train wrecks” we could correct with a quick “control-z” — remove foot from mouth… ah the relief!

In the meantime I guess we’ll have to settle for better Consequential Thinking – the capacity to assess and manage the emotional impact of our decisions.  Yes it’s learnable – harder than pushing a button though.

Frequently in keynotes and trainings audience members ask me for help.  They typically say, “What’s the emotional intelligence solution to _____(insert complex problem)___?” Or, “What’s the EQ perspective on ____(insert lifelong challenge)____?” It would feel gratifying and really boost my ego to tell them what I think they should do…  but most of the time it wouldn’t work.

Six Seconds has a set of five core design principles we use to guide our curriculum design and all teaching (and these also form the backbone of our Leve 1 EQ Certification Training).  One of the principles is “Wisdom Lives Within.”  That means our job is to help people reflect and discover their own answers, their own truth. Sometimes I have trouble with this because I get a great deal of positive reinforcement from “being smart” and having “good solutions.”  I guess that’s rooted in my own insecurity; I like being a “go to” person and it feels good to help and to be acknowledged as someone whose expertise is invaluable.  But that ego boost actually creates dependence – undermining what I TRULY want to give!

One of the other principles is “No Way is The Way” which means we can’t give people the easy answer because there isn’t one.  We need to help them craft a solution that’s authentically, powerfully theirs.  But the good news is they already know it! (see principle #1 ).

Again, a lot easier to sell “the secret to success,” but even if I knew the secret (sigh, I don’t), I suspect it wouldn’t actually work for most people in most situations.  There are just too many variables.

I read this quote from Colin Powell that reinforces these principles:

“There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.”

While people WANT “expert answers” that isn’t what they actually need from us as friends, mentors, coaches, trainers, teachers, partners – or even parents.  If we truly want to help people be and do their best, we need to learn to ask great questions instead.

So, that said, here’s “the secret to success my EQ perspective”:

Next time someone asks you for advice, ask yourself this before you answer: 
In the long term, would you rather be the “expert” solving this person’s problems, or have them grow to brilliantly rise to their own challenges?

A new study released in Applied Psychology found that people with a highly rational thinking style actually became more biased as the stakes went up.  The authors suggest that in an escalating situation, the highly analytical thinkers were less able to tune into the dissonance that would cause them to challenge their own assumptions.

In other words:  They ignored the feeling that they were on the wrong track.

The common view is that we need to be rational to make optimal decisions, but it’s just not true.  The last century has been driven by this paradigm and the results are clear – while we have incredible technical excellence, we are failing as a species.  My contention: “Analytical = Better” is one of the most pervasive and destructive myths of our era.

If wisdom is to be found, it is not within the paralyzing prison of logic alone.

Source: Kin Fai Ellick Wong, Jessica Yuk Yee Kwong, Carmen K. Ng (2008) “When Thinking Rationally Increases Biases: The Role of Rational Thinking Style in Escalation of Commitment,” Applied Psychology 57 (2) , 246–271  (Article Abstract)

Lately, I have been thinking about values and EI so I started to re-read some of the earlier writing on the theory. These abilities are to be used to promote emotional growth and development. People high on EI are not masters of the universe, nor do they rise to the top of the corporate heap. They do, however, have stronger and more positive relationships, they communicate more clearly, and they care.

Your posting on decision making and emotions is really fascinating Tom. It resonates with some of the points that Bill Gates made in his Harvard speach where he discussed how we can help cut through complexity to ensure that we continue to tackle difficult problems and not give up.

His point too is that we need to find ways of continuing to take positive action and inspire people to participate. He says “you have to show more than numbers, you have to convey the human impact of the work, so that people can feel what saving a life means to the families effected”

Being connected to the human element, the face to face contact, can surely only build our capacity for real empathy, something that statistics are unable to activate?

His speach is full of optimism and hope. Thanks to Mick for the link.

The feature article in the Magazine section of the New Times, January 13, 2008 is entitled “The Moral Instinct”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/magazine/13Psychology-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin and it is an essential read for everyone but in particular for practitioners of EQ and leaders. It highlights many fascinating ideas, concepts, and research; here are few of the headings:

• Universal Morality
• Reasoning and Rationalizing
• Moralization Switch
• The Genealogy of Morals

This quote from psychologist Jonathan Haidt, from the section, Reasoning and Rationalizing, describes the gap between people’s convictions and their justifications: “People don’t generally engage in moral reasoning, Haidt argues, but moral rationalization: they begin with the conclusion, coughed up be an unconscious emotion, and then work backwards to a plausible justification.”

I also found interesting a study that asked people to make a moral decision. It involved a train coming down the track and if not diverted it will kill five people working on the track. In this scenario you can pull a switch and the train will divert to another track and one person will be killed instead of five. In the other scenario the same decision must be made, save five people at the expense of one, however in order to divert the train you must push a fat man standing beside you on to the tracks. The two dilemmas are morally equivalent. But most people don’t see it that way. In the first scenario most people make the decision to pull the switch but they will not throw the fat man on to the tracks.

When they looked at people’s brains in an FMRI there where clear distinctions which regions of the brain showed activity depending on the dilemma scenario. In the first scenario, pull a switch, the region for rational calculation showed increased activity. In the second dilemma, push the fat man, the regions of the brain implicated in emotions showed more activity. It appears that the more intimate one is to a situation; the emotions that are evoked have a stronger influence on our moral decisions. This led me to wonder about these implications for corporate and government leaders. If leaders are insulated and isolated from the people who will bear the consequences of their decisions they may be less likely to have emotions as a source of data to assist them in making decisions. It also made me wonder if this factor plays a role in corporate scandals such as Enron, where executives make decisions that ruin the lives of employee investors for their personal gain and does it make it easier for a president to send men and women to die in a war if they are insulated form the brutal aspects of their decisions.

I thought of Abraham Lincoln who struggled emotionally with the consequences of his decisions to have men die for the rights of others to live free as he made repeated visits t the battle field. I wonder, was it easier for President Truman to make the decision to drop the atomic bombs because Japan was thousands of miles away. Do we not march in the streets to protest the killings of innocents in Darfur and Iraq because we can rationalize that it is not us who are pulling the switch? Maybe it should be a requirement that all leaders and presidents send 50 % of their time with the stakeholders who have invested their trust and their lives in them. Maybe we all need to open hearts wider and listen to the cries of innocents who are dying. Maybe if we can bring EQ into our lives, we will do the right thing.

In our EQ programs we’re increasingly using coaching as a method to help turn learning into action. This article from Mimi Frenette, our Master Coach, illustrates the principle "Emotions drive people, people drive performance."

VitalSigns for EQ Leadership: A Curious Solution

Bill’s meeting was proceeding smoothly — a critical discussion of sales team logistics — when Peter just "popped in." Peter is slightly senior to Bill, but in a different department.

"You just need to refocus your marketing strategy," declared Peter, sharing a "jewel of wisdom" from out of the blue.

"Here we go again," thought Bill, as he saw the discussion heading off tangent.

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