Innovative Brain Food from New & Improved

This is Your Mind on Questions

One of the greatest features of your human brain is, if you ask it a question it will answer it.

What time is it?  How far away is New York? What might be all the ways to get to New York?

See!  You can’t help it.

Phrase a problem as a question and your mind will start generating possible solutions.  Make a statement out of a problem and your mind will accept it, or it will look for data that refutes it.  Accepting it is sometimes the end of the mental line.  Your brain shrugs, says ‘ok’, and moves on.  Refuting it puts you in opposition to the speaker’s statement, usually not a good place to start if you’re looking for solutions to the problem. The beauty of asking a question is that your brain can’t help but try to answer it.

At New & Improved we believe the question-answering reflex is primal and universal.

Why?

Because the main job of the brain, the whole reason we have a brain, is to keep us alive and safe.  The fact that you can think with it is merely a function of the fact that thinking is one tool in the brain’s safety keeping arsenal.  And we all have a gator brain, our primal flight or fight brain that we share with all animals, even alligators.  Located down near the brain stem, it is interested solely in our security; in keeping us safe.  The theory on the gator brain is that it impacts our thinking almost all the time.  We are usually unaware of its influence, and it rarely impacts our thinking in a way that enhances our creativity.  And, because our gator brain seeks safety and security, it doesn’t like unanswered questions, especially unanswered problem questions.  Unanswered problem questions represent uncertainty, the unknown, possible danger.  Your gator brain, tasked with keeping you safe, doesn’t like that uncertainty.  A problem question, especially an open-ended one, leverages your instinctive gator brain to go get an answer.  For hard questions, it will trigger your neo-cortex, your big new brain, for an answer. So it’s our primal desire for safety that ultimately is why, if you ask your brain a question, your brain is motivated to answer it.

To get open ended problem questions, the stems; How to…, In what ways might I…, How might we…, and our favorite, What might be all the ways…?, are useful.  This last one invites lots of answers, which is helpful because the gator brain is lazy.  Once you’ve generated one ‘good ‘option’ the ol’ gator brain doesn’t feel unsafe anymore.  The first halfway decent answer will satisfy it, and it stops pushing for answers.  The discipline is engaging your neo-cortex to answer the question again and again to really answer the question  “What might be all the ways...?”

Your mind on questions is a powerful thing.  Phrase problems as questions and your mind will give you answers. You can’t help it.

What’s the #1 thing you can do to help your employees to be more motivated and engaged? (Hint: It’s not what you think it is!)

If we asked you, “what do you think the number one factor to help motivate and keep employees engaged in their work is” what would you guess?

Would you say?

Rewards? Or

Recognition? Or

A great team? Or

Something else entirely?

Go ahead, take a guess. What do you think it is?

Theresa Amabile, Harvard professor and expert in creativity and workplace productivity, conducted a study that asked 600 managers from a variety of organizations this very question, and the top answer received was recognition for good work.

Did you have a similar answer? If so, you might not be that surprised then.

However, what you might find surprising is that in subsequent research Amabile found out that the managers in the survey were wrong.  Recognition, it turns out, is not the most important factor in employee engagement!

By analyzing more than 12,000 diary entries from more than 200 employees across diverse industries, Amabile and her colleague Steven Kramer found that the #1 driver that helps employees feel more engaged and enthused at work is… (drum roll, please) whether or not the employees felt that they were making progress towards their goals.

That’s right, progress. According to their research, if during a work day, employees felt like they made some positive movement towards achieving their goals, they reported feeling more positive and having a stronger sense of drive and purpose at work. When they felt like they were running into obstacles or that their goals were constantly shifting, their overall moods were lower.

Amabile and Kramer detail their research and many of the practical implications in their book, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work. (highly recommended!)

As a manager or leader, if you want to help your employees be more motivated, you might want to leverage the progress principle by:

• Helping employees clarify goals
• Providing enough support (resources and time)
• Helping them monitor progress (no matter how small)

And you might want to do your best to:

• Avoid changing goals haphazardly
• And avoid holding up resources

And if you do want to use recognition, go ahead and make the most of it.

Recognize your employees for the great progress they are making!

Pushing the Limits of Our Willpower

Its the 12th week I’ve been on the road – 68 out of 91 days, 12 long car drives, 12 plane trips, most to different locations for different purposes, many with early morning startups and late evening end times. There is no pattern. I’m in a state of constant change. I can imagine some of the leaders I coach and many of my business partners saying, “What’s unusual about this?” They have been living like this for years.

This new road life is happening at a time when I have started several new self-care habits that will improve my health, my performance and have me walking my talk. I have been very disciplined in eating healthy foods and not drinking too much. But I'm not getting enough sleep to be at my best. I’m not completing 60 minutes of cardio-vascular exercise every day. My journaling practice usually feels rushed. I’m frustrated with my mental chatter as I juggle many clients, projects and ideas. I worry too much about the items on my “to do” list that are behind schedule.

To soothe myself I tell a story that I just don’t have the extra hours I need. But when I look more closely that’s just an excuse. At the end of the day I often find time for mindless activities - scanning blogs and articles on the web (justified as research), checking what my colleagues are saying on Facebook and LinkedIn or playing a video game. As I near the end of the day I’m finding I lack the willpower to stay focused on these new self-care habits.

I wonder how a road warrior like me might realistically practice the self-care habits the research says are needed for optimal performance as an innovation leader or team member? How might I develop the willpower to sustain these healthy habits when I’m on the road?

What Really Happens to Our Time?

How many hours do you have today? Do you need all 24? Can I borrow some of your time? I can return the favor later in the week.

Sound unrealistic? Yep, it is. We are all given 24 hours in a day – no more, no less. We can’t stretch an hour to be longer than 60 minutes. No matter how we use our creative problem solving techniques, we can’t touch this one. So, how are we supposed to get everything done when we don’t have enough time?

We asked Gloria Volz, Professional Organizer and Jane Bickford, Life Coach to share some tools for Time Management with us. Their philosophy is that Time Management isn’t about TIME at all, it’s about SELF. Self management determines how you use the time in your day, week and years of your life. In our Innovation for Results Program participants commonly want to find creative solutions to this “not enough time” challenge. We discourage the use of the creative process for this, as we know there are expert solutions available (assuming you’re truly motivated) and these two are experts. We think this will be an investment of time that will save you in the long run, but you have to read on. Before you do, set aside the hope for an answer that will make this challenge go away easily. You’re smart. If there was an easy answer, you would have already thought of it...

Questionable Selling

A colleague of ours, an individual who has fully integrated the Creative Problem Solving Process into her life, had an opportunity to be a consultant to the consultants. Our colleague was asked to make a proposal to a big box consulting firm to help them innovate in all areas of the organization.

During the preliminary meeting with the potential client, our colleague offered no solutions. She simply asked questions and listened, and listened and asked questions. Her first correspondence with the consulting firm was merely a converged list, taken from her notes, of about thirty questions. All the questions were from the client’s perspective. Each was an expression of a possible desire, phrased as a problem question, using the stems, How to…, In what ways might you…, and What might be all the ways…

It was a classically simple use of the CPS process. Gather data and then use that data and information to construct a list of problem questions. It turns out, as well, that it was a powerful template for running and responding to an initial face to face sales meeting with a prospective client.

The managing director at the big box consulting firm responded to our colleague’s correspondence with the following statement:

“You did for us what we should be doing for our clients.”

She got the job.