Excerpts from Chapter 1 of "SmartTribes: How Teams Become Brilliant Together" by Christine Comaford

 

Chapter 1 – How Great Companies Get Stuck

How the Brain Blocks Progress and Performance

Our brains do an amazing and wonderful job, but they don’t usually like change very much. You may like the idea of change. Parts of you may be very interested in change theory, talking about change, managing change—and especially describing how other people should change. However, actual change involving ourselves is scary to certain parts of our brain. The parts that exist to keep us safe have created elegant patterning based on one-trial learning.

Let’s take a closer look.

Your brain has three essential parts. The first part—the brain stem—sits at the base of your skull. This part is commonly called the reptilian brain, because it’s exactly like the brain of a reptile. It’s the oldest and most primitive part of the brain, and it controls balance, temperature regulation, and breathing. It acts out of instinct and is primarily a stimulus-response machine focused on survival.

Layered on top of the brain stem is the mammalian brain, so called because—yep—all the other mammals have this kind of brain too. The mammalian brain controls and expresses emotion, short-term memory, and the body’s response to danger. The key player in the mammalian brain that we’re going to be talking about in this book is the limbic system, which is the emotional center of the brain, where the fight/flight/freeze response is located. Its primary focus is also survival, though it is also the seat of anger, frustration, happiness, and love.

Let’s combine the limbic system with the survival mechanism in the reptilian brain. This creates the powerful combo pack we’ll call the critter brain, as my mentor Carl Buchheit of NLP Marin1 terms it. Once our critter brain has equated a particular phenomenon with safety or survival, it will continue to carry out that program. And it will do so as long as we are not dead, because it really doesn’t care about our quality of life—it cares about survival. And one key component of staying alive is belonging, or being like the other critters in the environment.

Safety and survival are definitely good things, but here’s the catch: since our critter brain doesn’t care about quality of life, it often will choose behaviors that keep us safe first and foremost. From a survival perspective, detecting threat is more important than being happy. This is why there are more negative than positive words in a language. So if we learn that we can survive by feeling worthless, by becoming invisible, by procrastinating until the last minute and then doing “good enough” work, or even by chronically doing a less-than-stellar job, then that program is the one our critter brain is going to associate with survival. Our brain will keep running that program ad infinitum because it knows we can survive it. Again, survival here means continued breathing. Those old programs are going to run as long as we keep breathing until and unless we can intervene and teach ourselves that something else—maybe even excellence—is not only survivable but safer.

Safety, belonging, and mattering are essential to your brain and your ability to perform at work, at home, and in your life overall. The greater the feeling of safety, both mental and physical, the greater the feeling of connection with others, the greater the feeling that we’re in this together and we belong together, the greater the feeling that we personally matter and make a difference and are contributing to the greater good, and the greater the success of the organization, the relationship, the team, and the individual.

Let’s move on to the third part of the brain: the neocortex. This part of the brain is most evolved in human beings, and the area of it we are most concerned with is the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex enables us to plan, innovate, solve complex problems, think abstract thoughts, and have visionary ideas. It allows us to measure the quality of our experience, to compare it to an abstract ideal, and to yearn for change. The prefrontal cortex is responsible for a number of advanced behaviors, including social behavior, tool making, language, and higher-level consciousness.

Scientists don’t really know all the things this part of the brain is capable of doing, but everyone from quantum physicists to voodoo doctors knows that there is huge untapped potential in the neocortex overall. So we’ll leave it at that.

For the purposes of simplicity we’ll distill the above to two states: the Critter State, where we don’t have access to all parts of our brain and thus are reactive in fight/flight/freeze, running safety programs; and the Smart State, where we have easy access to all of our resources and can respond from choice. (See figures 2-1 and 2-2 below.)

Today, innovation and growth through the next revenue inflection point depend on making sure the Smart State, not the Critter State, is driving management decisions and behavior in relationships. Management practices that rely on fear to enforce compliance keep people in their Critter State, in old safety and survival patterns, and reduce innovation. We need to get our teams into the Smart State, where they create new neural patterns for what it means to fail or succeed. Or, as Brené Brown puts it in her book Daring Greatly, “If we want to reignite innovation and passion, we have to rehumanize work. When shame becomes a management style, engagement dies. When failure is not an option we can forget about learning, innovation, and creativity.”2 The management practice of keeping people in their Critter State has grown not only increasingly obsolete but also increasingly ineffective.

Now, the Critter State is still useful, of course, and we want it to take over if a car is careening out of control and heading for us. We also will use it to engage emotionally. We simply want to make sure that we have full access to all parts of our brain so we are in both positive emotion and positive momentum.

 

Figure 2-1. Critter State: Limited Access to Resources.

 

Figure 2-2. Smart State: Full Access to Resources

Growth Mindset

It is time for leaders to learn how to be agile, how to fail fast, how to learn to live in their Smart State—and guide their teams there too.

Unfortunately, many of us have been socialized differently. We were given tests at school that decided how smart we were. We were taught that intelligence is fixed, or that some people have talent because they are born with it. Many who were told that they were smart have spent their lifetimes defending that identity by never taking any risks. If you don’t try anything new, you can’t fail, and no one can challenge your perception of being “the smart kid.”

But what is smart, really? Is it IQ, high grades, and college degrees, or is it the ability to adapt, to be resilient, to persevere in the face of adversity, and to seek challenge, learning, and growth? Is it being rigid, or is it being flexible and changeable?

According to Carol Dweck, author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, we can succeed if we embrace a growth mindset.3 Simply put, we can improve anything, but—and this is a pretty big but—we have to want it and work at it. This means we have to not only learn to accept failure and feedback, we have to seek it. It’s how we handle failure that determines our success. Do we get every bit of information we can and use it to try again? Do we work hard and keep practicing to overcome our limitations? That’s what Michael Jordan did when he was cut from the high school basketball team—and how he became one of the greatest basketball players of all time.

Nowadays it’s the smarter fish that win over the bigger fish. The smarter fish have the tools and the ability to manage and shift their and their team’s Critter States into Smart States.