I had decided I had enough of Pop Psych books – I needed a break.

In the past 3 or 4 years I have been reading almost exclusively about psychology and neuroscience.

Random titles that pop up in my mind: Stumbling on Happiness (D. Gilbert), Strangers to Ourselves (T. Wilson), The Happiness Hypothesis (Haidt), The How of Happiness (Lyubomirsky), Sway (Ori and Rom Brafman), Nudge (Thaler & Sunstein), Predictably Irrational (Ariely), The Logic of Life (T. Harford), Positivity (B. Fredrickson), Kluge (G. Marcus), Brain Rules (J. Medina), Made to Stick (Chip & Dan Heath), Yes! (Martin, Cialdini), Talent is Overrated (G. Colvin) Outliers (M. Gladwell), Mindset (C. Dweck)…

and before that books by: J.R. Harris (personal favorite of mine), S. Pinker, S. Blackmore, D. Wegner, D. Dennett, M. Shermer, R. Wright, M. RIdley, M. Gladwell…

Yes, I definitely needed a break. My decision was final.

But addiction is hard to cure. One day I went downtown with my wife. We drifted into a Barnes & Noble. Obviously I went straight to the science section. Jonah Lehrer’s book caught my attention. I grabbed it, thinking: “a book with a title like this… I would have bought it just a few months ago” and I smiled to myself, confident in my resolve. I started browsing the book, with an attitude of faked detachment and a know-it-all hubris. I read a few paragraphs here and there. I was immediately captivated by the author’s prose: elegant, engaging, clear. I was taken aback! I still held true to my commitment and put the book back in the shelf when it was time to go. I walked out of a bookstore with no books! Amazing!! Needless to say, the very same night I bought Jonah Lehrer’s book on Amazon.

Let’s cut to the chase: I liked it.
True, I was familiar with many of the studies mentioned in the book. I am an avid follower of WNYC radio lab: the author is a contributor to the show, and I found in printing a lot of what I heard on my ipod.
However, the narrative was brilliant. The style engaging. Each chapter begins with a riveting real-world story that is then used to illustrate scientific insights into the working of the brain: so we have the gripping perspective of a Quarterback playing the Super Bowl, the dilemma of a Royal Navy officer in the war room of the British destroyer HMS Gloucester during the Gulf War, the drama unfolding in the cockpit of United Airlines flight 232 (to name just a few). I wonder whether Jonah Lehrer read “Made to Stick” – he seems to be following the advice of Chip & Dan Heath in a brilliant way: use emotional and memorable stories to make your main point.

I think “How we Decide” does a good job in showing the complexity of human decision-making: intuition serves us well if we have practice in the specific field (we know more than we think); however, it can also lead us astray in predictable ways, and in those situations thinking the issue through is the way to go. However do not overthink, that also is a problem.

It is interesting that another reviewer found the book inconsistent.
I agree that Lehrer does not present a clear and cut strategy for decision making; however, I felt that the “inconsistencies” reflected the nuances of real-world decision-making and the complexity of the subject.
It’s hard to find a simple metaphor to use to illustrate the way the brain works. The dichotomy emotion – reason is obviously too simple. But it is a way to start, just like the planetary model of the atom is not how things actually work but it is very useful to help students get acquainted with a basic notion of what an atom is. The fact that inconsistencies pop up, that real life oozes out of the straight jacket imposed on it by any simplistic idea, it is to me a sign that the author is trying to show us the whole picture.

If I have a criticism, that is about the use of neuroanatomical parts of the brain as actors – I still cringe reading sentences like “Such restraint was possible only because Haynes,…, used his prefrontal cortex to manage his emotions.”, p. 127, or  ”Because he [Haynes, UA232 pilot] took advantage of his prefrontal cortex, relying on its uniquely flexible neurons, he managed to avert an almost certain disaster.”, p. 132. The pilot relied on his prefrontal cortex, but also on his whole mind.  By naming the prefrontal cortex as an actor, or the ACC as an actor, or the dopamine system as actor (my neurons made me do it!) we are downplaying the role played by other parts of the brain, by the body, by the situational cues. It would be different to say, for example that “Haynes used his ability to control himself and to think under pressure to avoid disaster, AND that the prefrontal cortex plays a big role in the ability to keep one’s cool.”

Similarly, I felt that sometimes the interpretation given by the author to some studies seems stretched so the referenced studies can fit the narrative, and not, as it should be, the other way around. For example, the placebo effect is showcased as demonstrating “the power of the prefrontal cortex to modulate even the most basic bodily signals” in the chapter dedicated to over-thinking (“Choking on Thought”). I think the placebo effect does not fit well in the chapter narrative. Moreover, Wager’s study about the placebo effect, used here by Jonah Lehrer, could also be used to demonstrate the concept of the “extended mind” (see “Out of Our Heads” by Alva Noe).

Having said that, what I loved about the book was the author’s vivid writing: it kept me engaged while pleasantly leading me to see different perspectives of materials that I knew already.

Bottom line: I am happy I decided to buy the book.

Tags: Decision Making, How We Decide, Jonah Lehrer

“I am a loser”.

I always thought that comment was a very American reaction to a mistake; and as such, from my perspective as an Italian, very interesting and kind of cute.

Not so anymore.

According to Carol Dweck, that comment is a sign of a fixed mindset. And a fixed mindset can lead to a lot of unnecessary suffering.

In her book, Mindset – the New Psychology of Success, Carol Dweck divides people in 2 groups: those who have a “fixed” mindset and those who have a “growth” mindset.
But what is a mindset?
A mindset is a belief people have about their abilities and their qualities.

Of course people have different traits and abilities and qualities that they are born with.
People with a fixed mindset consider those qualities to be carved in stone – and that means that every situation calls for a confirmation.
People with a growth mindset consider those qualities as a starting point – there is no telling what you can achieve if you apply yourself.

Having a mindset or the other has several consequences: even 4-year olds with a fixed mindset tend to stick to easy tasks to prove they are smart vs. stretching themselves by tackling more difficult tasks; people with a growth mindset can take feedback and use it to their advantage, while people with a fixed mindset transform the feedback about an action into a judgement about their identity (from “I failed” to “I am a failure”).

The belief that talents can be developed gives people with a growth mindset a motivation to work hard and to practice deliberately, which is the secret to excellence; by contrast, people with a fixed mindset see effort as a sign of not being good enough: it’s hard for them to become, they have to be, right away.
They forget the yet. Facing a mistake, a person with a fixed mindset might think: I am not good at this. A person with a growth mindset, facing the same mistake, might think: I am not good at this… yet!

The good news is that a growth mindset can be taught.
And I now believe that teaching clients a growth mindset is the most important task a coach or a trainer can carry out.

A coach can implicitly teach a growth mindset to clients by using a language of possibility (see Mark McKergow and Paul Jackson’s SIMPLE model), by praising clients’ efforts (vs. outcomes), by helping clients to see obstacles as challenges, by focusing clients on learning rather than judging, by bringing the attention of clients to actions and feedback rather than to labels.

Switching from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset can open up a whole range of possibilities and opportunities  - and isn’t that our mission as coaches and as change facilitators?
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Tags: Carol Dweck, learning, mindsets, practice

… can be found here:

Tags: Amos, counterinsurgency, Petraeus, Solution Focused, US Army, USMC

You can learn about Professor McAdams here.
You can also download his papers here.

Among his papers, the one that most clearly state his Theory of Personality is: A new Big Five: Fundamental Principles for an Integrative Science of Personality.

Prof. Dan P. McAdams

I love his theory because it offers a good framework for thinking about personality and about change.
I love it because it is science. I love it because it talks about “integration”. It sure helped me integrate my knowledge and my experience about personality and change. I can see people have traits. I find the Big Five Questionnaire very useful in my work. At the same time I see people change. Being a coach means being a change agent, and my coachee demonstrate their ability to change, in impressive ways, day in and day out.

I encourage you to read the paper.
However, here it is in a nutshell.
Personality is conceived as:

1. an individual’s unique variation on the general evolutionary design for human nature
   Mc Adams’ framework is based on evolutionary psychology. He makes it very clear that evolutionary psychology is not just another theory. In his words: “most of the grand theories are faith-based systems whose first principles are untested and untestable (Mendelsohn, 1993). In contrast, we contend that an integrative science of persons should be built around a first principle that enjoys the imprimatur of the biological sciences”.
2. expressed as a developing patterns of dispositional traits
   After the attacks launched on the concept of traits in the 70s, “not only did the concept of the trait survive the attacks, it emerged stronger than ever before”. Personality trait scores do predict observed behavioral trends across situations and over time. They do predict important life outcomes. Traits show long-term stability. They have strong heritability quotients (about 50%). Links between certain traits and the functioning of the brain are emerging. The Big 5 itself has proven to be a useful and coherent framework for organizing traits, maintaining its validity across cultures.
3. characteristic adaptations
   Plans, strategies, cognitive styles. Beliefs, values. Goals and motivational concerns. All these are characteristic adaptations. Characteristic because they are ways in which the character is expressed. Adaptations because they are unique to the individual, they are contextualized in time and space, they are triggered by specific roles and social demands.
   This is one level where change happens. This is the level where we operate as coaches, therapists and change agents.
4. and self-defining life narratives
   These are the stories individuals construct to make meaning and identity in the modern world.
   Each one of us has a life story. The more it matches our traits and our characteristic adaptations, the more it is healthy. This is another level where change happens. Coaching can be seen as a joint venture between the coach and the coachee to edit, reframe and construct empowering self-narratives.
5. complexly and differentially situated in culture and social context.
   Culture. It provides context for expressing traits and characteristic adaptations. Extraverts in Kyoto express their sociability differently from their equally extraverted middle class Americans in, say, Cleveland. Culture. It provides a menu for life narratives. No person is ever exposed to the same menu. Each person chooses from the menu.

Tags: Big Five, Change, coaching, McAdams, personality

My friend Coert Visser mentioned the book “Talent is Overrated” in one of his interesting postings (here).
I’ve just finished reading that book, and there are quite a few noteworthy concepts in there.

First, though, my critique.
My main complaint about the book is that, as Coert again succinctly put it in a personal note, it should have been titled “Deliberate Practice”.
The author, in an attempt to give more relevance to the concept of “deliberate practice”, sets out by criticizing the notion of talent as an explanation of expert performance.
Granted, the author does a good job in highlighting the limits of talent-based explanations; however, the most one can say about these explanations is that they are incomplete – not that they are not valid.
His overall attack is based on a handful of studies and falls flat: all he achieves to do, in my opinion, is to note that the concept of talent still needs to be worked out in the details and that it is still debated among researchers.
It kind of reminds me of the creationists’ attacks on evolution: since biologists are still arguing about the details of evolution (e.g., punctuated equilibrium), then evolution is false.
The author, moreover, in an attempt to convince readers of the vital importance of skill-development and expert performance, dedicates a full chapter to explain that because companies and banks are awash in cash and money is everywhere, the only area where businesses can build a competitive edge is in the development of human resources.
That chapter written in 2007 before the current financial meltdown can either make you cry or make you laugh out loud.

Having said that, the core of the book is pretty good.
The main idea is that the way to excellence is practice. Deliberate practice.
Deliberate means that:
- it is designed specifically to improve performance
- it can be repeated a lot
- feedback is continuously available
- it is highly demanding mentally
- it isn’t fun
Jogging 5 times a week, same route, same amount of time–that is practice.
It is maintaining an acceptable level of performance.
Running 3 or 4 times a week, alternating between long runs, speedwork, tempo runs and different routes, following a program, monitored by a coach—that is deliberate practice!!
It is about stretching the limits.
In this process, a key role is given to the COACH.

As the author points out:
- an expert coach can observe you in ways that you cannot see yourself
- an expert coach can design a program that fits your needs, based on the body of knowledge on how performance is developed in that field
- an expert coach can tell which specific elements are needed for a specific performance and need to be developed by working intently on them.
Therefore, starting out on a path of deliberate practice is “extremely difficult to do without the help of a teacher or coach“.

The author illustrates these points by using some interesting examples: a study done in then West Berlin on talented violinists; studies done on chess players; stories about football star players.
He also distinguishes between different models of deliberate practice: the music model, the chess model and the sports model.

Interestingly enough, the advantage of practice is cumulative.
I remember reading a book written by a SAS member (Special Air Service, the elite British Army unit) on his experiences with that outfit. He said that the motto of the SAS should be changed from “who dares wins” to “practice, practice, practice”, because of the mind-numbing, continuos rehearsals. Yet that is the very key to their successes: they could not have dared, let alone won, without all that practice!!

The book “Talent is Overrated” reminded me of how much we as coaches need deliberate practice too.
That is why I loved Solutionsurfers advanced brief coaching training program, more specifically the “live coaching days”: 3 days of live coaching with real clients.
Intense; a lot of practice; real time feedback; stretching the limits.
I learned more in those 3 days than in hour after hour of “regular” coaching.
I am looking forward to the next “live coaching days” in April 2009!
Top Gun for Solution Focused Coaches.

Tags: coaching, deliberate practice, performance, talent

It seems to me Solution-focused strategies are blossoming everywhere.
Or maybe I see them everywhere.
Whatever the case might be, I was not expecting to find anything regarding Solution-Focused approaches in a book whose subtitle is: “a surgeon’s note on performance” (the book is BETTER, the author is Atul Gawande).
Yet, there it was: a perfect case study in Solution-Focused strategy, right there in Chapter 1(“on washing hands”), even though nowhere in the book the words “solution-focused” are mentioned.
I thought it could be worthwhile to share this case study, because it is an excellent example of Solution-Focused processes at work.

In the first pages of chapter 1, Doctor Gawande sets out to introduce readers to the problem: how to increase compliance in washing hands for doctors and medical staff members. He tells readers why that is a very important goal – because washing hands is “the one thing that consistently halts the spread of infections”.
To have an idea of the dimension of the problem, the author quotes some statistics: “each year, according to the U.S. Center for Disease Control, 2 million Americans acquire an infection while they are in the hospital. Ninety thousand die of that infection”.
Yet, despite the fact that a whole bunch of different solutions have been tried out in hospitals (posting signs, repositioning sinks, increasing the number of sinks, automating sinks, issuing hygiene report cards, etc.), still doctors and nurses wash their hands on average one-third to one-half as often at they are supposed to.

After talking more about his personal experience with the problem and about why it is a difficult problem, the author tells the story of an intervention in Pittsburgh, Pa.
We can think of this case story as: bringing in a traditional (non solution-focused) consultant.
It so happens that Paul O’Neill, former secretary of the Treasury and CEO of Alcoa, took over as head of a regional health care initiative in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Experienced in solving performance issues in factories, Mr. O’Neill sent a young industrial engineer on a single 40-bed surgical unit at Pittsburgh veteran hospital. The young engineer was sent in with the task of solving the problem of how to increase hands washing behavior in the medical staff. As the author tells the story, the young engineer did not ask, “why don’t you wash your hands?” He asked “why can’t you?”. I imagine this well-intentioned consultant to be an expert in the Toyota system and in Lean Production processes (this is my own attribution) – because since the answer he got was “time”, he set about fixing things that took time: a “just in time” supply system, a re-arrangement of stethoscopes, and other similar changes. After these changes were made, infection rates fell almost 90%.
A success story!
Well, if you are a Solution-Focused practitioner you know there is a nag in these kinds of interventions. As you might expect, these changes, despite a lot of exhortation, after 2 years had spread to only one other unit; and the moment the young engineer left for other assignments, performances began to slide.

Enter hopelessness?
No!
Enter a Solution-Focused approach!!
A surgeon who helped the young engineer happened to read an article about a Save the Children anti-starvation program in Vietnam, run by Tufts University nutritionist J. Sternin and his wife. In their experience, over and over bringing outside solutions to the villagers had failed. Instead “the Sternins focused on finding solutions from insiders. They asked small groups of poor villagers to identify who among them had the best nourished children… The villagers then visited those mothers at home to see exactly what they were doing… The villagers discovered that there were well-nourished children among them, despite the poverty, and that those children’s mothers were breaking with the locally accepted wisdom in all sorts of ways – feeding their children even when they had diarrhea, for example;…”
The Sternins called their approach “positive deviance”.
The surgeon, Jon Lloyd, impressed by this idea, set out to try it, again in Pittsburgh veteran hospital. He held a series of “thirty minute, small group discussions with health care workers at every level… The team began each meeting saying, in essence, “we are here because of the hospital infection problem, and we want to know what you know about how to solve it”.
No charts, no presentation, just that simple question.
Is this Solution-Focused in its essence, or what?
Not surprisingly, “ideas came pouring out. People told of places where hand-gel dispensers were missing, ways to keep gowns and gloves from running out of supply…”
Everything changed: nurses would speak up if doctors were not wearing gloves; non-compliers were pressured by peers to conform; when new hand-gel dispensers arrived, staff members decided where to put them; and so on.
Of course they made sure to publicize the ideas that worked and the small victories on the hospital website and newsletter.
To cut a long story short: “one year into the experiment – and after years without widespread progress – the entire hospital saw its MRSA wound infection rates drop to zero.”
Yeah!

In these stories we can find all the ingredients of solution-focused interventions:
- treating people involved as experts
- finding resources and exceptions within the system (organization, village)
- finding out what these “exceptions” are doing differently
- focusing on what is working
- amplifying the small successes
et voilà, we have sustainable solutions because they come from inside the system itself, from the people involved!!

Tags: better, Gawande, health care, hospital, organization, Solution Focused