Steering the Elephant

Our ability to concentrate on one thing to the exclusion of others can be practical and efficient. It is also a coping mechanism. Selective attention provides a way for us to navigate through the maze of data that comes our way every second of the day.

We can:

• Tune our ears – a mother reacting to a baby’s crying in the middle of the night,
• Focus our vision – finding your child’s face in a large crowd,
• Train our noses – some people learn to love the smell of brussels sprouts,
• Latch onto an idea to the exclusion of others – this is the best way to get this done.

By selectively attending we can get a number of things done.

We can also miss a lot of things, too.  Take a look at the following from Christopher Chabris and Daniel J. Simons.  Focus on counting the number of passes between team members with white shirts.  Bounce passes count, too.

Well, how did you do? What did you attend to and what did you disregard or minimize?

In some cases selective attention is not only helpful, but required.  On the other hand, selective attention can have negative effects.  On October 21, 2009, two pilots on Northwest Airlines Flight 188 overshot their airport destination by 150 miles because they were having a deep discussion about what they were viewing on their personal laptops.  They later said that they could hear voices on their cockpit radios but ignored them.  Those voices were from ground controllers trying to get the pilots’ attention to find out if they were alright. The pilots’ licenses were revoked.

It has become popular today to take pride in one’s ability to multitask.  The brain does not really multitask when concentrating. It task switches and then attends to that task to the exclusion of others until you task switch again.  Task switching is a form of selective attention.  The pilots of Flight 188 thought they were multitasking.  They were not.  Instead of flying the plane, they task switched, becoming two more passengers on Flight 188.

So what do you do to minimize the negative effects of selective attention?

Before starting something:

1. Fight slipping into automatic behavior by visualizing what you are about to do,
2. Avoid task switching activities that are not directly related to the task at hand –  i.e. while you are driving – no texting, putting on make-up, eating your breakfast, reading the newspaper, shaving, or paying more than scant attention to that gift from God in the back seat in the safety restraint,
3. Use soft eyes – focus as much on the general as the specific.

“Calmness”, an emotional state that was analyzed from over 9 million Tweets, predicted the direction of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, with an 87.6% accuracy rate – four days ahead of time.

Hard to believe? Listen to this NPR: All Things Considered report by Guy Raz interviewing Johan Bollen about his just released study, Twitter Mood Predicts the Stock Market.

With Huina Mao and Xiao-Jun Zeng, Dr. Bollen investigated, “whether public sentiment, as expressed in large-scale collections of daily Twitter posts, can be used to predict the stock market.”  They investigated emotional states, rather than the usual logical indicators – basic market fundamentals, past history, market trends, the charts. Using two assessment tools, OpinionFinder and Google Profile of Mood States, they found that the mood state with the highest predictive accuracy value is not happiness but calmness.  So when the group of 2.7 million Twitter users is calm, the market goes up – four days later.  When they are not calm, the market goes down – four days later.

What does this mean?  Hasn’t happiness always been associated with productivity and success?  Aren’t happy workers good workers? Real California Milk even has an advertising campaign contending that happy cows make great cheese.

But maybe we have overlooked the value of calmness in our personal and professional lives, especially in our current economic and political environment.  Many people may be happy to have a job, but they may not be calm about their environment.  Calmness may be the better indicator of the decisions people consider risky in this economy – such as short-term investments, critical hires, pay raises – than happiness.  It may have an effect in less risky situations, such as work output, too.

Bollen, Mao, & Zeng’s work makes intuitive sense – when people are calm, they analyze financial risks differently than when they are not calm.  Their work may have organizational implications, too – a sense of calmness in the work environment can have a very positive effect on decision making and work output.

As you analyze the environment of your organization, think beyond whether people are happy and consider their level of calmness.

As with all species, our brains are designed to recognize certain things and disregard or minimize the importance of other things. Face recognition, for example, is developed in humans at a very early point, beginning in the first month of life.   Shankar Vedantam, in The Hidden Brain, discusses an experiment that he performed using his month old child, one he repeated a number of times.  He wanted to see how well his daughter could track his face as he moved around her crib.  To his surprise, she locked onto his face and did not look away as he walked completely around her crib.  As Mr. Vedantam points out, this ability to locate and recognize faces is rooted to our primitive needs to survive.  Differentiating between the draw of a mother’s face and that of a cuddly looking (predatory) animal is an important one.

Face recognition is so automatic in humans; we see them in the most unlikely places.

Face recognition is not the only brain activity to automate.  As we learn and experience different physical, emotional, or mental activities, we transfer the learning from active attention to automated action.  Cameron Carpenter demonstrates this point quite well in the following.

Notice, as one commenter does, that there was no music for him to follow, and beginning at minute 1:52 he is doing five different things at once.

There are times, however, when automatic processes can interfere with performance processes. Take the following test. It is a demonstration of the Stroop Effect – see how well you do.

As was just shown, even when we know what we are supposed to do, our automated brain can get in the way. The Stroop Effect demonstrates that performing a task counter to our automatic response can be difficult. Only by consciously focusing on the task and taking our time are we able to complete it successfully.

Here then is the caution on automatic responses – while they can enhance performance in some situations, they can also interfere with performance. They can be detrimental when trying to solve a problem. Sometimes we have to go beyond our assumptions or build in safeguards. For example, pilots are instructed and trained to rely on their instruments when IFR conditions exist, because reliance on physical senses while operating a plane can be misleading when there are no spacial cues. Pilots receiving this certification are taught to counter an automatic response and force themselves to read the dials for their own safety.

The challenge with automatic responses is that, usually, they are not obvious to us on an awareness level; we have to purposefully focus on them (e.g. countering the Stroop Effect). Before you can help your organization, you have to analyze the things you do automatically. Then you can ask yourself if these actions are helping you or holding you back. For those that are, the question then becomes, “What do you do to minimize the negative effect?”

There will be more on this.