SHRM11: Day Three Recap: Obscured By Clouds

Life is full of surprises.
Sometimes things are not as they seem.
Sometimes things come out of the blue from places you didn’t expect.

All three are experienced by every person and every collection of person-groups. One example: back in 1973, the pop rock band, Pink Floyd released “Dark Side Of The Moon”. Having only minor success previously in the U.S, this record came out of nowhere to enter the album charts at #2 and eventually logged over 740 consecutive weeks on the Billboard Top 200 Album Charts.

There are countless stories about the success of this record. However, my favorite has nothing to with the album itself. Mine is about the years preceding this.

Like most overnight sensations it seemed like they came out of nowhere when it fact it took years to get to this point. From 1967 to 1972, they consistently released critically well-received albums and strengthened their live performances. While recording DSOTM, they took two weeks off to record the soundtrack for the French film “La Vallee.” The soundtrack would be packaged and released under the Pink Floyd moniker as “Obscured By Clouds.”

“Obscured By Clouds” is not typically viewed as a must-listen in the Pink Floyd catalog. However, it served as a primer for what was to come. Moreover, the fact that it was recorded with such intense attention in a short time, and that it is a solid piece of work, is a testament to the commitment this band had to creating excellent work in the face of obscurity.

I thought about this type of intensity as I reflected on the last day of the 2011 Society for Human Resources Management’s Annual Conference. Since it was a half day, I only attended two sessions and each brought an interesting level of intensity.

As a closing keynote, I wasn’t sure what Michael J. Fox (Family Ties, Back To The Future, etc.) could offer this large HR audience. I soon discovered that his story of overcoming adversity in the form of Parkinson’s Disease was not a story of pity or remorse. It was the story of denial, anger, and fear. It was the story of another human being dealing with the unpredictable and coming to terms with the fact he was still Michael J. Fox. It’s just that he became Michael J. Fox, with Parkinson’s.

It was a story that reminded us that no matter who we are in the status hierarchy, we all have the same emotional reactions to change and uncertainty.

Fox’s presentation laid the perfect foundation for David Rock’s session, “From Human Resources to Neural Resources”

In essence, Rock surmises HR needs to understand the brain because more people are either thinking for a living or trying to influence thinking. Plus, this current research on brain science is assisting the understanding of organizations.

Not content to call it Emotional Intelligence, Rock promotes the idea of Self Regulation Training for one’s brain and its activities. This type of brain training increases the capacity to focus attention at work. Rock has written a few books on the subject. For this session he introduced these four concepts for increasing focus:

1. The Rational Is Overrated. 
Thinking of The Rational as being able to pay close attention, paying close attention is exhausting. Furthermore, our brains have limited space for this. As a result, we think unconsciously most of the time. For example, think about driving a car. When you drive, chances are you aren't consciously thinking about everything you’re doing: grabbing and turning the wheel, pressing on the accelerator or brake, looking around, etc. Yet we do all of this at the same time and very well.

The same can be said about solving problems. Consider how some of our best ideas come when we are not focused on the problem, e.g. in the shower, just as we wake up, etc. Rock theorizes that if we place more value on setting the stage for this type of thinking, organizations and people can come to impasses much more quickly.

2. We’ve Got The Emotions Backward. 
The strange thing about emotions is that we don’t think about them enough, but they are behind almost every decision. Even stranger still, a lot of our attention is on the negative emotions. Thus, most of the time instead of focusing on the emotion, we let the emotion control our behavior.

Part of the reason for this is we’ve been trained not to focus on the emotion. My theory on this is that it starts when we are children. Parents naturally want their children to be happy. Hence, they try to convince their child to avoid anger and sadness. This creates oppression rather than suppression.

According to Rock, suppression is better fitting. It is more of a natural braking feature cognitively. By rethinking how we view emotion and believing they are OK to have, the more likely we are able to self regulate them. Moreover, this will increase the capacity to focus attention.

3. Social Issues Are Primary. 
Experiments on exclusion and the affect it has on the brain demonstrate that social pain is equal and sometimes greater than physical pain.

4. Attention Changes The Brain. 
The more time spent improving one’s attention will increase the quality and quantity of one’s attention. Essentially, it’s like building a muscle, the more you train it, the stronger it becomes. For the brain, realizing how the best solutions come out of inexplicable nowhereness, realizing how we are emotionally unfocused, and not being surprised by the pain caused by our social connectivity is the best training you can do for it.

Improving thinking, focus and attention is increasingly important at work especially for leaders. It was clear from this session that this was something that HR could not only do to add value to an organization, but it could be the experts in this field for the organization.

One of the final points of Rock’s presentation was a word of caution to not use brain science to de-humanize the workforce. His challenge to us was to use the research to make sure that we are more human at work. 

I like this challenge. I think HR can incorporate a great deal of Rock’s ideas into the workplace. I think it has the potential to clear pathways through obscureness and cloudiness. And with any luck, it could land us on the moon.

Up next: My personal take and overall thoughts on SHRM11.