Self understanding and collective human behaviour
more ideas »
It's not just what you say but how you say it. Successful operators speak little and listen much.
When they speak their voices fluctuate strongly in amplitude and pitch, suggesting interest and responsiveness to customer needs... "Like a mother speaking sing song to a baby variation sounds perky and inviting".
When operators do it right they are almost certain to be successful and rather than being pushy and authoritarian they let the customer find their way to a sale.
consistency of tone
In other circumstances, in pitching business plans for instance, consistency of tone and pace is the key to getting the plan highly rated.
This challenges the prevailing view of organisational effectiveness : in the business world consumers, employees and executives are influenced by meaning and reason.
How you say it is now thought to be as important as what you say.
a new science of subtle signals
The informal rhythm of interactions in the workplace may be the key to higher performance.
These kinds of signals are found in tone of voice, body language, the ways people congregate or don’t, the time spent on tasks, the rhythm of workplace activity and the patterns of social networks. Out of this is developing a new science of subtle signals.
The differences between effective and ineffective teams
Creating smart environments where people respond intelligently to other peoples needs.
Beneath the formal organisational chart of any organisation lies hidden webs of social interactions.
The health or dysfunction of these social networks can determine the effectiveness of the team, a large group or the whole business.
What makes successful groups is the ability to sense the unconscious and instinctual side of human behaviour along with the social and collaborative side. These influences are just as important as our rational behaviour.
Mirroring behaviour
Mirroring behaviour appears to be effective and may be an outward expression of the internal work of mirror neurons in the brain.
There appears to be two distinct ecologies of communication:
the rational and linguistic which emerges predominantly from the left hemisphere of the brain and the non linguistic which has its roots deep in our human evolutionary past.
language and deliberative reason has led to enormous cultural and technological advances, but our brain, which developed over a billion years of pre-hominid ancestry hasn’t caught up
Apes, chimpanzees and other primates, our evolutionary cousins, lack a capacity for language but live in sophisticated social groups.
They take part in collective defense, hunting and child rearing all coordinated through non linguistic means.
Such connected activity produces strong cohesive groups. These ‘group reading and forming abilities’ have become an instincitve part of modern humans.
Asch experiment
Modern research has shown that these group behaviours have the ability to strongly influence individuals and a person will alter their judgement in order to ‘go along with the crowd’.
A good example is the intriguing line test where three lines of different lengths are shown to the subject and they are asked to choose an obviously correct answer.
[ video link »]
Recent experiments conducted with magnetic resonance imaging machines suggests that peer pressure can alter the way people see the lines. Certainly if test subjects heard a number of people give a wrong answer they suspended judgement on what their own senses were telling them and went along with the groups false perception.
Remarkably this conforming happens automatically and unconsciously and happens so often and consistently that it inevitably plays a role in the way people make decisions in the business world.
Challenges
- Far flung teams … are more effective when members feel operational or cultural affinity
- Workplace burnout … is a serious issue that costs companies millions each year. But because people tend to hide stress it can be very difficult to detect.
- Internal polarization … that inhibits discussion.
- ‘Group think’ … drifts towards mindless decisions where no one individual wants to stand out but a few days later would think “How on earth did I go along with that … I must have had my brain turned off.”
more ideas »