Diary of a CFO · 2026-08-21 · 1h 38m
Key moments - from our scoring
Substance score
52 / 100
Five dimensions, 20 points each
Dr. David Rock walks through the foundations of neuro leadership and how understanding brain science transforms executive decision-making. He explains the SCARF model - Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness - as a framework for understanding what the brain cares about in social interactions, and reveals how this framework helps leaders reduce threat responses and improve psychological safety. The conversation covers his journey from meditation-focused self-discovery to building a field that bridges neuroscience with organizational performance, including his development of NILES (Neuro Intelligent Leadership Enhancing System), an AI tool that detects cognitive biases in real-time and nudges leaders toward better decision-making. Rock also addresses the AI revolution's impact on leadership, arguing that properly designed AI increases rather than diminishes critical thinking. CFOs and executives managing teams through uncertainty will find practical frameworks for addressing the three broad issues limiting leadership capacity: information overload, self-regulation failures, and poor social cognition.
SCARF is a framework describing five things the brain deeply cares about in social interactions: Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness. Understanding these five drivers helps leaders reduce threat responses in their teams, improve psychological safety, and enable better engagement and performance.
NILES listens to conversations and decision-making through 30 different neuroscience models simultaneously, detecting biases in thinking and hiring patterns in real-time, then nudging leaders toward smarter, less biased choices without reducing human intelligence.
When facing uncertainty or threat, the brain defaults to survival-mode thinking rather than critical analysis; the brain assumes threat first, then later realizes it may have been safe, causing irrational reactions despite intelligence.
Leadership books repeat roughly 10 core ideas across hundreds of titles, suggesting either plagiarism or that evidence-based neuroscience principles had not yet unified and validated what actually works in leadership.
Design AI systems that increase human critical thinking and self-awareness - like NILES - rather than automating judgment or replacing human decision-making; the goal is to enhance human intelligence, not diminish it.
Our reviewer’s read on each dimension, with quotes from the episode.
The episode contains several non-trivial ideas - the cognitive constraint that prevents self-detection of bias, power's three-part neurological effect on leadership behaviour, and the 'human in the lead' AI framing - but they are heavily diluted by repeated ad blocks, biographical storytelling, and extended host self-insertion. The signal-to-noise ratio suffers badly across a 98-minute runtime.
there's a cognitive constraint as real as not being able to run a hundred miles an hour unaided, that, that we have a... There's a constraint in how our brain is built that makes it almost impossible to see much of your bias
little bit of power, you do three things... The first thing is, uh, you stop thinking of other people as people and you start thinking them as objects
The SCARF and SEEDS models are David Rock's own frameworks but have circulated in L&D and executive coaching circles for over a decade, limiting novelty for informed practitioners. The clearest fresh argument - that bias blindness is a hard cognitive constraint rather than a motivation or awareness problem - is genuinely underexplained elsewhere, but most other takes (fail fast, uncertainty activates threat, confident leaders outperform anxious ones) are well-worn.
uncertainty is more threatening than a threat often
we found is when you teach people about bias, everyone starts seeing everyone else's bias, but not their own... Then we thought it was a motivation problem, turns out not to be it
Rock is a genuine practitioner-builder: he coined a field, bootstrapped a multi-hundred-person firm from minus $50,000, published a peer-reviewed journal, and has run applied research programmes for over 25 years. He is not a career podcast guest. However, the conversation never draws on specific client outcomes or named company-level case studies that would demonstrate his institutional impact concretely.
I started in debt. I started with minus $50,000 when I started the company
we've developed 20 million leaders in 10 years
Rock supplies a credible layer of specificity - percentages on CEO imposter syndrome, years-long research timelines, financial losses on the master's programme - but most numbers are given as approximations ('72 to 78%', 'a couple hundred full time people') and neuroscience claims rarely cite named studies or journals. The strongest evidence is methodological (500 projects to yield 50 papers) rather than outcome-based.
72 to 78% of CEOs have imposter syndrome. Meaning, uh, they... And this is 2024
when you see an angry face, you get an immediate large reaction of threat response...5, 10, 15 times as much real estate comes on faster, activates stronger, uh, stays longer
The host asks broadly relevant questions but consistently fails to probe, challenge, or redirect when Rock gives vague or self-promotional answers. He repeatedly redirects the conversation to his own biography, faith, and self-assessed objectivity, consuming significant airtime and breaking the expert's train of thought without adding analytical value.
for me, growing up in a Christian family, I would say keen into faith sort of helped me to combat the whole imposter syndrome challenge... my very favorite Bible verse was, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. Philippians, chapter 4, verse 13
I like to think that I was able to recognize the types of bias that I have as a person because for I'm unusual. I am um, unusually objective and unusually self aware
Computed from the transcript - who did the talking, and the words that came up most.
What happens to financial judgement when AI, cognitive bias, uncertainty and executive pressure collide in the boardroom? In this episode of Diary of a CFO , Ademola Odewade sits down with Dr. David Rock, Co-Founder and CEO of the NeuroLeadership Institute and originator of the field of neuroleadership , for a powerful exploration of the neuroscience behind executive decision-making. This conversation goes beyond accounting and financial strategy. It examines the brain behind the numbers . Dr. Rock explains why even highly intelligent executives can make poor decisions under pressure, why recognising your own cognitive biases is harder than most leaders realise and how AI can either strengthen human judgement or encourage cognitive surrender.
Transcribed and scored by The B2B Podcast Index.
Speaker A: This episode is brought to you by Facebook. So you were scrolling on Marketplace and there it was, the bike you'd been searching for. You sent a message and it turned out the seller was super chatty, kind of funny, and an avid cyclist. The next thing you know, you're in a cycling crew. Well, a community cycling group. The thing about Facebook, you might find more than what you're looking for. From a browse to a bike ride this summer. Find more on Facebook.
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Speaker F: That's There you go. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
Speaker G: Oh, so just to summarize your TED Talk. Right. So there are actually three broad categories of issues that affect or negatively affect our uh, leadership, uh, capacity. Ah. So the very first one is the capacity issue and that is actually very linked to information organism.
Speaker F: Yeah.
Speaker G: Then next is a self regulation issue. Right. And the next is the social cognition issue which deals with understanding people. Right. And I can imagine this has actually come from years of observation, years of research.
Speaker F: Remember when I was young and, and foolish, someone said to me, uh, a mentor at the time said just go out and make a ton of mistakes. Just go out and mess things up. Like I was like, really? And now I kind of understand it. Like, yeah, just go out and try and found. But so anyway, so similarity, experience, experience, distance and safety. And so going back to the AI that I mentioned before, our uh, AI is called Niles Neuro Intelligent Leadership Enhancing System. Niles has the SEEDS model. It's called that framework is the SEED model, the SEEDS model and all our models in there. And uh, it'll listen to anything that you're doing through 30 different models all at once and like track how your brain works and then nudge you to get smarter. It's really, it's really spooky. So it'll detect any, it'll detect biases in your thinking, in your conversations. It'll hire alongside you and help you get rid of your biases. When you're hiring, it'll, it'll do all these different kinds of things. So it's really, uh, it's a great use of AI because it's not reducing intelligence, it's increasing your critical thinking and your intelligence. It's, it's, it's called the SCARF model. S, E, A, R, F. And it's five things that the brain did, deeply obsesses about and its status, which we kind of touched on. Right. Certainty. We were just talking about autonomy, which is feeling in control. Relatedness, which is in group. Right. The in group from similarity, bias, relatedness and fairness. Status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, fairness spells out scarf. So SCARF describes what your brain does when it's interacting with other humans. It's the neuroscience of motivation, engagement, psychological safety, inclusion, belonging, quite a few other things. And I'd included it in my last book, but only sort of towards the end. And this new book like really fleshes it out and explains like how to find your own SCARF profile, how to have better conversations every day that just turn down threat. So if we're not sure. If something's a threat, let's assume it's a really bad threat. Just to be on the safe side.
Speaker G: Eat or be eaten. Sounds like the. Sounds like a lot of the jungle.
Speaker F: Yes.
Speaker G: Interesting. You know, uh, we're actually getting to the end of, uh, this interview, and this is a question I always ask everyone when it's all said and done. What do you want the legacy of your body work to do? We are live. Ladies and gentlemen, you once again, welcome to the Kingdoms podcast, diary of a cfo. And today I've got with me a very, very, very special guest, fighting out of London, England. Big welcome, Dr. Uh, David Rock. How are you today?
Speaker F: I'm doing well. You know, sometimes when I speak at a big conference, they. They say, like, what song do we. Do you want to walk onto? I'm like, I just like this. And they put on We Will Rock youk by Queen, and I'm, like, embarrassed.
Speaker C: And.
Speaker F: And I will just say, just so we don't confuse people completely. I am in London, but I'm Australian. And, uh, I left Australia 16 years ago, and I live more in New York, but I'm kind of New York. London these days, and I've been to Johannesburg many times. In fact, I think my team has trained thousands of coaches since, like, the year 2000 in South Africa. Um, so I'm. Yeah, you know, we've got a bit of a following down that way. But, yeah, pleasure to be here with you.
Speaker G: Okay, it is a pleasure. And of course, RC or crc.
Speaker F: You can speak Australian.
Speaker G: Look. Yeah, I can fight with the kangaroos. Well, Australia. Australia is a really, really amazing, uh, place. I. I hope to go there someday. The World Down Under. I hope. I hope to visit us someday. And of course, you know, is the
Speaker F: highest number of things that can kill you per square meter. Even more than Africa. It's fantastic.
Speaker G: The kangaroos, the snakes, everything. It's a crazy place. No wonder I think the name the world down under is very well defeated.
Speaker F: Yes, indeed, indeed. How did we connect? I think it was Dave Ulrich connected us. You had him on the show. And Dave, you came highly recommended from Dave. And Dave's a someone I look up to a lot. So, uh, here we are.
Speaker G: That's it. Of course, you came in highly recommended by Dave, and here we are. Here we are. He's actually somebody that I look up to a lot, by the way. I'm a chartered accountant. And, you know, in the course of studying to become a chartered accountant, I had to read some of Dave's texts. Right. Some of his body of work. So I, I very much appreciate update. So a big shout out to Dave Ulrich, uh, on this one. And of course, you know, today's about you, so I have created an introduction for you. So please sit back while I read your introduction. So, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another powerful episode of the podcast Obia. Um, our mission is to educate, inspire and empower leaders around the world through conversations to shape the future of business, leadership and innovation. Today's guest has fundamentally changed how millions of people think about leadership. Before terms like brain science, cognitive performance and neuroscience backed leadership became part of the executive vocabulary, he recognized the greatest challenge facing organizations wasn't a lack of strategy. It was a lack of understanding of how the human brain actually works. He coined the term neuro leadership, creating an entirely new field that bridges neuroscience with leadership, organizational culture and human performance. Today, his work influences some of the world's most respected organizations, including Fortune 100 companies, helping leaders make better decisions, build stronger cultures, and unlock higher levels of performance. He is a co founder and CEO of the Neuro Leadership Institute, a, uh, globally recognized organization that has reached millions of professionals across more than 100 countries. His best selling books, including your Brain at Work, Quiet Leadership, and his latest release, Good with Humans, have become essential reading for executives, managers and coaches seeking practical, evidence based approaches to leadership. But today's conversation goes beyond neuroscience. We are going to explore what happens inside the brain when leaders face uncertainty, why intelligent people sometimes make irrational decisions under pressure, how organizations can successfully navigate the AI revolution without losing their humanity, and what separates high performing cultures from average ones. We'll also examine how Dr. Rock built an entirely new category, earned global credibility, and what the future of leadership looks like in an age where artificial intelligence is reshaping almost every industry. If you are a CEO, uh, founder, executive entrepreneur, or simply someone who wants to think more clearly, lead more effectively, or perform at, uh, your highest level. This is a conversation you want to revisit again and again. Dr. David Rock, it is a real privilege to welcome you today to the podcast.
Speaker F: That's a hell of a welcome, Matt. It's a hell of a welcome. I'm like, who's that guy? I want to meet him. He sounds interesting, but it's a hell of a welcome. You're 99% accurate. The 1% is, ah, my new book called Good with Humans isn't actually out yet, so you can't read it just yet, but you can order it. It comes out in November. And uh, it's Good with Humans is the Title, but all the other ones you can read today, uh, your brain at work has been a big, a big hit around the world in many, many languages.
Speaker G: Amazing, amazing. But you know, like before all of this recognition, before the Dr. David Rock of today, right? Who was young David, like when you look back at your childhood, like what experiences actually first made you get fascinated about how people think, how people behave.
Speaker F: A great question. I mean, I just remember asking questions about everything from as early as I can remember. And I had a, uh, my, my, my mom was in particular was really supportive of that and would encourage me to ask as opposed to kind of shutting me down. And she was very entrepreneurial and kind of open minded and, and, and, and uh, so I just, I just always asked questions. I wanted to know how things worked. And if you took a, if, if you kind of walked around my childhood bedroom when I was like anywhere from 5 to 10, 15 years old, you would have seen a huge amount of like every, every gadget that was in the house basically stolen and taken apart. So like my dad got really annoyed with me at some, at one point, but I was like taking apart the stereo, taking apart the, like the radios. Like I just wanted to know how things worked. Unfortunately, my, my dad wasn't electrically minded, wasn't scientifically minded. He had a pharmacy, a uh, drugstore. He was smart and all that, but you know, he didn't particularly know anything about sort of engineering or electrical things or anything like that. So I, I was sort of hungry to understand it and maybe with different mentors I might have become a, uh, you know, computer engineer or electrical engineer or something. But I just, I didn't quite understand any of that. But I just kept asking and asking and at some point I really, really early on kind of discovered that I had a mind and got curious about my mind. I was like, what's this thing? What's this thing? You know, I started reading as a lot of teens do. I started reading about, you know, all the crazy stuff, you know, hypnosis and out of body experiences and life after death, like all this stuff. And then Buddhism and different relig religions and what's this mind thing? And I landed on uh, some courses when I was about 15 that taught me to meditate properly, um, and just watch my brain. And I learned to. It was basically mindfulness meditation. And I learned really, really young age. I learned to practice mindfulness like twice a day for years. And I think in hindsight, because my brain was still plastic, I developed a really good capacity to observe my Thoughts. And what I understand about the brain now is that when you are good at observing your own thoughts, you're good at observing other people's thoughts as well. So I developed quite a good capacity to kind of not read minds, but really sense people's thinking patterns and emotions and just kind of read, observe myself and observe others. So I got to like, really sort of pattern recognize humans a bit. And so I spent a few years doing that and kind of learning that. That world. And then I was like, oh, I have to go into the real world now and actually learn about, like, make money, learn about business. And I became an entrepreneur. I tried working for someone for four days, failed dismally, decided I wasn't. Decided I wasn't cut out for it, and literally haven't had a job since. And I've just been entrepreneurial, trying to, like, find my way. And then I found my way into coaching. When I was, like, late 20s, I'd run some businesses. Some had failed, some had succeeded. I'd done a lot of work on myself, a lot of, you know, courses. And, uh, I just was finding myself kind of helping people with their business ideas, sitting down, having coffee, and suddenly I was kind of coaching them. And then suddenly I was training coaches. And Now I've trained 25,000 coaches. But my brain just likes to work out. Like, if you trace all the way back, it just likes to work out the pattern. It just asks the why and then tries to synthesize and organize it so I can understand it. And so that's been the kind of the pattern all the way through. But it really just started out with a big why. And then I got really interested in the mind. And then at some point, I got really, really interested in the brain. In my late 20s and 30s, as I started coaching, I got really, really interested because I wanted to know, like, how does this coaching thing actually work? It seems to do, like, magic, like, how does it work? And so I got really obsessed with the brain and started meeting with scientists, writing papers. I kind of slipped one day and accidentally started an academic journal and started running an international conference. And, you know, it's a whole story. But anyway, it all started with just being really, really curious and, and. And parents that didn't inhibit that, but, you know, encouraged it.
Speaker A: Uh, this episode is brought to you by Facebook. So you were scrolling on Marketplace, and there it was. The bike searching for you sent a message. And it turned out the seller was super chatty, kind of funny, and an avid cyclist. The next thing you know, you're in a cycling crew. Well, a community cycling group. The thing about Facebook, you might find more than what you're looking for. From a browse to a bike ride this summer. Find more on Facebook.
Speaker B: This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block. Or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it, ready to make anything online make sense. There's no place like Chrome. Check responses, Setup required. Compatibility and availability various 18.
Speaker C: When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit@ Indeed.com podcast. That's Indeed.com podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.
Speaker D: Enerji habaja falta de concentration nevlamental. You might be dehydrated. Gatorade zero powders an sido di senados scientifica. M Mente parajudartea mejorarel balance de hiratacion en el cuerpo echos con la mescla numero uno de electrolitos cincolores nisaores artificiales. Shop now online or at, uh, retailers nationwide. Gatorade hydrates better than water. Is it in you? Signos de hiratacion levey moderada consultatu medicos ilosindo mas persistent.
Speaker E: Now at Lowe's. Faster quotes start at the Lowes Pro desk. Got a material list handwritten on a sticky note or saved as a photo. Photo perfect. Bring it to us and get a quote in minutes. And if you don't see what you need on the shelf, we'll help you get it. You can access thousands of products beyond what's available in store or on lowe's.com right from the Lowe's Pro desk. Build quotes faster and source the materials you need to keep your jobs moving. Just like that at Lowe's.
Speaker G: It's quite an amazing story and, uh, it reminds me of something Brett Skiing told me on this podcast. He told me, you just need to tell people you are a person with a curiosity to ask the right questions. And I see some parallels between your story and my own. Story my own journey as well. You know, growing up I was this very curious kid who was a nerd growing up in Nigeria. My father had the massive library. You know, I read everything from philosophy to sociology to anthropology to psychology. Right. So psychology sort of helps you to understand, you know, how and why, uh, people act the way they do. But when you look back again, like what moments actually stand out today for you that seemed insignificant at the time,
Speaker F: I would, I would answer the question differently and say what moments looked unbelievably painful at the time and ended up being really positive? Because I mean, certainly there were, there were some moments. But you know, it's, it's. Being an entrepreneur is not easy. And I never raised money, I never raised capital. I've got a, you know, pretty meaningful team now, a couple hundred full time people and still haven't raised any capital. Just kind of done it all through,
Speaker G: through strap it all the way.
Speaker F: Although I didn't start with any money. In fact, I started in debt. I started with minus $50,000 when I started the company. Um, that was, my entire assets was minus 50,000 and a, and a laptop. That's what I had when I started. Um, so that was an inauspicious start. But I just, you know, I just like following the energy and kind of working things out and I just, you know, I worked out how to coach, worked out how to teach coaching, et cetera. You know, there's been a couple of moments where in my whole career where I just thought it was the end and it ended up being the beginning. And you know, one time I was, I was accused incorrectly, I was accused of, you know, fraudulently pretending to be a doctorate, a PhD. And I wasn't, I just, no one had told me you weren't allowed to start a journal and you, that you weren't allowed to do research and you weren't allowed to publish papers. No one said, oh, you have to have a PhD to publish papers. I'm like, oh, I'm just like, I want to answer this question. So I'm going to hire some PhDs and we're going to work together. I'm going to do a lot of the work, but they're going to, you know, help me with the references. So I was publishing papers and publishing a journal and someone who just happened to be a competitor, my major competitor, who happened to have what's called academic privilege, you know, went to the university that I'd partnered with. I was partnering with nyu. I'd built the coaching programs at nyu. It Taken me nearly three years of flying back and forward six times a year from Australia to New York to, to build this partnership and I was super proud of it. I, you know, I like built. I was now like part time on faculty as an adjunct at NYU and, and yeah, and my, one of my biggest competitors basically came along and said I was fortunately pretending to be a uh, um, a doctorate and I wasn't. I'd been at one conference where the conference had mis, misprinted something and I'd immediately, you know, corrected it, contacted them on stage. I corrected it, I was really. But they used that as evidence and then used this whole thing called academic privilege to like not let me know what the complaint was or who it was from. But I worked it out and you know, my three years of work was, you know, was, was destroyed. The whole partnership was shut down. And it was very sad because I'd immediately started to really grow the business amazingly when we had the NYU partnership and I thought it was the end, but it ended up being an amazing turnaround because I started, I rebranded the whole organization and partnered with a business school in Europe and ran the first Neuro Leadership Summit. Like less than a year later we ran the first Neuro Leadership Summit and published the first journal. And it was because someone wrote to me and said, you know, can you help us bring something a more hard science to the business school than we. Than psychology. Nothing wrong with psychology but they wanted something a bit more, with a bit more evidence and data and studies that were a bit more robust. And anyway, uh, I went to this business school in Europe and ah, we kind of launched the first Neuro Leadership Summit there. We've now run summits since 2008. 2007 was the first one. So sort of out of the death of this NYU partnership came this partnership to, to run an institute and publish a journal and build my own academic programs and do my own research. And so I was sort of cast out but then just came back much, much stronger. So there's been a few of those like oh wow, this is the end and actually somehow we pivot to something better.
Speaker G: That sounds like an incredible journey. But you know, before neural leadership existed, what particularly frustrated you the most about traditional leadership development?
Speaker F: There's a, there's a really simple insight that's sort of obvious in hindsight, which is if you read like one leadership book you might like have these great insights and really be moved and then you read a second one and you have some other interesting thoughts, then you read a third one and the fourth one, you're like, this is starting to really sound similar. And then you get. Then you kind of read like 20, and you're like, hang on, there's only 10 ideas here repeated slightly differently. What's going on here? And then you, like, nowadays you could use AI to summarize in, like, 10 points, the top 100, you know, leadership books. And you'll see it. There's just very few things that these books are saying. And so for me, there was one of two things happening. All authors are, uh, terrible plagiarists and lazy, and they're just copying each other and changing the words, which was one possibility. The other possibility was there was something very, very biological and very difficult about leading that. No one. And, uh, no one was talking about the biological foundation of it, right? Like, why is it hard, you know, if you work with a friend, for example, why is it hard to, like, you know, to give them feedback if they're underperforming? You know, what happens in your brain that makes that, you know, happen? Like, if you're, you know, like, there's all these questions, like, what actually goes on the brain that makes any kind of feedback so hard and so, like, useless, mostly. And what goes. Why is it so hard to lead? Why is it. Why do people lose the plot so much? Why do people complain about their leaders so much? So, basically, I realized that there was an underpinning biology to leadership that no one was talking about. And in fact, yeah, there was just nothing published about it. The closest thing was a renegade scientist, a really, really interesting renegade scientist who, uh, passed away now. But he'd, uh, written about sort of. He's sort of a precursor to our work. His name will come to me in a moment.
Speaker G: But.
Speaker F: So there's just nothing there. And I just thought, wow, it'd be really, really useful. And it must be really interesting and useful to actually go to that level. And the way I see it now is leading is like getting fit in a certain way. In that. In that getting fit. It doesn't matter if you're in Joburg or, you know, Durban or Cape Town or London or New York or Sydney or Hong Kong or anywhere. Getting fit's the same, right? It's the same difficulties, it's the same process, it's the same struggles. Now, the way you might do it in, you know, Johannesburg might be different than you do it in London. But actually, from a biological perspective, it's the same. Like, people have the same small set of challenges, right? You could study people because it's biological or giving birth, for example. Right, Giving birth, assuming you're a woman, has the same biological, you know, stages and challenges to it. And so leadership involves something very, very difficult that has very consistent challenges in it. And you know, I've been able to kind of summarize those challenges in three broad categories, but there's really basically three things you have to solve to lead or manage well. And these are three things that the brain is not naturally great at. So you're sort of fighting the natural tendency of the brain. And I'll give you these in Cliff and I, where we can, we can dig in. The first one is just too much information. So it's a capacity issue. You know, basically you're doing work yourself, you have a hundred things a day to think about. Now you're managing 10 people, now you have a thousand things to think about. It's, it just maxes out our capacity. So you need to learn hacks to like deal with so much information. So basically leading, uh, let's call leading just managing anyone, right? So going from being an individual contributor, managing 10 people, you're now a leader. Maybe you manage 10 people who manage 10 people, you're still a leader, go to the top of the business, still just managing people. Generally any of the transitions basically are just the way I see them. They're just a step change in the same three problems. So capacity is the first problem.
Speaker G: Right.
Speaker F: We've got very little capacity to process a lot of information and that's why we invented AI to help us with that. Although that's another conversation. We've completely ignored the way the brain works in like rolling out AI and it's causing just huge problems. So challenge number one, it's a capacity issue, right? And just the amount you have to process just goes up radically when you as a leader. Right. The SEC challenge number two, it's a self regulation issue. So you're just dealing with much more stress. And you know, being an individual contributor, you might have, you know, all this stressful stuff, but managing 10 people, and now you've got way more stressful stuff. Plus not just more things that can go wrong, but also you're being watched by people, which is inherently stressful. You've got more uncertainty, which is inherently stressful. You're trying to do things through people who just don't tell you the truth half the time. Like it's, there's just so much more uncertainty and uncertainty is inherently a threat response. Right. And so basically it's a self regulation challenge. Uh, is the Sort of second broad challenge. You know, you've heard of the Peter principle, Adam, like the Peter principle, you get promoted to the level of your incompetence. I actually think you get promoted to the level at which your self regulation cuts out. So you get promoted to the level at which you just can't manage your emotions well and then you just fall apart because of that.
Speaker H: Right.
Speaker F: So capacity challenge, self regulation challenge. And as just as you go out, these things just get harder and harder. And then the third one is a social cognition challenge, which is basically a, a cool way of saying understanding people, understanding motivation, developing people.
Speaker G: Right.
Speaker F: And so what happens is, you know, as an individual contributor, you might have to understand your customers. And so as a manager, you might have to understand, motivate and develop 10 people, which is like a lot to people to think about. People are confusing, complicated. Uh, you're a CEO of a 10,000 person company. You got to think about 10,000 people somehow. How do you understand them, motivate them, develop them. Right. And so it's a social cognition challenge. And there's a lot in that bucket. There's a lot in each bucket, but basically too much to process, a lot of stress, a lot of people to think about. And every single book that you see out there, pretty much, unless it's about sort of business strategy, but anything about the people side is basically solving one, two or three of those in some way. There you go. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
Speaker H: Whoa.
Speaker G: So just to summarize your TED Talk. Right. So there are actually three broad categories of issues that affect or negatively affect our, uh, leadership capacity. Uh, so the very first one is the capacity issue, and that is actually very linked to information overload.
Speaker F: Yeah.
Speaker G: Then next is the self regulation issue. Right. And the next is the social cognition issue, which deals with understanding people. Right. And I can imagine this has actually come from years of observation, years of research.
Speaker F: It took me 25 years to say it that simply. Literally, it took me 25 years to be able to say, it's
Speaker G: really simple,
Speaker F: it's really easy to be. I'll just take 25 years to work on something, work it out.
Speaker G: That is the interesting thing, you know, like some people have conversations with me now and they say, wow, how do you know so much? How do you make things look so easy? And I tell them it's, it's years of study and years of research, you know, and something about intellectuals that I appreciate is we are able to detach ourselves from our belief system from. Yeah, basically, because, you know, that Your beliefs can change over time. So, uh, I'll put you on the spot and ask you, like, what is one belief about leadership that you once held strongly, but you have now completely changed your mind about?
Speaker F: Yeah, it's an interesting question. And, and I don't know. Hmm. It's hard because when I think about leadership, I think about like, I think at scale. So, you know, for context, the organization I hit up, we've developed 20 million leaders in 10 years. And so, like, you know, think about like, you know, thousands like, of people at once. I think. I mean, one thing I really learned, just like, it's messy, it's a messy business. When you first set out, you're like, oh, these people at the top, they're really smart. They really know what they're doing. They're amazing. It's 75% of now that may not be accurate. Maybe 72 to 78 somewhere in there. 72 to 78%. I don't remember the exact number of, of CEOs have imposter syndrome. Meaning, uh, they. And this is 2024. So two years ago. I'm sure it's much worse now, but. But 2024, something around 72 to 78% of people had imposter syndrome. So leaders just feel like they're making it up because they are actually making it up a lot of the time. So I always thought that they knew what they're doing and mostly they don't.
Speaker G: Hi there. Are you a professional or business owner? Teaching investors or sharing big ideas? Bought. Your presentations just are not keeping up with your vision. That's exactly why I use Gamma App. Are proud partners. Gamma is an AI powered platform that helps you build beautiful decks, documents and web pages in just minutes. No complicated formatting, no design headaches, just clean, modern presentations that communicate your ideas clearly and professionally. If you want to present like a pro, sign up today using the tool stack, link in the description below and start creating smarter Gamma App. Wow. Yes. So most, most of the leaders do not know what they're doing. And it's interesting that now I'm speaking with somebody who is a neuroscientist. So what would you say is the reason behind Impulse succeeding?
Speaker F: Yeah, that's a big question. Uh, I mean, I think everyone else puts you on a pedestal, right? Everyone else, you know, if you're puts you on a pedestal and they, they don't see the amount of guesswork that you're doing and often the guesses are right. You're following hunches, right. You're following your intuition, which is often the right thing to do. But you, you know, sometimes you just feel like you're flying by the seat of your pants making things up. And people think that you're really, you know, log logical and ordered and structured and have a plan and a strategy. And you're like, no, today's a new day. I'm gonna like, work this out today. And yeah, I don't know. I think also, I think the brain is very, very threat focused, right? So. So if you look at a brain and you show a brain like a square and a circle and a happy face, and then a cow and a triangle and an angry face, right? Not much happens except for the happy face. You get a little bit of activation of the ventral striatum deep in the basal ganglia. And basically you get some dopamine up in the prefrontal everywhere. It takes like a few seconds to come in. It's not very strong, goes down. So basically you get a little, it's called a reward response, you know, when you see a happy face, but when you see the angry face, you get an immediate large reaction of threat response, right? Which much more of the brain, like 5, 10, 15 times as much real estate comes on faster, activates stronger, uh, stays longer, all three. So happy face, gentle, short little wave. Angry face, still just face. Angry, happy. Same level with the angry. Immediate, M. Intense, overwhelming. Uh, so basically in the brain, bad is stronger than good. And our attention follows this process. So our attention goes to towards, you know, where there's activation. So you. So we end up paying a lot of attention to negative things. And one of the ways this shows up is we notice our own mistakes a lot and we obsess about our own mistakes a lot. And we see all the things that we do wrong that no one else sees. I do, I do an insane number of stupid things every, every week. And I see all of them. No one else sees any of them. Well, that's not true. My seat. My team sees a few, they laugh and I laugh. We all laugh together. But. But my team around me, you know, I'm close to. I got lots of like 5, 10, 15, you know, 20 year people, right? Very open. They see 1% of the mistakes I make. You know, I walked into my bed yesterday, I think I've broken my toe. Stupid idiot. I'm an idiot, right? So the. By the way, that's not a metaphor. Like, I literally think I broke my toe yesterday on my bed. And so we see all these stupid things we do, and they really stand out because the brain, like, is, you know, it pays a lot of attention to threat and other people don't. So I think, uh, I think we're just sort of our own worst critics. And then the brain's also like hypervigilant to threats, hyper vigilant to, to potential losses and dangers and all this. So I think it's largely just the overactive threat response that makes people kind of tough on themselves. And it's a short leap from being tough on yourself to feeling like you're an imposter in your job. That's how I see it.
Speaker A: This episode is brought to you by Facebook. So you were scrolling on Marketplace and there it was, the bike you'd been searching for. You sent a message and it turned out the seller was super chatty, kind of funny, and an avid cyclist. The next thing you know, you're in a cycling crew. Well, a community cycling group. The thing about Facebook, you might find more than what you're looking for, from a browse to a bike ride this summer. Find more on Facebook.
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Speaker G: Mhm. So would you know the way? Would I say attribute it to condition and behavioral condition and because I remember studying the works of the likes of, uh, B.F. skinner, Ivan Pavlov and looking at people's responses to certain figures. And I feel like people's backgrounds matter a lot because there are people who come from backgrounds wherein maybe their parents or their guardians talk them down and that sort of thing affects them going forward. Like. But I'm not a psychologist, right? I'm just, I'm just a nerd. So I am the Joe and you are the Pro. So I love to leave it to the pro to, to sort of provide some explanation around it.
Speaker F: Look, there's a whole two hours we could talk about this specific issue. And I've studied this question quite a bit, but definitely the threat response that you're experiencing as you're in the womb, as you come out those first five, 10 years, 15 years, it's really important through like the age of 15 to 20. But there's some intense periods. Uh, but the threat response, like a sense of danger versus safety that you're experiencing has a huge impact on your development. But, but half of our character and all that is, is just genetic. We're just born with it. And, and half of it is roughly that's. They can't really study this, but roughly half of it is going to be that what you call conditioning. But there's, there's definitely people who are in environments where just there, there is more danger and, or they just don't feel very high status. They feel like other people are higher status. It might be because of their income, it might be because of their religion, it might be the color of their skin. It might be all the above. It could be all sorts of things. But. But if you feel lower status than other people, it actually activates the pain center in the brain, just like physical pain. And that's gonna make you take fewer risks, it's gonna make you be less Confident, it's gonna make you, you know, be less creative, you know, potentially it's not destiny. You can work with it. But so, so that's, that's kind of one variable. So if you're experiencing like, lower status and you're growing up with that and you don't see that you're experiencing more threat, and more threat is going to have an impact on all sorts of things in the brain. Similarly, if you're experiencing unfairness, if you're experiencing a sense of unfairness and inequity, similar but different to status, if you're sensing that you're going to have this threat response a lot, or you're growing up with uncertainty, you're just experiencing a lot of uncertainty all the time. So all these things activate threat responses and these threat responses pull away resources from the prefrontal, but will also just make you less confident and less, you know, feeling less, you know, less confident in the world. I didn't realize until a few years ago, uh, you know, just to share a personal story, I didn't realize like, how much privilege I had. We started working on bias in like 2011. Like in 2011 we started like studying how to address bias. And in 2015 we published something. And then 2020, when George Floyd happened around the world, you know, we really, really dug into understanding the space, you know, even a lot more. But we already had a big practice and we're already, we didn't jump on that bandwagon. We were very, very much embe. But, you know, I'd never realized that until, uh, I did that kind of wheel of privilege thing that, that just how much privilege I had being, you know, male, white, reasonably successful, family, good school, Western world, reasonable height, reasonably attractive, like all these things. And I just didn't realize that other people, you know, didn't have that experience. But the one memory I have that uh, really was, was interesting was when I was, when I went to primary school, I was really very loving, small, you know, community sort of primary school, private. But I was like, you know, popular. I was the fastest swimmer and whatever. Uh, and it was a smaller school. There was like 20 kids in my class. I went to high school, there were 200 kids in my class, all boys. And it was a, you know, I got in on a scholarship and it was a top. It was the number one school in Australia then for the, for academics. And it was hell, I hated it. And I wasn't the top status kid in the school at all. You know, in my class I was like the Middle. And there were many kids, taller, stronger, uh, meaner, smarter, all this. And, and I was Jewish, I still am. I'm not really practicing, but like I, you know, we were sort of in the minority and we would do Christian prayers and, and, and like, you know, I didn't get bullied, but I got very, but the only reason I didn't get bullied was I was clever enough to work out how to get around it. And I, like, I didn't play sports, so I just wouldn't get beaten up. And I, you know, got into music instead and learned a bunch of instruments and did things. But, but I actually felt what it felt like to not be high status in a community. And it might sound ridiculous, but, you know, I was scared from my life a lot. And I felt like not in the main in group. Like I didn't feel like I was in the in group. They're also some of the richest families in Australia now, I understand. But at the time I kind of felt poor. I kind of felt our family was poor because I was going to these mansions and these people with, you know, like crazy amounts of money. So at the time I was experiencing relative low status. Right. And also a little bit being in what's called the out group. So I didn't feel safe. And I walked the walk from the train to school a few times since then and actually reactivated all the fear I had every day probably for four years. I was just like totally skittish, just trying to make sure I was going to survive, which is awful to do to a kid, but so I had a felt sense of what it's like to not be the most privileged around, but I just never realized just how
Speaker G: much of that I had conditioned suffer or deal with. Imposter syndrome.
Speaker F: Imposter syndrome, yeah. Yeah. So, so for me like that, that experience in formative years and the sort of middle school years are very formative. That experience, you know, taught me to like be kinder and appreciate the underdog and like respect, you know, people more and be more, I guess, inclusive and all that kind of thing that experience taught me. Whereas if I'd been, if I'd stayed sort of in a high status position through, through high school, I might not have had that might not have been as kind and thoughtful and I think in a similar way, imposter syndrome. For a lot of people, they've just had a really tough upbringing and they still, you know, they just, they don't feel like they're as smart as everyone else. They don't feel as, as successful as everyone else. They feel like they come from poorer backgrounds. They don't. Not everyone went to Harvard, all of that. And I think that that background is, you know, it just weighs on people a lot.
Speaker G: Interesting. And it is amazing that your name is David, and David was an underdog in the Bible. And David is actually one of my favorite Bible characters. I think it is a toss up between David and Daniel. So, uh, for today, let me, let me give it to the Davids. Right? And you know, for me, growing up in a Christian family, I would say keen into faith sort of helped me to combat the whole imposter syndrome challenge. Because growing up, I was privileged to listen to Bible school. And my, my very favorite Bible verse was, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. Philippians, chapter 4, verse 13. So for me, uh, I say faith helped me to be able to overcome the, the problem of imposter syndrome. But, you know, coming to, to the pro yourself, how would you say, what ways, what tested and trusted ways have people used or utilized to combat imposter syndrome? Because at some point you just have to get over it.
Speaker F: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker C: It's.
Speaker F: I mean, it's an interesting thing. It's, It's a bit of a status dilemma. It's a status dilemma, right. So like someone, you know, like, it's hard to explain, but people put you on a pedestal. You see all your own mistakes. You're like, stop putting me on a, you know, you, you. I'm not up there. I'm down here with you. You know, we saw, we. Because of the way the brain, you know, notices problems. So, so people put us on a pedestal and, and trying to tell people that you're on the same level of them just doesn't work. It's, you know, so sometimes you just gotta, I mean, if you're a leader in a, in a team or a company, um, you, it doesn't pay to actually not be confident. You actually need to have some confidence. And if you're constantly feeling low status, you. You're feeling low confidence as well. And, you know, I went through this a bit. I was talking to a friend about this just today, actually. I went through this a bit when I was growing my business. I really, really, really didn't want to make it about me. I, I wanted to be, I wanted to, I want it to be about the ideas. I didn't want to put myself forward. I didn't even want to write a book really, at the time. But it's just like, I want to build something enduring that doesn't involve me. Also, I'm Australian. We don't like, you know, we don't like big noting ourselves. Bit of a tall poppy syndrome thing we have there. You know, we don't.
Speaker G: Tall poppy syndrome. I know about that. The Aussies are the Kiwis. The Aussies are the Kiwis.
Speaker F: Yeah, yeah, it's bad. So it's sort of like I don't want to put myself on a pedestal because I'll be. I'll be, you know, shot down. And so for a long time, I didn't want to make it about me. And then at some point I realized for the business to be successful, I kind of had to make it a bit about me because I couldn't talk people out of putting me on a pedestal. So that wasn't working. And I couldn't hide because people wanted to know who was running this and especially in my business. And so I sort of just reframed it and said, look, for my business to be successful, people want a Persona or they want to know who the person is. And so I sort of did it for the business in a way. I did it for the mission, right? So for the mission, I'm going to just. I'm not going to put myself on a pedestal, but I'm just going to create a personality that they can. People can relate to and it's really, really helpful. You know, like when people know who the person is that's running a business, they trust that business more. They relate to that business more, right? They feel a connection. They feel like it's a kind of type of secure attachment. They feel like attached, connected. In a human level, they get a sense of what's called relatedness. And so it can be really, really healthy for a leader of business to be visible. And, you know, you think of J.P. morgan, right, one of the biggest companies in the world, 300,000 people. Jamie Dimon doesn't. Jamie Dimon, right, Everyone knows his name. He doesn't need to be out. But everyone equates the business with Jamie Dimon, right? They've got more than enough money that he doesn't need to really do anything. But it really, really helps that he is out there leading from the front and people can connect with his personal vision and personal values and all this stuff. So I think the human in business is important. And I bet you if you asked him, he wouldn't have wanted to about him either. He would say no. It's about the team, it's about everyone. But at Some point he probably realized that he kind of had to be out front and probably begrudgingly if I had to guess. And it was like that for me too. Begrudgingly. Kind of putting myself out there. And you can't go out there unconfidently. If you go out there unconfidently. And there's research on this. If you lead unconfidently, people trash you. They're like, this person shouldn't be leading. So you have to lead confidently. People, uh, equate confidence with competence. Right. It's often inversely correlated, but generally the public equates confidence with competence. Generally, men exhibit a lot of confidence, including when they have no competence. Women tend to like, reduce that. They like to be less confident than they are confident people. Generally, women are often very competent and their competence doesn't match their competence. And quite often men, their competence is way below their competence.
Speaker G: Right.
Speaker F: If you notice, it's really been studied, like you give, you give a job, you know, job application, you know, to 10 men who don't, who aren't qualified. Most of them will apply and you give a, you know, job application to 10 women who are all qualified and only a couple apply. Like, it's great. So, so, so. And this is why universally people think men are better leaders, including women think that men are better leaders. It's just a style. And it turns out women are actually better leaders on, um, like 15 out of 17 competencies. It's been really well established. We wrote a whole paper on this, that women are much better leaders. But everyone thinks men are better leaders. No, they're just better at pretending to be confident. And.
Speaker G: But you do.
Speaker F: There's a degree of that. You do have to exude some and ah, it's better if it's authentic confidence. It's better if you actually feel it and you generate it. It's not just fake confidence, but you do have to lead confidently and you have to kind of step into it. And that's one way to solve the, to solve the imposter syndrome. There you go. That's my answer.
Speaker G: Interesting take. But, you know, uh, a lot of times we, we would. I say confidence comes from failures, from setbacks, coming back from setbacks. Yeah. So for yourself, looking back over the years, what failure or what challenge, what setback would you say has shaped your thinking better than any success?
Speaker F: I, I fail more than anyone I know. I fail constantly. I fail. It's hilarious how often I fail. And uh, you know, I fail a lot. But I mean, there's many, many things that I failed at. I mean, I've been failing for the last four years since the pandemic, to like, like really finding that way to grow the business. I think we finally found it, but it's. This is like attempt number 10 to, to like, the strategy that's really gonna get us back to meaningful growth. We had really amazing growth in the pandemic, which just killed it. And, and then afterwards, it, it was, you know, it's been harder. Uh, but it, you know, I, I fail constantly. I develop things that don't work constantly, but I just keep going and I, and I learn from it. Find what, you know, something good and then do something else. So, I don't know. Business for me is a, Is a process of failing upwards. You keep failing and failing and failing, and then you, you just try and fail cheaply. You try and fail cheaply and quickly, right? And take the lesson and move on. But, uh, I mean, there's too many to. Too many to mention so many things. I mean, I built an amazing, amazing master's degree years ago. Like 2015 or so, I built this incredible master's degree and we started producing a master's. We started creating master's students in the neuroscience of leadership. I was super proud of it. And we were doing real research and we were creating like a hundred students a year or something of, you know, like, really real, amazing hardcore academic research on the neuroscience of leadership. I was so psyched. And then I discovered we were losing a million dollars a year doing it, which was like, more than our profit. Like, we were like more than our profit. All of our money was going into this and more, and we're going backwards and nearly going broke. I was like, oh, my God, I can't believe that. And it just, it wasn't fixable. And it was, it was okay at the start. And then the UK government changed the laws, you know, about academia, and they changed. All this stuff changed. And suddenly we were just losing. And, uh, it was really sad and we had to, we had to stop. So, you know, we, we make so many. But for me, uh, you know, you just, you just, just have to keep going. It doesn't matter what you do if, you know, you bring value to people. You know, you get inspired by that mission and you just, you just focus on the mission. You know, if, you know, you're adding value and that your business deserves to exist. It doesn't matter if you're making puddings and that makes people delight with something unique and delicious, or you're, you know, building like, you know, tools that make people more self aware. Whatever it is you're doing, if you know it deserves to exist, right? You just come back to the mission and you focus on the mission and you, and you just pick yourself up and you keep going. I mean, Winston, I'm in London. So, you know, Winston Churchill has to be a quote at least somewhere in this interview. And he, you know, he said, the absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously. And when you're an entrepreneur, often you have no alternatives. Like pick yourself up, my friend.
Speaker G: Either you make it work or you make it work.
Speaker F: You're on the floor, you can't move, you've worked yourself to a bone, you've got no choice. Pick yourself up, get some rest and start again tomorrow. Like that's just what you have to do. Sometimes it's, it's kind of no choice.
Speaker G: Yeah, it's interesting, uh, a lot of people do not realize that Missing Churchill is actually a Nobel laureate. Right. I, I did have the privilege of reading a couple of these books. Yes. So he, he did win uh, the Nobel, uh, prize for literature as well as this other guy. Bertrand Russell. Yeah, Bertrand Russell, uh, was a philosopher. Recent. Churchill was a philosopher as well. But you know, the interesting thing is failure actually teaches more lessons than success. And that is one thing people cannot learn in business schools. So like, what would be your advice for leaders out there, you know, in terms of learning from failures that, you know, no book can teach them.
Speaker F: Remember when I was young and foolish, someone said to me, uh, a mentor at the time said, just go out and make a ton of mistakes. Just go out and mess things up. I was like, really? And now I kind of understand it. Like, yeah, just go out and try and found. I think we sort of a double edged sword to your statement. We learn from our mistakes because they create such a strong threat response that the memory burns in. You know, like if you're walking through the woods and you have an option of go left or go right and you go left and you end up seeing a bear and running for your life and surviving, right? You're just going to keep taking the right hand road from there on. And you'll always see a fork in the road. You'll be like, I'm going right. It's just like how the brain remembers and then it generalizes, right? And so an intense emotional experience burns a memory in and then you build the lesson. And so the problem is we actually should be learning more from uh, winning from success, but we tend to not pay it Much attention. But I teach this to leaders like, you know, the After Action Review shouldn't just be the postmortem. It should just be after anything important. You know, what should we do less of? What should we do more of? What do we do well, we should do more of. So we don't spend enough time like looking at what we do well and building on it and maintaining it, you know, because we are our own worst critics. But it's, you know, it's. We do learn a lot from mistakes. But. But I think the thing is. And um, my friend Amy Edmondson is a wonderful academic. She's really popularized psychological safety. And she's got a new book, I think it's called the Right Kind of Wrong. She's written a book basically on how to fail well. And I think it's a wonderful book and it's doing quite well. And it just basically explains that you should fail much more than you do. People aren't taking enough risks because they're worried about looking bad. But the way you fail, the right way to fail is to fail cheaply and quickly. And she kind of pulls that apart and why it's important and how to do it well. So I do think it's really important to experiment. And you hear about this stuff, you know, the minimum viable product and rapid experimentation and all this. You hear this from the technology space, but I think universally it's really important for leaders to know that you have to fail a lot to succeed. And, uh, the more you fail and the quicker you fail, actually the better in some ways because you can get to the, you know, you can get to the good stuff faster.
Speaker A: This episode is brought to you by Facebook. So you were scrolling on Marketplace and there it was, the bike you'd been searching for. You sent a message and it turned out the seller was super chatty, kind of funny, and an avid cyclist. The next thing you know, you're in a cycling crew. Well, a community cycling group. The thing about Facebook, you might find more than what you're looking for. From a browse to a bike ride this summer. Find more on Facebook.
Speaker B: This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block. Or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it, ready to make anything online make sense. There's no place like Chrome. Check responses, setup required, compatibility and availability various 18
Speaker C: when you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed sponsor job. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit@ Indeed.com podcast. That's Indeed.com podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed.
Speaker D: Sponsored jobs Energia baja falta de concentration Nevlamental. You might be dehydrated. Gatorade zero powders an sido di senyados cientifica mente parajudarta amejorar el balance de hidratacion en el cuerpo echos con la mescla numero uno de electrolitos cincolores nisa aures artificiales. Shop now online or at retailers nationwide. Gatorade hydrates better than water. Is it in you? Signos de hydratacion leve y moderada consulta medicos. Ilh sindo mas persistent.
Speaker E: Now at Lowe's. Faster quotes start at the Lowes Pro desk. Got a materialist handwritten on a sticky note or saved as a photo? Perfect. Bring it to us and get a quote in minutes. And if you don't see what you need on the shelf, we'll help you get it. You can access thousands of products beyond what's available in store or on lowe's.com right from the Lowe's Pro desk. Build quotes faster and source the materials you need to keep your jobs moving. Just like that at Lowe's.
Speaker G: Interesting take. Uh, by the way, Amy Edmondson. She's actually on my radar. I'm not very sure if I have sent her an invite for the podcast yet, but I know that name is on my radar. She wrote the book the Fearless Organization. Correct?
Speaker F: Yeah.
Speaker G: Interesting. Interesting. Shout out to Amy. And of course, you know, uh, you actually coined that term neuro leadership. So when did you realize you weren't simply creating just another leadership framework, but an entirely new category?
Speaker F: It's kind of an accident in a way, but also an accident that was waiting to happen. Happen and sort of like it was inevitable. But I, uh, what happened was around 2003, I started including neuroscience much more in all the leadership work I was doing. So before that, like, I started doing leadership work in, like 1998, and about five years later, I was like, oh, it'd be really interesting to just, you know, include some Handouts. It's like some one page, you know, copy photocopies from books of like, things. Because it was like, I was like, oh, this really would help people make sense. And it was so popular and so powerful. I just started including more and more kind of in the classes I was teaching about the brain. But I realized I needed to get more serious about it. I saw no one else was doing it. It was incredibly helpful and not for selling tickets, but for like, people really understanding things. So I just found understanding leadership issues through a brain lens just made people understand them much faster and much better. And so I started like writing and interviewing neuroscientists. I started when I was on my travels. I was always traveling because for since the year 2000, I've had Australia, the US, UK, Singapore, sort of circuit. I've had that circuit for, with a business in each for literally 26 years. And uh, you'd love my frequent flyer miles. The.
Speaker G: I'm jealous. I am jealous a lot.
Speaker F: So. So I just started including like, bits about it and. But at some point I was like, like I really, really want to understand the neuroscience of leadership properly. And. And I was meeting with all these scientists and one on one, going to their lab and like interviewing them and filming and reading their papers and they'd mentor me. And I did that with like 20 or so scientists and. And I had a professor as a mentor who was just like a. Someone I'd met not through a university, but just decided to mentor me and we started writing together. It was Jeffrey Schwartz who wrote the Mind and the Brain, a brilliant, uh, psychiatrist and neuroscientist. Anyway, so. So at some point I was like, oh my gosh, I would be amazing to get all these people together, all these neuroscientists together and like, synthesize a bit and understand how their work fits together. And basically like, wouldn't it be great to get all these scientists together in a room? So why don't I, like, find a way to run a conference and get some, you know, audience members to pay for it and see if I can get these neuroscientists together in the same room to, to like, build this idea. And it was honestly one of the absolute worst ideas I've ever had. It was an absolute tragic mistake because the last thing academics want to do is agree on anything. And their job is to argue and their job is to be right. And you know, the arguments are fierce because the stakes are so low. Is a joke in academia, right? And there was no agreement, right? There was Literally, like, intense arguments between. I ran this conference in 2007, and they just argued and argued, but the audience, who were like, you know, senior, like chief human resource officers from big companies and heads of leadership development, heads of learning and a few academics, there were people who were practitioners who wanted to. These people loved it, right? And I just, you know, I called it the first Neuroscience of Leadership Summit. And BusinessWeek, someone from BusinessWeek heard about it and covered it and said, this is the first neuro Leadership Summit. And this guy, David Rock, has invented the neuro leadership field. So at BusinessWeek did this big story about it. Big, big story about it at the time. And, uh, I had no idea this was even happening. And suddenly I coined the term neuroleadship and started a field. And I was like, okay, I guess I've started a field now, so let's go with it. And the next year, we ran a conference in New York and Sydney and, uh, nearly. Nearly lost the whole business because of that. Because it was 2008, and that was scary. Now, the most tragic mistake. Oh, why don't I just open? Why don't I just run? Why don't I just run a conference in the middle of Manhattan, Take over a whole hotel? What a great idea. Oops. So, uh, there was that, but that, you know, but so. So it just, it just, it just kind of started. And then I was like, oh, my gosh, we should. Someone should publish a journal. But no one would publish a journal. Someone should pick up this conference and do it. I couldn't find anyone to keep running the conference, and I couldn't find anyone to run the journal. So I was like, I guess I'll do it. And so we started publishing research and getting these different scientists to write. They wouldn't speak to each other, but they would speak to us. And so me and my team would, you know, do research with these scientists and kind of say, all right, well, what is what, you know, what is self regulation in the brain and how does it work and how do we improve it and what all this kind of stuff. So it was sort of a. It was, you could say it was a happy accident, but it was. It, uh, was an accident that was waiting to happen in a way, because I'd started thinking about it in 2003, pretty seriously. I'd been interested in the brain since. For like 10 years before that. I'd been reading privately, like, a lot. I'd read everything I get my hands on in the brain. 2003, I started putting it into programs 2007, kind of ran the first summit in Italy, which was because NYU shut me down. I ended up running this summit in Italy, and then business weeks that I started a field. So now I'm running a journal, and now we're doing a master's program and all this stuff. So it's just, you know, just been. It's been a story of following the energy.
Speaker G: But how difficult was it convincing executives that neuroscience actually belonged inside of the boardroom?
Speaker F: It's actually really, really easy if you have the right level of science. That's the hard bit. So there's pop science and there's academic science, right? The pop science is, you know, you use 10% of your brain and, you know, all this junk, most of it wrong, the academic stuff, most of it way too complicated, just not relevant. So, so there's wrong and then there's, you know, not relevant. And actually, to find. It took a long time to work out how to structure the research, how to structure the real research so that it would actually be correct, right? So, so, so, so it would be correct and simple enough so people could understand it and still correct. And that. That took a long time, and it was probably 10 years of publishing research before we started to really find that. And the funny thing is, it's. It's easy to tell the first chapter of the story. Like, it's easy to go into a boardroom and say, look, let me tell you a little bit about the brain. It's got this, this, this. It's pretty easy to be interesting for the first, like, half an hour. It's really hard to be interesting in, like, you know, every week for a month or meaningfully, because it's very complicated. Neuroscience is very, very complicated. But what we did, which in hindsight was clever, was we'd take a topic, like feedback, and we do a research project from one to four years, right? We take a topic and basically study that topic from a brain perspective, right? Uh, a leadership challenge. How do you make a learning stick? How do you reduce bias? How do you motivate people? Um, you know, all these kinds of things. So we take a leadership challenge and say, let's go fishing. Let's go and. Let's go and see what the literature says. Let's go and interview neuroscientists. Let's go and, like, do a literature review and sort of understand everything that exists. All the different labs that have attacked this. And you'd often find, like, a hundred labs that attack this question from 100 different angles. You're like, what the hell? And so that's what we would do. And often we wouldn't find anything. We wouldn't find a signal. We published about 50 meaningful papers. We probably did 500 research projects to publish 50 papers. And of those 50 papers, 30 of them are too inside baseball to be helpful. And out of the 20 left, like, 10 of those are kind of interesting if you're a practitioner. And 10 of the 50, which is 10 of 500 studies, you know, 10 of those are actually important. Like really, you know, really important. Like how to actually break bias, how to actually design, learning how to actually, you know, et cetera, motivate people. So, you know, it's generally important. And then we've had, you know, two double, double platinum album hits. Out of all that, there's like, two ideas are really, really, really impacted and really, really sticky and like, super important. And like, every kid should be learning this in school. And it's really helpful. But what we did is we, we, we took a question and we found the signal in the noise. We found a pattern, and we were able to produce a model that was accurate, but, but simple enough to be memorable. And it's very, very hard to do. A lot of people are great at building acronyms. If you've taken less than a year to build an acronym, I don't want to hear it. It's like, really good acronyms are really, really hard. But we built two acronyms that summarize really, two really, really complicated things, and they end up being very, very accurate and very helpful. And one of them is in my new book called Good with Humans. And so they basically describe human motivation and human bias in a really, really simple way. So it's a long journey, uh, it's a long answer to a short question. But, you know, each one of those, one of them took three and a half years, one of them took four and a half years to come up with of synthesizing. But that's what we found, is that you get this exact level, right, of not pop science, but, but, but sticky and understandable and memorable, but actually accurate. It's very, very hard to do that. Each one of our meaningful studies was like at least two and a half years. And that's with people who know what they're doing, who really know the research, who are just like, working on that. So it's, it's hard. But we worked out that it was worthwhile. And then the interesting thing is we had this massive library of like 50 papers and a thousand pieces of content and all this Other stuff. And we had absolutely no idea what to do with it until basically three years ago. And then on a hunch, we were like, hey, huh, I wonder if we could put all this into an AI. What would happen? Especially what would happen if we put it into an AI and we taught the AI how to make people smarter by giving them their own insight. And not just have all this content, give it all the content about the neuroscience of leadership, but also teach it how to bring people to their own insights. So instead of using an AI that reduces your critical thinking, build an AI that increases people's critical thinking and designed it specifically for leaders. And that's what we did. We just launched that a year ago. And it's the most powerful thinking partner for leaders that exists because it understands everything about the brain and leadership. And it'll listen to you, run a meeting and tell you exactly what happened in your brain, everyone else's brain, how to do it better, all of that, and, but do it in a way that you have the insights along. So that's, that's been sort of the, uh, really fascinating part of the journey is, is like creating this entity, that's all I can call it, this entity that, that makes smart people smarter rather than dumber, which is Most of the AIs are making us dumber, actually makes some people smarter really, really, really quickly. So that's, that's something I'm super excited about at the moment. That was also very hard. Still very hard, but fascinating.
Speaker G: It is very hard. And of course, you know what I appreciate about what your approach is finding that middle ground between pop science and academic science, because pop science is shallow. Academic science is too deep, way too complex. Right. And what appeals to practitioners, from my experience, is somewhere in the middle. You, you need to make it deep enough for it to be resourceful and to stand the, the test of time, but you still need to make it highly relatable so that people that are practitioners in industries are able to relate to it and key into it. So I appreciate that, uh, very much. But, you know, looking at the business side, if you were to pitch newer leadership to investors Today, rather than 20 years ago, what would you do differently?
Speaker F: Well, fortunately, I don't have to pitch it to investors. I have no investors. I still have no investors. I'm hopefully never going to have investors. But if I did have to pitch it to investors, I was this. I mean, we've built the world's smartest thinking partner that we think could go inside, you know, the world's biggest Companies to completely overhaul learning and performance and a way of driving performance. And it's reversing the negative effects of AI at the moment. Um, so that's, ah, kind of a big thing. But the other thing is just look, learning about your brain in the AI era, learning about your brain is absolutely critical. It's central. And in fact, companies are making terrible mistakes right now because they don't understand the brain. So it's a very easy sell. You know, understanding your brain gives you a massive edge in the AI era because you need to think about thinking. And how do you think about thinking if you don't understand thinking? Right. So using AI well involves literally thinking about thinking and people are using it terribly. Whatever. I'm writing a piece about this at the moment. What every company is doing right now is giving everyone, you know, copilot or Claude or whatever and then trying to encourage everyone to use it as much as possible. It's the worst idea ever. It's the worst idea ever. Like, just don't do it. Because the worst performers your people are, the more they'll use it. Like the worst performers your people are, the more they'll use it. Because to the brain, like, being given an opportunity to not have to think is delicious. It's like offering people, it's delicious. It's like offering people junk food. Like, hey, would you like some, some junk food? Yeah, of course I would. And that's fine. It's nice to eat a pudding now and then. It's good. But don't uh, like eat a pudding three meals a day. And don't just eat pudding. Right? Treats are wonderful. But you know, so, so you give people the ability to not have to think and they're gonna, they're gonna eat that three meals a day. They're just like. And this is what we're seeing in companies doing the stupidest things with AI, like writing emails with it, producing documents with it and doing their work for them. And it's just garbage coming out. And everyone's got 10 times as much volume of garbage now than they've ever had. So my advice to companies is learn about the brain. One of the first things you'll learn is, is that the right way to use AI is to actually, uh, we call it human in the lead, not human in the loop. Right? It's human in the lead and it's there to make you smarter. But you're making all the decisions. You're not outsourcing any critical decisions or any critical creative work or development work. By definition, it's average by definition. The entire infrastructure of it is designed to give you the average of thinking. So anything that you output from this is literally average. And I don't know many companies that want on average emails, average content, average marketing, average products, but that's, you know, so, so, so because we don't understand the brain, people just like, oh, go and use this. Go and use this. Literally, the worst. The. The worst performers people are, uh, the more they're using it, which is terrible. The really, really top performers, like the top 5%, they use it sparingly, thoughtfully. They're. They're getting smarter with it, but they're not. But they're working harder. They're working harder. You probably noticed this yourself, Adam. Like, it's a. It's a great tool that it makes you think more deeply, right? And it. And it's, you know, so. So we need to understand the brain tech, especially in the boardroom, and we're briefing a lot of boards at the moment about the right way to approach AI transformation. And it's actually by function. Tell people the absolute no go zones. Like, if you're in sales, you're not allowed. It's against company policy to send an email that's AI written to a client. Never do it. Like, you're just. You're also not allowed to, like, you know, like, send an email with 10 typos. Like, you'll be fired if you consistently send an email with 10 typos because the recipient thinks you don't care and you're not very smart. Same thing. An AI written thing who clearly don't care and you're not very smart, so you're not allowed to do it. So leaders need to actually say, look, these are the areas you're not allowed to use AI for. And then here's the areas that you definitely should use. And here's exactly how. But. And you have to be really, really vigilant about, you know, quality and all this stuff. And also, don't forget that 40% of what you get is just wrong. It's just made up. So, so that's really.
Speaker G: Hallucinations, uh, AI.
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Speaker G: Actually meant to be a co pilot.
Speaker F: It's worse. It's terrible. Do you know this, Adam? There's a book just, just came out. It was a real tragedy. This guy wrote a book about the, the uh, the. The hallucination problems with AI and his book was riddled with freaking hallucinations. And he didn't know it.
Speaker G: Guess what? It made me guess what? I have a friend. I have a friend who's a medical doctor. He wrote a book about ChatGPT using ChatGPT.
Speaker F: Really bad idea. No one should ever write a book using AI don't ever write a book using AI I mean publishers won't accept a book with a single sentence written by AI but it's just terrible. But no, he. This is a true story. The New York Times covered it. It was really uh, hilarious. He. He just really. He uh, really messed up. What he. And some of them, most of them came from one mistake which is he didn't realize that if you ask AI to give you a quote from a famous person, it will give you a ah, made up quote intentionally and not tell you that because it doesn't want to copyright. So yeah.
Speaker G: That is insane. That is very, very insane. It's interesting how help people just want to be lazy and get certain outcomes. But that's a conversation for another day.
Speaker F: But I say one thing about that because it's, it's, it's important. You just gotta remember that last century's wealth was all made on labor saving devices. If you could, you know, basically the lawnmower, the washing machine, the dishwasher, everything was about saving you physical labor. People give money to save physical labor. It's rewarding in the brain to imagine not having to do something physically, right? You have to put the washing out, takes you an hour. Oh, now you have a dryer, press some buttons like oh, uh, amazing. It feels deeply rewarding to the brain because we evolved at a time with limited cognitive resources, limited metabolic resources, limited food and you know, limited food, right. So we had to conserve our physical resources. So we're built to be excited when we don't have to do something physically thinking uses a lot of the brain's cognitive resources, but it uses a lot of the brain's metabolic resources. Consciously making decisions, solving problems, paying attention uses a lot of the brain's resources and the brain uses a lot of the body's resources. So we're also really excited when we need to do something but don't need to think as much. Exactly the same way as oh, uh, we can put, you know, clothes in the dryer now it's like, oh, I can put this in the AI machine now. I don't have to think about this, I can just press some buttons now. I don't have to like focus on this for half an hour and go out in the wind, right? So you, you, you get really excited, the same excitement. And in fact if you look at most of the wealth this, this century, the last 30 years is most of the wealth has come from mental labor saving devices. And it's amazing. You can start a billion dollar company saving people. 10 seconds on a process like shaving 10 seconds off having to do something. There's huge companies that are, ah, doing that. And so it's all about just saving clicks, saving attention. And AI looks like uh, uh, an amazing attention saver and it's completely not. And we're just steering into a disaster at the moment because boards don't understand the brain. So it's a great time for boards to learn about the brain. Feel free to reach out to me. I'll, I'll brief your board anytime.
Speaker G: It's interesting. So would that be cognitive surrender as a result if using AI, it's just crazy. I had, I had a, a fellow colleague of Yours? Uh, another neuroscientist From Stanford University, Dr. Ben Ray, he wrote the book why Brains Need Friends.
Speaker F: So why Brains Need Friends? I don't know Ben or the book, but I could, could probably write a book just like that. In fact, my last chapter of Good With Humans is pretty much that.
Speaker G: Probably. Yeah. Wow. Interesting, uh, interesting. So in terms of, you know, evidence, right. What sort of evidence would you say convinced the major organizations that this wasn't simply another leadership trend when it comes to neural leadership?
Speaker F: Look, it, it going goes back to the sort of that getting that sweet spot right of the pop science versus activity. We just developed models that are immediately clearly useful. And literally like, you go and give a talk in the morning and that afternoon people are having like, insights they'd never had before, solving problems they hadn't been able to solve before. So it just comes down. It's not like, oh, uh, this theoretical stuff. It's like explaining things about the brain that people are challenged by and being useful. So let me give you an example. We did a lot of work on unconscious bias. And we started in 2011. We published a paper in 2015. We, uh, were super proud of it because it was good. Took us four and a half years. No one had a framework for addressing bias. Like, if you looked up Wikipedia at the time, it said, there is no way to address bias. Daniel Kahneman, the world's Nobel Prize winner in this space, said, can't do anything about bias. Intelligence doesn't help. Knowing bias doesn't help. Even I'm biased, and I understand more about bias than any of you. Like, there's no academic way to address bias. There's no nothing. And we were very confident and, you know, arrogant. And we said, oh, I bet you we, we can work it out in a year. Because our research is amazing. You know, no one synthesized like we, we had. We, we, we'd become experts in synthesizing research. And so we weighed in for a year, couldn't find it. Two years, couldn't find it. Three years, couldn't find it. Four years. We found it and we were psyched and we, we published this paper which was the world's first framework for, for doing something that Daniel Kahneman said someone should do. We followed his clue is that we organized the biases into the way the brain categorizes them, like how they happen in the brain. And we found a pattern which we basically put up a hundred biases. There's a hundred plus or minus 50 biases. And we basically put them on a wall and try to organize them by cognitive processes. And what we found is you, uh, could find a pattern. It took us literally four to four and a half years to find this. But we found a pattern, we published it it and we started presenting it to boards and teams and companies. And it did absolutely nothing. It was entirely useless. It was a wonderful academic experiment, but it wasn't making people less biased and we, we couldn't work out what the problem was. And then we, we actually started getting feedback and input from other people and we built a more diverse team, you know, ironically, and found what the problem was and we retracted the paper and we put out a new paper solving the same problem about a year later. And that paper, that idea, the first time I showed an executive that idea was in the back of a napkin. They immediately bought it and bought a training to teach their whole leadership team. And this is one of the biggest financial services companies in the world. They was like, this is amazing. We need this right now. Please teach this to my top 1000 managers. Right? And so it's just like when a model's right, it's just like immediately you get it, you're like, oh, wow, that explains all this stuff we haven't been able to explain before. And it's useful. And so, so, so for us it's not hard to convince people. What's hard is to be helpful. If you, if you're just trying to convince and you haven't actually got something helpful, you'll never get there. But we don't try to convince them that it's great to understand the brain. We teach them something about the brain and they like they have insights and insights change the brain. Insights motivate, insights is how you coach insights, how you train insights, how you sell. It's all about insights. It, you know, insight releases energy. So, so we find if we build us, if we build a useful framework, so we built useful frameworks on feedback, on bias, on motivation, on inclusion, on psychological safety, on accountability, on all this stuff. So you know, we built 15 different kind of frameworks that make you better at something, meaningfully better at something. And we, that you know, we just focus on being useful and then people get it.
Speaker G: Speak, speaking of the bias. Right, right. I remember during my time with the big for accounting firms, I remember doing some training around bias and I like to think that I was able to recognize the types of bias that I have as a person because for I'm unusual. I am um, unusually objective and unusually self aware. So I think a lot of people tend to fall for biases like the halo effect, confirmation bias, affinity bias. Right. I think those are like really, really common, you know, cognitive biases. Right. But I, I'm not a professional when it comes to psychology, but I strongly think the, the base point should be starting with self awareness. Of course. How do you address a bias when you have not even acknowledged the bias in the first place? But when you're self, aware, when you acknowledge the bias, you're able to deal with it. But how do you help people to be objective?
Speaker F: I got bad news for you.
Speaker G: Uh, okay, I've got me. Have it, please.
Speaker F: I'm not going to tell you you're not self aware. You're obviously self aware. I'm not going to tell you you don't try to be less biased. I'm sure you do. And I, I suspect you do notice a few of your biases. But, but objectively, scientifically, categorically, we see other people's biases radically more than we can see our own. Uh, so, so what we found is when you teach people about bias, everyone starts seeing everyone else's bias, but not their own. And, and at first we thought it was a self awareness problem that wasn't it. Then we thought it was a motivation problem, turns out not to be it. Then, then we realized there's a cognitive constraint as real as not being able to run a hundred miles an hour unaided, that, that we have a. There's a constraint in how our brain is built that makes it almost impossible to see much of your bias. You can see a tiny fraction. And the cognitive constraint basically is, is really simple and I'll demonstrate it with a thought experiment. Atom Olika, could you add up 56 and 79 and at the same time multiply 56 and 79? Could those two tasks.
Speaker G: No way.
Speaker F: What if you're really motivated? What if I offered you a million dollars but you couldn't fake it, but I offered you a trillion dollars if you could actually do it? If you're so motivated, could you do it?
Speaker G: No way.
Speaker F: It's physically impossible. Right? So most decisions have a lot more data and steps than adding up 56 and 79. So you're in a decision. Do I hire person A or person B? Do I give this feedback to my friend, right? Who really shouldn't have this job or not? Like you're making this decision. And while you're making that decision, there's way more data in that decision than adding up 56 and 79 and more steps. And observing bias is way more data and way more steps than multiplying 56 and 79, way more. So two tasks that you absolutely, no matter how motivated are, you know, you can't do at the same time. Now you got to way more complicated tasks called making a decision and seeing if you're being biased. So essentially there is no physical way you can detect your own bias while you're making decisions, decisions. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. Right there. That's the bad news. Can't see your own bias. Uh, but there's some good news in that. There's some good news in that. If you are not holding the decision in mind, if you're not holding the 56 and 79, but you're observing that person, we can see other people being biased in real time. So we can't see our own biases because we're doing two tasks at once. But if we're not doing the cognitive task and we're just doing the bias awareness task, you can see other people making biased decisions in real time. This is why we, other people all seem more biased than us. Universally. Everyone thinks everyone else is more biased than they are. Like the universe. It's actually a bias itself. It's, it's true.
Speaker G: The fact that you think another person is more biased is a bias on its own.
Speaker F: Yes, yes, I, I, I should be a comedian, but it's literally true. And uh, it's, I'm going to forget the name of it, unfortunately, but it's a very, very, it's one of the most common biases. Everyone has it. Everyone has it. And so, so basically it's a mechanism problem. It's a cognitive constraint. So you can't really see many of your own bio biases. The second problem is that, is that what goes on unconsciously versus what you can observe consciously, right? The ratio between that people have no idea. They're way off by like many orders of magnitude. Right? Because we've been told like 10% is conscious, 90% unconscious. It's way off, way off. Just to process this information, just to understand and follow along with this. It's the most amazing amount of processing involved. But look, 10 seconds, uh, let's say send 10 seconds of conscious processing. If you were to track how many, how much information there is in 10 seconds of conscious processing and track how much information is going on unconsciously in the same 10 seconds. If you could like quantify those two things and say the conscious is like this much space, let's call it this much space. The unconscious is not the building or the planet or the solar system. It's the Milky Way. Right. So consciously you can access about a cubic meter. Unconsciously, uh, it's about the Milky Way in the same unit of time. So you can expand that cubic meters to like you've done a great job at Amala expanding it maybe a few more cubic meters, maybe some more than most, but you've still got the rest of the Milky Way to go that you can't access. So you, you cannot see the vast majority of your biases. You cannot.
Speaker G: And that is our creatures.
Speaker F: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I thought you had some bad news. But you know, doesn't mean you're not self aware, doesn't mean you're not tried, doesn't mean you're not less biased than other people. In some ways you might be more thoughtful and you might be able to deliberate, build, uh, deliberate processes. But what we found is you have to build a process that involves other people catching each other and you can't rely on the individual trying because no amount of trying was getting there because of the cognitive constraint problem. So we built a framework that was memorable enough, sticky enough and non aggressive enough. The second time we published, we built a framework that basically helps you see a bias in a team meeting or in a process and call it out in a friendly way. We call that the seeds models, Similarity, expedience, experience, distance and safety. Each one of those is a category of brain process. So similarity bias is based on how the brain classifies people as similar or different. You know, we're both from the Commonwealth, so we get on better than if we weren't from the Commonwealth health, because we are a bit, uh, so similarity bias is a deep, it's based on a whole set of deep brain processes. Expedience bias is based on kind of just trying to minimize effort. So the different biases based on really, really different brain processes. So I can be in a meeting and I can literally hear someone having a distance bias and just call it out and I know what to say to offset it, how to, you know, to balance it. Or I can completely hear someone having a safety bias. So instead of having to remember a hundred biases, you just have to remember one word and five categories and now everyone can have that. So we've taught that to millions of people. It's being used by all sorts of organizations and intelligence agencies. All sorts of people use it, uh, to like detect bias much more effectively. So you know, we explain that to a leadership team and show that to a board or whatever, they get it they're like, oh wow, that's actually going to help solve a big, big, big problem. We're going to hire better, you're going to promote better, we're going to manage better, we're going to build strategy better. You know, if, if we use this framework so they, they, they kind of see it.
Speaker G: So I, uh, I like for you to do a recap of the framework. The S is for similarity, the E is for experience. And first E is expedience.
Speaker F: It's a weird word, expedience. Expedient is just like you're just, just grabbing at something. So, so similarity bias is based on the way we categorize people as in group or out group. And when we categorize someone as in group with similar go, we process everything they say much more deeply and like thinking our own thoughts. In fact, I'll say that again. So like when someone is in your in group and you feel they're similar to you, everything they say is processed more deeply in the brain. Like everything, even their movement, their sound, I mean everything. You understand them better, you value everything differently. When someone's in your out group and they feel different to you, you use a whole different brain network, whole different brain process. So similarity bias is a whole category of kinds of biases, but essentially it's based on categorizing people as similar or different. Expedience bias is a relatively simple one. It's just cognitive laziness. It's just the way you jump to conclusions so you don't have to work. It's basically offloading. Like AI is a giant expedience bias. It's just like I'm just going to offload and it comes fraught with problems. So it's just, you're just trying to save effort and you're jumping to your conclusions. The second E is experience bias and this is a quirky one. It's a very hard one to, to mitigate. So you know, you're accountant trained. So you know, you look, you know, look, thing, look at things through that lens. You know, if you're in a meeting with an engineer and a lawyer and a marketing person, you're all going to be in different meetings because you, you have different filters for the exact same words, right? Someone legal costs and you think about financial costs and the marketing person thinks about cost per, uh, customer. And like you literally have different mental models for every word. And, and so you experience that meeting completely differently. Each of you. Some one person will think it was an amazing meeting, next person think it was a Terrible meeting. It's like, it's amazing. And so experience bias is just the way we see the world differently, but we think we're correct important, right? We do all these urgent things, but we never get to the important things. And he said, look, do the important, non urgent things first so that you're actually doing important things, and then do the urgent and important things, and then do the urgent, unimportant things, right? We think things that are in front of us are just more important, uh, both in time and in space. And it's just a funk in the brain. And it's a funky circuit in the brain where if something's close, we just value it more. And then there's a safety bias, which goes back to threat being bigger than reward, which is that we think it's, um, you know, if there's a danger and an opportunity, we'll go five clicks into the danger and one click into the opportunity. It just feels safer and it has all sorts of repercussions. We don't fire people at the right time. We hold onto people we should fire because we're worried about the loss. And then a month later or a week later, we're like, oh, my gosh, why did I wait so long? It was a safety bias. You worried about the cost, you worried about the loss, and it ends up being great. But so, so, so anyway, so similarity, expedience, experience, distance and safety. And so. So going back to the AI that I mentioned before, our, uh, AI is called Niles Neuro Intelligent Leadership Enhancing System. Niles has the SEEDS model. The SEEDS model and all our models in there. And it'll listen to anything that you're doing through 30 different models all at once and, like, track how your brain works and then nudge you to get smarter. It's really sp. It's really spooky. So it'll detect, detect biases in your thinking, in your conversations. It'll hire alongside you and help you get rid of your biases. When you're hiring, it'll do all these different kinds of things. So it's really, uh, it's a great use of AI because it's not reducing intelligence, it's increasing your critical thinking and your intelligence.
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Speaker G: But you know, what sort of criticisms of newer leadership do you think are actually fair? Chris, There is no great model without the critics.
Speaker F: Yeah, no, we have some academics that don't love us and I kind of understand their perspective. I mean you've got simplify slightly to make things sticky and you know, the seeds model, you know, bias. For example, there's a hundred plus or minus fifty biases depending how you see it. There's no Number of biases. And have we caught every single bias with seeds? No, we haven't caught every single bias. We've caught most of the biases that matter. And if another team went at this, they might come up with a slightly different framework and a slightly different framework. So it's not perfect. But you know, all models are wrong. Some are useful, right? But it's very easy find what's wrong with a model. And there's plenty of things wrong with the SEEDS model, but it happens to be accurate enough, really based on research and very, very, very useful. And academics often don't like things that are useful, especially if they didn't create them. They like things that are accurate, they like things, you know, perfect. Academics really, really struggle to write books because, you know, they just have to put everything in there and they have to like every disclaimer and every detail and everything. So they like robust, complete arguments with everything in there. And they're kind of allergic to simplicity in a way. So they'll look at our framework and say, well, that's too simple. Well, it's like, well, took us two or four and a half years to be simple. But so, you know, but those are reasonable arguments. And if we were trying to teach an academic program, we wouldn't teach these kinds of things. But we're trying to teach, you know, a hundred million leaders a year how to be more self aware. And to that you, it's, it's, it's very easy to be too academic if you're trying to do that, you know, also in every language. I think that's a, you know, that's a reasonable question. And then sometimes they look at me and they say, well, you don't have a real, you know, neuroscience degree. You haven't come through the lab, you haven't done 25 years of hard labor to know, you know, but the fact that I'm an outsider makes me able to synthesize, right? I'm not wedded to one specific way of thinking. So I can synthesize because I got a foot in leadership and a foot in neuroscience and I write real neuroscience papers, but I'm still not a PhD. I've got a doctorate. I've got a real doctorate. I had to prove that I'd done doctoral level research. I did. I wrote a 20,000 word thesis. You can look it up, you can read it. My thesis explains the whole foundation of the neuroscience of leadership. But never went to university. Don't have an undergrad, don't have a master's, don't have anything, but I have a doctorate. And some people, it just blows their mind and they just say, hang on, I spent $50 million in 25 years in jail and university. How do you get there? They don't like it. I'd be mad, too. But, uh, I wrote four books and 30 papers to get that degree, so I definitely worked for it. I just didn't go through the system. But sometimes they don't like that, you know, but everything's totally referenced. Like, I use academic reference. I, you know, do all that stuff.
Speaker G: But.
Speaker F: But they'll look at me and say, you're not a real, you know, scientist because you didn't go to university. Well, I didn't know there was a rule against doing research and trying to make the world through science. I didn't know there was a franchise on that. Sorry.
Speaker G: Uh, I've got to tell you this, and I use this line a lot. You don't have to like me. Well, you have to respect me. So they don't have to like your body of work, but they have to respect it. So that is the nugget I'm going to leave for you on that one. And you know, speaking of the people that we address, which is the leaders, the executives, that is what your body of work actually, you know, goes out to help. But speaking of the biases as well, what misconceptions would you say that corporate executives have about the way their, their own brains work?
Speaker F: I mean, so, so many. Look, they, the really clever executives are, uh, hungry for other people's perspectives. And, and, you know, I think about, you know, I m mentioned Jamie Dimon from JP Morgan, right. Like, he surrounds himself with people who are much smarter than him. He's pretty smart. And you hear about this a lot. And the smart executives know that they're wrong a lot and that they've just got one slice, right? The, the smart executives, you, uh, know, ask a lot of questions of people. They, they hire smarter people. There's an old saying, you know, A, players hire other A players and B, players hire C and D players. Right? Uh, if a leader's smart, they surround themselves with people equally smarter or smarter, and they listen. They ask a lot of questions, and they really listen because they observe really quickly how wrong they are. I'm wrong about so many things. I make so many mistakes. And the more I involve diverse perspectives and other people who, with broader experience, the fewer mistakes I make. I still make plenty. But. So I just think the really successful leaders know not to trust just their brain. They Actually know to get really diverse perspectives on things that matter. And the people who aren't so successful have a lot of arrogance and certainty in their thinking. And, you know, they get overconfidence. It's, it's, uh, a. It's an interesting balance because you want to be confident, but actually curious. You know, ultimately you have to make the call, and when you make the call, you have to be confident. You have to be curious to get to that confidence as well.
Speaker G: And I would say you have to be courageous as well. Uh, but why do intelligent leaders repeatedly make poor decisions when under pressure?
Speaker F: Well, I mean, it's really simple. The more pressure you have, the less resources you have for your prefrontal, the more stress you have. The higher your limbic system is activated, the lower your prefrontal is activated. So it's just a seesaw. So pressure reduces cognition, and if you're under exceedingly high amounts of pressure, you just, you just make dumb decisions because you don't have the metabolic resources, the oxygen and glucose for the networks for making decisions. It's really simple on that level. But, you know, also I think, and we did a lot of research on this, power does something really interesting to the brain, even a little bit of power. Like you're with a group of six people, and someone's appointed a leader for a task, an irrelevant task, and you watch what happens. Everyone's brain, little bit of power, you do three things. It does three things to your brain. The first thing is, uh, you stop thinking of other people as people and you start thinking them as objects. And this is kind of necessary to lead because you need to, like, because of limited capacity. Remember, we, we opened with limited capacity, right? So if you're, you know, trying to manage, you know, if you're managing 10 people, they've got 10 projects each. You're gonna, you've now got a hundred projects to think about. You, you sort of can't think about every detail of every person to, to, to kind of make decisions. So, so we, we, we stopped thinking of people using our people circuitry, which is more here, and we start using our conceptual circuitry, which is more here. And so you can look like you don't care. You can look like, you know, you don't take people into account, you don't take their feelings into account because you're not, you're objectifying them, literally conceptualizing them. They're a concept, not a person in the brain. The second thing is you, you become optimistic, you become more confident, more positive, more approach focused. So I'm leaning in. It's like a towards state versus an away state. You're, you're, you're leaning in, you're open, you're curious, you're more positive, literally. And in that positive state you don't notice risks, right? So you're just, you're extra optimistic. So a little bit of power, you objectify people, you become more optimistic than normal. And the third one is you think at higher levels, so your thinking lifts up into uh, more abstract levels and less detailed levels. So the dark side of this is you're, is you treat people as concepts. You're too optimistic and you don't think about the details, right. The sort of more optimistic way of understanding that is you're able to think about a lot of people at once. You're able to think, you know, really positively, which is, which is important when you're taking risks. And you're able to think really conceptually at a high level. So, so the positive side of this are strengths as a leader and the negative side of this are weaknesses as a leader. But in any case, your, your brain does these three things when you lead. So it can be very, very easy if you're not self aware to, to um, you know, to just not think about people very well. And this is one of the most common mistakes with leaders. They're good at, at driving people, not good at understanding, motivating and developing them. Right. So they're very good at focusing on outcomes, which is conceptual, but they're not good at focusing on the human stuff. And so as you go up in an organization, the need for human stuff goes up, but your skills in the human stuff goes down. And by the way, it goes down because you've got having worse capacity issues, which makes your self regulation even worse, which makes your social cognition even worse. So you get a really senior role. You're challenged in all three things, right when you need it most. You need the social cognition really a lot, especially with a lot of power. So basically power messes with your head and makes you treat people as objects, be overly confident and overly positive and not detailed enough. That's what it does. So you've got to notice that about yourself and get feedback from lots of people so you make fewer mistakes.
Speaker G: Uh, interesting. So how does uncertainty physically change the way that we think?
Speaker F: So I mean, look, the brain classifies everything as threat or reward. I sort of was coming to this before, like everything is either a danger or an opportunity. Everything. Like five times a second your brain tracks threat and reward on every axis. Smell, taste, touch, feeling, temperature, everything. Right. Uh, so let's go back to the scanner experiment. You put people in a scanner, you show them a square and a circle and a cow and a happy face and a, you know, angry, you know, and now a rectangle and something else and an angry face. Right. What's interesting is when you show them an ambiguous face, an uncertain face. Right? So what's interesting is that you get a threat response when you see an angry face, but you get an even stronger threat response when you see an uncertain face, and this has been reproduced in lots of different kinds of studies, is that uncertainty is more threatening than a threat often. Right. And so uncertainty activates a really strong threat response. A strong threat response reduces resources for the prefrontal, which is the seat of everything intentional, including processing lots of information, dealing with self regulation and understanding people. So those three things reduce under threat the three things that I mentioned earlier. Right. So, so basically uncertainty makes, reduces our iq, our self regulation, our social position. And it does that because we classify uncertainty as a really bad threat just to be on the safe side. So basically, like if you m, the brain says, look, if you miss a, if you miss a reward, you might miss lunch, not so bad. But if you miss a threat, you might be lunch. So that's really bad. So let's make sure we don't miss any threats. So if we're not sure if something's a threat, let's assume it's a really bad threat just to be on the safe side.
Speaker G: Eat or be eaten. Sounds like the, sounds like a lot of the jungle. Yes, interesting. You know, we're actually really getting to the end of, uh, this interview. And this is a question I always ask everyone when it's all said and done. What do you want the legacy of your body work to be?
Speaker F: I don't think about that very often. I, I, I stay, I try and stay present. And for me it's, am I doing the most meaningful work I, I could do that's really, actually truly authentically helpful? Am I, you know, doing that in a way that's continues to be interesting for my brain? Because if I get bored, bored, I'm in trouble, right? So, uh, am I doing work that's interesting? Am I doing work that makes a difference? And am I generally building wealth going forward in some way, in some level? You know, I don't obsess about the money at all, never have. But for me, I just sort of more constantly, am I doing what I should be doing at any Time. If there's a legacy or an outcome, that's great, but it's. I never think about that. I mean, the model I haven't explained is the one at the heart of my new book, which is good with humans. That model we've taught to tens of millions of people. That's probably what I'll be remembered for, just because it's the most helpful framework. It explains literally why people do what they do. The subtitle of that book is the Neuroscience of what Makes Us Tick and what Ticks Us Off. And it's the second of a double platinum albums that I mentioned, so Seeds is one. And it's. I'll finish with this. It's. It's. It's called the SCARF model. S, E, A R, F. And it's five things that the brain deeply obsesses about. And it's status, which we kind of touched on, right? Certainty. We're just talking about autonomy, which is feeling in control. Relatedness, which is in group. Right? The in group from similarity, bias, relatedness and fairness. Status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness. Fairness spells out scarf. So Scarf describes what your brain does when it's interacting with other humans. It's the neuroscience of motivation, engagement, psychological safety, inclusion, belonging. Quite a few other things. And I'd included it in my last book, but only sort of towards the end. And this new book like really fleshes it out and explains like, like how to find your own SCARF profile. How to have better conversations every day that just turn down threat, how to deal with hard things like motivating others and then how to like drive change better. So it's sort of a whole, you know, manifesto. So I'll probably remember for that just because it's the most helpful thing I've done and lots and lots of people know it and I'm, um, you know, hopefully this book will be a success as well. So that would probably be my answer. But I don't focus on legacy. I just focus on being useful and having fun.
Speaker G: Fun. Amazing stuff, Amazing stuff. And of course, you know, on this podcast, I, uh, do have a tradition. And this tradition was what made you, you know, to be invited to, to the podcast. So you have to tell me one person, at least one person whose body of work you admire, you respect, and you think they will be a great feat for this podcast and you would invite them. So who would that person be? So they've already invited you, so you have to pay it forward as well to another expert.
Speaker F: But yeah, I mean, I mentioned Amy. Amy Edmondson, a deep Thinker about psychological safety. She's got some great new. A great new book. And, uh, yeah, Amy's fantastic.
Speaker G: Okay. Amazing. Amazing. It's amazing. You. You invited Amy Edmondson. She's been on my radar, so I think I very, very much appreciate that. And, yeah, we go with the quick fire round. So just five questions and five quick answers. Five questions and five quick answers. Are you ready to rumble?
Speaker F: Yes. Shoot.
Speaker G: Okay. Uh, so, uh, number one question is, what is one leadership principle you never compromise?
Speaker F: Create clarity. You want a quick answer.
Speaker G: That's one.
Speaker F: Create clarity. Always create clarity. That's the first role of the leader, is just. Just create clarity.
Speaker G: Yeah.
Speaker F: Number two.
Speaker G: Number two is what is one misconception about the brain that is famous. A famous misconception about the brain that
Speaker F: we use 10% of our brain. Totally wrong.
Speaker G: Okay, so what percentage do we use?
Speaker F: Million percent. We use every square millimeter.
Speaker G: Okay. Amazing. Number three. Number three is what is one daily habit that has changed your life?
Speaker F: Napping.
Speaker G: Okay, so number four is what is one book that every leader should read?
Speaker F: My new book, good with Humans.
Speaker G: Uh, amazing. I love the plug. And of course, number five, what is one decision you wish you had made sooner?
Speaker F: Spending more time in London. Maybe that's where I am right now. Just having such a lovely time here. Yeah. Maybe spending more time in London.
Speaker G: Okay. Uh, amazing. Amazing. London is definitely an amazing m. Place. And of course, you know, I always say this, that an attitude of gratitude is good attitude. And anytime a person shares a time with you, they're sharing their life with you. Press the SI unit for measuring life is fine. So for me to you, it's a massive love and respect for sharing your life anytime with us on the podcast. And the aim of the podcast is to educate, to inspire, and to empower. And I think we have done. We've delivered on all three counts today. It's a very, very big thank you from me to you and for the audience, uh, that want to reach out and, uh, know about your body of work. So what's the links? Should we be added to the description of the podcast?
Speaker F: I mean, let's put Niles my AI because you can ask Niles everything about everything that I've talked about, and it's just incredible. So Niles is. Ask Niles AI so A S K N I L E S dot A I is fantastic. NeuroLeadership.com has all my work with organizations and individual programs. Uh, and then if you just search good with humans on Amazon, you'll find, uh, the new book, uh, that's out in November, but your brain at work is also still a great book. And that's, that's, you know, been out for a little while. It'll give you the foundations of a lot of what we talked about today.
Speaker G: Hey, Amazing. Amazing. So thank you very much once more and of course to the audience, you guys know what to do, like share, subscribe, share with your network, please. And of course, always go for something in your life. Conceive, believe, strive to thrive and achieve until I come your way again. Keep, uh, winning, guys. And of course, it's goodbye from me. And it's goodbye from the mad, the myth and the legend. Dr.
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