[Music] can you please give a warm welcome to today's speaker Ian McCain good afternoon I'm on so welcome unofficially to the start of the long weekend and you know it's interesting because when Caroline invited me to speak here I didn't realize until I looked in the calendar to realize that I got the afternoon just after lunch slot on the Friday before the start of the long bank holiday May weekend so the one thing that I almost did was I thought long and hard about packing a mirror so that I w
ouldn't be the only person in the room and that at least be one other person in the audience so I can only conclude on that basis that you guys are the optimistic learners so I better be clear that I don't disappoint you either with your optimism or with your learning and this is my first talk at Google so I fit into that category Caroline and it's it's really good to be here and particularly on the run into the long weekend and we're going to spend a little little bit less than an hour and I'm
going to make it a little interactive so there's going to be some of me some of you and then we'll kind of make up the rest of it in between but I think everybody starts off by telling this story I'm gonna give you a very very short version of the story so I'm the founder of a business which is called flow group and I started the business 20 years ago so it's actually 20 years old this year and I didn't have any great grand ambitions or plans to be an empire builder and we built the business pre
tty slowly steadily organically and we now have a business that has got operations across four continents and during the last 20 years or so we've worked with a very very wide range of organizations in fact these are just some of the brands that you'll be familiar with in the last 10 years alone we've worked with over 300 different mostly international organizations in all sorts of shapes and sizes so many of them are blue chip multinationals a number of them are sports governing bodies governme
nt agencies voluntary organisations NGOs we're kind of industry agnostic I think we've worked with 38 different industries in the last 10 years alone and the one thing that we bring to the party is become an element of people and that's probably the one single variable or expertise that we specialize in now when you looked at the list of things we call the things down the bottom the Centers of Excellence you'll probably be very familiar with them and you can imagine that that's what an organizat
ion that do what we do around people would cluster their activities in under the headings that you see the one that I put the red circle around is the one which is probably least familiar if at all familiar to you which is called Green Line and that's what I'm going to talk to you about our work with you on this afternoon is this Green Line proposition and the reason that I chose this because Caroline kind of invited us to think about something that would add value and be interesting is because
it didn't exist five years ago and five years ago we saw something that was missing in the market in the organizations that we were working with across the globe and we created myself and my co-founder of Green Line who is based in Toronto Blair Steinbach and his background is neuroscience so he for almost a quarter of a century has worked with all sorts of agencies from athletes to government agencies to military tubes organizations business organizations in the area of how do you perform best
under pressure and that combined with our own experience and field research came to create something which we call green line and here's the proposition so the title that I've chosen for today is this whole idea of what I've put up on the screen here so it's a proposition and there are three key words to with you or to think about for the purposes of the next hour the first is effective effective leaders I'm guessing that all of us here at this stage in our career have had the experience of what
it's like to work under or work with it effective leader we probably have even more experience of what it's like to work with or work under an ineffective leader and they are different and the difference between effective leadership and ineffective leadership is that the effective leader he or she has thinking and behaviors that cause them to be able to create an environment which in this world we call culture which is productive and engaging and get great work done and we all probably have the
experience of both during our careers at this point so this whole idea of effective the second word which is interesting is the OS or the operating system because effective leaders with their thinking and behavior probably don't even know what they're doing or how they're doing it right they just show up the way they show up with the thinking and behavior and it's underneath the surface so the idea of an operating system is a very good analogy for this proposition and actually it was brought to
our attention working with one of the big four accountancy firms in London and they were wowed by the green line proposition which we're about to explore and they ran into a challenge because they said well hang on a second where do we deploy this because we can see this is so good as a basic and they called it our operating system it's going to affect our teams and make our teams better and more collaborative it's going to affect the way we interact with our with our key clients and our custom
er relations it's going to help with our innovation because we need to be innovative and creative in a changing environment and it's going to help with our efficiency and our effectiveness by reducing down waste and increasing speed of execution but it's all under the surface and we know that the value of the operating system is that if you've got a robust operating system then you can run more programs simultaneously you've got higher efficiency and higher speed with your processing and you get
less blue screenings of deck which in leadership terms is pretty invaluable so what we did was over the last four or five years we've managed to codify and build the evidence for what is the operating system that differentiates effective leaders from ineffective leaders and that's what Green Line has become and one of the other interesting elements of it is in spite of the fact that we got a pretty mature business fifty-fifth after 15 years and five years ago in the last five years the Green Li
ne proposition amongst our clients now accounts for 40 percent of our revenue from a standing start from nil I'm looking out at the audience here and I'm imagining there aren't many of us that remember there was a motor oil advert in the 1970s and the tagline for it was it gets two parts of the engine that other oils don't reach well we found the Green Line seems to get to parts of organizations and people psyche that other types of development doesn't which so we call it the Castro gtx have dev
eloped that's where we are with so for today I'm gonna share with you a few things the first thing is I'm gonna give you a context where this came from apart from the history so where does it apply how does it work the second thing we're going to do is I'm going to share with you a very simple model and the model is very simple the third thing we're going to do is the methodology or the operating system is broken down into as you'll see here seven do's and 7 don'ts and we've got cards we've got
seven red cards in the current footballing environment that's pretty understandable unintelligible what that does and then we've got seven green cards which are the very opposite of the red cards so I'm gonna share those with you and then that's effectively what we're going to spend our time at this afternoon there's going to be some audience participation as we go along I'll engage with your the appropriate moment and get some input because I'll be very interested in your take on some of this s
tuff so let's just talk about context for a second when we talk about context and we look at business we look at it as a game of two halves just extending out a football analogy for a second on one half or on one side of business you've got what we call the mechanics and the mechanics are simply the structures and systems and processes and policies procedures they all begin with P the strategies that are necessary to create order in what otherwise would be chaos so they're very necessary and the
y create order and they create transparency so this is the mechanics of business on the other side you've got the humanics because I've still yet to see a project deliver itself I've still yet to see a strategy implement itself and the interesting thing about business in our experience over the last quarter of a century or so is that when there is a problem and something needs fixing and the business has to go to try to find a solution where do you think it typically goes do you think it goes to
fix it to the humanics or to the mechanics what's your sense almost exclusively it's the mechanics let's write a new policy let's restructure let's take her with the system or investigate the system we had a classic example of this with one of the leading banks that move to an outsourced model just over ten years ago one of the things that came in into our orbit was the performance management area and they knew they needed to do something with it so they'd outsource it and they'd centralized ev
erything they realized when they did their due diligence that there were 65 different performance management systems out there in the group and that wouldn't do so what they decided they needed to do was they needed to find one that was going to be fit for purpose and the Silver Bullet for all performance management so they went out and they spent two years investigating crafting wreak rafting and two years later they came up with a silver bullet performance management system they ran it for six
months after six months they abandoned it the reason they abandoned it is because they realized when they did their investigation as to why it wasn't working that the problem of the calls was not with the system it was basically that people didn't have the skill of a confidence to have the type of conversations you need to have in order to keep performance going so it's a classic example of an organization looking in the wrong place to try to solve the problem and prioritizing mechanics over hu
manics and actually it's very understandable because mechanics are predictable they're tangible they're measurable people on the other hand they're messy a manager in the very early stages of my own career took me aside and says here you gotta learn one thing about organizations all problems come with hair on top or not as the case may be and it's actually true and if you think about it the only way to get anything done is through human interaction whatever that is and we've kind of tagged the i
dea of conversations onto green line because the lowest common denominator or base unit of currency of all interaction is the individual conversation and if you think about individual conversations well I talk about conversations in the current epoch it's not just face to face anymore obviously it's not just a telephone anymore obviously it's not just meetings anymore which are now virtual and global but it's also inclusive of and trumped by you pardon the expression the electronic conversation
so you put all of those channels together and I've got a question for you how many interactions do you think happen through those channels on a daily basis I'm not even gonna talk about Google I'm just even talking about Ireland I'm not even talking about Ireland I'm talking about your own team we had one client mad enough to undertake the challenge to investigate and come up with a number and I'll tell you the client was the client was a retailer in Ireland Primark or pennies to you and I and t
hey they discovered that there were two hundred and twenty thousand interactions that take place across their network on a daily basis now the question I have and it's a rhetorical question is do you think that the quality of the conversations or interactions that are happening are having an effect or an impact on the business okay you don't even need to answer that one let's not the audience-participation point what we've discovered is that there are basically three outcomes to any interaction
and it's a little bit like if it's a machine then you need to drive it and if you need to drive it you've probably got a gearshift and those of us have got automatic cars and anybody from the US wouldn't know what anything else is I'm sure is you've got three settings on your gear stick right so the first is d you have the interaction you have the engagement you have the conversation business moves on there's a second category of interaction and neutral conversation happens and nothing happens b
ut there's a third category of interaction and the third category of interaction is or which stands for reverse in Greenline language we call it residue because what ends up happening is now as a result of this conversation poorly handled poorly communicated or executed now it's not just one conversation we've had now there's a multitude of conversations that escalate or ripple out from this now instead of having one meeting we need to have a series of meetings many of them unofficial and in car
parks and in coffee coolers now instead of having a few people involved it's escalated emails have gone out CCBC see now the head of the departments involved oh and by the way if this is at home it's your mother-in-law we call this residue and residue actually has a cusp the way it shows up and this is me kind of short-circuiting this from our analysis of it our research is it shows up in two camps one impact of residue is it creates a lack of clarity or and it creates a second category which i
s a loss of commitment and these are some of the headings that it that it has and this is real the interesting thing is that managers typically spend the portion of their time guess what mopping up residue going around with a mop and a bucket tidying up the result or the residue of things that could have should have been handled more skillfully earlier on in the piece people get paid to come to work to mop up highly-paid in many cases so does this resonate with you by the way or does this never
ever happen here are you are you residue immune or are you human so if that's true here's my question to you and it'll be different from person to person question I have is how many hours a week would you say on average the average supervisor our team leader or leader manager in Google would spend tidying up resident have a reflection so there's four categories here and I'm just going to ask you to volunteer how many of us would suggest or say not to five how many of us would be in that camp oka
y three to four people oh I'm just giving it away we're short on time so I'm just kind of short covers it but at least we know the three or four people in the room we believe it's less than four less than six what would you say your average is would you be putting it in this category with that would that be the general consensus here somewhere in here yeah the International average is about 12 hours a week now if we talk about residue and what causes residue let me ask you that so this this is a
piece where I'm interested in hearing from you because it manifests itself differently in different organizations but not too differently and what I'm interested in is if you had to come up with reasons why conversations go wrong so if you want to go into the root cause and do your root cause analysis what are the things that cause conversations to go wrong typically in your experience in Google here give me an example anybody I'm just going to take anything from the floor okay so not knowing w
hat you want from the conversation so not having your clarity what else it's too quickly and having to come back again so doing things too quickly and then having to rework on and do it again and again we head over here not listening so people not listening I was listening by the way I was just paying attention over here but I get what you mean okay hidden agendas from different parties not knowing like the why you're doing it okay so not only not not knowing the what but also the why the wrong
people in the room go on so Google is human lack of context okay so context is either not not or different for different people anything else was there a funny one here because we'd love to hear it okay what we typically do when we work with groups is we take this information and we put it together we take a sheet of flip chart paper we take a red marker and we write up everything that the group has got to get got to go through and we put it and we call it the red list I'm gonna come back to tha
t in a second so we'll take all of this we put it in a red list so I want you to imagine big sheet of flipchart paper here with all the red stuff that includes what you've said plus much more that's it that that's already in the room here's the interesting aspect of the whole proposition is we're very keen to go back to very simple first principles and the very simple first principle about effectiveness whether we're a leader or we're not by the way there's one thing that I forgot to mention is
in the title of the talk it says effective leaders when I talk about a leader in this context you don't need to be anointed or appointed with the title of leader for this to apply and actually even with leaders that we've worked with when they come back and they tell us how this has worked for 80/20 they come back and tell us the human story of how it helps them with their 14 year old order with their relationship at home with their whatever else so even if you're not a leader in here formally a
nointed as long as you're a human being and you've got a personal life and I won't even ask you to put your hands up if you have or you haven't got one of those but as long as you have that this applies just as well and here is the this is the reality of it because it's a human reality we have a situation where to get stuff done unless it's self directed and we're doing our own thing on our own time a lot of what we need to get done is through other people and you've got person a which is my sid
e and you've got person B which is the person on the other side of the bridge and you've got a gap and as those in Transport for London continue to insist we need to mind the gap and that actually is the challenge it is this fundamental human challenge because if it were as easy as this we wouldn't even have a business we're given a problem or a challenge to solve and we got to sit down and work it out and there could be a b c d e and f perhaps if it's a project or if it's a team meeting or what
ever it happens to be very often what happens is instead of moving in the right direction the problem of the challenge creates a tension which is a versus B because I've got a view I've got a history I've got a perspective Caroline might have something completely different on the other side and we start to try to engage to solve the problem and it creates attention and part of the reason it creates attention is because of the red list and the red list is real and it's also human and the thing th
at's fascinated us is that there's a policy and a procedure for practically everything you know if it's in the EU there's a policy and a procedure for the shape and size of bananas there are some organizations with we've we've encountered where there's a policy on soda you can't bring soda into the building because it will ruin their vending sales there's another company that we work with it's a policy on furniture removal because they're so so heavily unionized that if you want to move a desk f
rom here to here you've got to go and call the furniture removal people so we have policies for all of this trivia yet we actually don't have an operating system for how to interact with one another to get a better a best result or a best outcome it doesn't actually exist until now so the proposition is we we know that this red list is real we still have to solve the problem of the challenge how do we navigate our way skillfully through what is present very often and produce an outcome that isn'
t a residue outcome but one which actually leaves us with clarity and commitment around the outcome so we know it exactly what it is we're supposed to do we know what the context is we know the why we know the what we know the how we're committed to it we have the same idea of it and we go and we deliver it and we're committed to doing so that's the proposition and the final thing before we get into the brain science which I'm about to share with you is there's a cost to this and organizations a
re really waking up to it let me give you a really crude residue calculator we'll start off with the 12 hours so we take the 12 hours this is a real live example of an investment bank that we worked with globally so 12 hours times 48 weeks times average hourly salary globally times the number of people employed by the business locally and you get a result I did this presentation most recently to 300 CFO's who are not normally renowned for their interest in conversations or anything people-orient
ed usually and we were flooded with inquiries on the back of this one slide that we've just given because they did their own maths with their own numbers and they came up with a very very large number now those of us who aren't already gone on holiday for the weekend will appreciate that this number is only half of the real number because for every one hour that I'm spending tidying up residue it's an hour that I'm not spending doing what is actually going to add value to the business so it's a
six-point game if you get tired of the football analogy at any point I can just switch metaphors let me share with you the model the model is deceptively but it's deceptively simple it's based on a journey so this is the Greenline model and any journey that we have people identify with this so they relate to it very well because we're all on a journey and whether it's a macro level life journey whether it's a career journey that we're on whether it's a relationship journey that we were involved
in we're all simultaneously on multiple journeys and once the journeys are all different the elements of the journey are all the same so one of the things you need to have in a journey is you need of a destination which we simply call the bear it's somewhere where we haven't arrived at it yet we haven't got there yet it's over there and it's not where we currently are so that's one fixed point that we have in any journey second fixed point in any journey is where we currently are you can take a
snapshot in time of any moment which is a here if the language by the way it gets too technical at any point please let me know that's in the middle so how do you connect here there what's the fastest way straight line we actually draw it as a dotted line because life teaches us that life never really works in a straight line and interestingly we have friends and clients in the aircraft business or airline business and they will tell us that if you take airplanes which most of us do a lot of the
time then the airplanes trajectory it's as it's in the aircraft's interest to stay as close to that straight line as possible for obvious reasons the first is it's the most cost-effective secondly related to that as you've identified as the fastest thirdly beyond that it consumes the least amount of energy in this case fuel which is tied into cost and finally people get there faster and cheaper so they're happier so these could be the KPIs for any business any industry interestingly the aircraf
t's flight path doesn't stay exactly on the straight line they tell us that actually looks more like this it kind of Wiggles and wriggles from here to there and it actually only intersects with the straight line on the optimal line pay for eight percent of the time on average so eight percent of the time it's connecting to the line 92% of the time what's it trying to do get back on the line to fit like Irish weather it's either raining or it's about to rain there's only two variables and you're
either on the line I'm trying to get back on the line and this is simple and easy enough in air craft territory because what they simply do is they put in the onboard coordinates they onboard it of the destination and then the GPS kicks in it makes the auto corrections all the way through that's how the flight works green line just follows that metaphor but in the people's sense so in order for Green Line to work there are four key skills that we need to have the first which is obvious but not c
ommon practice is we need to create an agreed there we need to understand what the purpose is we don't need to understand what the destination is we need to understand why we're doing it and what we expect is an outcome so that's the agreed there step one the second thing we need to do is we need to be able to recognize when things are going off the straight line because sometimes if we're working together somebody will always recognize first that we're going off but it's the recognition of it s
ometimes it doesn't happen the recognition and things are way off before we realize it so that's the second competency the third thing that people need to do is they need to have and this becomes the moment of truth do I have the courage to call it and this is very interesting from a cultural perspective because in some cultures the culture is or the habit of behavior the received wisdom of how things get done around here is you never you never speak out and in some cases people break that in to
go the opposite extreme where people are speaking out all the time but then nobody's listening so but there's an element where do I because there may be a tension that's created by speaking out or talking to somebody or bringing it up that's a cultural issue and finally the final element of is part of the reason that people often don't speak out or they don't step in to tap somebody on the shoulder and say I think we need to redress this and we need to look at doing it a different way is becaus
e they're not sure that they're going to leave the conversation or the relationship or the project in a better condition or even as good a condition as when they found it before they tapped in so very often very humanely they'll decide to avoid so this essentially is that is the proposition of the metaphor in 25 years of working across organizations lovely what we find sadly is not very much of this in reality what we find far more is this as far more red line than there is green line and you'll
see the differences in many many different ways and we're going to dig into this now in a second and the green line outscores the red in all four key areas KPIs that we identified earlier on and there are many reasons why not so the proposition for green lines which I'm going to share with you there are seven red cards and sorry seven green cards and the green cards are the mechanism by which we keep as close to the center line as possible and on the green line navigating from here to there sev
en cards and you've got a handout there but we're going to come back to that now in a second the red cards are the things that are most likely in interactions to cause the conversation to go on to the red line and therefore in the wrong direction before we get into the cards I mentioned that my partner in founding green line is in the neuroscience game and there's a really robust set of neuroscience that underpins the cards so I'm going to give you the 15 minute version of something which would
probably take 15 hours if we had 15 hours but I'm going to give you the short simple version of it because it's the weekend so the brain how many of us have an interest in or an awareness of the function of the brain from a neuroscience point of view many of us have okay not not unusual and not surprising so that's really good so you can probably teach me a thing or two even in addition to what I'm about to teach you so for those of us who have our haven't what I'm going to ask you to do is woul
d you put your hand out like this and splay out your fingers and thumb okay would you put your thumb in wrap around your fingers bring the fist towards your head turn around and turn your fist and say hi brain this is actually a pretty good working model of your brain in a couple of ways firstly it's about this size it's just a little bigger it's about this weight it's just a little heavier and there were two component parts to it that are two functioning parts at minimum that work in parallel w
ith one another simultaneously the first is the thumb which is one function and this is the limbic of the older part of the brain which is called the feeling brain the fingers that wrap around the front is a more recent development and that's the neocortex and the two have you know they work well independently but actually together if they can do an awful lot more just like your fist but they actually compete with one another and their functions sometimes they get mixed up so let me describe bri
efly what each does and where the risk is in the context of our conversation today on the cars so let's talk first of all about the green brain and the green brain is a cognitive system cognitive system is something where our logic our ability for complex thought our problem-solving capability so most of the time from one end of the day to the next this is on we are solving problems everything from programming all the way through to what am I going to wear in the morning or tonight or what am I
going to have for lunch this is constantly on so when I say 7 times 7 49 ok that is a good demonstration you've passed your MOT your problem-solving brain is working even at this time so that's you have to engage your problem-solving brain solve a very simple problem like that so that's the first thing second aspect of the of the green brain is it creates context what am i what do I mean by that there are seven birds and offense you shoot one how many are left okay so the interesting thing is wh
en you ask that question it ranges from numb to dead or alive right so there are many many answers to the same question and it all depends on one thing even the question dead or alive begs the begs begs the question context what is the context so you change your context you change the problem you see change the problem you see you change the problem yourself and we are infinite context makers the human brain each of us individually is creating context every minute of every day one of the challen
ges is we often think that when we sit down to have a discussion that we are operating from the same context when you disagree or you can't agree or those tension or there's there's an A versus B in the room it is never about logic we make them as the mistake of thinking that it's about logic and my logic is better than your logic disagreement is never about logic it is always about context but by then it's often gone too far let me demonstrate context I've got two models here yellow marble is a
dog Blue Marble is a car dog car put the two together it is impossible practically not to have a mental image in your head with a dog and a current right how many of us have got a mental image with a dog and a car in it as I was describing okay how's your dog and car describe where they are okay so the dogs in the back seat of the car watching out from the window okay anybody else is something different you imagine God okay so we got a car lover in the car a dog lover - dog hater here we're her
e yeah what we got I have the car that has a dog exterior from Dover yeah I know what I know exactly what you mean now I've got that picture in my head it probably won't leave they might have transformer selected front sides and off in front in the back no so this beautifully illustrates the fact that all you need to do is introduce two pieces of data and you can't help but create an image in your own mind and it's different from person to person so that's what I mean by creating context that's
the second thing that the logical brain does interestingly enough we have great capacity in this brain of ours and depending on which piece of research you read since the 1950s it vacillates we have the capacity in the cognitive brain to hold between not just two pieces of information like a dog in a car but as many as between five and seven pieces of information we can hold simultaneously now here's the question I have if you can take six let's say we'll take the average data packs and you can
hold them simultaneously and you can spin and move these and manipulate them into any order or sequence which will create a different picture in your mind or your your durability this is the wonderful power that we have computing power how many options or possibilities do we have if we've got six variants who knows the mass theory six variables how many possibilities eruptions it is six factorial so it's 6 times 5 times 4 times 3 times 2 times 1 that's exactly how many you have you've got a tota
l of 720 possibilities so we have the ability or the capability with the thinking mind to engage with the world and make of it with all the data that we've got that many impressions that many possibilities that many opportunities that many ways of looking at the same thing it's quite remarkable that's what makes us brilliant but what makes us more brilliant is the final thing in the thinking realm and this is what differentiates us from the animal kingdom is we have this ability to imagine futur
e this is a little bit like telling fish about water because we do this without even knowing that we're doing it but we are the only mammal on the planet that can meaningfully think of a future that doesn't exist currently imagine it to be the way it is or isn't work in the present and make decisions and spin the marbles in creative ways that enables us to achieve what it is we imagine squirrels don't do this they don't gather round the squirrel family and say last year guys we ran out of nuts w
e're gonna have to kind of delegate it out a bit better we're gonna have to create a spreadsheet and we're gonna have to figure out how we're going to get more nuts in so that next No what they do is they actually just go out all squirrels instinctively go out and find nuts and bury them and they just hope that they've found and buried enough nuts that there's going to be enough nuts for the nut for the squirrel population to find so it's a remarkable gift that we have and actually isn't this fu
ture orientation and this future capability the very essence of what leadership is the ability to imagine something that doesn't exist and work at the present and even some soon because what what happens is the brain organizes your marbles for you in order of so it's sequences priority how do we how do we sequence it so when the cognitive brain or the green brain is operating its sequences our brain and our thinking from there to here so it enables us to make decisions in the present and even su
bsume some present desires for the for a better future and for the greater good and we can make that decision in the NAP it's what distinguishes us from the animals so we are not the most we're not the strongest mammal on the planet we're not the most naturally armored or most armored mammal on the planet we're not the fastest but we dominate the planet and it's because of this ability to sequence our marbles from there to here so that's on one side on the opposite side we have the feeling brain
and the feeling brain has got a completely different function the feeling brain does not care about the future it only cares about now it's the older part of the brain it's the limbic system and it's like a 24/7 always-on surveillance system that is designed for one purpose only to keep you safe that's all it's got to do so you're a zebra you're grazing in the savanna a lion jumps out the last thing you want to do is begin to engage your thinking brain and think I wonder is it a hungry lion or
is it lunch time I wonder maybe we could make friends with the Lions and if we befriended the Lions we could probably know by then you're already lunch so the red brain only wants you acting and once you're acting as quickly as possible in fact how quickly the red brain reacts or activates 100 times faster than the time it takes to think of thought now we can't even imagine how fast that is but let me give you a demonstration of it I recently had shoulder surgery on the shoulder and when I came
out from hospital I had about 40 degrees of movement in any direction so I could probably do this and this and I was at home rehabilitating and on my second day at home I was walking up the stairs and guess what I tripped on the way up so I'm in this situation and I'm going forward before I had any chance to do anything guess what happened now I thought if you've ever had shoulder surgery in two days later and you had 40 degrees in movement but you can probably imagine what the pain was like but
it didn't matter because whatever pain I was experiencing in the future was nothing compared to what I would have done if I'd crash my head against the stairs on the way up so what had happened was the red brain had simply taken control so if you imagine it's like the cockpit to go back to the aircraft you've got a pilot and a co-pilot the green brain is like has got the one of them's got the controls most of the time the green brains got the control but occasionally when the need is there the
red brain takes over it just moves in like a flash takes over the controls and makes decisions on your behalf to keep you safe why do you think it's a hundred times faster than the time it takes to think a thought survival it's the older brain it's the preservation of the species so the interesting aspect about this is that it also has an impact so your marbles of sequence from there to here normally but guess what happens when it takes over the controls have you ever been in a situation where y
ou're in a meeting somebody puts you on the spot like ask you what 7 times 7 is in front of your peers and you know that sort of thing and you're not expecting it and all of a sudden you mentally freeze and something that you know you just freeze you can't you give you your best answer you come up with the best thing that you can think of on the spot you go off 20 minutes later guess what you think of all the things you should have done should have said should it should it should it should and a
s Ken Blanchard says all of a sudden you should all over yourself but you only afterwards realize it because something has happened and something has happened in here so what is happened in here is that the red brain takes the controls and guess what it does first it reef sequences your marbles for you and it does it very quickly fast enough for you not to hit your head on the stairs on the way up so now instead of a very here sequence there's a here to there sequence and the red brain or the re
d marble which is a here and now and survival becomes the very first thing the interesting thing about survival is that 21st century threats no longer are in the Savannah the 21st century threats that we have in Google and in our organizations and in our families are now represented in the team meetings and are represented in the project and are represented at home around the family table or between ourselves and some of the sibling or whomever it happens to be and now when it kicks in what we d
o is in order to keep ourselves safe the red brains taking controls we have to in that moment make a decision as to how do I stay safe in this environment what do I do to get out of this what am I going to do not to not to lose face what have I got to do not to take responsibility for this and by the way it gets better so we got we got our six marbles if this lasts or persists this state for about twenty seconds or more what ends up happening is a chemical cortisol gets released into the brain w
hich literally burns working memory so it literally burns off your capability to think and the range of what you're capable of and it narrows it down so I've now just lost three marbles I've gone from six marbles to three I've lost half of my working memory three marbles it's a trick question it's not even a question but it's a trick statement because I've got from six which is 720 possibilities three marbles one of my possibilities now six it's three factorial I've literally gone from six marbl
es 720 possibilities down to six and the six now are so clear have you ever been in the situation where you were sitting at your desk and an email comes in and you go that's the fourth time this week I got to do something about this and you start to type you start to compose that email and as you start to compose it you get stronger and stronger you get clearer and clearer you're a wordsmith you should be appalled poet laureate all of a sudden it should have done this weeks ago and the kind of e
nergy surge that goes in through there and you get to the point where you want to hit Send and what does it feel like when you're about to hit that send button you just hit Send and you feel like you've just taken down the woolly mammoth until 20 minutes later when somebody walks in with a copy of the email that you just CC to everybody and says do you really send this mate by which time the other marbles that had fallen on the floor after all the war come back in and you now have a perspective
that you didn't have at that moment any of us here I've got kids or access to kids because I don't Caroline you're going off to play with your borrowed kids for the weekend hmm well and seen them lose their marbles because if we've seen them lose their marbles we have a situation where let's say we've got somebody who's five years old they've lost their marbles they're all over the floor and we as parents have a strategy for dealing with this now if you're a five year old kid and you've just los
t your marbles and you're down to six options you've only got three left what is my ability as a five-year-old to have reasonable conversation in this moment very late so what do we do as good parents well intentioned we reason with them at what point do we realize that reasoning isn't going to work well normally at the point where they literally drop one more marble and then they race off to the room and they slam the door because they've only got two choices that's all they got because they fe
el more threatened so they lose another marble and we're just kids with longer legs we think we're adults we think we're sophisticated but inside of us there's that five-year-old kid and the red brain is the red brain is the red brain when it comes to that now I say all that to say that in most organizations civil organizations what tends to happen is people don't lose three marbles it's pretty destructive people can pull themselves in ways but it is fairly regular that people might lose want on
e model what's the impact of losing one marble the impact of losing one marble is first of all when the red brains resequenced the marbles from from here to there what's the marble on the end that is going to go first it's the green marble it's the future-oriented one so now we've got a situation where I'm in a situation where the least important element is the future outcome of what we're about to do here the most important element is what what I need to do to defend myself and when I say lose
one marble one very simple example of what that would look like would be you know the phone rings and you pick it up and it's that number it's just that caller ID number that's on there that's enough for you just to trigger and just lose one model now you're going to have prepare yourself differently for that call for that conversation for that interaction then you would do because you've just lost the future-oriented model hmm interestingly enough if you lose one marble you go from 720 options
to how many you go to 120 you've just lost 600 options and they're the ones that are most future-oriented as somebody who's had to lead and develop a business it's very critical that if we're gonna hire the best and the brightest and the lengths that you go to here in Google and many other organizations to find hire and recruit the best and the brightest we do that and they perform in there 720 marble state but what happens when people are under pressure because it's only then that you really be
gin to see how people perform and work under pressure and we have lots of evidence of high flyers high potentials very talented people very gifted people who round the organization are just walking around pulling pins out of grenades and even the Grenadier in the room I'm walking right out there and causing devastation around them without even knowing that they're doing it simple hint if you're down to 120 one way to help yourself and understand itself diagnosed and this is very helpful for me h
ow do you know you've lost a marble as soon as you find yourself mentally moving into what we call binary thinking it's either you or me because either them or us it's either yes or no it's either black or white it's either as soon as you find yourself moving into a state where it becomes binary rest assured you are now in a chemically induced state it's not a great time to be making decisions which is why good negotiators at that level will always take breaks and lots of them to walk out to coo
l off for that 20-minute period so that they have got the perspective of the seven twenty possibilities in the seven twenty options leadership reputations get made or broken in these moments marriages get made or broken in these moments so that's the short science let's do the short version of the cards so what we've done is blaring eyes we've endeavored to create a system to codify this operating system that will enable us first of all not to create situations where we're triggering losing marb
les and we become suboptimal in our ability to make decisions make choices and also how do we stay on the green line how do we avoid going onto the red line so we're going to start off and I'm going to spend most of the time in the remaining time that we have Oh okay we're a little short on time how many of us have to leave at 3 o'clock that's going to determine okay so the very most of us okay in that case I'm gonna show you a five-minute video and I'm gonna ask you to have a look at the video
through the lens of the red cards if that's okay so these are the cards they're pretty self-explanatory and the five-minute video that we're going to watch is a conversation between two people a and B who've got two different views of the same thing and they've got of resolves a situation where Barry who manages Lisa in a technical function she wants to apply for a role which will promote her but it involves managing people for the first time he doesn't believe she's ready for it she believes sh
e's already demonstrated a capability and that she is ready for it and they're in to have a discussion around it we're simply going to observe it through the lens of Barry so if you watch watch the cards played by Barry and maybe the impact that is having on Lisa on the other side in terms of marble retention or marble loss and once that's done then we'll just wrap it all up okay so this is the purpose of it so I'm going to flip through the introductions and we'll just get straight on to the cur
rents so cards are the ready I'm not saying that all of the cards appear and some of them might appear more than once let's see what you can see hello Lisa hello Barry how are you and well and you good so you applied for a promotion where you at with the application oh well I haven't actually filled it in yet I wanted to come to you first and get your advice how ready do you think that you are for this step oh I'm definitely ready I mean I I think I've proven myself in my current role and I thin
k I'll make a good manager actually if I'm given the opportunity I am a key contributor you say so yourself yes you are goes without saying you're you're a great asset to this organization but how do you think that you would cope with the greater responsibilities oh well stop when you move into two people management I remember when I was promoted myself I found it a big challenge there's a lot to take off and you know you're you're you're managing people you're coaching you're you're giving feed
back you're doing appraisals it's it's a lot you know and it takes a while to get it right and you have a lot of experience and a lot of management potential are you sure you're ready well I think so yes I mean I've seen a lot of people with a lot less experience and expertise get promoted in the past and they seem to be doing just fine I think I'll make a good manager actually I'm I'm looking forward to the challenge I'm already the one people come to when there are issues and I'm often the one
who has to point out issues before they impact the business and you know I think with a greater scope of influence I could influence the system instead of just helping people work around the inadequacies do you not think that there are a few things that you need to work on first oh yeah I'm sure there are such as well for example your communication style how do you think you come across I'm not really sure what you mean Barry I am a key contributor on this team I'm the go-to person I mean I'm a
lways willing to help and give advice and I try to help them out the best way that I can our last team meeting Kathleen wanted to make a suggestion about potential potential changed the report do you remember how you spoke to her no well you were very condescending and you made her feel and look like a bit of a fool are you aware of that oh come on Barry her idea it was impossible and you know it I mean she clearly doesn't know how the system works so she wouldn't have suggested it I said wouldn
't need it to be said and she got the message didn't she I mean what do what do you want me to say be quiet saying nothing and and let that bed let the business suffer no no no not at all look I I just think that you're very direct people and and that is not a style that suits people management look I just think that that at this moment your leadership style suits more to an autonomous role would you would you not agree with that no I don't I want this promotion Barry I think I deserve it you yo
u know obviously don't know no don't get me wrong look Lisa I I think you're you're a fantastic worker you're a top contributor I just I want to support you in achieving your goal frankly Barry it doesn't sound like it I just don't think that you're ready for this not not at this moment Lisa you asked me for my advice I'm giving it to you and I think that we can you know work on developing your people skills but in the meantime maybe something comes up that doesn't involve people management you
know I'm fed up waiting Barry I want this promotion and I think I'm more than capable of managing people actually look if you really want to move into people management we can do a development plan I'll look into some courses that may be available and and we can start there how does that sound yeah it's fine thanks okay look why don't we meet in in what say two weeks in the meantime I can look into what courses are available and I'll email you the link you can have a look at those we never chat
about thin how's that sound yeah that's great okay good thanks Barry when thanks doesn't really mean thanks that interesting could you see the red cards are play how many to count for any advance on four I said okay somebody got the full set it's like bingo yeah and any recidivists any kind of repeat repeat offenders which ones yes yes very often it's a master class and leaving questions that's for sure okay so the interesting thing about it we talked about operating systems and this is where I'
m going to finish is that we all have a basic operating system we use it but we judge ourselves by the intention that we have not the impact that it has on the other side we other have an effect of operating system where we don't these seven red cards are the ones that are most likely to actually create the impact on the other side because what's the impact in the other side not not very good and in rating it when you look at that conversation if you had to give it a rating in terms of its effec
tiveness how would you rate it here looking at it through your own lens neutrally two or three two threes is what I'm hearing okay Barry now on the other hand goes to his management meeting and he sits down with Aiden and Aiden says I know you had a difficult conversation to have how's he breaking it seven or an eight you know I gave her the gave her the feedback I gave her the example we got a plan we're meeting in two weeks I think I got away with it right seven or eight meanwhile Lisa was tid
ying at her desk Caroline inquires and says well you know she's putting her effects into a box how did it go and she's rating it a wat a one well it's definitely lower than we're rating it so now you've got three versions of the truth right and there's only one that has legal tender and that's Lisa's but the sad thing about it is is that not only is the impact on Lisa sad part of this equation but it's the implication that there are berries walking around the organization pulling pins out of gre
nades and thinking they're doing a great job because they don't have an operating system and he's not a bad guy he's doing the best with what he has to get a result in a difficult situation and this is a good as he's got so guys apologies for running four minutes and twenty-eight twenty-nine thirty seconds over because I normally castigate people for running over on my side of the fence so mayor Copa for that thank you very much for the invitation Caroline thank you very much you you
Comments