Conventional wisdom suggests that if you want people to participate, you need to mandate it. However, this can easily backfire. What research suggests is that if you want people to participate and get the most out of this participation, you need to make it compelling. Getting people to fully engage in learning, transformation or even just to attend an important organizational event is a central challenge for HR or talent functions. During times of intense change, this can often appear to be less important, when in fact, it may be even more critical. If you’re looking to achieve something beyond just compliance, you need to design in a way that compels people to fully participate and engage – a challenge when most of us are busy and overwhelmed. In this timely conversation, Drs. David Rock and Emma Sarro will explore insights from both science and decades of practice, including the non-obvious downsides of making learning mandatory, and three areas to focus on when making experiences truly compelling.
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Emma Sarro: Hello, and welcome. Welcome to another week of your brain at work. Live! I see everyone joining
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Emma Sarro: as you're joining. You know the deal. Drop where you're coming in from in the chat, find the chat, make sure it's set to everyone, so we can all see where you're coming in from today I'm zooming in from a bit different than normal. I'm normally outside of New York City. Now, I'm on the West Coast today of the Us.
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Emma Sarro: It's hot. It's going to be over a hundred where I am.
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Emma Sarro: I see everyone, Washington Seattle, the Philippines. Amazing
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Emma Sarro: as you can see, I'm not Erin again. I'm stepping in for her this week. My name is Emma Sorrow. I'm the director of research, and I've been here for just almost 4 years and welcome to have all of our regulars back, our newcomers welcome. We're excited to have you with us for the 1st time today.
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Emma Sarro: So in today's episode, we are diving into the myth that the only way to get people to show up for something is to mandate it instead. The science really says that if you want people to participate fully and get the most out of this participation. You need to make it compelling. And what does compelling actually mean when it comes to the brain. And what does that mean about how we have to plan things, to work, to compel others to participate and to show up fully. Show up.
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Emma Sarro: Now, as you know, what we always like to suggest is to turn off all of your alert systems. Your phone, move it to the side, take off your watch, you know, minimize everything that is going to give you alerts, so you can fully participate speaking of fully participating. And we love interaction. As I mentioned. So just get used to dropping ideas in the chat, and we'll try to answer as much as we can.
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Emma Sarro: So today, as you know, I'm 1 of the speakers today. Emma Saro received my Phd. From Nyu and direct the research team here, and I'm excited to welcome our guest in. You know him well, he coined the term neural leadership when he co-founded Nli 2 decades ago, over 2 decades ago. He's got a professional doctorate, 4 books under his name, one in the works, and a multitude of bylines ranging from the Harvard Business Review to the New York Times, and many more
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Emma Sarro: warm welcome to Dr. David Rock, our co-founder, and CEO.
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David Rock: Thanks, Emma, good to be back with you.
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Emma Sarro: Yeah. Nice to have you here.
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Emma Sarro: So today, as you know, in the learning, experience, social events, compelling individuals back to the office or trying to get everyone back to the office. Anything where you want people to show up to truly show up. Normally we default to mandating, but we know that's not always the best way, and can actually backfire right? And so the real question is, what happens when you, when you mandate something, what's going on in the brain. And why do we get not the results? We're actually trying to go after
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Emma Sarro: so I'm going to pull David in to start us off with, really, what's the history of this idea for us at neuro leadership?
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David Rock: Yeah, it's it's it's something that it kind of popped out. In the last 10 years, when we started to really scale experiences. So like, we'd build a, you know, digital learning experience. And we might have like 10,000 people, we're trying to get involved right? And we're able to really track the numbers and and see
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David Rock: what works and and try different things. And we're able to like, really, you know, basically follow the science experiment follow the data right? And there's some really big surprises
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David Rock: in the data. One of the really big surprises was we were able to get really high percentages of people engaged in
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David Rock: learning experiences. Quite large numbers without mandatory at all. I remember one of the early projects was like it was like a 6
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David Rock: session program. It was virtual and there were hundreds of participants. Actually, there were thousands of participants, about 4,000 people. And we got over 90% of people engaged in the experience through the end. And it was a 6 session program.
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David Rock: thousands of people. And you know, we showed that to lots of folks at the time they were like, Wow, that's that's just completely out of the, you know, out of the sort of normal that we normally get you know. How do you do it? We started thinking about what we do differently and
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David Rock: trying to kind of codify this whole thing about making something compelling, and we actually ran a couple of sessions at the earlier summits on this, and we had some great practitioners come in and share their experiences of what they've been doing, and we shared some science. And then I think we ran one of these a couple of years ago. We ran a session on your brain works live on this topic. But we've got some fresh insights, but essentially it's
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David Rock: it's so easy to fall into the trap of saying, oh, this thing's really important. We need to mandate it. Otherwise people won't come right. It's such a. It's such an intuitive thing, such a sort of gut feeling to go with like, Oh.
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David Rock: it really really matters. We, you know, everyone has to be there. So we need to mandate it.
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David Rock: But it's it's not necessarily. It doesn't necessarily work. And and then the other thing is, there are ways to get really good numbers of people
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David Rock: without that. Another example is, we got actually was over a hundred 1,000 people we got north of 90 was 94% of 100,000 people engaged in a 4 module experience in 50 countries. And so, you know, when you get this compelling thing right, you can really scale something. And the interesting thing is you're getting full participation from those people. No one's there just because they kind of feel like they've been told to. So the big. The big surprise was, if you do this right, you can get amazing. Turn up. And then the other thing is kind of
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David Rock: what happens when you do make something mandatory, like kind of the downsides of of that.
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Emma Sarro: Yeah, and what is it? And actually, I'd love to just pull the office of the audience super quickly on. This is when you are organizing something, and you want people to show up. What do you? What do you tend to feel? Is your your average percentage of of participation? I'd love to get people thinking about that, but also.
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David Rock: Experience like a multi-modal digital experience.
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Emma Sarro: Either digital or even in person. You know, when you when you mandate, what do you do? You tend to feel participation? 2025%,
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Emma Sarro: 20. Yep, less in person, even less in person. Wow!
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Emma Sarro: That's surprising.
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David Rock: Yeah, it definitely depends on the topic.
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David Rock: And.
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Emma Sarro: Right and depending on the topic, really speaks to what we'll be talking about, too. You know. How, you know. Is it meaningful for the individuals? 50%.
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David Rock: Yeah, it's it's very, it's very topic. So I guess, let's dig into this this. The science is a little bit more around kind of what goes on, because this is the thing. It's very intuitive to say, let's mandate. And with mandating you actually can get a good number of people like turning up right because they have to.
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David Rock: Now, let's imagine, like in a digital experience like a you know, a zoom event, or you know, Webinar, or something, you know you're required to be there, or an e-learning. You know you're required to be there. What goes on? What happens in the brains is a really interesting thing that happens. And people have been studying this. We put a lot of the
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David Rock: science of this in a paper we wrote some years ago in strategy and business called is your diversity program making your company more biased. And there was this weird thing that happens. And it's basically an autonomy issue. Autonomy is like this whole issue of kind of who's in control? Who's in charge? Who's making the choices? And when you tell people they have to do something. They have an autonomy reaction. Right? They feel like they're being told to do something. They have no choice right? They have to come. So choice has been taken away that generally creates a threat response.
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David Rock: And it's also a bit of a status attack
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David Rock: right? Like you know, you're telling people they have to learn this thing. So you're essentially saying, you know, they're broken. But it's also a fairness response, because a lot of people most people like, let's say you're doing a you know, you're requiring a bias training in that realm. Everyone sees everyone else's bias, but not their own. So everyone's going to have a fairness reaction, saying, my whole team needs to do this, but I don't need to do this right. And in many domains we also see that.
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David Rock: you know. We see that folks don't see their own gaps, but they see other people. So when you so you're getting a autonomy reaction, a status reaction and a fairness reaction quite often. And so what happens is the people who probably would.
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David Rock: you know, if it wasn't mandatory, who would probably come anyway, who are pretty excited about the topic, and now annoyed.
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David Rock: The people who are maybe on the fence are now pretty annoyed, and the people who were already against this are now passionately fighting against this, and probably like getting worse at whatever you wanted them to do. Right? So you think of sort of the passionate advocates the sort of in between us, the middle and the detractors right. The detractors become really passionate.
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David Rock: passionate about fighting your idea, and so but they'll turn up right. But now they'll literally, you know, if it's a bias program, they'll literally become more biased because they're annoyed.
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David Rock: And so you get this this backlash effect.
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David Rock: particularly from the detractors from the people who weren't on board. Anyway, you get this, and those are the people you wanted to move. The most right. You kind of saw this group of people who were detractors kind of needed this the most, and they end up being more against your idea than they were before
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David Rock: right, and then you push the middle into the negative and and the topic. So it's just a terrible
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David Rock: thing to do, even though it feels intuitive. And but it really, it's an autonomy issue and a status issue and a fairness issue. And you're getting 3 of the 5 things that matter like in threat. That's a pretty heavy threat.
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Emma Sarro: Yeah, absolutely. And so it backfies. And you can. Even this is coming up in the chat a lot, too. And even if they show up. And you might get 90% of people signing in the sign in sheet that they're they're showing up. But will they actually take in anything that you want to get across? Will they learn? Will they start to try new habits? Will they engage in anything you're you're trying to? Or will they resist, as you're saying, and even do the opposite. So not only is it a backlash, you're just not getting anything out of it, so it ends up being a waste of time, of everyone's time.
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David Rock: Yeah. And and you know, when people are annoyed, they don't learn much. I mean what you do, especially if it's digital. You literally, you know, press play, and then then start doing real work right? And you just you know you go between. And when that level of distraction you're recalling nothing.
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David Rock: And so people are just going to use the time because they're annoyed. They're going to use the time to, you know, engage elsewhere. And so it just doesn't work. So even if you think you're getting, you know, 70, 80, 95% engagement, you're probably getting 20% engagement
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David Rock: which you'd be better to have 60% of people show up, and 60% of those people be engaged and and you know, than than just about everyone disengaged.
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David Rock: That's the I think that's the insight there. So the other 3 things autonomy is a big issue, you know. People feel like they're being told what to do a close second is status. People feel insulted that there's you're telling them there's something wrong with them, and the 3rd one is fairness. People often don't think they need this, and it's a waste of their time. So you're getting autonomy status and fairness reactions in sort of that order.
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Emma Sarro: Yeah, right? Yeah. And and the pursuit of statistics that I think that makes a lot of sense. You want to report that you've, you know, been successful at whatever whatever you're you end up mandating. But in the end you don't see any change in behavior.
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Emma Sarro: You know something that you're you're speaking to here, David is. I think you're going towards this bell curve we often talk about. So the resistors form about what 20% 25% of maybe any group that you're you're trying to get to. Can you talk a bit about that bell?
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David Rock: Yeah, there's some research on that. In fact, even positive changes. About 25% of people actively push against them just on principle. They don't like change. So in any. And it's an approximation. It's a generalization. But it roughly does look to simplify to about 25% across all kinds of change initiatives, learning initiatives.
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David Rock: You get about this roughly, a quarter of a group that are detractors, just, you know, not involved, not on board. And and often it's those people that are the reason the company's kind of doing something. And so if you, if you're mandating for those people you, you're gonna get a negative result. It's not. It's not going to be healthy. So that's that's the you know, the kind of central challenge.
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Emma Sarro: Yeah, so where do you focus? Then.
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David Rock: Well, you know, the trap is to focus on that bottom 25. The other trap is to focus on the sort of top 25, which is the passionate advocates because they're already on board. You don't need to. You really want to focus on the middle. You want to move the middle a little bit.
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David Rock: You want to move that 50% or so of an organization slightly to the right. You just want to make them slightly more passionate, slightly more engaged, slightly better at something.
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David Rock: But if it's really tempting, the squeaky wheel gets the oil right, it's really tempting to focus on the squeaky wheel, you know, when you're delivering, when you're a facilitator and you're delivering to a room, and you've got 20 people, and 5 of them are just fighting you the whole time, and 10 of them are just sitting quietly learning, and 5 of them are passionate. It's really tempting to focus on the 5 who are fighting you all the time
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David Rock: and the middle get annoyed. And the top people, you know, get just, you know, kind of check out as well. So you're actually better to focus on the middle or even the top people and get momentum with them, and that'll bring the middle along. But you've really got to watch that squeaky wheel issue and focusing on that.
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David Rock: you know. But some people are uncomfortable with the fact that folks just don't agree with them and don't like their ideas. So they just want to fight. I want to get in there and convince them, you know, and and it's not the best use of attention. Often.
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Emma Sarro: Yeah, it's true. I mean, you're tempted to do that right because you want to see everyone, everyone change. But something coming up in the chat. Is, is this really the root cause of the return to office?
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Emma Sarro: Resistance.
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David Rock: I mean, that's that's a whole, you know. Topic in itself. We've been talking about it for a while. So the the challenge with return to office is that people got a massive dose of unexpected autonomy
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David Rock: that pervaded all of their life through this flexibility. Now, certainly there were some people like 1020% of people who really wanted to be in the office all the time. So that's not so relevant to them. But the vast majority of people. And the data is north of 60% less than 80% somewhere between 60 and 80% of people
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David Rock: either want to mix it up at their own discretion, home and work right? So they want to do both, or they want to be fully at home.
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David Rock: Right? That's you can pretty much. Take that to the bank right? There's no more than 20% of people who want to be in the office all the time.
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David Rock: and those 20% want to do it because they're most productive there. And they'd quite like everyone else to be there. So they can be even more productive right in their minds. But
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David Rock: but the 80% who want to mix it up. The challenge is, we gave those people this massive dose of autonomy, not just in where they work, but also when they work.
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David Rock: but also like what they ate, and also how they slept and how they socialized, and whether they saw other humans that day and caught colds from the subway and the quality of their parenting and the quality of their exercise. And I mean, like everything right, people moved countries, moved cities, moved states moved, you know, like people had children, they wouldn't have had like. Also, like we gave people a lot of control
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David Rock: of their lives, and a good number of people were mixing it up, coming in sometimes, and that and a good number were just, you know, wanting to work at home, and the percentage of people who were abusing that was no greater than the percentage of people who abuse everything. Anyway, there's always 3 to 5% of a company that you know probably shouldn't be there and are probably not doing the right thing right. The number abusing the system isn't wasn't any meaningfully higher than that. So.
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David Rock: but we we kind of saw that horrified and said, All right, we need to bring them all back in. But the autonomy reaction. The sort of mandating coming back is fascinating. So one of the things I've seen I've had this conversation with maybe
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David Rock: maybe a thousand Chros, and maybe 200 Ceos in the last couple of years, like like a deep, long conversation, sometimes in groups. You know, quite often in groups.
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David Rock: and every single time, every single time without fail, never, ever, ever seen this not happen. Every single time the person used the word mandating it was in air quotes.
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David Rock: So we mandated right? So so. And only just now, with some companies, they're actually mandating right? But until very recently it was mandating because they knew they couldn't mandate right. They knew they couldn't require it, so it was always like we were kind of mandating it right, and the reason is they knew they would lose a lot of people, and they are losing a lot of people when they do that. There are some companies that that's actually part of the strategy that they're happy with that
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David Rock: right? And some, you know, some companies that's like their goal. And some companies didn't realize that was gonna happen and and are struggling with that. But essentially the the mandating with return to office is problematic because the big autonomy drop that you get and the, you know. It's also a little bit of a fairness reaction again. Fairness like, Hey, you! You're now gonna lose 10 HA week, but expected to perform just as well, you know, on on dressing up and transportation and meals and everything else.
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David Rock: You're losing. Maybe a quarter of your working week, and you expect it to perform the same.
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David Rock: You're going to lose sleep. You're going to be up later, you know all sorts of things, so there's a fairness reaction on top of an autonomy reaction. And again at a status reaction. It's a little bit of an insult not being trusted to, you know. Be an adult and work where you work. So you got a similar set of threats, autonomy. But the autonomy is even a bigger threat because of the
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David Rock: because of how universal it is. Not just about work. It's autonomy about, you know everything, exercise, diet, health, well-being, sleep, parenting family. You know the whole kind of thing. Curious, just a question for the group. What are some of the strategies you've found? And let's get some things in the chat. What are some of the strategies you found have worked
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David Rock: for, particularly the return to office is kind of, while that's top of mind. What are some of the things that you found have worked. And the universal thing is, you know, food and drinks, and that's that's been the kind of the number one outlier. But you know, aside from food and drinks, you can say that if you want, what else have you found? Has worked.
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Emma Sarro: Pizza party, the classic one. But you know what's interesting is people are thinking about. This is, there was some statistic a while back on, you know. Would you leave if return to office was mandated, and even the individuals that wanted to work in the office? They they also reported they would leave. If there was a mandate, even if it didn't directly affect them, they would also.
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Emma Sarro: they would also find someplace else to work because they didn't like the idea of a mandate and being required. So even if it wasn't directly attacking them, that autonomy, that loss of autonomy, they didn't like it. Enough that they would leave. It's interesting.
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David Rock: Yep.
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David Rock: so you know you you can mandate it, but you'll get a lot of presentiism, and you get a lot of people voting with their feet. And the other thing is
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David Rock: you know, and this is starting to get to a whole other topic. But we wrote a piece on this called the Patchwork Principle, that there are absolutely benefits to being together. But those benefits come don't require being together all the time, and they don't require being together 3 days a week, being together a few days a month, and then maybe some teams being together, more certain teams or certain groups like new employees. There are some groups that benefit more, some teams that benefit more, but generally everyone together.
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David Rock: The benefits from that decline after a few days a month. So whereas the benefits of being able to work where you want, which is often mixing it up right or at home, the benefits of the autonomy are. Every day you get your feeling trusted, and, you know, respected every day, and you're working where you're most productive every day, and if that's at home, you know you've much fewer distractions, so there are real benefits to that flexibility. But unfortunately, you know, leaders.
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David Rock: You know, the leaders themselves feel a threat to their status, their certainty, their autonomy, their relatedness, and their fairness. They have to be in, so the leaders often have a threat to all 5, which is interesting. So yeah, some interesting ideas in there. The patchwork principle was our kind of solution to this which is require people there. Yeah, require the mandate it, but mandate it one or 2 days a month.
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David Rock: and and that seems fair. Doesn't seem like a huge, you know. Drain so, mandate that they have to be in there one or 2 days a month the same time. You know, mandate, once a quarter, you add some extra days, for. So they got more time, right? So every you know, 3rd month you've got extra time. But every month everyone's together, and then look at different functions or levels or teams, and give them a certain number of days per month, that they that they are mandated to be in there.
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David Rock: But let them choose, like at a team level. Which one? So you're mandating the requirement, you know. If you're a new graduate, we want you, you know, an extra 8 days a month in person with your team. There you work out at a team level how you do that? So you kind of mandating an outcome versus the exact detail. So that's a that's a different way to to think about it.
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Emma Sarro: Yeah. And there's something that's coming through here around. The idea of accountability, too, is providing some clear, transparent set of guidelines. I think we all that all provides our brain with a sense of certainty which is also good. So if it's if it's done well organized, well, that's that is transparent and fair across the organization. I think that can satisfy some of those rewards as well.
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David Rock: Yeah, yeah. So there's lots of good ideas coming in. You know, ways of bringing people together. There are definitely benefits of being together. There are certain things that are much, much richer and easier to do, but there is a big big downside to forcing that every week.
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David Rock: and you'll find you'll get plenty of people in if you follow the patchwork principle that's in the chat there now, from Fast Company, you'll find plenty of value in that. But yeah, let's let's change gears a little bit. Let's talk about learning and learning solutions. As we said, we started to think about compelling
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David Rock: because we were, we were able to get such amazing results that blew us away.
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David Rock: And we're like, well, so much better being, you know, building something compelling than mandatory. You know, let's focus on that. So we've been thinking about kind of the elements of that. And the 1st one is is essentially making making an experience meaningful to people.
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David Rock: And this is
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David Rock: this is, you know. Let's let's just think about a learning experience. Right? Let's make this. Maybe it's a leadership program of some sort. Whether it's, you know, growth, mindset or psych safety or accountability or
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David Rock: something. You know, you're learning how to lead through an AI era.
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David Rock: But how do you make it meaningful for folks? What is? What is it that it's that it's meaningful? And these 3 elements I'll give you a sort of connected in some ways. It's got some similarities, but but meaningful is very much
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David Rock: tying to the person's own goals
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David Rock: right? Existing goals. So everyone has a goal. Hierarchy deep in their brain of like goals nested within goals nested within goals. And it's got to feel
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David Rock: like there's some benefit to them. So it's got to tap into an existing like dopamine based reward circuitry. Right? So when something ties to an existing goal, it's activating our reward circuitry. It's increasing our sense of dopamine. So what's in it for me, the with them is literally activating goal focused circuitries. And so it can't be really lofty goals, but it's got to tie to things the person already has to achieve that are really prioritized, that are really important.
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David Rock: So you know, if we if we're doing a you know a coaching program, for example?
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David Rock: You know, you teach people, you know, coaching. The 1st thing they're gonna imagine is this is gonna mean, I have to have more conversations with people. Actually, the way we'll position it is, we're gonna show you how to have fewer and shorter conversations with people
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David Rock: right? And they're like, Oh, that's interesting. I'm interested in that. I want to have fewer and shorter conversations. And, in fact, when you learn to coach properly, you literally do have fewer and shorter conversations, because you're not lost in the, you know, in in threat responses and debating. They're actually much nicer, more energizing short. So we think about like, what's something that? What's a goal? An employee already has?
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David Rock: Right? You know, I wanna I wanna know how to, you know, engage my team better really get my team really motivated
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David Rock: right? I want to know how to. You know, deal with all this overwhelm better.
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David Rock: I want to know how to you know. Deliver my results easier in less time.
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David Rock: I know how to leverage the company's resources. I mean really clever ways to save time. Right? I want to feel less exhausted at the end of the week. So think about things that really matter to people, and you've got to have that. It's got to feel meaningful to them. Do you want to talk some more about that in relation to some of the brain.
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Emma Sarro: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you spoke to it. It just it lines up with the dopaminergic goal oriented system, and where you're more likely to prioritize and engage in that behavior. If it is something that is important, if it has some kind of purpose, and at any time we have a number of things we could do and any any person's day. We have a number of tasks we have to get to. You want that task that's associated with the learning to be the 1st one they choose.
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Emma Sarro: It's worth it for me to engage in this over all of the other tasks that I have, and we tend to choose the thing that feels the most meaningful to us at any time. Our brain evaluates all the possibilities, and we're going to choose that one that's most important. So if you can convince them that this is going to help you do your job better to reach your goals faster, and it lines directly up with something that they already see as meaningful, they're more likely to
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Emma Sarro: jump in. And in a learning experience you want the brain to be in a state to be engaged so open, not resisting and leaning in right open to learn this thing.
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David Rock: Yeah, an interesting, an interesting hack you can use is you can hack our distance bias
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David Rock: that we have. So so we all have this distance bias that that is really pervasive and universal. And you know, I was thinking
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David Rock: I was thinking, I need to chat to my sister who lives in Australia, and I could just pick up the phone as long as it's after 5 pm. Here, it's her morning, right? I could just pick up the phone and call her right. It's the same as calling anyone else. But my brain, you know, hesitates, even though I know the time. There. My brain hesitates, just feels far away.
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David Rock: And I know she'd be like shocked to hear from me, even though you know we talk now and then. It shouldn't be a shock. But it's like we have this kind of. We're just not built very well to think in terms of time zones and long distances. It like it's not easy. It's like it's not easy to run a marathon right to train, for it's not easy to think long distances and long times so, but so. But what happens is
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David Rock: This distance bias relates to things that are far away and in in distance and in time, but also in ownership.
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David Rock: Right? So when so, the opposite is true, when something feels like it's yours. And something feels like it's happening now. And it's happening, you know, around you physically, it suddenly is much more meaningful to you. It's it's easier to think about. It's much more important, right?
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David Rock: So you sort of hacking that you're saying, Okay, well, how do we? You know it's all right. We need. We want to teach people to how to have better conversations. All right. Let's do it the week before performance season, performance management season. Right? So much more meaningful because it feels like right now. It's in in time. So tying things to to events so that they're much more meaningful is is pretty important. So you ha! You're hacking into that the positive aspects of of distance, bias.
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Emma Sarro: Yeah. Oh, I love that. I love that you brought up ownership. I think that's such an important, so so attached to a sense of purpose, but you know this is yours to take and use in your task. This is yours to take control of, I think. Is it is the the thing that we learn the most about. It's it's attached to your own sense of self most likely to learn about, understand, try to understand, remember absolutely. And that's such an easy hack to turn that around.
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David Rock: Yeah, yeah, so it's distance, time and ownership, the 3 kinds of distance that we think in terms of. So the brain thinks in terms of those 3 kinds of distance. So something that doesn't feel like you own it. Someone else owns it feels far away physically, and it feels like a long time away. It's hard to think about it. It's literally difficult to prioritize it, and difficult it might actually be the most important thing for you to think about.
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David Rock: That project might be the most valuable thing you should be putting your time on, and it's just hard right. And then the person who runs. That project comes to visit you for a week, and that whole week you just can focus on it really easily.
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David Rock: right? Even though you hardly see that person. They're in a whole other building. But they're in town right? Somehow. You can think about it. So it's a really interesting mechanism there to to use in different ways. So distance is one of the 5 seeds biases, similarity, expedience, experience, distance
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David Rock: and safety. And it's really a category of bias. That's very powerful. So anyway, that's meaningful. The second one's interesting. I use the word intriguing. So
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David Rock: intriguing in some way. Now, that means you're not giving away the punchline in the promo. You know you're leaving some, you know. You're leaving a little bit of like, you know, intrigue a little bit of like uncertainty in a positive way.
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David Rock: and in. There's a lot of different ways of making something intriguing.
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David Rock: one is like the people who are obviously, you know, presenting. So the faculty that are going to be presenting you're intrigued to learn from them.
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David Rock: One is you know, things are intriguing because they're sort of a different schema.
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David Rock: you know, like, Hey, we're going to talk about trust. But we're going to look at it through the lens of neuroscience or through the lens of working with horses, or through the lens of the way. Sea otters, you know, sleep. Who knows? Right? I'm just making these up, but but you like a really like a novel schema.
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David Rock: Is intriguing. It's like a different, a whole different kind of schema to to look at. A particular topic can make it intriguing. Right? Unexpected is intriguing novel, right? So so it's the people that are there. It's the branding of the program. It's the schema that you're looking through? What else comes up for you or folks in the chat? What else do you think we can do things to make things
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Emma Sarro: Oh, yeah.
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David Rock: Intriguing.
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Emma Sarro: I mean, I think, having something novel. This is what all marketing is designed is designed, after all, of the apps and all the technology that we use today is that tapping into that will focus on what's new and what's different. And that's what we're attracted to. So if you can, even market the event or the learning in a way that's something they haven't seen before. You might get this when you show up. And
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Emma Sarro: this is a new way of looking at at this, or, you know, like a new group that's going to be there.
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Emma Sarro: That will just encourage them just to focus.
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Emma Sarro: even if if it's for a little bit, just to kind of catch them, and it is where our brains are just designed to notice new things. And so you want to tap into that in addition to the making it meaningful, it's like, Get them to look at it. Get them? Yeah.
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David Rock: Yeah, something novel, something unexpected, something quirky. You know all of that.
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David Rock: And it's really really helpful. We ran a workshop in New York yesterday in the city. And you know, at the start, I said, Hey, we're going to have a guest. We're gonna have a guest presenter. Towards the end of the session, and I didn't say who, and it was like. I wonder who the guest presenter is, and the guest presenter was Niles our AI, which we've just released. A conversational version that you can literally have a dialogue with Niles, with with a really very human sounding voice, with incredibly rich
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David Rock: dialogues, blew me away, blew the whole room away. The room was just like suddenly went, oh, my God! But we had this, you know. 10 min conversation with Niles Niles stands for neuro, intelligent leadership, enhancing system, and you know Niles has a voice and a personality, and Niles is trained to coach you to bring you to your own insights or give you input
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David Rock: from, you know, from our research on the right way to lead. And it was just like so unexpected, so novel, so different and kind of, you know, really brought people in kind of kept people engaged. And then, when we did it, it was this lovely big surprise. So I just think something like intriguing is really important to make something compelling. So we've got meaningful.
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David Rock: We've got intriguing and then the 3rd one is important, and that's coherent and
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David Rock: coherent is a really really important thing and a much understudied issue in organizations. We've actually written a paper on coherence. It's a really, really important thing. If you're in the learning space, it should be something you study and understand. It's like the structural engineering of your ideas. It's like you're building bridges. But you've never understood. You know, engineering principles. You want to understand the engineering principles of ideas. That's what coherence is. And so coherence is
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David Rock: is essentially how things fit together.
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David Rock: And it's it's the way things kind of form a group. So some of you have noticed that I just did a mic drop
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David Rock: right meaningful intriguing, coherent right? Which is the coherence of a mic drop right of. And and that's what you want like a mic drop is compelling right? It's sort of the definition of a compelling moment is a mic drop moment. Right? So I've connected you know, compelling to mic to mic to coherence. Right? All together. So you'll remember. So coherence is a lot about how everything fits together
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David Rock: right? And it's not about acronyms all the time. Try to avoid those unless they're really really good. But it's literally, how does this idea fit with every other idea? How does this fit with the other programs I've done? How does it fit with the other goals that I have? It starts to be a little similar to meaningful. But it's actually different. It's the fit of everything together. Yeah. Talk to us a little bit about coherence in the brain and kind of how that works and what goes on there.
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Emma Sarro: Yeah, I mean, it's all linked to how our neurons are connected. Right? We form schemas based on things that we know. So we have a memory. It forms like a schema, and it pops up every time we remember that event. And then, if you attach one more thing to it, it's like a map that you attach one more thing to. It's easier to pull up and then generalize to other ideas. And so if you're able to attach something new to something they already know.
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Emma Sarro: Then you're able to understand it better. Oh, this fits into this schema in this way, and then you're able to understand it faster. It's easier to think about. So you're not forcing someone to think too hard to learn something. It just pops up a normal schema. So you're able to kind of allow someone to learn something easier. It's a little smoother, and it feels better to them because they already understand a bit more about it.
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Emma Sarro: So it just makes the whole learning experience more enjoyable.
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David Rock: Yeah. Yeah. So it's a yeah. It's a really important thing that that people don't
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David Rock: focus on enough. And there's, you know, like, there's some particular skills for coherence. One is simplifying. Because when you've got, you know, really complex ideas, complex sentences, you can't weave them together, right? So you've got to kind of strip things back to their core, and then you'll see connections more. Go look at different patterns. Look at the architecture of ideas that connect things together.
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David Rock: You know, obviously connect things to your organization's goals and mission and values and all those good things. But that's the those are the 3 most important things we found in terms of kind of storytelling
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David Rock: and and and it's you know, it's meaningful intriguing and coherent. But I've left out some. I've left out a really important thing. And it's really the.
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David Rock: It's really the secret as to how we got the the such incredible results, such incredibly high percentages. And it's really the.
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David Rock: there's a bit of a trick. And it's basically the the experience for people is so compelling itself. The learning experience is so incredibly compelling. And what that means is, it means you got a very high percentage of level, 4 insights. So the experience is very insight, rich and insights that moment where something really comes together and energizes you. And so you should be having level 4 insights, level 4 out of 5
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David Rock: insights the 5 level 5 is like life changing. Level 4 is very, very motivating. Level 3 is interesting. Some motivation level 2 is a feeling of an insight kind of coming and going, and you don't really remember it. Long
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David Rock: and level. One is an insight on the way. So this 5 point scale we developed called the Eureka scale. You really want to build experiences when it comes to learning experience that are really rich with insight and insight moments the opposite of that is, you watch a 5 min video and you wonder why you watched it
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David Rock: if you'll ever get that time back? Yes, sometimes I've watched like these these required videos. I'm like, Oh, my God.
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David Rock: it's just no insight, nothing useful, just like staring at information, you know. So you want to build experiences that incredibly insight rich and then put, put like really influential people into those experiences. Right? That's the secret that's really the secret right build, a learning experience that has no wasted time, no dead air, no like. Why did we do that exercise? Make it as short as possible?
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David Rock: Right? Build learning experiences that are as short as possible. Don't start with the oh, we've got a day program. We've got some content. Let's do a day program or half day program. Ask yourself, how do we like? Do something really transformational in an hour? How do we do something really transformational in 90 min? Right? So I think you know.
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David Rock: insight rich, short and get really influential people into the programs early and then share that out. And that's how we got 90 to 95 to 96% of big audiences engaged is that we just we designed for insight.
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David Rock: And then we get the right people in it. And then kind of spread the word, and that's kind of intuitive. But it just really really works from from our perspective.
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Emma Sarro: Yeah, you're speaking to now, you're kind of like shifted into. How do we design our learning and and the pieces that we put into it. Our ages model the social learning pieces that design for insight, and so it does. It does. It's worth it to design with intention. And how are you building in those insights? And so does this. How does this, then, you know, differ when you're designing for in person and virtual? Or how does it differ to make something compelling in person.
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David Rock: Great question. We actually, I have a whole program on this. We just launched this year called brain-based design and facilitation, and we could rename it as become an insight. Jedi.
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David Rock: that would be more compelling. Right. That would be more intriguing. Become an insight, Jetto, because you really what you learn to do is is design for insight in both virtual and in person environments. That's kind of the feature of the program. Every time I've run it, I just ran one in
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David Rock: in London, Singapore, Sydney, Melbourne, and what I've had every time I've run it is people like the biggest statement people come out with is. Oh, my God! I didn't realize how important insights are, and how how it's possible to really design. So you maximize them. So you really
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David Rock: have a lot of them, and they're strong and that you weave them together. So people are basically learning in this program how to design for insights called brain-based design and facilitation. There's a virtual version
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David Rock: that's coming up, I think, starts next week. My team can put a link in there. There's a few places still in that if people are interested, but it's a really, really fascinating skill. To be really good at is designing for insight.
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David Rock: You know, we wrote 3 papers on insight. One is basically how they happen in the brain. One is why they matter and how they change the brain. And then the 3rd one is how to measure them. So we've got this whole body of research. And we walk through that in the in that program and obviously research on ages and social learning, and we do a lot of work on then designing to particular cases you have and stuff. So so anyway, that's that's a really.
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David Rock: that's a big piece of it is that people have a great experience, and for me a great experience is level 4 insights. And above.
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David Rock: and you can measure that you can you can design that? Actually, we started to do something. Emma, you and I were just talking about this. We just started to talk about licensing our whole measurement approach
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David Rock: to organizations and we've got a whole way of measuring habits after a program, and that's an interesting piece of it as well.
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David Rock: to think about, anyway. So I think the the you know, the meaningful and intriguing and coherent. And then then, you know, really really insight rich experiences, and kind of getting the right people in 1st and then scaling from there.
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Emma Sarro: Yeah, right? Yeah. A lot of things coming up for me. But 1 1 question that Kate brought up is before you even design for insight. How do you convince people ahead of time like, how do you market this to your organization ahead of time? You want to show up for this thing, you know, you want to participate. You want to log on and and fully participate, as opposed to getting people dragging their feet.
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David Rock: Like, how do you do it?
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Emma Sarro: How do you get people there to begin with, before you even design? They don't know. It's going to be insight rich.
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David Rock: Yeah, I mean, I mean, that's the that's the me, you know. That's the meaningful intrigue. And probably the intriguing is the really important part is really.
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Emma Sarro: Title, it.
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David Rock: It's really working on that. And probably the best secret we have is run a great program for some influencers, for some people of real influence and get them sharing it out. Just go around and take a 30 second video of them talking about the program. And you know, send that to everyone. Low, low tech is great, just you know. And as soon as the program finishes, get get the right people to just say a few say a quick testimonial, and and share that as widely as you can.
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Emma Sarro: Yeah, yeah, I know what's coming up is that this is really, really anchoring on all of our understanding about how and why humans decide to change their behavior act. And it's really linked back to because other humans are doing it. And other humans that they respect are doing it. Those they focus on. So that's why the influencers who you choose as influencers are really important. And the biggest reason why people change is because they see others doing it. I mean people.
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Emma Sarro: They'll line up in a line when they see a line forming, and they don't even know why the line is there. But you'll see them do it.
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David Rock: Exactly. Yeah. So if you've got 10,000 employees and a thousand managers, most companies will think of investing in the top 100 and go quite deep with the top 100 and say, well, we don't have budget for the next 900. Our research is like, and the data we have says so compellingly that you're better to work a little bit with the 1,000 like. Give the 1,000 a few simple things to do that influences the 10,000 right? So you got 10,000 employees, a thousand managers, 100 top leaders
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David Rock: mostly. It's like, Oh, let's work with the top 10 or the top 100. No, let's let's give the top 1,000 something meaningful to work with, that influences every single employee. And this this is the everyone's or everyone model is that when everyone thinks that everyone's involved in something, you get much more momentum in a solution. So that's another part about making something compelling is that feeling? This is a company, wide initiative. This is a priority also, giving it a bit of a deadline like this is a priority, not for the whole year, but for the next quarter
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David Rock: and you know, for this quarter, we're gonna really work on growth mindset. Right? Maybe next quarter we'll work on psychological safety and then accountability, for example. But it's it's really
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David Rock: yeah, it's a, it's. It's kind of that little bit of priority. And deadline is is a good thing.
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Emma Sarro: Yeah.
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Emma Sarro: all right. Well, 1 1 final question that's kind of related to this idea is is, you know, we're talking about learning. We're talking about events. But what about just trying to convince someone or compel someone to listen to your idea? It's kind of along the same same line.
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David Rock: Yeah. And I think the other question that came up, I think it's interesting also is, what if you have to do a mandatory program like the government said, you have to do it. How do we get people? You know, how do we minimize the threat? But I think there's this interesting challenge with with being in the idea business, right? Whether it's our work or you're in the sustainability field or you're in education or anything like you're trying to change people. The challenge is the person trying to do. The changing
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David Rock: is often very passionate about the work. You know, I'm very passionate about our work right? We're often very, very passionate about the work. And when you're passionate about something, the other person actually gets this weird
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David Rock: I call it the evangelist effect right? They they actually feel a little bit of a status threat, because in your passion is this like sort of inherent unconscious statement that the other person is
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David Rock: broken and will be fixed by your idea. Right? So there's a bit of a status threat when you basically
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David Rock: you know, are excited about an idea you try to share. Right? Maybe it's growth mindset, right? You're passionate about growth, mindset. You share it with enthusiasm. And other people are like Whoa! So the more kind of passionate you are, the more people go in a way, state the more in your towards state, the more people go in in a way state. And partly it's status. And of course it's autonomy, right? Is they feel like you're telling them what to do. So it's this really interesting dilemma.
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David Rock: I saw this when I was in Davos in January, that, like all these passionate people trying to change the world in all these amazing ways, and you get such strong reaction, you know, sharing your ideas when you're enthusiast.
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David Rock: you got to pretend you don't care and not create that status and autonomy threat. So it's an interesting sort of tension in designing and rolling out. You know these different learning solutions. You can be too excited
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David Rock: about the solution. It's possible to be too excited and create sort of the evangelist problem or evangelist dilemma. It's an interesting challenge in there as well.
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Emma Sarro: Yeah. So what's the key, then to try to get them to have their own insight about your idea?
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David Rock: Yeah, ask questions. Yeah, ask questions. How would it be to if you had 20% more time? Because your conversations are faster, you know. So asking really clever questions.
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Emma Sarro: Yeah, so okay, one final question is coming in. The chat from Joe is, how how about enticing leaders to participate? So we have our own lead program and self paced. And how would we, you know, kind of convince. You know, the top leaders to join learning programs.
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David Rock: I mean, it really depends. The the way I do it is. I tell them that everyone else is is broken.
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David Rock: and that we need them to understand this idea so they can teach it to everyone else.
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David Rock: And it's it's a little bit that's a little bit being a little bit like
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David Rock: I don't know what the word is, but it's it's a little bit more subtle than that. But essentially, you know, this is something the whole organization needs. But we need your your support for it. And we need you across the idea and able to role model it because everyone else needs. Because then you're not creating a status threat. You're actually creating a status reward.
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David Rock: Like one of the best programs
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David Rock: that we've ever done is teaching leaders how to be internal coaches, and they love being an internal coach so much more than being given a coach. The result is very, very similar.
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David Rock: And so you're essentially saying, Hey, this this is really important for everyone else. But we need. We need you to understand this. And then they're much, much more likely to get on board. Oh, and, by the way, all your peers are involved. So you're going to need to. You don't look bad in front of your peers. So those are some of the the hacks. Let's go to that last question that I wanted to share a couple of really interesting developments that
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David Rock: that come up in the chat and some other things. But the final question, I think that was there was this this issue of what if something is required. What if basically, the government said you, you have to run this training? So so the question is, what can you do to give people like a little bit of unexpected autonomy, so unexpected rewards are stronger. So can you have 3 versions of this that people get to choose one of?
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David Rock: Can you give them, you know, different ways. They can experience it. Can you give them like some kind of feeling of choice in the process? It's limited. It's definitely limited right, but a little bit of certainty about why, it's important, like a bit of fairness, that everyone has to do this. It's not about them.
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David Rock: But if you could weave in some autonomy in a clever way like Hey, you could do this on your own, or you could choose to do it with 3 other people. In in this event, you know, you can all go through it together in this, podcast in this, you know webinar, or you could do it on your own, or you can do it in this
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David Rock: this way. Right? Give people a perception of some autonomy, and then watch everyone choose the fastest version, but maybe the fastest version was the one you were expecting everyone to do, anyway. But it's a little bit of a trick, but I think that can be a helpful thing.
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Emma Sarro: Yeah, a little bit of an offsetting effect here, right like, you know, the mandation is is going to be across the board. A bit of a threat. So what? Where can you kind of like offset that threat as much as possible?
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David Rock: Yeah, yeah, for sure. So a couple of quick announcements and I'll I'll get you to put some things in the chat if you're interested in learning more. We've we've had some breakthroughs with Niles, our AI, and we're definitely now starting to put this into companies. And it's an incredible experience with voice. So if you're from an organization interested in exploring like the world's smartest AI coach, it's it's quite a great one. It's not just gonna coach you. It's gonna literally make you smarter faster.
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David Rock: It actually makes you smarter like at the end of a coaching session. It tells you some themes and some things to practice and stuff. So if you're interested in that, just put the word Niles in your company name, and someone will reach out and talk to you about that. It's just starting to go to companies. But we're really excited about it. We've had some big breakthroughs in the way it works, and it really is the most powerful
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David Rock: tool, in fact. Some. Some very well educated companies in this are very excited about this. So Niles and your company name the second thing is, I mentioned this before. We are looking at now, licensing just our whole measurement approach. So if you're in a large organization, and you want to actually use our Bcp measurement, and you know, use all our data, collect data as well. Get all our formats. Then, for sure, just put Bcp, the letters Bcp stands for behavior change percentage and your company name.
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David Rock: and we will. We'll follow up with you about that. We mentioned brain-based designer facilitation that's coming up. We've put the link in about that, the other thing. And this is a big announcement, Emma, do you want to tell everyone about the summit. We've now got the dates, and some of the themes let folks know about that.
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Emma Sarro: Yeah, yeah, we've nailed down the dates. It's going to be November 12th and 13th Virtual again, global again. And a 2 day event. It's the theme of this is thrive through complexity, which is really resonating now with all of us, and 2 days of sessions around the most essential habits to perform, to support high performing organizations.
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Emma Sarro: How do you develop the best leaders in an era of AI? How do we collaborate with AI to boost our thinking to amplify our thinking, optimize agility, really build and integrate ratings and not lose sight of humans. So all of these topics, a number of them, I know that we're putting together all of our initial announcements to be sent out. So you'll definitely get some things in the mail. You'll see it online soon with a place to register. So it's all. It's incredibly exciting for all of us here.
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Emma Sarro: Something else to start planning.
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David Rock: Yeah, it's gonna be a lot of AI focus from lots of perspectives. And a big thing they're working on at the moment is literally, how do you use AI to make you smarter because of the research coming out, showing the opposite? If you don't use right? So we're looking at how you can use it to make you meaningfully smarter. And there are definitely some ways. But you've got to actually, ironically understand thinking better to do that.
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David Rock: So. And you know, that's what we've been kind of working on, and for a long time is understanding and improving thinking. So yeah, I can see folks coming in. Niles stands for neurointelligent leadership enhancing system. And if you put Niles and your company name, someone will reach out
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David Rock: and some last quick questions, yeah, the summit is going to be virtual this year. We hope to get back to in person. But November 12th and 13.th Try and keep the day. It's also going to be around the clock. So there's going to be a North American program, Apac and Amia. So if you're anywhere else in the world, you'll be able to log in at local times to an amazing parallel program. So fantastic session. Emma, it's possible to make things compelling.
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David Rock: The data says it is. It's much better than mandatory thanks for running such a compelling conversation today together. Any closing thoughts.
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Emma Sarro: Yeah, no, it's great. I enjoyed this conversation. I think something was coming up before. Oh, yeah, next week we're actually diving into what you're terming the stuff of thought which is really around all of the different kinds of thinking like, how do we develop skills just to be a better collaborator with AI, because we can use AI to actually improve our thinking and really go against what some of the research is showing.
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Emma Sarro: Actually, in some ways, if we use it in the wrong way, it can, it can make it worse. So how do you boost your thinking with AI be a great collaborator with AI as opposed to, you know, not working well with it. So that's.
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David Rock: Yeah, it should be a fun session called the stuff of thought. And it's gonna be a fun session. We're going to be kind of going deep and getting feedback from you and all sorts of things. So thanks so much. Thanks. Everyone have a great week. See you next week. Bye-bye.
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Emma Sarro: So thank you all. I hope you enjoyed today's conversation. You'll love the podcast show. If you liked this. So make sure, you subscribe. You can see all of our past sessions. So look for your brain at work wherever you enjoy listening to podcasts, like spotify and this is where we log off for today. I hope you all have a great weekend, and on behalf of today's guests and the Nle I team behind the scenes. Thank you again for joining us, and we will see you here next week. Thank you all.