Join us for a deep dive into the foundational research of what drives humans to connect with each other, to feel a sense of togetherness, and in contrast, what creates division.
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Erin Wickham: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of your brain at work. Live! I will give us all a couple seconds to get out of the waiting room and into today's session. But we thank you for being here and spending the time with us for the next hour. As we talked about today's topic. If you don't know me, I'll be your host. Today. I'm Erin Wickham, Senior Director of Insight design at the Neuro Leadership Institute, and we're happy to have you back for our regulars and for our newcomers. Welcome. We're excited to have you with us for the 1st time today
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Erin Wickham: in today's episode. We'll explore the foundational research of what drives humans to connect with each other, to feel a sense of togetherness. And in contrast, what causes division. Now, as I quickly share some housekeeping notes, feel free to drop in the chat or the comment box. If you're joining us on social and let us know where you're joining in from today. It's always nice to see the reach of these webinars.
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Erin Wickham: See, Emma is from New York. We have Maryland in the chat, Boston. I'm from New York as well. A lot of the United States so far. Oh, there we go! There's the Netherlands and Austria. We're getting some people from Europe as well, so excited to have you all along.
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Erin Wickham: We do suggest that you put your phone on. Do not disturb and quit any email or messaging apps while you join us today. This helps you to just get the most out of today's conversation, and we do love interaction. So feel free to share your thoughts and comments in the chat as we go along. We'll refer to them throughout the session.
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Erin Wickham: Our 1st guest for today. You know him well coined the term Neural Leadership Institute when he co-founded Nli over 2 decades ago with a professional doctorate, 4 successful books under his name, and a multitude of bylines ranging from the Harvard Business Review to the New York Times. A warm welcome to our co-founder and CEO. Dr. David Rock, Hi, David
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David Rock: Hey, Aaron? Good to see you happy. Friday.
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Erin Wickham: Good to see you as well. Happy Friday. And then our moderator today holds a Phd. In neuroscience from New York University. She leads the research team at the Neuro Leadership Institute, where she focuses on translating cognitive neuroscience and social neuroscience into actionable solutions for organizations. A warm welcome to the Senior Director of Research today, Dr. Emma Saro, Hi. Emma
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Emma Sarro: Hi erin! Thanks, hey? David! Happy Friday.
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David Rock: Happy Friday. Such an interesting and topical conversation today
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Emma Sarro: Yeah, we seem to always dive into the tough ones, don't we? For anyone who's been with us? We've been doing a bunch of tough ones. But it's it's a great, it's a great topic. It's needed right now.
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David Rock: Yeah, I think it's about making sense, you know, helping us make sense. And we want to do our best to stay away from actual politics and really get to the core of what's going on in our brains as humans gathering together in organizations like, what's what's going on in our brains, right? You know, in the world of organizations that can help us to function better individually. And as teams and whole organizations like. So you know, where are the insights from the science to help us all
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David Rock: deliver deliver on our mission whatever that is. That's kind of what we're looking at.
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Emma Sarro: Yeah. Yeah. And something I read recently, which was a bit of an insight for me. And it makes sense is that the workplace is social is a social experiment like it is social, no matter what work you're doing, you are in a social environment. And so the social dynamics are. They come 1st and they impact everything that we do in work. So how? How well the work comes out depends on how you manage those social interactions
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David Rock: Yeah. Every every organization in a lot of ways is a giant experiment. It's a giant experiment with a set of different conditions in each one. If you took a hundred companies of roughly the same size.
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David Rock: and you isolated their values just just looked at their different values. Right? There's an experiment in what happens when a company has different values, then you isolate. How do they do goal setting differently right? And these 100 different companies have this different experiment around.
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David Rock: you know, goal setting, but also around remuneration and around team size. So they're all based on these hypotheses that are mostly untested and just kind of somewhat random built by the senior leaders. Beliefs, right? But there are all these sort of conditions set like, we're going to pay people this way, we're going to motivate people this way. We're going to organize them this way. And then we're going to hopefully increase performance as a result. And no one's really ever studied, because it's very, very hard thing to do.
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David Rock: sort of isolating those conditions and saying, Hey, what really works? But they're all these very
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David Rock: long term decades long experiments in kind of how to motivate, manage, and pay people that maybe in a you know, a couple more years AI will be able to kind of help us pull that apart and be able to see the patterns in in kind of those big experiments. But that's kind of how I see large organizations, especially as an experiment hypothesis being tested out around how to organize humans better
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Emma Sarro: Yeah, yeah. And it amazes me that we don't. I mean, this is what we do. But understanding how the social brain works can actually make everything else work better like hat. And we'll talk about this today. But just like understanding that will drive motivation better and drive our interactions better. I mean, you'll get better outcomes. So why not understand it first? st But oftentimes we default to what's worked in the past or what we think has worked in the past without actually updating
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David Rock: Yeah, I associate it like, you got a whole. Imagine you got a room full of computers, and everyone studies the way the computer functions. But no one studies the way they communicate right. No one looks at the actual communications between them. But humans have incredible amount of communication going on between us consciously, but even more unconsciously. And I think that's what we're trying to do is bring awareness to. You know, the the connections between people which is really the topic for today
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Emma Sarro: Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, so for everyone, we're not just talking about political differences here, we're talking about a number of things that get in the way right that cause this this rising divisiveness, I mean, I mean, across the board. The numbers of you know, reported incivility or uncivil behaviors, rudeness in the workplace. It's all rising. I mean, this is no surprise to anyone, right? But the reasons why
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Emma Sarro: vary. There are definitely one huge thing or generational differences. I mean, we've got what? 4 to 5 generations in the workplace.
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Emma Sarro: They, you know, how do they relate to each other? They have whole different belief systems what's important to them other things. One. We were just talking about this, but the return to office mandates and those organizations that are mandating individuals back to the office report a 63% increase in uncivil behaviors. This was just based on some recent research. And that makes sense. You're adapting back
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Emma Sarro: to interpersonal dynamics in person, and a number of other factors are getting in the way organizations forgot how to do it.
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David Rock: One of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite neuroscientists, Lisa Feldman Barrett. We've had her on the show some years ago, but she said. You know nothing jangles a primate like crowding.
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David Rock: nothing jangles a primate like crowding. There's some stories in the media this week in a few of the big journals and and newspapers about, you know, companies sort of forcing everyone back in. But there's literally not enough seats for half the people, and everyone's like jammed in hallways. And you know all of this. So
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David Rock: it's it's there's some. There's some challenges with that. But you know, bringing people back together. There's this, you know, Big burst in incivility happening? Probably not just because there's not the desks that people aren't used to, you know, working around large numbers of of folks
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Emma Sarro: Yeah, and the stress of changing right? Like we, you know, losing your autonomy. Now, having to go back, changing your day to day. So that's a stressor in and of itself. And now individuals have to manage that and get their work done. So that's 1 definite stressor right? Causing maybe leading to incivility. Another one is just differences in values and beliefs. And we were just talking a bit about that. But there's there's evidence that
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Emma Sarro: individuals most individuals want organizations to take a stance on important issues. And so, if that differs with an individual's belief, set of beliefs, individuals are more likely to, you know, engage in these in these uncivil conversations or debates.
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David Rock: There's a there's a thing called sacred values. And in the last decade some neuroscientists have actually been studying that and kind of defining it, and a sacred value is something that you you
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David Rock: you hold very, very dear. So you know, for a lot of people that's a religion for a lot of people. It's a political perspective. But it can also just be a belief system about, you know, work from home versus work, from the office. Right? Some people are very, very passionate about that topic, but generally sacred values are things people are willing to, you know. Go into conflict over, and perhaps even, you know, go into violence over
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David Rock: and at the extreme. You know you have fundamentalists and others that are, you know, literally willing to, you know, kill and die for that sacred belief. But in the workplace, you know, I think the sacred beliefs that are, you know, are relevant. Here are things like political beliefs, but also religious beliefs. And you know beliefs about, you know also just beliefs about people like some. Some folks will be very, very
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David Rock: wedded to fixed mindset that people don't get better. And people just need to be assessed. And you just need to bring the smartest people you can in and get everyone else out, and you know there's no point trying to grow. People like there'll be people very passionate about fixed mindset and some very passionate about growth mindset. So I think you've sort of got, you know, political and religious beliefs. But then there's a bunch of others, and those sacred values are actually processed in the in the brain quite differently.
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David Rock: Then, you know other kinds of decisions. You want to talk a little bit about that and what you've seen there
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Emma Sarro: Yeah, I mean. So from what they understand, engaging or just kind of thinking about your sacred value is very associated with someone's sense of self, and and the closer it is
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Emma Sarro: to someone's sense of identity. It's so deeply wedded. What they find is that individuals are just more willing to engage in behaviors that they wouldn't necessarily engage in otherwise, and these behaviors might be violent behaviors in some cases, or in the workplace, hopefully not violent in the workplace, but in the workplace, maybe more willing to debate or argue or engage in behaviors that might exclude someone else.
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Emma Sarro: And there's actually also some evidence suggesting that exclusion is a factor that can lead to someone
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Emma Sarro: kind of arguing their sacred belief or making it more likely for them to engage. And so you can imagine when organizations either take a stance on some issue or one group is arguing one issue that differs from your belief system, this sacred belief, you're more willing to actually engage in a way that debate. So you can imagine all of these things can just lead to conflict
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David Rock: Yep, there's lots of things driving that right now, for sure. And obviously one of the bigger ones is political differences. And you know, those differences are really big and people getting really passionate about it. And you know, we said, in the last couple of weeks we've been talking about this like just, you know, don't have political conversations in the workplace just like you shouldn't be having religious conversations in the workplace or conversations about sexuality like you. Just you just don't talk about those things in the workplace.
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David Rock: Everyone's better off when you don't talk about those things, but it doesn't mean that people are not getting worked up
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David Rock: and anxious and upset and stressed, and taking that out and being uncivil on others. So you know we're not, I think, as a general. You know we shouldn't be talking about that stuff, but we should be talking about civility.
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David Rock: I know we studied civility and instability in the last couple of years. Give us the cliff notes, Emma, on what the research is saying about incivility itself as a construct other than it's kind of getting worse. What do we know about it? And what do we know about it from neuroscience?
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Emma Sarro: Yeah, other than that. And we can talk about this, too, other than that. It's incredibly costly for organizations, because what ends up happening in the brain is that we end up focusing on it for hours, for days. Maybe we lose a whole day of work because
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Emma Sarro: we perceive incivil behavior towards us and in civil behavior it's hard to. It's hard to see sometimes, too. So from looking from the outside, I mean, maybe you know, someone felt that they weren't. Their perspective wasn't listened to in a meeting, or someone interrupted them, or these very subtle behaviors, which makes it really difficult to be tangible and measurable.
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Emma Sarro: And there are obviously more obvious behaviors, too. So oftentimes the research points to 2 different levels of behavior, the subtle ones and the more obvious ones. Both of them are equally as damaging or impactful on individuals. Right
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David Rock: Yeah, and I,
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Emma Sarro: Threat, response.
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David Rock: I see some questions coming up. We're going to get to that question of sort of what do we do about this? We'll definitely get to that, I promise just kind of laying the foundation. So keep the questions coming. But we're going to kind of lay out some of the science and some of what's going on, and then we'll show you like what the research is suggesting that we really do about this. We'll get to that shortly, for sure.
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Emma Sarro: Yeah, yeah. And what happens? And I'd love for you to talk a bit about this. But the escalation that happens so because this is an interaction. And we understand how how threats impact individual right? It impacts their ability to self-regulate. And how can that kind of get out of control
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David Rock: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think there's an underlying. There's a thing called allostatic load, a double LO. Allostatic load, which is basically a summary of lots of different biomarkers that includes immune function and cortisol levels and
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David Rock: heart rate all sorts of things. It's essentially like the load in total of your stresses right? And people kind of wake up in the morning with a certain allostatic load, and you can measure it by a little bit of saliva where they measure cortisol level as a proxy, and you can take blood and see immune function. But just, you know, even just with cortisol, you can see cortisol levels spiking and going up and down
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David Rock: from different experiences, different times of the day. And we and what you put in organizations essentially, is is much higher, baseline, allostatic load right now is that people are waking up in the morning at a higher, you know, threat level.
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David Rock: And what happens is when you're already at a threat level. Then other things that are also a bit of a threat put you at a much stronger threat level. So you spiral much more easily, and I know a lot of people reading a lot and getting anxious into the night. You start losing sleep. Your self-regulation goes down, and
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David Rock: you know, things annoy you even more. And so you've got this sort of incivility cycle happening in organizations where people are coming to work anxious, you know small things setting them off
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David Rock: and then things get kind of, you know. Get kind of difficult. But I guess. Let's, I guess. Let's yeah, do we? Do we want to dig into the science of of civility? Or should we go into in group outgroup? Where where do you want to go next?
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Emma Sarro: Yeah, let's dive into. Because one thing that was coming up as you were talking about this is, yeah, we individually, we become more hypersensitive. Right? We talked about this. I feel like we've been talking about this for the last couple of years, because, coming out of the pandemic, I think we were also
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Emma Sarro: for different reasons, in a similar state, where we had individuals at different levels of stress or prior stress. And so small things could kind of set individuals off, because, biologically, you're much more sensitive. And so you might have an emotional reaction to something that wouldn't seem as terrible to others around you. But even the interactions, when we're less
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Emma Sarro: control, we have less self control. We might say something. Another individual will kind of amplify that reaction, and so that incivility spiral will just kind of continue. And because
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Emma Sarro: all of this leads to less self-control, we're more likely to engage in behaviors. We wouldn't normally. And so that's that's the worry, I would say for organizations is that you really need to create an environment where civility is is foundational, so that individuals you don't have these things spiraling out of control like we never want.
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Emma Sarro: Yeah.
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David Rock: Yeah, I think there's a continuum. There's like, you know, civility is kind of minimum viable product for how you want people interacting right civility, and let's talk about the habits of civility in a moment you got civility, and then you got sort of further along the continuum towards the positive. You've got respect right? And then, further along the continuum, I think you've got inclusion. And then further along the continuum, you've got psychological safety
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David Rock: right? So you know, civility is sort of the basic like, don't make things worse. Right? Respect is like, make things slightly better. Inclusion is like really involve people, and psychological safety is, you know, get people really challenging each other, arguing well and really getting into a dynamic. And that's ultimately what you want. But a lot of organizations are in a place of just, you know, needing people to be civil. So what did we see? I know we did a lot of research on this. What do we see as the critical
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David Rock: habits for that sort of foundational level of of don't make things worse of, you know. Let's make sure we're civil with each other. What did the science say about that?
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Emma Sarro: Yeah, I mean, it is, it is really, really foundational and basic. The 1st one is really just like, notice your own self. Notice your emotions be able to, you know sense when you are starting to feel like a bit threatened or angry, or a little hot, right? A little emotional. Notice that, and then and then
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Emma Sarro: use a self-control strategy. So then, inhibit your reaction. Right? So the 1st one is, notice your emotions. Notice, then, inhibit them. So engage in a strategy of self-control, and then and then you communicate and communicate cleanly is how we how we use the term. And that kind of speaks to, and I'd love you to talk to this, but speaks to like. How we can create a civil environment is the clean communication
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David Rock: Yeah, yeah. And it's really an interesting concept, clean communication. So we'll put this on a continuum, or maybe on a continuum this way, where you've got sort of, you know. Reward on the right and threat on the left, and you can literally, you know, put a hundred statements that you would make in response to a comment or an action. And you could. You could put it exactly where it lives right and in the in the sort of middle is clean on the right is, you know, respectful, and then.
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David Rock: you know, even supportive. But what you don't want to do is be on the left where you're making a comment. And it basically activates a threat in the other person. So so clean communication is something that that you know doesn't activate a threat in the other person. Right? And so you imagine a scenario like, you know, someone looks like they're taking a very long lunch.
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David Rock: and they're a colleague. You're not necessarily their manager, but you know you feel like they're letting the team down, you know. Clean communication is not.
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David Rock: you know. Why are you taking so long for lunch. Right? That's not civil, right? And you can see, that's gonna create a threat. It's gonna create a threat to status in particular. So you know, clean, clean communication is is, you know, can be difficult in that context. It's gonna depend on your relationship with that person and how you know how they are.
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David Rock: but you know you might. You might say something like, you know. Is there anything I can do to help you? You know, with the projects you're working on, you're looking like you're you know. You got a lot on your plate at the moment. So you know, something something that doesn't activate threat for that person. But it's it's definitely a bit of a a bit of a of a learning.
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David Rock: It's a bit of a learning journey to kind of see like look in all these different scenarios, these things will actually create threat. These things will start to spiral down. These kinds of comments, won't. They're not necessarily even that respectful. They're just clean. So you're not. You're not sort of exacerbating. So civility is not necessarily asking everyone to be kind.
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David Rock: It's just. It's the absence of unkind in a way. That's why I call it kind of a minimum viable product. And it's it's it's not saying we want you all to be nice to each other. It's saying we want to focus on work
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David Rock: we want. We want to get back to work.
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David Rock: You don't have to be nice to each other. We just ask you not to be uncivil. And so just showing that distinction of what's clean communication, what's not, and really just building that muscle, getting people practicing. That's kind of the heart of it, although it starts with
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David Rock: noticing, you know, noticing your reaction, noticing that you're annoyed.
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David Rock: You know, noticing that that they're
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David Rock: You know that those things are going on
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Emma Sarro: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And and I think the most important part of this is, yes, having those those clean statements to say are important. But you won't necessarily be able to do that unless you're able to control your emotions first, st right? And to at least just pause. And we we talk about this all the time when we talk about our emotional regulation strategies, they're so important. And that's that's the primary thing in in this whole set of habits is you really need to pause first, st you need to notice yourself
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Emma Sarro: before you react with a statement that might not seem out of bounds first, st but it can cause. It can be one of those subtle and civil behaviors that causes the next person to then ruminate on it all day.
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Emma Sarro: and you know the other aspect of this that just came up is just the the idea of incivility as a contagion right is how quickly it spreads. It's not just you and the person that you're interacting with, it's everyone around you. It spreads. We've talked about this before, but it spreads like a virus that behavior will spread through an organization, and individuals are just as impacted by observing it in others.
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Emma Sarro: And then on top of that, the idea of you, if you are a leader and your emotional state, and how you react and and whether you're being rude or that you are, you know, in a mood that is maybe more negative, it'll more likely pass to others right? Because your team is looking at you and focus on you more than others.
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David Rock: Yeah. Yeah. And it's very. It's very
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David Rock: yeah, it really spreads very quickly.
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David Rock: Particularly senior leaders. Like, if a senior person is uncivil others will, you know, quickly jump on it and and feel like they can do that.
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David Rock: And you see that you know you see that in a you know, in a team you'll see an organization. You might even see it in a country. And you know, you're seeing you're seeing that kind of spread happening as well. So yeah, some interesting, you know, some interesting questions and comments coming in.
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David Rock: and I think, the you know the the focus we're looking at here is sort of how do we?
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David Rock: How do we get organizations? More, you know, like better, better functioning at this time, you know, within civility there with the challenges there, how do we kind of.
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David Rock: you know, get organizations kind of back to work in a way that's healthy and and you know, reducing conflict. And I think, as a general rule, like not talking about these kind of explosive issues is a really important point. But then the question becomes, What do you do next? So let's dig into the science to answer that and explore kind of what goes on. There's a there's a really important construct to understand about the human brain
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David Rock: as it relates to social interactions, and that there's a very, very, very deep mechanism that happens unconsciously with every person we look at. And it's a classification. It's on a continuum, but it is very binary, and and the classification is, are you in my in group or in my out group?
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David Rock: And you can be quite far along the continuum or just along. But it is pretty clear which one people are, and it's very, very deep in the brain. It's pretty much impossible not to have this happen with every person.
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David Rock: generally new people that you meet are in your out group. So unless you're like
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David Rock: like, let's say you're in a you know another in a foreign country. You don't speak the language, and you you meet a someone who speaks your language. It pretty much won't matter their age, gender race other things you'll feel in group with that person because of the differences right with generally, but
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David Rock: with the exception of that scenario or someone who's, you know. Often people who are very, very attractive. We accidentally feel in group with or familiar faces we've seen on TV or someone. So with those exceptions, oh, and the exception of having too much to drink. Suddenly people become your in group.
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David Rock: But with those exceptions generally, people are not trusted, and we we keep our distance from people we don't know, and what that looks like in the brain is very, very interesting.
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David Rock: When someone, when the brain says, this is different. This is a different person to me. What it's essentially saying is, don't let their ideas into my head. Don't, don't kind of even think their thoughts because they could be trying to manipulate me. And what Jason Mitchell at Harvard and some others have found is that when you take information in from someone you think is your out group.
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David Rock: you process it in a very shallow way, and this is the case completely independent of what they say. This is the case, for, like physical movement across the screen. Even when they take the person out. It's just dot points reflecting a person like you. It's very basic. It's a very basic process in the brain. So out group members
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David Rock: processed in a very shallow way. Now, when you process information again, any kind of information from an in-group member, even just their physical movement, right? But especially their words and ideas. It's very similar to thinking your own thoughts. And you process much more robustly. You create pictures of what they're saying you relate to it. So the whole process of perception is much, much richer, just based on
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David Rock: in group or out group. So out group members, very shallow processing in group members, very deep processing. And so it's just this mechanism of, Do I trust this person or not? Are they in my in group or my out group. And a big piece of that is, do we have shared goals, or do we have competing goals
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David Rock: right? And a lot of the time, you know. Imagine politically, like, we've got competing goals, you know a lot of the political arguments, the sense of competing goals, you know, I want to create a more fair society. You want to create a society in a different way, or whatever the axis is, we feel like we're in competition
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David Rock: in that way. So that's that's a basic mechanism. So there's sort of a really, really big impact in 3 levels perception. We just talked about. Briefly, then, let's talk about empathy and motivation. But, Emma, you know, what do you want to add? In terms of the sort of basic mechanism of in group and out group
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Emma Sarro: I would say. One thing I love about this research is the understanding how easy it is to form an in-group, and I think that's maybe one of the misconceptions is. Oh, once once you're on a team, that's it. It's difficult. You'll see everyone outside as an out group. But it is so easy. What the research shows is you could
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Emma Sarro: literally just say, in a group of people, people on this side your group, a people on that side of your group. B. No matter who you are, what you look like where you come from. You are now part of this in group. It is so easy. And they with the way that they've shown this this minimal
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Emma Sarro: paradigm. Basically, you can show individuals that don't even have faces right? There's no distinguishing features. And now you have all of these benefits of in group. You understand them better. You're more empathetic as we'll talk about. You're more motivated to help them. It's just such an easy way to group individuals and benefit from them. So the way that you can do this in the workplace is so easy
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Emma Sarro: focusing on that. We're all working on this one thing together. This is our shared set of goals. And immediately you have these benefits.
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Emma Sarro: So that's the one thing about this research that I think is so profound and and can be used so well in organizations is, how can you remind individuals of your shared goal. Which kind of stems back to the civility issue is, how can you in these interactions in these situations? Maybe that's the civility statement is, what are we working on together? Let's bring us back to the shared goal.
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David Rock: Right? Yeah. And and this is this is a really important point Emma's making. And let's let's dig into it a bit more, and then we'll circle back to empathy and motivation and the differences. But the research shows really, really, clearly that
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David Rock: that that you can create in group and out group, using really trivial phenomena, like just dividing a group of 50 people into, you know, 2 groups of 25. Give them a red flag, a green flag and see what happens when they interact. And it just like really process, they really process differently. Just, you know, we love to break into teams and have opposing teams like it's a very natural dynamic. We're like, always ready for it.
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David Rock: And there's a sort of it's a bit of a joke. But actually someone wrote a paper on this that the whole world would be better if we found aliens aggressive aliens, because now we would all be in group with a separate out group.
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David Rock: But someone actually wrote a scientific paper on this and explaining why it would be relevant. Because right now, sort of the whole planet is, you know, we have in group out group. But if we had a shared enemy we'd have all in group here. And, in fact, Independence Day the movie played with that in Independence Day 2, where they had sort of 20 years of peace because we found aliens. It was this sort of surprising feature in the story. But anyway.
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David Rock: the point of that is, it's really really easy to create in group and out group, out of a group of people, and the effects are very deep.
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David Rock: But the research on how you create in group is so clear. It's 1 of the clearest signals in anything we've seen. And it's it's shared tactical goals. So I use the word tactical meaning. They're not lofty goals like world peace, and being a good parent.
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David Rock: be a good parents, very lofty. It's very hard. But, they're not like these sort of big picture goals.
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David Rock: There are things you have to do. And the reason that's important is that when someone else becomes a partner in having to like
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David Rock: plan something, and the word planning is important when you have to include that person in your planning. You're actually including that person in your premotor cortex, like the representation of that person, is now in your premotor cortex, as like someone you need to complete this step, and we can get much more technical. But basically, this person becomes part of your plans, and in your brain you now flip them to in group
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David Rock: but if there's nothing you really have to do together, you can't actually imagine yourself, even, you know, playing with matchboxes together, or cars or anything. It's like it doesn't work. But if you even just imagine any task you have to do together, it's amazing. It starts to shift so shared tactical goals really, really important. So just sitting down and saying, Look, we both want to make our company more successful, probably doesn't do it.
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David Rock: But look, we both want to make our. You know, our target this month will be we'll probably be more effective if that's relevant to both of you. So shared goals is really the kind of punchline to today's session. And then the second punchline is shared goals, and the 3rd punchline is shared goals, and like, really, everything
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David Rock: comes back to kind of bringing people back to things they have to do together. Right? All this stuff going on in the world got it. What do we have to do together this week or this month?
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David Rock: And the more that you do that, the more like you do that, the more you actually create in group. And and I'll tell you a couple of reasons why it's important. 1, st one is perception, right? Our group members
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David Rock: shocking perception, right? Perceptual errors, misreading, misunderstanding. Basically, you talk to our group members, you just you hardly. You hardly process what they say. So of course you make a lot of mistakes in their intentions and their goals, and you see them as crazy, mean, stupid, or lazy, because you're hardly processing what they're saying.
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David Rock: Right? So our group members just on a perceptual level. We make all these mistakes, but the empathy level is fascinating, and we've been talking about this in your brain at work for a little while that we're actually more motivated to see an out group member fail than we are motivated to see an in-group member succeed.
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David Rock: that the reward network in the brain fires up more when an outgroup member fails like we're really excited to see outgroup members fail in all senses of the word that includes experience. Pain, you know, lose a game, you know, like, perform badly, like all kinds of kind of pain and threat, like when an out group member is experiencing something bad. We feel very rewarded
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David Rock: and more rewarded than when an in-group member wins. And it's a really important point. There's a bunch of different studies about this, but we really our motivations really go there. But now I mentioned empathy. Then I've gone to motivations. The empathy side is interesting. We have very little automatic empathy without group members.
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David Rock: whereas we have this automatic empathy within group members and what it looks like like. There's some studies of you know, putting a needle in someone's cheek or a cotton bud. And you but you're actually seeing a picture of it, not a real thing. But you're seeing a picture of a needle versus a cotton bud going into someone's cheek, and that person is similar or different to you. And when you see someone similar to you with a needle. You get a pain response in your brain just watching it. And when you see a cotton bud with someone similar, you get no pain response, right?
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David Rock: And when you see a needle going into an outgroup member, you get no pain response in your brain.
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David Rock: the same as when you see a cotton bud in that person? Right? I could slow down, explain that clear, but basically, people different to you, experiencing pain. You don't register it. People similar to you, experiencing pain, you actually register it as pain, and you pay attention. So you have. You have an automatic
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David Rock: empathy, and people didn't rate feeling differently about those pictures, and this has been done a few different ways. It's not about any particular race, it's just about difference. And so what you see is
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David Rock: these sort of is that the way we experience empathy is so different, based on in group and out group? Really, this isn't much. There isn't much
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David Rock: automatic empathy, and it's even harder to have effortful empathy to do what's called perspective taking. It's very hard to imagine the mind of someone that you think has different goals to you. Someone's got competing goals to you in your out group. You just don't kind of process their goals very well. So you're not doing automatic empathy, and you're not doing the effortful empathy which is called perspective taking. So both of those are really not great, and you want to see them fail.
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David Rock: Right? So now you see why we don't want out groups.
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David Rock: So even though it'd be nice to talk about politics, sexuality, religion, all sorts of things. It'll create out groups.
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David Rock: And we want to do anything to avoid creating out groups. We want to do what we can to create in groups and even a lot of let me say something controversial, a lot of well intentioned inclusion strategies accidentally created out groups. And we don't really want to do that we want to do everything we can inside organizations to make sure everyone's in an in group, or we mess with perception, empathy, and motivation in ways that don't work for anyone. So that's
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David Rock: that's, you know, that's kind of the big piece we wanted to get across today. So lots of good questions and comments coming up, Emma, anything you want to add, or should we dig into some questions? There
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Emma Sarro: Yeah, well, what's coming up? I mean, this research is so fascinating, and it is so clear and clean cut in the act. It's been repeated multiple times. And it's also one of the things that I'm so that makes me so sad for our brains, and how our brains have developed because it's not necessarily a great thing, right? That we it isn't great thing. We actually feel more rewarded and joyful when individuals outside of our group
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Emma Sarro: feel pain. And that's just such a. It's a fact. It's been proven several times over. And it's sad that that's the case. And so that means that we need to be really intentional about making sure that everyone is included like you said, because it's so easy to see people outside of our group
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Emma Sarro: just as easy as it is to see people in part of our in group. And so it does mean we have to ensure that everyone is included and and individuals are bringing up like De and I efforts. Right? So that's that's an incredible part of how how that training occurs, and how those initiatives are rolled out is to ensure that everyone is part of that. That whole initiative
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David Rock: Yeah, we just ran a whole series of sessions. We did them as an experiment. We love experiments. We did an experiment with 30 min sessions. And we just ran
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David Rock: 4 of them in a series called The Right Way to Do Dei today, and we ran the 1st one on bias. So the foundational science of the right way to think about bias, second, one on inclusion, the 3rd one on speaking up
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David Rock: and psychological safety, and the 4th one on the business case, which we just did this week. And so the Shorter sessions kind of punch you with the, you know core research. And we're going to put those into A into a kind of email with with this link to all the podcasts that's going to come out shortly. But the the you know, one of the common themes through. That is just as you're doing any Dei efforts, just really anchoring on shared goals and not accidentally creating
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David Rock: competing goals and creating accidental out groups. And certainly that's
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David Rock: that's been a really important feature of the of the research. We actually wrote a paper that we had huge arguments over the years about internally, about whether we even should publish and should share. It was called take the focus off difference, and it's a controversial paper because it can be taken out of context, and you can read it as like.
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David Rock: you know, we shouldn't be celebrating individuality. It's a complex debate. But essentially, we should be celebrating individuality within the context of shared goals. So the more companies focus on, you know, celebrating different communities, the more you accidentally create out group. So you've got to kind of create in group, create this common goal and then celebrate individuality within that. And this goes back to
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David Rock: you know, diverse teams, and you know some. There's there's a there's a you know. There's a thing, you know, when you put a diverse team together, you
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David Rock: you you actually get more friction, and that friction is important and necessary.
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David Rock: But you've you've really got to work pretty hard to make sure that friction works. And is there
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David Rock: because, you know, it's sort of like, you know. Imagine you're going out for dinner, and you invite people that basically disagree with you and see the world really differently. It doesn't sound like it's going to be a fun dinner, right? If you invite 10 people who literally all see the world really differently to you. And you don't actually kind of start with a shared goal. And what you're all there for.
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David Rock: it's just going to go all over the shop right? And in a similar way, as we build these diverse teams, we've really got to have these common goals that we're working on. And then within those common goals, we want to celebrate our differences. But within those common tactical goals. Now let's look at all this from different perspectives. But you got to start with the common goal first, st
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Emma Sarro: Yeah, yeah. And I think there's value in thinking about those diverse perspectives and individuals from different backgrounds and different experiences, all necessary. But start with that kind of superordinate or common goal, and how each individual's role is critical for reaching that role. Right? So you can focus on what every individual brings to reaching that goal, and that's really important for
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Emma Sarro: helping individuals feel their value, their individual value, to reach that goal. But then reminding them that the ultimate goal is the same
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Emma Sarro: right? And each of you are critical for reaching that with your different perspective. So kind of combining both of those you're kind of getting the individuals feel valued for what they bring, and we're all going towards the same goal. So you can use that on a team level the organizational level. I think that that kind of combination works well
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David Rock: Yeah, I've often said as someone of a joke, that if I was building scarf in order, right scarf describes the 5 things that matter in the brain. Socially. Right? Relatedness is the R.
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David Rock: And you know, if I was building scarf in a temporal way and sort of follow this, you know it would be Ersk. It would always start with relatedness because relatedness is shared goals, and in any interaction, if you don't have shared goals, you usually have competing goals. And so basically everything else you say next isn't going to be processed. Well, it's going to be misunderstood. And you know, so so that that relatedness is such a foundational thing. That shared goal is such a foundational thing, and I think it lives above, like
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David Rock: all the other things that we need to sort of do with each other, particularly in this time. I think it's like the 1st thing to focus on
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David Rock: is
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David Rock: let's not talk about politics. Let's not talk about the the, you know. Let's let's talk about what we have to do together this week and this month. And and actually, it helps everyone when we when we do that. And I'm not just saying that as a CEO trying to make everyone work harder, like it'll help people's mental health.
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David Rock: right to actually turn down threat and feel like we're making progress. It'll help with conflict, with civility, with everything. If we focus less on the things that are dividing us right and more on the things that unite us, and attention changes the brain. Attention primes us to think so. So you know what I'd love to see practitioners
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David Rock: doing is just focusing on what unites us. You know, we got to focus on what unites us much more and then we start to have in group, and then that becomes its own, its own reward. That for me, I think, is the is the really important message so far
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Emma Sarro: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, and it makes sense. And sometimes, you know, we often go back to understand. Like, why is this? Why are we so tuned to these these groups? Why do we need this sense of relatedness? And ultimately it's because, like the only way we were able to survive is by being, is finding people to work together towards something like we couldn't survive on our own. So we are so sensitive to that, just as sensitive as we are to individual threats. Right? We talk about
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Emma Sarro: threat and reward. And so and that's why, for instance, we're super sensitive when we observe threats in others, too, which is why, like our ability to observe like, Oh, man, this environment is threatening. There's rude behavior going on. So that's why these things are so intertwined.
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Emma Sarro: But we are so driven to find a group that we can work together with. And so, yeah.
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David Rock: Yeah, it's there's a couple of interesting questions come up. I'll share a few stories that sort of start to address some of the questions in the Q. And A. And the and the chat as well, you know. I i 1 of my close friends,
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David Rock: A couple of years back started training for the New York Marathon, and he was a few years older than me, and not particularly a runner and I was inspired by his efforts, and I and I went along to to cheer him on the finish line in New York one year, and and he was, you know, he got to the end. It's a long run. It's like
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David Rock: it's a really long run. I don't know officially. 20 miles, nearly 40 kilometers or something crazy, but he was, you know, absolutely exhausted. And
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David Rock: and I, as soon as he ended, I said, Wow! Like, why did you do that? And would you do that again. And he's like absolutely. I would absolutely do that again. I say, why would? Why, why were the runners high like? What was it? He said, no, I had the entire city cheering me on.
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David Rock: and the high from feeling in group with an entire city is just so strong
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David Rock: and literally, you know he's running, and everyone's cheering like for hours, right? The entire city is cheering this guy on right. And of course they're cheering everyone on right. But it's this huge sense of in group
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David Rock: that that we very, very, very rarely get, and it's such a fulfilling thing he did 2 years running, and then gave it up. But but it really it really spoke to me about the power of of in group, in a lot of ways. And then another another example of this. I think it's really poignant. I think we've all had this, you know. We go to a we go to a social gathering with a friend where we don't know anyone else except this one friend.
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David Rock: You know we get there. And suddenly, just as we arrive and we're inside looking for them. We hear that they're like an hour late and
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David Rock: we start to panic like we don't know anyone right, like lots of people would just walk out and leave. Lots of other people can't even hear the story anymore. Like, it's so overwhelming. Right? Your facial expressions are interesting
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Emma Sarro: He instantly got nervous
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David Rock: Right? Exactly so, just imagining this story is a lot right? But what happens is, you look across the room and you see one person, you know, and your whole threat level, which is really high, goes down like a lot, and you talk to that person, and they intuitively introduce you to 2 or 3 more people. And now you're kind of okay. And they right? And by the time your friend gets there you know a 3rd of the room, and you're doing great right. But this feeling of you don't know anyone you don't know if you're going to be cast out of this room
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David Rock: is a very deep biological, evolutionary byproduct right of of our history. And we kind of all have this experience of doing this.
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David Rock: It's it's a really interesting phenomenon. So it's very woven into us. That our group is is, you know, is dangerous.
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David Rock: This might be a room full of, you know, friendly looking people that are your peers. You just don't happen to know anyone yet, but your body will say, this is really dangerous. Get, you know, get out of there. So it's an interesting thing someone's asking a question about, can you expand your in group?
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David Rock: And Australians have a good way of doing that? We call it drinking. You drink. You literally make friends with strangers, people who would normally be in your out group. You just view them as friends. It's called a social lubricant for a reason. I'm not advocating it, joking about it, but that is one way of expanding your in group, for sure. But you know, identifying shared goals with people
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David Rock: right talking to people about what matters to them and and what they're working on.
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David Rock: and you know, finding things in common. There is a step so shared. Goals is the best way, but shared experiences gets you kind of partway there as well.
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David Rock: So when you just discover shared experiences with someone. You know what you have in common.
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David Rock: You get quite a long way there to expanding your in group.
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David Rock: And yeah, so we just got to focus more on similarities and less on differences, and that, you know, that's what gets us there. What's coming up for you in the in the chat
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Emma Sarro: Yeah, absolutely well, a lot of comments around individual differences. And absolutely right. We have individual differences across the realm of scarf. Every time we talk about that there are individuals that are a bit more sensitive or have a greater need for each of these things. And sometimes people talk about the social interactions as a bit of like, you know, my bucket of what I need for social interactions is smaller than yours, or it fills up quicker.
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Emma Sarro: We absolutely have differences there. So some individuals just need more of that social arousal in order for them to feel satisfied. So they go out in search of it. So maybe some individuals have an easier time jumping into a room where they know maybe just one person as opposed to others. So there are definitely differences right? But we all have this basic sense. We'll all feel excluded similarly, and we'll all
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Emma Sarro: feel included. Similarly, it's just like our needs might differ a bit
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David Rock: Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely let's let's get the poll going just in case people have to jump off. Let's get the poll going quickly. Just lets us know kind of how to support you in different ways. I think we just had an article come out in Hbr like today. Did we did. I see that in the chat. So we had an article come out about civility. So the second bottom one, for there's executive briefings. We you know we do executive briefings about like civility, like how to make your organization more civil.
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David Rock: but also on on a bunch of other topics around around growth mindset. Obviously, we're doing work on AI in the brain. We're doing work on
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David Rock: growth, mindset, psych safety and accountability. And how to build those 3. So those executive briefings are a really good entrance point to kind of introduce us to your organization, individual education. At the bottom we have the brain based coaching program. We have the certificate program, and we also have the brain-based design and facilitation program that we're now starting to roll out virtually. So that's look out for those.
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David Rock: And there is a de-escalation solution. That, I'm sorry to say, is becoming popular again. And it's called calm. We introduced that towards the end of the pandemic. So calm is literally the skills for de-escalation and then connect is better conversations
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David Rock: and and involves turning down threat. Increasing insights. We talked a little bit of that in the last in the last few weeks. So those are some of the some of the options there. So yeah, Emma back to you. What questions you want to dig into there
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Emma Sarro: I have one thing I'd like to talk about, and we were talking about this a bit before we jumped on is one of the reasons this is so important. So, aside from just the general culture of civility in your organization and the benefits of just being in a civil environment is when you're working on a team. And we talked about this in our series, our De and I series of the benefits of having diverse teams right when you put diverse
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Emma Sarro: teams together, it might not be something that you necessarily want to do. You're not driven to do it, but you get better outcomes, and we wrote about this a bit, too. Can you talk to you a bit about like? So why is it so important? And why we don't tend to do it, obviously, but like
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David Rock: Yeah, I sort of alluded to it earlier around, like, you know, when you're putting a dinner party together, you don't intentionally like, think about okay, who are all the really different people that are gonna that just see the world completely, differently. I'm going to bring together. Right? You, you basically go. Who would it be fun to talk to? And it turns out the people that we fun to talk to are already in your in group, and you have lots in common with.
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David Rock: and you feel like you have lots of shared goals with them. And so you see the world really similarly right, whereas the research shows that the benefits of diverse teams happen when people see the world really differently.
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David Rock: and everyone really feels like they can speak up and challenge each other. So it's a really interesting phenomenon. So we don't naturally create diverse teams. And when we are in a diverse team, that's inclusive, people actually report feeling like they're less effective
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David Rock: that people report feeling less confident in their work. They actually literally say, I don't think I'm as effective as when I'm in a more homogeneous team. And what they're actually saying is, it feels like I have to work harder.
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David Rock: And in fact, we study that exact phenomenon. It's called cognitive elaboration. Right? So in a more diverse, inclusive team, you have to do more cognitive elaboration. You have to work harder to understand what other people are saying, and you have to work harder to explain yourself. And it turns out that we equate the work on both sides of that as we're being less effective.
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David Rock: But actually over even a short amount of time. Not just long term. You're actually making better decisions. You're letting fewer errors get past. You're making more creative decisions, better linear decisions. So all your decision making is actually better in that diverse team. But it actually feels like it's worse. And this is one of the reasons that we don't have. You know, diversity kind of handled, despite there being just absolutely reams of evidence that it's a good thing right? The people's felt sense of it
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David Rock: isn't that. It's a good thing people's felt senses they're in it. It's like, yes, actually said, I've sort of cognitively exhausted, like it's a lot like just you know. Let me let me have a meeting with people where we don't challenge each other for once. Right?
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David Rock: But actually, that challenge is is necessary, a certain amount of it can be too much right. This is going to have just the right amount. But but that challenge is actually necessary for good work.
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David Rock: And you know, Steve Jobs saw this. He talked about this a lot sort of the creative friction. But it's short term people report, it being bad for their performance. So you imagine this is why managers don't sort of intuitively create diverse teams, or why this, you know, space, still, you know, continues to be important, despite there being so much business case evidence of it being useful, just that the sort of intuitive sense isn't right. So that's, I think, what's going on here
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Emma Sarro: Yeah, I love that research. And it is such a fascinating paradox, right? That the report of like this is not effective. I don't like doing this? I don't think the answer is right, but the answer is more likely right. And and it's been shown in several different arenas, both academically and in industry. And we just one of the last sessions that we ran was on this business case. And you see this overwhelming
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Emma Sarro: financial evidence, innovative evidence, the talent pool evidence that whether or not you put something out to market like you're more likely to land. Well, if you have diverse perspectives, all of these benefits. Right? So the tension is necessary. But I would say also, it's more than just like throwing them together right? And you mentioned this, too. You need the inclusive environment. You need the psychological safety in order to
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Emma Sarro: kind of achieve those outcomes. Individuals will. And we talked about this to this recent research, individuals will self silence if their opinion is the minority opinion more likely. So you need to create the environment where they won't self silence
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David Rock: Right right, and I'll put in the chat here. The original paper that we published on this a few years back now. But it's it's a really central paper that still like explains a lot. It's such an important piece of research in there about diversity teams feel less comfortable. That's why they perform better. It's it's a really important one that we talk about a lot. So
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David Rock: so yeah, we someone's throwing in a fun question to close with, why do people feel traumatized? What do we do about it? I'm gonna say that
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David Rock: shared goals. I know it sounds a little trite, but the the trauma is coming from the sense of division. It's coming from a sense of despair. It's coming from a sense of lack of autonomy, lack of certainty, lack of fairness, all these kinds of things. And we want to put positives back in to offset that trauma. One of the best positives is, you know, working with people that you feel you can work well with. And you know, getting things done being productive. And
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David Rock: you know, like being able to focus on good work and be able to get good work done is important.
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David Rock: and we start a downward spiral when we start. Being unable to to, you know, meet our own expectations. We start a downward spiral, and we start to watch the news. I feel like we're we're at the start of the pandemic, where we all need to get back to some really intentional practices to minimize our threat level. It doesn't mean ignore things around you. But but how do you? How do you activate?
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David Rock: The right mental state for this time is a really interesting question. It's a very personal question for everyone. But it's it's an important one.
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Emma Sarro: And and remember, one of the 3 main outcomes of an in group and being part of a group, is the empathy, right, the the ability to feel empathy for those in your group. So so bringing, like finding that group individuals in the group will be able to empathize and and that helps the process for sure.
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David Rock: Yeah, absolutely. I think we're at the end. You know, we wanted to talk about the neuroscience of togetherness
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David Rock: and division. And I will just say, focus on the togetherness. The brain wants to go to division because negative is stronger than positive, and the brain just wants to go to the division, but focus on the togetherness, you know, spend time with loved ones, spend time in communities, spend time with people you care about, and spend time focusing on shared goals with people, spend time, you know.
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David Rock: focus your brain on the things that matter, on the things that we can do together, and the togetherness that we have. It's going to be important for our ability to move forward. So thanks, Emma, thanks, Erin, thanks everyone for being here. Great conversations appreciate your interest in the work. Great time for some individual education. You want to get in and study this stuff. We'll make sure to follow up with those of you interested in that as well. So thanks very much. Everyone. Take care, bye, bye.
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Emma Sarro: Thanks, David. Thanks, Erin. Thanks for joining everyone
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Erin Wickham: Thank you so much, everybody. Thank you, Emma. Thank you, David. That was an excellent conversation. I know I learned a lot, and we appreciate all of your participation in the chat. If you enjoyed today's conversation, you'll love our podcast so make sure, you subscribe. You can hear past episodes of your brain at work, live wherever you enjoy listening to podcasts like spotify apple podcasts and etc. This is where we officially say farewell for the week
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Erin Wickham: on behalf of today's guests and the Nli team working behind the scenes. Thank you for joining us, and we'll see you back here next Friday. See? You? Then