![]() Or if your radar has never encountered some threat, you may totally miss it and seem exceptionally complacent (which, as I have written about extensively, can be common in organizations with extensive history of success and can be hugely dangerous).īut, in general, without the development of this very powerful survival hardware, we would probably not be around today. It does not work perfectly always: if you cannot find a solution to the problem or are faced with repeated threats, fight and flight impulses may cancel each other leading to a freeze response – despair and demotivation. To repeat, this appears to be a very powerful system which has evolved over a very long period of time. We eliminate the threat, the chemicals and muscles and the like eventually go back to normal. Or, in a more contemporary setting, to work 18-hour days to somehow correct the quality problem on manufacturing line #6 or the service problem with an important customer. With energy spiking, we then follow through on the first action that seems sensible whether it is to climb a tree better and faster than would be remotely possible under normal conditions, enabling us to avoid the saber toothed tiger. The goal: to figure out how to eliminate the threat. When all is functioning well (it sometimes does not – more on that later), our minds go into rapid problem solving mode. While this hardwiring evolved for detecting and responding to physical threats, the response to threats to our egos, our status or our psychological security are biologically identical. That is the nature of what is often called hardwiring. And what is fascinating is that we don’t have to tell ourselves to do any of this. All other thoughts can literally disappear. Our minds instantaneously focus on the source of the threat. ![]() These emotions are like a slap in the face. A variety of more or less “negative” emotions are triggered in a nanosecond: fear, anxiety, anger (directed at the source of the threat), perhaps even shame or guilt (that you have been inept enough to get yourself into this situation). If it’s an unknown situation or our experiences reveal it to indeed be a threat, chemical signals shoot out into our bodies to increase blood flow, tighten muscles, and prepare us for “flight or fight”. A quick check with the seat of memory reveals if we have past experiences that can disqualify this as a threat. When the radar senses something it perceives as a threat, much happens very quickly. ![]() ![]() The Survive Channel has what is akin to a very powerful radar that operates whenever we are awake, and quite possibly at a reduced level as we sleep (since what we hear or smell or feel does not turn off completely when we sleep). You might think of it as a Survive Channel (see diagram below). After many, many millennia, this mechanism seems to have become a part of our brain/body hardwiring and we carry it with us today. Yet despite predators, famine, poisonous plants, ice ages, and more, they managed to survive – in part because they developed some sort of very powerful mechanism to help them spot threats and act very quickly to eliminate dangers. When something akin to modern humans emerged on Earth 100,000 or 200,000 years ago, they were far from being the biggest, fastest, or in any way most ferocious creatures around. And the string of CEOs and other executives I have shared this material with seem to agree. What I have found is that a simple concept of one part of “brain/body hardwiring” appears to have rather profound implications for those trying to run organizations today in an increasingly fast moving world. I have been testing my conclusions with some straightforward Darwinian thinking and with help from researchers in brain science. With the help of inspiration from some of my colleagues (Russell Raath and others at Kotter, Professor Richard Boyatzis from Case Western Reserve University), I have been refining observations I have made over the years about people-as-people. But until recently I have not tried to clarify what this mysterious human nature is, or rather the part of humanness that is related to the topics I care about: superior performance in general and, more specifically, leading complex change. That is, the patterns I see which help explain superior or inferior organizational performance, leadership, and management cut across settings because – at some level – people are people. I have used the undefined term “human nature” for decades now to explain why the sorts of generalizations I make about organizations and managers seem applicable anywhere: in different countries, industries, corporate cultures.
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