Dr. Delia McCabe and Pete Behrens: Neuroscience & Leadership in the Age of AI (World Agility Forum 2023)

Ready to journey into the fascinating intersection of neuroscience, leadership, and AI? We promise insights that will transform your understanding of leadership coaching in an AI-dominated era. Join us as our esteemed guests, Dr Delia McCabe and Pete Barron, guide us through complex topics such as handling information overload, the potential of generative AI in the job market, and the paradoxical behaviour of individuals indulging in harmful activities despite awareness of their risks.

What happens when leaders miscalculate and dismiss their subordinates? How does our brain function in leadership roles? Our in-depth conversation takes a critical turn as we probe these significant questions and more. We share valuable tips on establishing boundaries for mental well-being. Additionally, we navigate the role of dopamine hits for stress reduction and the intriguing dynamics of our PFCs as the day progresses. And guess what? We don't stop there.

We explore the future of learning and creativity in an AI-driven world. We also inspect how businesses are adopting remote work and gatherings intentionally. Discover the importance of clear goal setting and optimizing brain neurology for productivity from our experts. Reflect on the influence of AI on creativity, innovation, leadership, and decision-making. It's an episode loaded with novel insights that are too enticing to miss. So, are you ready to redefine your perspective? Tune in and let the exploration begin!

Dr. Delia McCabe on LinkedIn
Pete Behrens on LinkedIn
World Agility Forum 

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Transcript

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 0:00

This episode of no Way Out is brought to you by the World Agility Forum. In fact, this episode was recorded live in Lisbon, portugal, september 2023, at the World Agility Forum, where I had Dr Delia McCabe and Pete Barron on stage to talk about neuroscience and leadership in the age of AI. What do we talk about? Well, we talked about the challenges of training people who think they know everything. We looked at the concept of distributed cognition. We even examined how does alcohol affect decision making and cognitive capacity. The next day you ever had a hangover? You ever got into work, all right. We also looked at the potential of generative AI in eliminating jobs and what is the impact on leadership coaching in the age of AI.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 0:45

I'll call that episode brief, complete, so we can get airborne and get inside your Oodleoo. Let me point out something else. Last year, when Dr McCabe stood on stage, she scared all of us, right? Do you guys remember that Coffee and all that? So my question I want you to get up here on stage to her is even though I know, even though I know the things that she told me are bad for me, why do I still do them? And then something else when Pete gets up here as well. I want to ask him another question about when leaders are in a position of authority, why do they have a tendency to misunderstand people, dismiss people? Why do they do that? So I think there's a connection that we can be made here Come on up, folks with what Delia shared with us and what Pete shared with us. But I want to invite him up to the stage and today, in this afternoon's session, we're going to let you ask some questions as well. So hey, pete, first time meeting you in person, nice to meet you. Thank you, dr McCabe.

Dr. Delia McCabe: 1:44

All right we're going to have some fun here, all right.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:49

So on the no Way Out podcast, remember we look at all the sciences that underpin John Boyd's Observe when it Decide ACLU. We know that perception is a controlled hallucination, meaning it is created top-down, inside-out. It's an active process, it's ongoing, so it's learning, so it's planning, so it's decision-making our emotions, our moods. So we're lucky to have our panel today to talk about the connection not just between the brain and leadership, but even where AI is going to take us. So welcome, thank you for being here. Let's see where do we want to start today? You want to look at leadership and the brain first. Start with leadership.

Pete Behrens : 2:29

Your question was triggered a memory of a leadership team we worked with. So you asked why do leaders not aware of what's happening below? What we see often is like we did a study with a bank a large bank and they had. We did a cultural survey and it came out with some data and we had leader data and employee data and the leaders collaborated and thought that the drive was about right. Employees, on the other hand, said all we do is go, go, go, like we have no time to collaborate. And that opened the dialogue Like why is this?

Pete Behrens : 3:05

Is this true? Even, and as we diagnosed it, we realized leaders do collaborate, leaders are working on collaborative strategy, but then once that gets put in a PowerPoint and that gets shared in an all-hands meeting, we're already behind. Everybody else feels the go, go, go. I just think leaders are living in a bubble, in an ecosystem I think somebody earlier this morning mentioned the Gemba like where the value exists. I think when leaders can break through that barrier, that's when they can start to become aware, because it's just a lack of awareness of what the other environments are.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 3:41

What about ego? Like somebody gets promoted in an organization and they have an ego, right? I mean, we all have egos. So how does that play into leadership roles?

Pete Behrens : 3:50

Yes, wow, we could go a lot of places with ego. We all have ego. We are all naturally biased to need status. Okay, so this is the David Rock scarf model. So the Neuro Leadership Institute talks about status being one of the key indicators of the threat reward system in your brain. Now, ego, it feeds ego Status. What does status mean? It might be a position, but it also might be the corner office. It might be things like I feel healthy or I feel fit. That's a status, right? So status is multi-dimensional. But in the workplace, status is often associated with decision power, ownership, control, and that's what fuels and all humans are driven that. That's a reward, that's a positive feedback system.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 4:40

But aren't most managers who make or who get promoted? Aren't they promoted based off their technical skills and not their teamwork skills or leadership skills? Is that true?

Pete Behrens : 4:51

It is incredibly true that a majority of leaders are put in position the way. We say this. We would never hire an employee Sorry, I kind of got my back to half of you here We've never hired an employee without education and experience. Yet every day we put those same people in a position of power with zero education or experience in that role.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 5:11

Every day we're promoting leaders and they get promoted because they were good at what they did, and they're not getting trained at leadership, so I'm kind of curious if there's a connection to the biology of the brain when you're put in the leadership position. Is there anything in the research that shows that?

Dr. Delia McCabe: 5:25

Well, the one thing that will happen automatically is that your stress level will go up, and the minute your stress level goes up, your capacity to look at alternative solutions to problems is reduced, and we know this because of research that examined the exploration, exploitation of what the human brain gets involved with. But I think, definitely I understand what you're saying and it's 100% spot on. People aren't trained and we need to be trained, but how do you train people when they think that they know everything? I have yet to solve that problem.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 5:58

Hey Nigel, how do you do that?

Dr. Delia McCabe: 5:59

Yeah, and that's one of the problems that we have Mostly when people get promoted, a lot of people think that they now know everything, so you don't get them. They don't feel open to learn, and once again, we come back to neural energy. The brain is always looking to save energy. That's one of its primary goals. So if you put a person in a position where their stress has increased and they're possibly not doing the things that they need to support their brain and their body, and now you're saying, now you need to change, they don't have any of the capacity to do those things.

Dr. Delia McCabe: 6:32

You know, we come down to neurons continuously, because everything that we speak about here, that everyone else speaks about, is frameworks and protocols and systems and things that you want people to do, but it's brains that does all of that. Whether you're a leader, whether you're a team member, whether you're the janitor, you want that person to change. You have to make the neurons malleable enough to do that, and that's something that's a big part of the equation that we don't discuss, which is why I address that, because without that, everything else is so much harder Leadership, everything else.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 7:04

So what I'm hearing is it may be important that leaders understand, not necessarily the biology of the brain and the compounds that attack different receptors and all that, but maybe how basic functionality works, like how do we perceive reality and things like that. Is that something you're looking at at all?

Pete Behrens : 7:19

Oh, I mean we use the neuroscience all the time in our field and the reason we do that number one we work with a lot of tech enabled industries and tech leaders that have moved up.

Pete Behrens : 7:32

Sometimes they get turned off by the psychology, sociology side of science versus some of the more researched on the scientific side or the medical side of the research Mechanisms. So leaders, I think, appreciate some of those dynamics you mentioned earlier. You need tactics to drive mindset and one of the ways we incorporate that is I have a hard time teaching leadership to somebody who's never experienced leadership in their like their own position, like everything kind of just goes past them because they don't have a place in their brain to integrate the learning. And this happens if you teach Scrum Master to somebody who's never done a Scrum Master, a product owner, somebody who's never done a product owner. You try to teach leadership to somebody who's been a position to be a leader. They don't have some of those world experiences to understand the mindset. So it's almost like you need to fail a little bit, you need to experience a little bit. All of a sudden that's a riper soil that can actually be not trained but at least inspired in some way to change.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 8:37

Okay, so one of the things we've been looking at in the no Way Out podcast is understanding things like the free energy principle. We're not going to dive into that, so we're taking a look at the latest and greatest, that is, information from neuroscience. That's not only informing how we perceive reality or consciousness, but actually how AI can be developed All right. So this is pretty fantastic stuff that's coming out in the last 10 years or so. So in my view, there's an opportunity and I'm going to test this out here with Dillia and Pete and that is I believe there's a way we can use the explanation of LLMs and active inference AI generative AI to help people understand how they actually perceive the world, how they learn how their moods are created, how their energy is created. I just want to get your thoughts on that. Can we leverage that new technology to help teach people?

Dr. Delia McCabe: 9:30

Can I just go with that?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 9:31

Please.

Dr. Delia McCabe: 9:31

Anybody here feels like they have a desperate, desperate need for more information. Anyone you really feel like you want more information, like you don't have enough information, like you're battling to find more. I don't see that in anybody that I work with. Most people feel they've got too much information. So you're going to give people the tools to understand something more, but they've got to do something to that. And then they've got Netflix telling them what movies they like, and they've got YouTube algorithm dictating what they watch, and they've got polarization in society and they've got all of these things that are making them overwhelmed. I don't know how much excitement can be generated around finding out more about something that is actually quite a big of a mystery now. So I have to just mention that.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 10:17

No, but this connects back to what Sonia talked about this morning. Right, the context isn't there.

Dr. Delia McCabe: 10:23

We're assisted living, right, absolutely, we've got everything supporting us and yet we're exhausted. You would think that, with all the decisions made for us, we would be thriving. We would be jumping around like little children full of energy. That is not happening because every single decision, every single choice is using neural energy and the lack of control that people feel because of that.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 10:42

So if I'm getting new information and I don't, let's say you're hearing new ideas here at a conference or a new consultant comes in and shows you something that you never heard before, if I understand Dr McCabe correctly, we're going to push back on that information because it's a lot easier on our brains not to put energy towards that. Is that right?

Dr. Delia McCabe: 11:00

100%, because all of you are going to go away with a whole lot of new information. Now you've got to sift through that information, but all the other information hitting you doesn't go away when you leave here. It still continues hitting you. So I'm guilty of this too. I've got a folder on my laptop and into that folder goes. I'm going to read this later. How many of you have got that? We've all got that. We're going to look at it later. And when do we ever get to that?

Dr. Delia McCabe: 11:21

We have too much information, and this is part of the challenge that we're living with as a species right now. This information isn't serving us. I don't see people that are happier. I don't see people that are sleeping better. I don't see people that feel like they're confident and that they can cope with all this overwhelming change. I'm not seeing that, and I don't see any system, any protocol, any framework that's telling people how to do that. When I work with people, I started the neuronal cellular level and then we work up and make them stress resilient, so this doesn't overwhelm them. But the bottom line is we don't need more information. We need information presented maybe in a different way, and that's a different conversation.

Pete Behrens : 11:56

What do you mean? I might have to repeat I completely support what you're saying. In fact, I had a conversation during the last workshop break and he had pulled himself out of a workshop and I was talking and I was asking. He said I actually appreciate learning in a pull environment more than a push. I think we're guilty of conferences. We push too much, we're teaching too much.

Pete Behrens : 12:23

I've been reflecting on our role as leaders and our role as coaches and trainers and I think we get it wrong a lot. I think we think we're here to teach, but that assumes then that the other side of that is this sponge who's just taking it up. But they're not. You're not sponges. You have an ecosystem that has a reward system, but it's a reward because you want to do something. That's a pull and we're trying to push. I think our job as educators and as trainers and coaches and even speakers, it's to inspire, to create that drive that they want to go do that. So then the information is coming, the one they want. So I think AI from that standpoint, I agree, if it comes at us more, it's going to make it worse, but if it's accessible, like it's becoming, and you make it creatively interesting to drive that, then yes.

Dr. Delia McCabe: 13:15

I think I agree. The challenge we have is that our boundaries are very poor. We're not setting up boundaries to say, okay, now I'm finished with work and now I'm going to focus on my well-being. We don't do that. We're on 24 seven and so we look for dopamine hits to reduce that stress and that's why we go on to our phones, that's why we binge watch Netflix and so on and so on. So we're looking for a relief from all of that.

Dr. Delia McCabe: 13:42

Once we establish boundaries, we allow our brain to have downtime, we get into the PNS and then we make better choices. The brain makes very, very poor decisions when it's under stress, and we know this. We've seen people do that, people in leadership roles, they do that, and I can't see that changing unless people take upon themselves. So we've got to give people to want to pull this towards them Boundaries, establishing what you can control and what you can't control, because your brain actually craves control more than anything else, and this lack of control is making people feel overwhelmed. So boundary setting pull that towards yourself, take that away is something that you need to cultivate.

Pete Behrens : 14:21

Another. I think another technique related to that that we teach is, as you say, every decision you make, every prioritization you do, that PFC gets used and they say it basically starts to diminish through the day. So this is why your vices come out around dinner time and later it's. That thing is tired and the other thing that that does is inhibit behaviors you don't want to do smoke, eat a piece of candy, whatever it is you're trying not to do will happen late in the evening because you're tired.

Pete Behrens : 14:50

What we try to help others do is say well, just put the things that are hard to do early in the morning, the things you don't want to do early in the morning and as hard as that is right, those that's where your creative juices are. So you know, know your body, I know COVID and not COVID. My day ends about two o'clock, two in the afternoon, not because the day ends in terms of the workday, but my brain ends. I know that. So what do I do? I plan for that and then I also try to plan those activities that doesn't require a real important brain in those later afternoon times or I'm able in whatever way to not have to work during those times. But if you know yourself and know and how to create those spaces, I think that's really critical. I call that my Homer Simpson time.

Dr. Delia McCabe: 15:36

Well, because you've created that boundary. That is necessary because, as the day progresses, the PFC becomes less and less capable of inhibition.

Dr. Delia McCabe: 15:43

And that is inhibition you know, for whatever the thing is that you're trying to avoid, the other thing, of course, is to maximize friction for the things you don't want to do and minimize friction for the things you want to do. Say that again you maximize friction for the things you don't want to do and you minimize friction for the things that you do want to do. So, in other words, you don't keep a whole giant box of chocolate accessible for you, because at 5pm you'll be eating that, you have to get into the car and you've got to go, drive down the road to go and buy that. So that's increasing friction for the thing you don't want to do. You make it really easy to do the things that are good for you, and that is reduction in friction and that just once again saves neural energy, which is this very precious resource that most people don't hold onto with enough dedication.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 16:37

You know, I was laughing when I first came in the Asselin coaching space because I changed my LinkedIn profile. Nobody got that.

Dr. Delia McCabe: 16:46

Sorry, they're tired.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 16:48

There you go. I laughed at the idea of going for a walk as a team meeting.

Dr. Delia McCabe: 16:57

Is that something that you Fantastic to do that because what it does it actually stimulates the prefrontal cortex. When you do that, and you also don't have to look at someone else in the eye, you're busy doing a combined activity. What you're doing there, you're doing something called distributed cognition. That's what you're doing when you're thinking on your own and you're trying really, really hard. That's called bounded cognition, and we live in such a complex world today that we cannot hold on to all that information that we need to be massaging and analyzing by ourselves. So we need to distribute the cognition and we do that beautifully when we walk. So we increase BDNF, we increase this. We actually reduce the competitiveness when we go for a walk. So someone's got an idea and you don't like it. You don't have to look them in the eye. You can mention it while you're looking at the tree, in other words. But in organizations.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 17:42

we know that leaders often look to see you sitting at their desk at the moment, and if they're not sitting at their desk, they're clearly not thinking. So we need to change that paradigm at least. And it's okay to go out and do something like play a game, do something. Is that something that you're encouraging leaders to let their people do, experiencing COVID, as we all did.

Pete Behrens : 18:07

I think health and that stress was something we all lived through and tried to work through. I think it's given a new appreciation for those types of things and we are seeing some pullback. It reminds me a little bit of, I mean, steve Jobs did that. The walking meeting was pretty famous he would do. I had an experience. I actually tried that Through COVID.

Pete Behrens : 18:29

I tried to make one meeting a day where I would just do it as I walked and I'd stay on Zoom and I would even take notes. I'd have my phone and do that. And I did that with one of my clients and it was a senior leader and I was working with their board of directors. This was not with the board, this was just a check-in, this was a status call and we ran the meeting and I thought it was fine. I got an email about an hour later and said Pete, don't do that again. And I even explained to them I do this for health. I pick one meeting. This happened to me. I thought this was a good meeting. So it's interesting how, yes, we can try and we're all individual in terms of how people perceive some of that. But from the standpoint of and I think we mentioned that a little bit earlier the concept of work. To think that at your computer clicks time, that's not a definition of work, but it's perception as reality, perceived as work.

Pete Behrens : 19:31

Absolutely and measured as work, what we try to teach leaders, the things that are easy to measure are not really the things you want to measure. What do we measure? We measure things like budget because we can, dates because we can Scope, because we can, but those in projects we know aren't the things that are valuable, but the things that are hard to measure. Things like outcome well, that's delayed, it's under, it's manipulatable. Or things like health or culture, those are hard to measure. So that's the danger we measure things because they're easy, not because they're right.

Dr. Delia McCabe: 20:03

Well, it leaves us in a position of responsibility to actually educate people. So maybe what you could have done is send him a book, the book spa, and say to him hey, have a look at this. But you know, the thing is that if that's his perception and he's the only person or it was a sheet.

Pete Behrens : 20:17

but yes, thank you. It's a difficult, it is hard.

Dr. Delia McCabe: 20:21

I was working with someone the other day and she's a senior leader and she was crying and we were on zoom and she was crying. Now I think that she would have been offended if I had been walking.

Speaker 5: 20:32

I needed to see in the space with her and her stress and how she.

Dr. Delia McCabe: 20:35

So I think once again it's context driven. One has to deal with that. I think we have to look after our health and our wellbeing as well as we can within the constraints we have and the constraints that our clients position us with. So no complex, challenging problem was ever solved with a simple solution.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 20:57

All right, so we're gonna do this. If you have a question for the panel, go ahead, and we have microphones on the side While we're setting up for that. I do wanna flip over to something about the military and the military culture in the US. There's alcohol on all our bases, right, so we have rules and requirements that we can't drink alcohol certain distance from aircraft. I get that wrong. It's a amount of time. That's another trick. So alcohol I don't know what the cultures are like around the world when it comes to drinking alcohol at work or even going to a party after work, but the dangers of alcohol in decision making in the workspace any thoughts on that?

Pete Behrens : 21:39

When I go first.

Dr. Delia McCabe: 21:40

I don't have the research on that, so Look, the challenge with alcohol is deeply from a neuronal perspective. It actually impacts how mitochondria function, and mitochondria are the energy organelles of the cell. So that's one thing to just keep in mind. The second thing is that alcohol is a central nervous system depressant, which means it can affect your mood the next day, and that's why people can often feel a little bit down, can't focus, can't concentrate memory, a little challenged. But when the minute your mood becomes challenged, so does your perspective and so does your capacity to make decisions well, and we know that from the research.

Dr. Delia McCabe: 22:14

So alcohol has a role to play in our well-being and if we consider the types of alcohol we consume, that's part of the process. And there's evidence to support the fact that red wine and port that is red is better for us from an antioxidant perspective, and you know the brain being the greediest organ, that is an important thing to consider. But I think that if alcohol becomes something that you rely on to reduce the stress, to get the tiger out of your head, that's when the challenge steps in, Because then you are relying on something externally to give you that relief that you're looking for, which you should be getting in some other way. And that's a long conversation because the one question I always get okay so what is moderation? For some people, one glass is moderation. For some people, two bottles is moderation. So we have once again this perception issue. But it's important to understand what's happening at the cellular level because that will impact your cognitive capacity the next day.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 23:10

As we're scanning for anybody that has questions, I have another idea here. Question here We'll get a mic to you in a second.

Dr. Delia McCabe: 23:16

You were going to speak about AI. Well, a little bit. I do. I think AI is very important. Let's go to the questions.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 23:25

Can you hear me? Yeah, there you go.

Speaker 4: 23:27

Yeah, first of all, I want to take the panel for the really great conversation and insights. I have a question for Pete how do you see generative AI and AI in general improve the way that we lead today and in the future, and do you agree that AI might potentially eliminate jobs on the mid-level management in the future?

Pete Behrens : 23:48

I mean, yeah, thank you for the question. It's eliminating jobs all across the board, so it will mean no doubt it's going to eliminate many managerial type positions and, eventually, leadership. I mean we saw, if you were here Friday, joe Justice talked a lot about the Elon Musk type companies that are creating zero management type structures. Managers are role, leaders are role. There's the ship side, the act of leading. Everybody has that. Even a technical person using AI has leadership. So I think we've got to start to separate the role from the act of leading.

Pete Behrens : 24:28

Number one and number two I think AI creates more importance to every decision we do. You talk about the default. We are so easily to go into default. We start letting AI go into default. Look out right, it will be uncontrolled at some point. So we've got to be really careful. We see this in just checklist cultures. We see a process that's really good. We use these checklists. It helps us think through the problem Pretty soon. What happens with the checklist? We just do the checklist but we don't think about what we're checking. You guys ever see that at work? A great process turns into a default mode operation over time because it becomes habit, routine. Ai is going to put that on steroids. If we're not thinking and overseeing some of that stuff, I think it's going to become really problematic. So I don't see leadership going away. I do see many roles definitely changing a lot.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 25:23

Can you imagine that? All that AI creating PowerPoint for each other and having meetings that's what's coming.

Speaker 4: 25:30

And building up on that, how do you see the way that we coach leadership? Change we the introduction of AI Leadership coaching?

Pete Behrens : 25:39

Yes, how is leadership coaching going to change? Go, change. Yes.

Dr. Delia McCabe: 25:44

You want to think about that while I answer another question.

Pete Behrens : 25:46

Yeah, I'm looking at you. That's an interesting question.

Dr. Delia McCabe: 25:49

Look, let's just think about something really basic. If a brain is really exhausted and it's got to write an article and it's got an AR right there and it puts the question in and it gets this fantastic article and it can just change a few words and out the article goes. Or it's got a problem at work and it just puts it into AI and then it comes up with these solutions. How long do you think it's going to be before most people rely on AI? Because what's going to happen is going to reduce neural energy expenditure and the second thing it's going to do it's going to create a neural pathway for using AI.

Dr. Delia McCabe: 26:28

My concern with this whole issue is where does creativity come from? Where does innovation come from? It comes from the prefrontal cortex. It comes from our capacity to take disparate ideas and concepts and put them together in a very unique way. If we go to AI and we put some ideas into AI and we all start doing that, we're going to end up with a homogenous mass in the world, reflected in products, concepts, books, movies, art. We can see what's happening with art in relation to AI.

Dr. Delia McCabe: 27:05

How will we stop this? So I have to ask you a question. A year ago we didn't know about chatGPT, did we? And look where we are now. I predict that we can't predict. I predict that it's going to be impossible for people to say that this is how it's going to roll out. My concern is that the neural energy challenge may drive change in a way that can be very, very negative for us as a species, and we can end up in a world that is gray no unique insights, no unique ideas, no beautiful innovation. Because of that homogeneous mass we're all going to be feeding into this engine that's going to end up driving us, and that's my concern.

Pete Behrens : 27:52

I have one comment, but is there another question? I'm going to make sure we get in and while we're looking for a question, while we're looking for a question, the one thing I would just point to is there was a study called Personal Freud. So before AI they actually did it where you would go into a virtual office, tell them your problem, they would switch it. You would become the doctor hearing the problem. You come into the room, then they would switch it and you would provide advice to yourself and you could coach yourself. So that was even before AI. We've been starting to do this so thank you for the amazing talk today.

Speaker 5: 28:28

So you mentioned about, we are always in the seeking of more information. But you think in the other side and just assume that, like, we seek more information because we are in the phase where we don't know a lot of things about a product or a service, so we always seek more information and we use that information to make it more actionable. So there's a gap between getting more information and come to the action. So that's why we human beings are always in the phase of getting more and more and more, but we lack of doing it and making it more action.

Dr. Delia McCabe: 29:04

It's very easy to collect information. It's hard to put it into a way to action it and to allow other people to use that action. So that's why we choose the collecting first, because it's very, very less energy intense. But if you put it into AI, you'll get a quick answer about how to action it. But will you action it? So there are a lot of questions around this that are very hard to answer and, as I said, I predict. We can't predict. We just have to try and do the best for ourselves individually and for the teams that we work with and for the organizations that we work with, and speak about these things, discuss these issues, because if we don't discuss these issues, we'll have much less chance of solving them than if we keep quiet about them.

Pete Behrens : 29:46

One thing I'll say about you know, tie this back to Agile. I was a Scrum Trainer Coach for about 10 years and I could take or leave the process, but what I loved was it enabled us to learn through doing. And I think you're saying I need to seek information or I need to do. Agile is actually learning by doing. So I think if we can kind of get back to some of that heart of agility, as Alistair Coburn says, or the principles of agility, the practices and the processes and the frameworks I think have just gotten in the way, just take those steps and observe and see and get that data as you're doing it, because, as you say, if you can't predict, if you're in that complex world, that's really the only way to really get good information For leaders. That's a gamble walk For a product owner that's actually putting products out that you don't know if they're going to be good and you got to get feedback on.

Dr. Delia McCabe: 30:41

Well, that's how you do a minimum product. You just try it out and you see, and the point is that you learn very quickly and then you move. But the problem with people is that the brain craves certainty, it craves consistency, it craves darkotomy. So you actually have to learn to become capable of quick change, quick agility, and Sonja mentioned this earlier. She spoke about the resilience and the capacity to be living in complexity with ease, and Richard Feynman, a very famous physicist, said that he was happy to live with not knowing. He was happy to live with uncertainty, and that is really hard for the human brain to do. So we need to actually cultivate that, because until we cultivate that and focus on that, but we need to reduce our stress levels to be able to allow that to happen.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 31:30

The information we seek. Isn't that always aligned to our current orientation, or there's other times for it?

Dr. Delia McCabe: 31:37

It minimizes surprise 100%, and the challenge is that when we come across something that we don't like and that's part of what the decision making process is about that I'll discuss is that we by default reject it and go and find something that we do like that suits us and that makes it really hard to change. So we have to be working at that constantly. I don't like this idea, but could it work? And that's where distributed cognition is very useful.

Pete Behrens : 32:03

One of my favorite discoveries was learning. Procrastination is not a time problem, it's an emotional problem 100% we avoid things we don't like and that's what we'll procrastinate. I just love that. I do it all the time. The hard thing you just you avoid.

Dr. Delia McCabe: 32:19

And that's once again. It's a body and a brain thing. There's an emotion attached to it and the brain responds.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 32:25

That's maximizing evidence for your existing model. I think it's what I said. All right, Any other questions out there? We have a few more minutes. One more.

Pete Behrens : 32:34

Yeah.

Dr. Delia McCabe: 32:35

Good, go ahead, brian.

Pete Behrens : 32:38

Although online, I don't know if they'll hear.

Speaker 6: 32:42

So last year we talked about sort of the optimal time for making decisions for our brain, and on the heels of that I had a project in Salt Lake City, utah, and was able to change their planning stage from four o'clock in the afternoon to eight o'clock in the morning. Remarkable returns, great, super happy about that. The problem was, with that success, we were given the same opportunity to do that with a group that is displaced across Singapore, perth, london and Houston. So, understanding that there is an optimal time for us to make better decisions, how do you recommend, or how do the three of you see, collaborating on a global scale and accommodating for sort of those neurological problems?

Dr. Delia McCabe: 33:28

That's a good question. You want to take that, Pete. Maybe you had experience in it.

Pete Behrens : 33:32

Yeah, we deal with that all the time. I work with organizations where one of us because it's Australia to New York, to LA, to Paris, somebody's at 11 o'clock at night Both COVID and distributed global communications. What we're finding? All the studies I've read individual creativity is up, team creativity is down. It is hard. I participated in this conference during COVID. It sucked. I'm sorry, hugo, I spoke, I probably did a great job. I have no idea. It's like talking to dead air. It's not you, it's just the environment. So it sucks.

Pete Behrens : 34:16

The best companies I'm seeing that are doing this like one is the gaming company I'm going to forget their name. What's that Real? Yeah, what we're seeing is intentional gatherings and intentional ways intentional, remote, intentional and the way they're doing that is they have local events that are certain things. They have global events that are certain things. They have regional events that are certain things. They're being explicit and this is what we teach in all of our leadership Be more intentional about what you want to see happen. So that's going to take some intention and it's going to suck for most of what you do, but I think if we can create intentional times that we do get together and we can do stuff like this. That's going to create a different outcome. So that's yeah.

Dr. Delia McCabe: 35:08

Yeah, I think there's a difference between discussing change and decisions and actually actioning those decisions. So maybe that could be taken into account with the way you work, with the people that you work with, and obviously we want to optimize for brain, for the neurology to be optimized. But it's a challenging question, brian, and I don't think anyone has the solution to that. This is part of the gift of COVID, part of the gift of international communication.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 35:34

All right, Well, that's our time for today, dr McCabe. Thank you very much, pete. Great meeting you for the first time. Thank you, been looking forward to this for a while. We look forward to any questions you may have when we're in the hallways and things like that. Don't be afraid to engage. Just be afraid of me, though, okay.

Speaker 5: 35:51

Thank you so much. Billia, brian and Peter, thank you so much.