During November, we explore four mental models related to transformation and change. By the end of this month, you will have strengthened your innovator’s toolkit with these new principles and ideas. The law of diminishing returns is the first mental model for us to get our teeth into.
Tag: risk
3 surprising ways curiosity changes your brain
You are more engaged, active, and open-minded when you’re curious. But what is it about curiosity that makes it so powerful? In this issue, we explore the psychology of curiosity and three surprising ways it changes your brain.
Curiosity Boosts Memory
In a study published in 2014, researchers discovered a connection between memory and curiosity levels. Here are some of the key findings from the investigation by the University of California at Davis:
- When people are curious to learn the answer to a question, they are better at learning that information – not only in the very short term but also after a 24-hour delay.
- Most surprising, though, was participants had greater recall of unrelated, extraneous or incidental information present at the time.
- Scans revealed when people were more curious, brain activity rose in regions that transmit dopamine signals; in the hippocampus, the part of the brain associated with memory and regions related to reward.
Point number two helps me get a handle on the characteristic of being open-minded. We can remember more of our experiences when we are curious.
A little test you can do for this is to try and remember extraneous information connected to an enjoyable learning experience.
Risk and Reward
When faced with something new, our brain weighs the risks and rewards before deciding whether to engage.
This happens when you are scrolling and decide to open an article or photo. You made a similar micro-calculation when you saw the subject of this email. Is this worth my time?
Curiosity, the restless feeling of wanting to know more, tips the scales in favour of exploration.
The regions deep in your brain responsible for processing rewards and motivation are active when you become curious. The nucleus accumbens, the bilateral caudate nucleus, and the ventral tegmental area all fire up when we want to know more.
When we’re curious, our brain has decided the potential rewards outweigh the risks. And this instinctive risk/reward calculation drives us to explore the physical and mental world around us.
Designing provocations for learning is a great way to heighten curiosity, so your students don’t scroll by!
Curiosity Powers Our Motivation to Learn
When was the last time you discovered something new in a favourite topic? Experiences which challenge our knowledge increase curiosity and cause us to explore for longer.
Here’s a recent example I experienced.
Most of our understanding of effective teaching has shifted since I was a primary teacher. I am curious about this tweet about Adaptive Teaching vs Differentiation, which presents the following statement:
Having lower expectations for some groups, particularly by setting them different work, will result in pupils having different knowledge and worsens gaps.
Challenged? ✅ Curious? ✅ Motivated to find out more? ✅
All new learning challenges the schemas we use to organise knowledge and understanding. A study by researchers Bonawitz, Schijndel, Friel, and Schulz found children are more likely to remain curious in this challenged state.
An unpublished Duke University study also showed heightened curiosity, increased patience and made people more willing to wait to discover a solution. In contrast, less curious people were more impatient and wanted to jump straight to the answers.
More curiosity has the power to motivate us for longer and increase our patience for discovery.
⏭🎯 Your Next Steps
Commit to action and turn words into works
- Pay attention to the signals of your own curiosity and the positive impact it has on your learning.
- Don’t just tell people they need to be open minded. Use provocations and well designed questions to increase curiosity.
- Change the start of your next few lessons or workshops to optimise for curiosity.
🗣💬 Your Talking Points
Lead a team dialogue with these provocations
- Your challenge is to increase curiosity in your team. What do you need from me?
- What’s the best way to challenge long-held views?
- When was the last time you changed your mind?
2000 Feet Up Without A Rope
On June 3, 2017, Alex Honnold had the best day of his life. That day, he free soloed El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. Free soloing is a form of climbing where the climber uses no ropes or safety gear.
El Capitan is one of the most challenging climbs in the world. It is a 3,000-foot granite monolith that towers over Yosemite Valley.
To put this in perspective, El Capitan is taller than the world’s tallest skyscraper, Burj Khalifa and about three times taller than The Shard in London.
Alex Honnold climbed it in a single 3-hour 56-minute push. Without a rope.
The BAFTA and Academy Award-winning documentary Free Solo depicts what many people consider one of the most remarkable athletic feats of all time.
Watching the film again this week, I reflected on risk, uncertainty, and differences in perception. Ultimately the story of Alex Honnold’s successful free solo ascent is a story of learning and mastery.
Stretching his zone of comfortable risk
The consequence of Honnold’s climb going wrong was ultimate. If you slip or miscalculate on El Capitan at 3k feet up, your death awaits you.
One comment from Fellow climber Tommy Caldwell struck a chord with me.
Imagine an Olympic gold medal-level athletic achievement … and if you don’t get that gold medal, you’re going to die.
Tommy Caldwell
It took years for him to prepare himself physically and psychologically. The film illustrates the meticulous preparation and rehearsal he committed to over seven years.
It’s about having a wide range of preparations, a wide range of experience. You build a broad comfort zone, basically. So that anything unforeseen will still hopefully fall within your comfort zone to some extent. I’ve consistently pushed myself in slightly different directions. If you think of your comfort zone as a bubble, just slowly push it in little directions each way. And then eventually it winds up with a pretty big bubble and then all you can really do is hope that whatever your objective is will still fit within your bubble.
Alex Honnold
This was no quick decision or lucky accomplishment. Honnold had mitigated and reduced the risks as much as possible. It was clear from the footage that risk analysis, management and strategy became an integral part of years of preparation.
Our Perception of His Risk
Watching the film is an emotional and visceral experience. We know Alex Honnold was successful and accomplished this incredible feat. Yet, still watching the final stages of his climb is excruciating.
From our point of view, the way he exposes his life to the risk of death is unfathomable. But that is our perception from a place of limited knowledge and experience.
People can be as scared as they want, but ultimately it doesn’t change the likelihood of me falling off. It doesn’t change the consequences of me falling off. I mean, no matter how scared everybody else is, it doesn’t change whether or not I can’t actually do the thing that I’m setting out to do. At a certain point, only I can know how prepared I am, how I feel for it. Ultimately nobody else has put that kind of time and preparation energy into it.
Alex Honnold
We project ourselves into the screen, into his climbing shoes, and it all seems unreasonable.
Visualising Success and Failure
Part of Honnold’s preparation was the use of visualisation. Back in issue 184 [Learning Zone Vs Performance Zone], we looked at some of the strategies elite athletes use, from sports psychology, to support their growth, development and performance.
Many of the world’s top athletes use visualisation techniques before a big event they’re mentally rehearsing it in their minds. This can increase motivation, build confidence and improve your performance. The more realistic this visualisation and preparation is, the more successful it will be. Athletes will think about the sounds they might hear – like the crowd. What they might smell – like freshly cut grass. And imagine what they are going to see. And how they might feel.
I appreciated an extension of this concept from Honnold’s reflections: negative visualisation to prepare his disposition and mental state for performance. He visualised a negative experience as much as a positive one.
the negative visualisation is important to do ahead of time, just so that in the actual moment, it doesn’t come up for the first time…the positive visualisation is easy because you just think like, oh, I’m going to feel great. I’m holding all these holds. The climbing is going to feel fluid and beautiful and fun. It’s going to be this incredible experience. But I think, you know, it’s important to balance that against the negative visualisation. Or even not the actual visualisation of falling to your death, but imagining what it would feel like to get into a position and suddenly hesitate or worry that your foot’s going to slip. To think through all those anxieties ahead of time. So they’re less likely to occur when it matters.
Alex Honnold
The need for negative consequence rehearsal may be unique to his sport and the El Capitan ascent, but it provokes us to reflect on the balanced preparation he invested in.
Your Talking Points
Apply these insights to our work in educational innovation with these provocations and questions.
- How do we better appreciate the differences in perception of our project?
- What new information and knowledge might mitigate the risks we face?
- Do we share the same understanding of the risks we identified?
- How do we rehearse the negative consequences of our project?
In the comments below let me know what resonates.
Successful Teams Are More Open About Their Mistakes
A research study into the performance levels of hospital staff explored something unusual about the error rates that were recorded there. Amy Edmonson the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, shares more about her exploration:
“My first research project in graduate school explored the relationship between teamwork and errors (in hospitals), because errors are a critical input to organizational learning, especially in that setting. I assumed I’d find a negative relationship between teamwork and error rate.
Instead, I stumbled into quite a different discovery. The statistical results I obtained were the opposite of what I’d predicted. Well-led teams with good relationships were apparently making more mistakes; there was a significant correlation between teamwork and error rates—in what I initially considered “the wrong direction.”
This presented a puzzle. Did better-led teams really make more mistakes? I simply did not think that could be accurate. Why else might better teams have higher error rates?”
After some further exploration Edmonson hit upon what was taking place:
“In well-led teams, a climate of openness could make it easier to report and discuss errors—compared to teams with poor relationships or with punitive leaders. The good teams, according to this interpretation, don’t make more mistakes, they report more.”
Our attention is often drawn to encouraging cultures of innovation through more open mistake making – but perhaps it is more than just making the mistakes, taking risks and a have-a-go culture. We need to be open and encouraged to share them too.
Pic Western Decay by sleepinyourhat