Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently by Gregory Berns Ph.d. Page A
Authors: Gregory Berns Ph.d.
Tags: Religión, General, Medical, Psychology, Business & Economics, fear, Neuropsychology, Neuroscience, Management, Industrial & Organizational Psychology, Creative Ability, Behavior - Physiology, Thinking - Physiology, Psychophysiology - Methods, Risk-Taking, Psychology; Industrial, Perception - Physiology, Iconoclasm
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make up stuff. I made it to executive VP not by being bright, but by being theatrical. By being passionate. You can fake passion. Andthe better ideas were being shot down because the other guy didn’t do theater as well.”
Their approach to coaxing innovation, even iconoclasm, is through the idea market. Everyone, on the day they start work at Rite-Solutions, is given $10,000 in opinion money. This money can be invested in ideas in an internal stock market. The market has a superficial similarity to a real stock market, but it has some crucial differences that allow ideas to evolve. Employees log in to the market and can view an “expectus,” which is a brief description of an idea that someone else in the company came up with. It might be a simple idea, such as developing a piece of computer code to perform some new visualization function. At this stage of the game, it is still just an idea. If another employee likes the idea, they can invest part of their opinion money in that idea.
An investment grows in value through the next two components of the market. For an idea to gain traction, other people have to make comments and criticisms within the market about how to improve the idea. This is called “interest” money. Lavoie and Marino operationalize the amount of interest by the number of comments for a particular idea. They have structured the market so that interest money counts for twice as much opinion money. But to realize a profit, employees must put in real time working on an idea. This is called the investment phase, and it is the most valuable of all, because it transitions an idea off the drawing board into reality. It need not be complex. It can be as simple as someone saying, “Here’s what needs to be done, and I’m willing to contribute two hours of my own time.”
One wonders why someone would spend their own time working on ideas that are not directly related to Rite-Solutions’ contract work. Marino believes the answer has to do with trust. “Going in on Day 1, we let our people see anything that anybody is working on. Very few companies do that.” Another reason is that the market helps people create their own jobs. “Not only does the originator of an idea benefit financially, butif the idea is successful, then he’s going to be the one working on that technology,” Lavoie says. This is a nice perk especially if it’s a particularly hot technology that people are dying to work on.
Lavoie and Marino came up with a novel solution to the problem of social fear and how this fear stifles innovation. To be sure, it doesn’t remove all of the fear of sharing one’s ideas publicly, but it attempts to take some of the drama out of it. It also has another, unanticipated benefit in terms of transparency. The market makes it clear to everyone in the company what everyone else is working on, in essence providing a big picture for everyone who wants to know how their work fits into the company as a whole. Lavoie and Marino didn’t design the market to address the problem of secrecy in organizations, but the market has turned out to help decrease a third common fear that gets in the way of iconoclasm: the fear of the unknown.
Fear of the Unknown: A Biological View of Uncertainty
Although fear of the unknown is an entirely different type of phobia from the fear of failure, it is also processed through the amygdala. This is actually good news, because it means that the pathways by which fear inhibits behavior flow through this one structure. We have learned a great deal about the amygdala in the last several years, and this knowledge can be applied to ameliorate this particular roadblock to iconoclasm.
Fear of the unknown, or ambiguity, is a funny thing. It is not a specific event such as an electric shock or the pain experienced from the criticism of an unempathetic supervisor. Ambiguity stems from a lack of knowledge. It looms over the psyche like a dark cloud on the horizon. The brain
Their approach to coaxing innovation, even iconoclasm, is through the idea market. Everyone, on the day they start work at Rite-Solutions, is given $10,000 in opinion money. This money can be invested in ideas in an internal stock market. The market has a superficial similarity to a real stock market, but it has some crucial differences that allow ideas to evolve. Employees log in to the market and can view an “expectus,” which is a brief description of an idea that someone else in the company came up with. It might be a simple idea, such as developing a piece of computer code to perform some new visualization function. At this stage of the game, it is still just an idea. If another employee likes the idea, they can invest part of their opinion money in that idea.
An investment grows in value through the next two components of the market. For an idea to gain traction, other people have to make comments and criticisms within the market about how to improve the idea. This is called “interest” money. Lavoie and Marino operationalize the amount of interest by the number of comments for a particular idea. They have structured the market so that interest money counts for twice as much opinion money. But to realize a profit, employees must put in real time working on an idea. This is called the investment phase, and it is the most valuable of all, because it transitions an idea off the drawing board into reality. It need not be complex. It can be as simple as someone saying, “Here’s what needs to be done, and I’m willing to contribute two hours of my own time.”
One wonders why someone would spend their own time working on ideas that are not directly related to Rite-Solutions’ contract work. Marino believes the answer has to do with trust. “Going in on Day 1, we let our people see anything that anybody is working on. Very few companies do that.” Another reason is that the market helps people create their own jobs. “Not only does the originator of an idea benefit financially, butif the idea is successful, then he’s going to be the one working on that technology,” Lavoie says. This is a nice perk especially if it’s a particularly hot technology that people are dying to work on.
Lavoie and Marino came up with a novel solution to the problem of social fear and how this fear stifles innovation. To be sure, it doesn’t remove all of the fear of sharing one’s ideas publicly, but it attempts to take some of the drama out of it. It also has another, unanticipated benefit in terms of transparency. The market makes it clear to everyone in the company what everyone else is working on, in essence providing a big picture for everyone who wants to know how their work fits into the company as a whole. Lavoie and Marino didn’t design the market to address the problem of secrecy in organizations, but the market has turned out to help decrease a third common fear that gets in the way of iconoclasm: the fear of the unknown.
Fear of the Unknown: A Biological View of Uncertainty
Although fear of the unknown is an entirely different type of phobia from the fear of failure, it is also processed through the amygdala. This is actually good news, because it means that the pathways by which fear inhibits behavior flow through this one structure. We have learned a great deal about the amygdala in the last several years, and this knowledge can be applied to ameliorate this particular roadblock to iconoclasm.
Fear of the unknown, or ambiguity, is a funny thing. It is not a specific event such as an electric shock or the pain experienced from the criticism of an unempathetic supervisor. Ambiguity stems from a lack of knowledge. It looms over the psyche like a dark cloud on the horizon. The brain
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