How Can Your Network Help Your Inner Homer?

Homer: Just give me my gun…
Gun Shop Owner: Sorry, the law requires a five-day waiting period. We’ve got to run a background check.
Homer: Five days? But I’m mad now!

Your two brains

You’re probably familiar with the idea that we all have two systems of thinking – a thoughtful, logical system and a impulsive, emotional system. Richard Thaler* has a great model for thinking about them: Mr. Spock and Homer Simpson.

Mr. Spock is what Thaler calls your “Reflective System”, i.e. the part of you that stops and thinks of consequences, re-checks calculations and assumptions, etc. Homer is your “Automatic System”, i.e. your “gut reaction,” “fight or flight, “lizard brain,” etc. It’s the part that came in very handy when your prehistoric ancestor was strolling across the Savannah and wished to not be eaten by predators lurking in the tall grass.

Doughnuts. Is there anything they can’t do?

As civilized folk, we try to ignore our inner Homer and be upstanding Mr. Spocks when it comes to making decisions. We’re taught that making decisions rashly or under emotional stress should be avoided.

When angry, count to ten before you speak; if very angry, swear.    – Mark Twain

That’s wonderful advice, but while we can identify obvious situations where we know we need to wait to cool down or spend extra time doing research, we are still incredibly vulnerable to subtle tricks that cause us to make faulty decisions, even when we think we are being quite logical. Homer may be dense at times, but he also can be quite sneaky. For even while our inner Mr. Spocks are supposedly making cool, logical decisions, our inner Homers are influencing them by how we weigh certain risks, how we look at future needs vs. immediate wants, etc. These all impact how we decide no matter how hard we try to cut off that influence.

This is where your network can come to the rescue. We typically see networks as a way we can not only find out things from others, but also as a way to perhaps influence others. Well, it works in both directions. It turns out that while our inner Homer is pretty powerful in prioritizing his own immediate reactions for reasons to do with survival, so is our inner Homer’s tendency to need the acceptance, praise, attention, approval, etc. of others. Our prehistoric ancestors that lived in cooperative groups increased their chances of survival and hence the passing of their genes to future generations.

Put your inner Homer to work!

So when, for whatever reason, we’re still on a path not in your best interests (e.g. can’t quit smoking, downplaying project danger signals, floundering in a fulfilling job, discounting marketplace trends, etc.) and personal motivation doesn’t seem to be enough, use Homer’s need for approval to help you alter your behavior.

Here’s the catch: you need to have built a network that can really help you, not one that will just reinforce your biases. Just as having diversity in your network for working on “logical” issues helps you reduce your blind-spots, so it is with working on these “emotional” issues. For instance, it won’t do you much good to help you quit smoking if your network is entirely made of smokers. Likewise, it doesn’t help you spot and take seriously trends that threaten your competitive position in the marketplace if your network is made up of carbon copies of your experiences and outlook on trends.  But also keep in mind that you are more apt to be influenced by your network the more you share in common with those members. So you have to mix it up a little: common interests and beliefs in some areas along with different beliefs in other areas with certain folks, plus different common interests and beliefs with other folks.

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*Check out “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness” by Thaler and Sunstein. Richard Thaler is well-known for his work in behavioral finance.

Missing Layer, Filled?

Network and collaboration tools not only offer ways to directly improve productivity and innovation by connecting previously isolated parts of your organization, they can also help identify and influence behaviors that lead to better overall performance. In a way, you can look at integration of these tools with enterprise systems as “filling in” a missing layer between two other ways behaviors are already being influenced.

“Influencer: The Power to Change Anything” by Patterson, et al, provides some excellent examples of people creating change in many different areas, both public and private, under daunting circumstances. They achieved this by focusing on vital behaviors and by using combinations of sources of influence to change those behaviors. Briefly put, their sources of influence model distills the forces that impact behavior down to just two mental maps, Motivation (“Is it worth it?”) and Ability (“Can I do it?”). In addition, these mental maps are subdivided into Personal, Social, and Structural sources. This results in a total of six sources and the authors make two important points:

1. The more of the six sources you can tap into, the more likely your influence efforts will succeed.
2. The more you tap into the Personal first, followed by the Social second, and then finally the Structural third, the more likely you will succeed.

What does this have to do with integrating network and collaboration tools with enterprise systems? We can view these systems as initially having been focused on supporting influencing behaviors from a Structural perspective. This was through things like performance and compensation (Structural – Motivation) and resource planning (Structural – Ability). Gradually, they added focus on supporting influencing behaviors from a Personal perspective. This was through things like tracking competencies (Personal – Ability) and development (Personal – Motivation). This mapping isn’t perfect and there aren’t hard lines between these areas, but you can see how the framework can be applied to understanding how influence is supported.

This framework then causes us to ask, “Where is the support for the Social layer?” Is there a way in which systems can support influencing behavior through Social-Motivation (i.e. networks of relationships that encourage the kinds of behavior someone would like to do more of) and Social-Ability (i.e. ones that support these new behaviors)? One way Social-Ability could be supported is by integrating networking and collaboration tools to support people finding the expertise they need to help achieve their goals. A way in which Social-Motivation could be supported is by integrating these tools with an individual’s development efforts.

Those are just a couple of examples and this is only a start at looking into how to support changing behaviors more effectively. Changing behaviors is one of the trickiest and most difficult, but in many ways the most effective, way to improve performance. We are often uncomfortable with it because we often confuse influence with manipulation or coercion. This makes us either reluctant to attempt influence because we don’t want our intentions to be misunderstood or it makes us resistant to influence because we don’t want to feel we’re being controlled. The former can be addressed by being transparent and honest with people about intention (the antithesis of manipulation) and the latter can be addressed by starting with the individual at the Personal level (as advised by the authors.)

Photo by Dog Company