Wednesday, 15 December 2010

People still willing to torture


People 'still willing to torture'

Electric shock
Subjects were apparently given electric shocks
Decades after a notorious experiment, scientists have found test subjects are still willing to inflict pain on others - if told to by an authority figure.
US researchers repeated the famous "Milgram test", with volunteers told to deliver electrical shocks to another volunteer - played by an actor.
Even after faked screams of pain, 70% were prepared to increase the voltage, the American Psychologist study found.
Both may help explain why apparently ordinary people can commit atrocities.
 It's not that these people are simply not good people any more - there is a massive social influence going on. 
Dr Abigal San
clinical psychologist
Yale University professor Stanley Milgram's work, published in 1963, recruited volunteers to help carry out a medical experiment, with none aware that they were actually the subject of the test.
A "scientist" instructed them to deliver a shock every time the actor answered a question wrongly.
When the pretend 150-volt shock was delivered, the actor could be heard screaming in pain, and yet, when asked to, more than eight out of ten volunteers were prepared to give further shocks, even when the "voltage" was gradually increased threefold.
Some volunteers even carried on giving 450-volt shocks even when there was no further response from the actor, suggesting he was either unconscious or dead.
Similar format
Dr Jerry Burger, of Santa Clara University, used a similar format, although he did not allow the volunteers to carry on beyond 150 volts after they had shown their willingness to do so, suggesting that the distress caused to the original volunteers had been too great.
HAVE YOUR SAY
Until humans value the lives of others equal to their own, this will unfortunately continue to be the case
Louise, Lincoln, UK
Again, however, the vast majority of the 29 men and 41 women taking part were willing to push the button knowing it would cause pain to another human.
Even when another actor entered the room and questioned what was happening, most were still prepared to continue.
He told Reuters: "What we found is validation of the same argument - if you put people in certain situations, they will act in surprising and maybe often even disturbing ways."
He said that it was not that there was "something wrong" with the volunteers, but that when placed under pressure, people will often do "unsettling" things.
Even though it was difficult to translate laboratory work to the real world, he said, it might partly explain why, in times of conflict, people could take part in genocide.
Complex task
Dr Abigail San, a chartered clinical psychologist, has recently replicated the experiment for a soon-to-be-aired BBC documentary - all the way up to the 450-volt mark, again finding a similar outcome to Professor Milgram.
"It's not that these people are simply not good people any more - there is a massive social influence going on."
She said that the volunteers were being asked to carry out a complex task in aid of scientific research, and became entirely focused on it, with "little room" left for considering the plight of the person receiving the shock.
"They tend to identify massively with the 'experimenter', and become very engaged and distracted by the research.
"There's no opportunity for them to say 'What's my moral stand on this?'" 

Tuesday, 14 December 2010

Interviews with Global leaders of Change on iTunes

A host of interviews are available here;

http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/six-sigma-lean-six-sigma-continuous/id298069740

Monday, 13 December 2010

How Anger Poisons Decision Making - Harvard Business Review


How Anger Poisons Decision Making
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You’re late for work, and it’s pouring rain. In the parking lot, a car speeds around you and takes the last spot near the building entrance. You end up trudging from the back of the lot and get soaked to the skin. You’re mad, and you know your judgment at the moment is probably impaired. Worse, the leftover anger will continue to color your decisions at work, our research suggests, without your awareness—not a good thing for anyone trying to steer the best course through the day’s business problems.
Many organizations have anger-management programs for their most egregious bullies, but the reality is that the vast majority of employees will experience anger triggered by anything from a family quarrel to a lost parking space—and their work will suffer for it. For example, angry people tend to rely on cognitive shortcuts—easy rules of thumb—rather than on more systematic reasoning. They’re also quick to blame individuals, rather than aspects of a situation, for problems.
Companies can effectively work around this human tendency and mitigate the impact of anger-fueled actions in the workplace by introducing accountability. If you expect that your decisions will be evaluated by someone whose opinions you don’t know, you’ll unconsciously curb the effects of anger on those decisions. When you can’t be sure how your evaluator will judge your behavior, you’ll pay more attention to the key facts of a situation, which will then crowd out the (unwanted) influence of your own feelings from past events. This finding has important implications for organizations and their populations of semirational, emotion-ridden individuals who endeavor to produce good decisions in spite of themselves.
A study conducted by Jennifer S. Lerner with Julie H. Goldberg of the University of Illinois and Philip E. Tetlock of UC Berkeley documented the psychological effects of residual anger. The study found that people who saw an anger-inducing video of a boy being bullied were then more punitive toward defendants in a series of unrelated fictional tort cases involving negligence and injury than were people who had seen a neutral video—unless they were told that they’d be held accountable and would be asked to explain their decisions to an expert whose views they didn’t know. After watching the bullying video, the subjects in this accountable group were every bit as angry as the others, yet they judged the defendants’ behavior less harshly. Accountability appears not to change what decision makers feel; rather, it changes how they use their feelings—a much more manageable objective for the workplace.
Accountability vs no accountability chart here
Without revealing their own views, managers should inform employees that they will be expected to justify their decisions on certain projects—not just the outcomes—after the fact. By improving accountability, managers can steer employees toward decisions free from the negative effects of anger.

Wednesday, 8 December 2010

PCC Goes to China

OperationalEfficiencyPortfolio01.jpg http://tiny.cc/cxkwj


I'm pleased to be able to say we are truly going global, with our latest article featuring in the Lean Six Sigma Institutes newsletter in the Far East ... Thanks to William Feng Yu for sharing our thoughts with his members.

Electronic Pick Pocketing WREG News Channel 3


RFID - Easy to Pay, but easy to lose your money too?

How scary is this if it catches on?

Tuesday, 7 December 2010

Change Happens - Get over it, get on with it!


Change Happens - Get over it, get on with it!
By David Bovis 

I know this title is a little provocative. It is supposed to be!!

     1.    How would you feel if someone tells you that you have to change? There’s no choice.

   2.    How would you feel when you have sufficient experience to perceive why you need to change, how you can change and what is in it for you?

    Two different ways... two different feelings!

Let’s start with a constant. Change does happen! It is inevitable and it has been happening again and again for thousands of years.  In fact, change is the only constant affecting everything, from petrol prices to theories about the origins of mankind and the planet! Nothing is excluded, everything can change - even the way we approach the management and implementation of change in business ...

In industry, change happens for many reasons; market conditions, organizational evolution, ash clouds, oil spills or even by planned ‘change improvement programs’. Sometimes we choose it; sometimes it is thrust upon us by circumstance or by leaders.

Organizational leaders understand that because change happens, their organization must constantly evolve, adapt and transform itself if it is to survive in the market place, the goal is often to grow to a position of market leadership and improve efficiency and effectiveness, 'we must change to cope with change itself, so we can 'win''. 

This is why Lean, Six Sigma and other process improvement best practices are so prevalent in business today and why organizational improvement programs are constantly evolving in a quest to find a change program that works straight away and delivers sustainable results.

The process focused tools, techniques and strategies have been finely honed and developed to deliver results, but what has to be recognized is that it is the people who offer the resistance to change which ultimately affects long term outcomes.



Q. Why is this and how can the problem be resolved?

Resistance happens on a psychological level. 

People form personal comfort zones and if you ask them to move toward something uncomfortable, they will invariably offer resistance. Sometimes the resistance persists and in some cases, the change initiative fails before it even gets off the ground. This can be massively expensive and disruptive and I’m sure we can all recall such experiences in our own organizations. 

I’m equally sure that you have felt that uneasy feeling when you have had to push your own boundaries or fully step outside of your own comfort zone (like being detoured on the way to work or your car keys going missing when you’re late). Be it in your private life or your working environment, it doesn’t take much to challenge your patterns and you may well have resisted the change in the form of anger, anxiety, frustration or any number of negative emotions.

The degree to which you resist change depends on a number of factors including: who or what you perceive to be the origin of the imposed change, what assumptions and judgements you make and how threatened you feel by the new conditions relative to the speed of exposure – to name but a few. 

If the need to change originates in a person or a system you implicitly trust, you are more likely to accept and follow the 'new' course of action.


W.I.I.F.M...?

The irony here is that as humans in a world of change, we yearn for change; 

we pursue it with a vengeance … but usually only 'outside' of the working environment - so whats the difference?

When it’s something we want (we've had the freedom to make a choice) and we subconsciously perceive a beneficial answer to the Question “What’s In It for Me” (WIIFM), we don’t oppose change; we embrace it.

Music!

Think of the weekly music-chart updates, most weeks there’s a new No.1. In 2000, there were 42 different number one hits in 52 weeks. Also consider how we feel when that ‘comfortable’ regular change disappears? Who remembers the 16 weeks Bryan Adams was No.1 with the Robin Hood Prince of Thieves single “Everything I do) I do it for you”? Boring right? Or maybe your example is Whitney Houston’s ‘I will always love you’ from the film ‘The Bodyguard’ which lasted 10 weeks. It seemed like an eternity didn’t it?

The evolution from Top of the Pops to live download updates reflects our desire to understand the latest situation quickly; this is largely due to the way our brains derive meaning from feedback - something our 'systems' and prevailing conditions we create at work fail to deliver.

Heroic Leaders!

Think of the hero in a disaster movie. Despite the circumstances, people are expected to do something which is way outside of their comfort zone. “Jump!” shouts the hero.  The character hesitates briefly, but because the situation provides them the immediate feedback they require and the hero is consistently confident, the person jumps off the sinking ship or out of the window in the burning building. They reflect the leaders’ behavior.

These hero’s only do what all natural leaders do, they lead by example. In the world of change, this is a really big issue at a psychological level; many leaders today instruct others to change, which is a bit like telling someone to jump from the burning platform into the safety net without holding their hand or jumping with them. 

Natural leaders do exist but they are few and far between. What do they do differently and why? How do they do it? Wouldn’t you like each of your teams and departments to be led by such people?

Here’s the science bit!

Assumptions occur in people when the systems & Sub-systems (ERP / MIS / Teams / Accounting or production Processes and procedures) they encounter, fail to provide relevant information in a timeframe that is conducive to their neural requirements. We call this 'temporal detachment'.

Over the course of their lives, people are exposed to different Environmental Emotional Experiences (EEE).  This results in them making different assumptions about their current environments which then results in differing opinions or ‘Cognitive Dissonance’.

Cognitive Dissonance is another name for the experience of intuitive discomfort in any given situation, which provokes people to react with an instinctive fear / threat response. They have EEE imprinted self defense mechanisms and a negative reaction resulting in blame / projection / lack of engagement, ownership and responsibility, which results in an external locus of control.

Cognitive Dissonance from assumption, in the face of a lack of timely meaning (not information transfer as occurs in I.T. systems) also results in people experiencing a low self concept, low confidence, low energy, and a lack of creativity and innovation.  They fail to solve problems preferring to default to blame and other automatic defences that ultimately undermine organizational performance. 

The worst thing is, people start to feel comfortable with this ‘way of being’ over time and 'we' (humans) don’t challenge what we are comfortable with, regardless of whether it is judged good or bad.

Understanding these and other psychological issues which result in resistance to change will enable a leader to act in such a way that they will consistently choose to elicit positive behaviors and avoid behaving in a way that will result in resistance. That is to say, they will have the knowledge and capacity to choose to act in a way that will get the person to “Jump!!” before the ship sinks or the building burns down. 

Where leaders can understand the intricate details of the people process that culminates in the motivation of their team members to embrace change, they can realize improvement programs that will be an instant and sustainable success.

Creating heroic leaders at every level in business is about aligning beliefs and behaviors, such that they are seen in direct relationship to performance and profit. The link is absolute and is driven by a philosophy of ‘being’ as a stable foundation, that comes before the endeavour of ‘doing’. 

“How we are, is how we act”. 

With this awareness, making change that is primarily focused on ‘what we do’ can be seen in a new context ... doing can be seen as an effect of how we are being, rather than the cause. 

If you can change that belief, (supported by the latest findings in Neuroscience and psychology) you will change the way you approach change, and change can become comfortable & sustainable, culturally.




Authored by David Bovis (Founding Partner, PCC (Psychology of Culture Change) LLP
PCC provides the context in which to perceive the origins of change as something beyond what we ‘do’ in the form of new tools, process and procedure, as is historically popular in the prevailing market. By creating heroic leaders, PCC provides 'meaning' - required for each and every individual to understand and make cognitive choices over their actions and reactions, relative to their immediate conditions and organisational objectives; this provides a vehicle by which people can emotionally function in a new and sustainable way, making a change to culture autonomous and sustainable.

Contact him at david.bovis@pcchange.co.uk  

New guide for innovation partnerships

Manufacturing News, Source : TheManufacturer.com



The Institute for Manufacturing (IfM) at the University of Cambridge has produced a new report to help businesses select effective partners for collaborative Open Innovation (OI).

OI involves working with external business partners to develop new products and access new technology but many businesses lack the necessary capabilities to engage in such a project and, thus, seek ‘innovation intermediaries’, which include commercial and technical consultancies, government departments and academic networks.

IfM has conducted a year-long study involving BP, GlaxoSmithKline, PepsiCo, EPSRC and NESTA and has now produced a report “Getting Help With Open Innovation” which offers tips for and examples of a structured approach to selecting the most appropriate intermediary for a particular company’s needs.

Dr Letizia Mortara, of the IfM’s Centre for Technology Management (CTM), says: “Our research had identified a clear desire for a structured method of selecting innovation intermediaries. This came from the intermediaries themselves and the companies which used their services.

“Intermediaries vary considerably in terms of the capabilities they offer their clients. The report equips companies with the right questions to ask in order to be able to assess whether a particular organisation is right for them.

“In turn the report also helps intermediaries to clearly state what their services consist of and to clarify their offering for clients.”

The research drew on interviews with more than 100 organisations, both intermediaries and users of intermediary services.

The report also includes a directory of more than 100 innovation intermediaries.
For a copy of the report email Rob Halden-Pratt at rwh26@cam.ac.uk.