Month: September 2021

Changing your mind about something as important as vaccination isn’t a sign of weakness – being open to new information is the smart way to make choices

People tend to stick with their stated beliefs. But here’s how external forces like vaccine mandates can push people to do something they don’t want to do – and provide some face-saving cover.

theconversation.com

Social psychologists know that, on the one hand, people are motivated to maintain consistency across their beliefs. Because people want their web of beliefs to be coherent, they tend to give a lot of weight to beliefs that are consistent with their overall worldview and to discount those that are contradictory. As a result, people will continue to hold on to a set of beliefs even in the face of mounting evidence that they should revise what they think.

Psychologists describe this unconscious strategy as a way for people to minimize any cognitive dissonance they experience – when things don’t add up, it can be disturbing, so to avoid those uncomfortable feelings, they ignore what doesn’t fit well with their existing beliefs as a way to maintain balance.

In the context of COVID-19, for example, someone who is predisposed to dislike the vaccine will give little weight to new evidence of vaccine effectiveness, because that evidence contradicts their current worldview.

Eventually, though, enough counterevidence can lead to what psychologists call a shift in coherence, in which people can come to believe that their initial viewpoint was wrong.

When environments change a lot, exploration is important. Good decision-makers will often forego the best-known option in order to determine whether other options are now actually better.

In these situations, helping people to change behavior requires reducing their need to feel bound to act in a way that is consistent with the attitudes they have expressed

More generally, people are creatures of habit. You likely feel most comfortable doing what has worked for you in the past. The more you learn to pay attention to how much change there is in the environment, the more you can work to push yourself to explore new options and change your beliefs and behavior based on new evidence.

This is one of the predominant myths of conventional minds. They believe that changing your mind is a “sign of weakness”, as it signifies you’re all over the place and “aren’t really standing behind your beliefs.” While this can be true for someone who changes their mind repeatedly, back and forth, to suit their needs in the moment, for someone who explores and sees a change in their environment and thus permanently changes their own beliefs and values to match it, this pivot is more commonly known as psychological growth, whereby one expands one’s worldview in the process.

In fact, as I’ve noted to others before, psychological growth and development actually requires these paradoxical shifts to occur at certain stages in one’s life, as the expansion of one’s worldview frees the individual from their past beliefs which are no longer empowering them but are actually limiting them.

Of course this can be confusing and disorienting to the individual who navigates their life with their beliefs. But once they recognize their outdated beliefs are no longer working for the current reality they are living within (like an outdated GPS), they in time will see that updating their beliefs as an empowering act, rather than a sacrilegious one. In effect, after going through one of these psychological paradoxical shifts, everything will make perfect sense upon reflection within their newer worldview.

To fight burnout, workers can’t allow well-being to feel like another to-do

In her book ‘The Burnout Epidemic,’ author Jennifer Moss describes a crisis in well-being as a result of workers being stretched to their limits.

www.fastcompany.com

…we’ll lose nearly $1 trillion in productivity globally each year, spend $190 billion in healthcare outlays, and 120,000 people will die from burnout in the United States alone.

“These survey responses make it clear that a lot of people are having serious disruptions in their relationship with work,” Leiter noted. “It’s not surprising that people are more exhausted —people are working hard to keep their work and personal lives afloat. But the rise in cynicism is even more troubling. Cynicism reflects a lack of trust in the world. So many people feel let down by their government’s poor preparation for the pandemic, as well as by the injustices in work and well-being that the pandemic has highlighted.”

Millennials have the highest levels of burnout, we found. Much of this is due to having less autonomy at work, lower seniority, and greater financial stressors and feelings of loneliness. The last was the biggest factor leading to burnout, according to our research. As one millennial put it: “The pandemic has had a tremendous impact on my well-being—I’ve had mental health challenges, and I’ve hit major roadblocks with that. My physical health has changed because I can’t exercise like I used to. It’s affected me economically. I feel as though my career has been set back yet again.”

One executive at a global accounting firm shared with me that her company recently offered everyone access to a meditation app. After a series of emails from corporate reminding her about all the cool features and benefits the app could offer, she still couldn’t find the time to log on. The executive says that if she has time left in the day, it goes to jamming a granola bar in her mouth and getting to the bathroom. She laughs, “It’s just so ironic. Shouldn’t they make this place less stressful so I don’t need an app to calm down? It all feels a bit tonedeaf.”

From our research, I learned that a big predictor for well-being at work during times of stress was trust and communication.

I learned that this trust would have been built up long before the crisis hit. But it could be developed with frequent and humble communication.

A little bit less than a year ago, we entered a pandemic. At the time, we naively believed this was a public health crisis and indeed it is a public health crisis that continues to today. But it’s also uncovered another number of crises. Crises that are economic in nature. Crises that are political in nature. Crises that are exacerbated by inequalities. Crises that are connected to our climate issues. And so we have seen as the waters have receded is more and more of these crises brought to the surface.

How will we solve these crises? Well, doing a little bit better, maybe a little bit more efficiently, best practices will get us a little bit of the way. But clearly it will take new thinking and innovation. And so this session is going to be thinking about innovation. But what kind of innovation and with what values.

Peter Tufano

We want to talk about the ways that social entrepreneurs can be the sort of people that can help us get out of this and help us think about how we might make a world that’s fit for purpose in the 21st century because I think there is one thing we can all agree on is that “business as usual” is no longer getting it done.

Peter Drobac

I’ve been toiling in the field of social innovation for two, two plus decades now and you know the animating feature of social innovation is this recognition, this clear-eyed recognition, that the current systems are not working or not working for enough of us. But there is a real animating feature to try to fix, repair, rebuild, reimagine those systems to make them more inclusive and provide more opportunity for all.

But the diagnosis that these systems aren’t working is the same diagnosis that we see from those who are animated from populist anger. So we come at the problem from the same vantage point. The way we have constructed societal forces are simply not working.

I often talk about the weight of systems, systems residue that is weighting folks down: people of colour, marginalized folks, poor folks, women. We can go through all these forms of oppression and these systems are exacerbating those. So we all see it. However our prescription for what to do about it is radically different.

Social innovators recognize that indeed there’s a problem but they raise their hands as engaged committed citizens to say, “Well it’s our job to fix it. We roll up our sleeves, we get to work, and we figure out what we can do.” So much of the populist anger is a nihilistic one as you said Peter, it’s a blow it all up, consequences be damned.

And these conflicting forces that are butting heads, there has to be a way to engage more folks from the other side who are frustrated as many of us are who are engaged in the work of social innovation but do it within the realm of democratic practice that provides a seat for all of us at the table. I think that’s the needle to thread. And I think we’ve got to figure it out and we got to figure it out sooner than later.

Cheryl Dorsey

As a fellow recovering doctor, I use a lot of medical metaphors and sometimes talk about you know these issues as being deep wounds were trying to sort of paper over with band-aids and really just treating the symptoms. And what social entrepreneurs and social innovators do is really try to understand what’s driving these problems at their root causes. And try to impact those systems and those deep structural forces, treating the system rather than the symptoms.

Peter Drobac

Two Warning Signs Told Us That The Great Resignation Was Coming

For all the hand wringing about the current “Great Resignation,” the reality is that we should have seen this coming.

www.forbes.com

For all the hand wringing about the current “Great Resignation,” the reality is that we should have seen this coming. Long before the pandemic, there were signs that more than a few employees were unhappy. And as the pandemic progressed, even more worrying signals emerged.

These are just two of the warning signs that the Great Resignation was imminent; there are dozens more. The point, however, is that the current exodus was predictable. Whether we discovered this through surveys or simply listening to employees, the signs were there. The big question for every executive moving forward is whether we want to start listening to avoid this problem again in the future.

Note how this “ignoring of reality” within the workplace over the past couple of decades shows the cognitive dissonance of management in these companies. In effect, they didn’t want to believe that things were beginning to fall apart and no longer working effectively, which would mean that they weren’t effective at their job anymore, so they just ignored it and believed that everything was fine. But you can only ignore reality for so long.

And a further downside of this is that the more things fall apart, the more management will try to take more control of things, thus making things worse because it causes more burnout of staff who actually want management to let go of control, giving them the autonomy and responsibility to do their work on their own through a collective sense of leadership instead.

For myself, these signs have been blatantly obvious since the Dot-Com Bubble burst in 2001 and they’ve only been building since then. So the pandemic isn’t causing these issues in the workplace today. All it’s doing is bringing them all to the surface so that they can no longer be ignored. That’s because whereas before people’s livelihoods we’re on the line in the past, now their literal lives are on the line and it’s making them question everything about their world and the way work has been done within it.

Why U.S. Talent Shortages Are At A Ten-Year High

A shocking 54% of companies globally report talent shortages—the highest in over a decade. But why? Here’s what we found.

www.forbes.com

“Skilled workers are in control and companies need to understand people’s priorities to compete.”

The last year has changed the way employees view and approach work. In short, employees want more, and they don’t want to compromise. In the EY 2021 Work Reimagined Employee Survey, more than half (54%) of employees surveyed globally would consider leaving their job post-pandemic if they are not provided some form of flexibility in where and when they work. Liz Fealy, EY Global People Advisory Services Deputy Leader, says, “Employees’ willingness to change jobs in the current economic environment is a game-changer. The Covid-19 pandemic has shown that flexibility can work for both employees and employers, and flexible working is the new currency for attracting and retaining top talent.” Workers also want to be measured on the value they deliver, not the volume. According to a study by Citrix, 86% of employees said they would prefer to work for a company that prioritizes outcomes over output. And they expect to be given the trust and autonomy they need to do their best work. Then there’s work-life balance. In a survey conducted by Prudential, of the workers planning to look for a new job post-pandemic, 38% are doing so because of work-life balance challenges.

What is creative tension and how could it help us?

What is creative tension and how could it help us? If you’ve ever experienced that niggly feeling of frustration that you’re not quite fulfilling your potential, let me introduce you to a concept c…

iconocsgroup.com

And although creative tension and cognitive dissonance are not identical, Tompkins and Lawley claim that our mental processes for each are very similar.

“When the way the world is, and the way we expect or want it to be are different, a ‘cognitive dissonance’ and an internal tension result,” they explain.

“Both creative tension and cognitive dissonance demand resolution. Creative tension pushes us to create something new, whereas cognitive dissonance pulls us to find ways to maintain our existing views and beliefs.

BTW I believe the words “pushing” & “pulling” should be swapped, so that cognitive dissonance feels like something is pushing you (forcing you) to resolve something immediately (like someone micromanaging you over your shoulder) whereas creative tension feels more like an attractive possibility of something new out there pulling you (or gravitating you) towards it.

Cognitive dissonance – Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance is the perception of contradictory information. Relevant items of information include a person’s actions, feelings, ideas, beliefs, and values, and things in the environment. Cognitive dissonance is typically experienced as psychological stress when they participate in an action that goes against one or more of them. According to this theory, when two actions or ideas are not psychologically consistent with each other, people do all in their power to change them until they become consistent. The discomfort is triggered by the person’s belief clashing with new information perceived, wherein they try to find a way to resolve the contradiction to reduce their discomfort.

Coping with the nuances of contradictory ideas or experiences is mentally stressful. It requires energy and effort to sit with those seemingly opposite things that all seem true. Festinger argued that some people would inevitably resolve dissonance by blindly believing whatever they wanted to believe.

Two Errors Our Minds Make When Trying to Grasp the Pandemic

Disappointment and uncertainty are inevitable. But we don’t have to turn them into suffering.

www.theatlantic.com

She is making another cognitive error: She is mistaking uncertainty for risk. Uncertainty involves unknown possible outcomes and thus unknowable probabilities. Risk involves known possible outcomes and probabilities that we can estimate. Risk is not especially scary, because it can be managed—indeed, risk management is the core business of the insurance industry. Uncertainty, on the other hand, is scary, because it is not manageable: We can’t measure the likelihood and impacts of the unknowable.

The Role of Cognitive Dissonance in the Pandemic

The minute we make any decision—I think COVID-19 is serious; no, I’m sure it is a hoax—we begin to justify the wisdom of our choice and find reasons to dismiss the alternative.

www.theatlantic.com

Human beings are deeply unwilling to change their minds. And when the facts clash with their preexisting convictions, some people would sooner jeopardize their health and everyone else’s than accept new information or admit to being wrong.

Cognitive dissonance, coined by Leon Festinger in the 1950s, describes the discomfort people feel when two cognitions, or a cognition and a behavior, contradict each other. I smoke is dissonant with the knowledge that Smoking can kill me. To reduce that dissonance, the smoker must either quit—or justify smoking (“It keeps me thin, and being overweight is a health risk too, you know”). At its core, Festinger’s theory is about how people strive to make sense out of contradictory ideas and lead lives that are, at least in their own minds, consistent and meaningful.

How to resolve this dissonance? People could avoid the crowds, parties, and bars and wear a mask. Or they could jump back into their former ways. But to preserve their belief that they are smart and competent and would never do anything foolish to risk their lives, they will need some self-justifications: Claim that masks impair their breathing, deny that the pandemic is serious, or protest that their “freedom” to do what they want is paramount.

Will we be flexible, or will we keep reducing dissonance by insisting that our earliest decisions were right?

Although it’s difficult, changing our minds is not impossible. The challenge is to find a way to live with uncertainty, make the most informed decisions we can, and modify them when the scientific evidence dictates—as our leading researchers are already doing. Admitting we were wrong requires some self-reflection—which involves living with the dissonance for a while rather than jumping immediately to a self-justification.

The real reason it’s impossible to hire anyone right now

Workers quit in droves during the Great Resignation of 2021. But companies desperate for hires are finding their job adverts are still ignored

www.wired.co.uk

“Tech candidates are quitting because their companies aren’t embracing flexible work properly,” Power explains. “They’re being asked to go back into the office either full-time or a few days a week, and because other companies didn’t treat them well during the pandemic and things are picking up again, they’re leaving”. But unfortunately, most of the other companies that are hiring aren’t offering the flexibility they are looking for

Some recruitment experts say this is the toughest environment they’ve ever experienced for attracting talent. The Great Resignation has seen millions leave their jobs in the spring and summer months, but other people are not rushing to replace them.

This may be because more candidates are scrutinising the way companies treated employees during the pandemic, and are not liking what they are finding out. Companies’ track record of redundancies, flexible working, diversity or their attitudes towards the office have become the litmus test for sizing up potential employers.

“Most companies still aren’t open about the salary ranges for the roles they recruit for, and this is something candidates really want to see so they can make informed decisions,” says Margolius. Indeed, job search engine Adzuna found that almost four in ten UK vacancies over 366,000 roles – are advertised without salary information.