Avoid A “Total Eclipse of The Brain”
Our basic neural connections fear change from established routine which can hurt our progress
Welcome to the Gazebo! Grab a cup of coffee and join me for some tips that will further your success at the intersection of management, communication, and technology.
Summary For This Week:
You may be passing up good ideas for the wrong reasons.
We like consistency and hesitate when presented with big new ideas.
The fear comes from our initial brain programming.
But not evolving is a recipe for organizational extinction.
Some new ideas are worthwhile and others potentially disastrous.
Critical thinking is needed to avoid a “Total Eclipse of the Brain.”
When was the last time you felt like something was wrong but weren’t sure what it was or why you felt that way? It might have been a subtle change in sounds, smells, or routine that triggered the feeling. Or it might have been an unexpected bold, new idea from someone about something that could affect you and your livelihood. It is natural to react with hesitation when a comfortable norm is disrupted but, from a business perspective, it is only through trying new things can we and our organizations evolve and remain current. How we manage our natural fear of the unknown determines whether we continue along the same path as before or move into new developments that could breathe new life into our organizations.
Image created by Ed Paulson using Copilot in Windows.
A challenge to appreciating a bold new idea is that our initial fearful reaction is hard to ignore, and a part of our brain will process new information through that feeling of fear. This is perception priming at work and our brains will interpret subsequent information in the context of support for or argument against our initial instinct, with the heavier weighting on against.
The upcoming total solar eclipse offers a chance to experience our primal neural connections in action. In case you have been living under a rock for the past few weeks, a total solar eclipse is happening this week. A total solar eclipse is when the Moon aligns perfectly between the Earth and the Sun such that the Sun is completely blocked out. The shadow of the Moon passes across the Earth’s surface, and we Earth residents in the shadow’s path watch day turn to Dusk for a few minutes, in the middle of the day. It is quite an experience that will never forget and you should check it out if you can. (BTW, a partial solar eclipse is very cool as well.)
Removing the Sun from the sky in the middle of the day would qualify as a bold event in my book and based on the clamor around this week’s eclipse, it looks like millions of others agree with me.
My first solar eclipse was both amazing and troubling. It left me with a sense of awe combined with hesitation. I understood the science behind what was happening and still felt a mild sense of fear, which I found surprising. I logically knew that the Sun would return in a few minutes, but that knowledge did not override the emotional concern. As I learned more about how our brain works, the unexpected fear I felt started to make sense.
There isn’t much in our life more consistent than the rising and setting of the Sun. If you think about it, for every day of our lives, the Sun rose in the East, traversed the sky, and then set in the West.
This bright big ball in the sky gives life through warmth and light, and its reliability gives us all a welcome feeling of consistency and comfort. When the sun rises, it is a new day, and life goes on.
We talk about death and taxes as being inevitable, but sunrise and sunset have been here from the beginning, and should the Sun disappear, life as we know, it would end. In this context, I started to understand how earlier humans would view a solar eclipse with intense fear and trepidation. What if the Sun never came back? They didn’t have the benefit of a scientific explanation.
How does an eclipse tie in with business planning? Have these comments ever come up in meetings? “That is just not the way we have always done things here.” “This is too radical of a departure from anything we have done before.” “This goes against all the norms for our industry.” It is like the idea of changing from the accepted path was in the same category as blocking out the Sun in the middle of the day.
If you are the person proposing the idea, you must consider this established mindset when making your pitch. (See my November 6, 2023, post for a personal Silicon Valley startup story about how I mismanaged my audience’s mindset and killed a new idea that would have saved our company.)
Image created by Ed Paulson using Copilot in Windows.
If you are in the audience listening to the idea, beware of your natural tendency to immediately dismiss it instead of taking some time to objectively consider it on its own merits. Sure, it might be radically different from what you are accustomed to, but that doesn’t mean that the idea is without merit. Here is where a systematic approach to new idea evaluation becomes critical because it helps to remove our initial fear bias and allows the idea to stand on its own merits.
Some ideas are simply bad ideas and should not be pursued. But the others that present amazing new opportunities deserve to see the light of day.
Don’t let your initial fearful reaction eclipse you from seeing the idea as the valuable gem it may be.
Here’s to the pagan in all of us! Never forget that our core brain wiring was programmed thousands of years ago when life was quite different, and it is up to us to adapt it to our modern world. Enjoy the eclipse!
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