Tunnel vision results from tunnel focus

CorporateNature No 134

Taking a break can help break up tunnel vision; 
While exercise is best done on an empty stomach.

We've all been there. Working on a project, you encounter a seemingly unsolvable problem which drains all your mental energy. You get frustrated and take a break, grab a coffee and a snack or go for a walk. After the short break, you come back to the desk, start working again and then something miraculous happens. The solution to that tricky problem suddenly pops up in your mind effortlessly. It was almost as if there was no problem in the first place. What's that all about? 

TUNNEL VISION - TUNNEL FOCUS

When you are involved in focused mental work (studying, writing or any type of problem solving) your brain tends to zoom in on the task at hand. Most of your efforts go into trying to solve the issue you see "at the end of the tunnel", and there is no energy and processing capacity left for your brain to make sense of the full array of information available. At a certain point, when the amount of incoming information becomes too much for the brain to cope with, you become overwhelmed. The brain starts to falter.

EXERCISE COMPETES WITH DIGESTION

A similar process happens if you exercise on a full stomach:

"When you exercise, your body isn't using its energy for digestion. Instead, it slows any digestion currently taking place so it can divert as much blood as it can to feed your muscles and your lungs. If you've just eaten before exercising, you can experience gastrointestinal problems."

BREAKS & RETREATS HELP

Just as your body cannot digest food when you are exercising, so you cannot digest your thoughts and focus on the bigger picture while doing your day job. You need a break, a strategic retreat, a change of scenery. 

Albert Einstein famously played the violin whenever he encountered a problem while working on his theories. This activity gave his hands something to do and at the same time gave his brain a chance to relax, process the new information and see things with fresh eyes.

Keep this in mind the next time you're stuck on a particularly stubborn problem. The solution is very simple: take a break, change the pace, change the scenery, give your brain time to digest all that information. 

Aerobics
(image source: Wikipedia)

Entrepreneurs approach opportunities in two ways: like monkeys or like chimps

By George ILIEV
CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 73.

Capuchin monkeys and chimpanzees both enjoy eating nuts (see documentary video below). Cracking a nut open is no rocket science but for a monkey (or even a human toddler) it can be quite a challenge.

Monkeys waste a lot of energy bashing rocks against the nut without seemingly learning much from each attempt. Chimps and other great apes, on the other hand, plan and execute the blow to the nut shell with precision learned from watching others in the family. Thus, chimps often manage to crack the nut with a single strike.

Some entrepreneurs adopt the monkey approach to tackling problems and opportunities. Others take after the chimps. Younger entrepreneurs are generally more likely to follow the "monkey way" of cracking nuts: multiple trials, multiple errors, slowly learning from their own mistakes and expending a lot of energy in the process. Mature entrepreneurs are more likely to resemble chimps: having observed others for a long time, they have learned from these observations which nuts to tackle and which to leave aside, and how best to crack the nut with the least amount of energy.

Yet, whether you are a monkey or a chimp, when you reach a nut (an opportunity), you'd better start cracking it as best as you can. Or else another species will eat it.

Do you work in a Wolf or Dog culture?

If you answered the question you probably gave the wrong answer. Startup culture is wolf culture, while dogs revel in “corporate-style” hierarchy.

(By George ILIEV)

The phrase "dog-eat-dog" was coined for a reason. Counterintuitively, dogs do not cooperate among themselves. Wolves do. Dogs dominate or obey each other in a strict hierarchy of submission, whereas wolves are the ones who “discuss” to make group decisions. If you work for a startup, you are likely working in a “wolf culture”, grounded in cooperation and tolerance. If you work at a big corporation, your environment is probably a “dog culture”, based on domination and pecking order.

Photo: Pack of Wolves (Source: Wikimedia)

EXPERIMENT 1: Top dog dominates in "dog-eat-dog" hierarchy

Recent experiments in Austria show that a top dog will monopolise all food and will not let a lower-ranking dog eat from its bowl. A lower-ranking dog would be so intimidated it would not even dare attempt to eat with the top dog. In contrast, the same experiment with wolves shows that both high-ranking and low-ranking pack members share access to the food. There is a simple explanation why dogs have diverged so far from the cooperative nature of wolves. Dogs were bred for their obedience to man, who is seen by the dog as the “top dog”. Humans mistakenly perceive this as cooperation but from the dog’s perspective this is submission, not cooperation. A dog’s true (beige-to-grey) colours shine through when left in a group of its own.

EXPERIMENT 2: Dogs are poor at independent problem-solving

The domestication of the dog, over around 10,000 years of selective breeding, has reinforced the dog’s hierarchical perception of the world and the micro-society of the pack. This appears to impact the dog’s problem-solving skills. Experiments with dogs and wolves show that 80% of wolves manage to open a can of sausages, while no adult dogs manage to achieve this under the same conditions. The exception are dog puppies, who manage to open the can with a similar success rate as the wolves. This shows that the lack of independence in dogs is increased by their cohabitation with humans as puppies grow up.

THREE LESSONS FOR THE BUSINESS WORLD

Lesson 1: Companies are no democracies

The results of the group-feeding experiment bring to mind a well-known fact: No matter how much we praise democracy as the most sophisticated system for ruling a country , corporations are not democracies. Corporations are authoritarian organisations with an established hierarchy, just like an army, a police unit and a pack of dogs.

Lesson 2: Do not confuse submission with cooperation

Corporate executives can learn from the psychology of the dog. Your corporate subordinates might be very cooperative in their interaction with you (their boss), but that does not mean they see themselves as cooperating. Instead, they may be perceiving themselves as Yes-men who have to act submissively. This model may work for subordinates without strong independent thinking but if you want to keep the real problem-solvers working for you, you have to empower them and treat them like wolves treat each other, with a degree of equality. Otherwise your subordinates may leave for a less hierarchical organisation or for a startup.

Lesson 3: Corporations institutionalise their employees

Corporate culture institutionalises its employees just like the human “top-dog” reduces the problem-solving skills of his/her pet as the puppy grows up. Conversely, startup culture encourages problem solving and independent thinking in ways similar to what the wolf experiments show.

Hope at the end of the dog kennel

Let’s not give a dog a (completely) bad name. Corporations come in all shapes and sizes and corporate cultures vary hugely. In a similar way, there is variation among dog breeds: Labrador retrievers and poodles are more hierarchical and aggressive towards lower-ranking pack members than German shepherds are. It may be no coincidence that German shepherds physically resemble wolves much more closely.

In the corporate world, Google and Facebook have a “less-hiearchical” hierarchy than oil and mining giants like ExxonMobil and BHP Billiton. In the end, both Google and Facebook were born as startups 10-15 years ago. Would another 10,000 years of selective breeding change that?

I look forward to your thoughts in the comments below or @GeorgeILIEV