Overcome 'Brain Lock' by Embracing Complexity

Julie sat at her computer. It was late on a Thursday. She knew what she needed to do, but every time her hands touched the keyboard, she literally couldn't make her fingers move.

She wondered out loud to herself:

• "What is wrong with my brain?"
• "Why can't I get the ideas out of my head?"
• "I need to run ideas by someone, but I have no one."

John just finished a huge deliverable. He worked all night and day on it. At 43 years old, he shouldn't have to pull 3 all-nighters in a month. The following day he received a note from his boss. It was one sentence of "good job" and a full page of "ideas to improve." John was beyond deflated. Hoping to respond, he just looked at his computer and started to cry.

He thought to himself:

• "What is wrong with me?"
• "I don't even know what to say."
• "Should I just give up and stop trying?"

Anthony was in a virtual team meeting. As the lead solution architect, the 8 people on the call had many questions for him. Every time they spoke and asked questions, he got more and more aggravated. After 40 minutes, he lashed out in an angry tirade. He started yelling something about "I'm the only one who gets what's going on around here."

Meeting attendees wondered:

• "Why is Anthony such a jerk?"
• "Why is he so aggressive with people?'
• "I need to talk to HR about his behavior."

These are not fictional examples. They're real. And they're happening more and more in today's COVID, work from home, and ever-changing environment.

Is this an employee issue? Yes.

Is it a manager problem? Yep.

Is it something to ignore? Absolutely not.

"If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't." ~ Emerson Pugh

Why Does The Brain 'Lock Up'?

In a nutshell, people are human - they are not computers. Being human means the brain can only handle so much. There, I said it. Our brain is indeed like a muscle, and many people are pulling theirs.

I see three converging perspectives leading to 'Brain Lock':

• First, the executive perspective: Constantly moving forward and accelerating the market share in an attempt to out-maneuver the competition means executives want their people to work faster.
• Second, the manager's perspective: Doing the work and doing the work well means juggling expectations and allocating time, effort, and resources appropriately to ensure work gets done. That means managers want their people to prioritize.
• Third, the individual contributor's perspective. Doing the work means getting the work done. And it usually means getting that work done today or this week. The focus is on completion. Let's face it, most people define progress as "is it done yet?"

Across these three perspectives, there is something missing.

Can you see what it is?

Who in the organization is defining the "right work" to do?

What I see play out in company (after company) leads to a lot of lost productivity and slows down execution. What is it? Simply put, people and leaders are not defining the right work to do. They're still stuck in an annual planning and goal setting process because it's the way things have always been done.

What I mean is, everyone's work is "right" and the "best" work because it's their work. Very few companies have operationalized a structured approach to deconflict initiatives, manage collisions, and prioritize effort at various altitude levels within the organization. And they certainly don't do this constantly. They may have these disciplines at the "top" but below that level, there's a lot of random activity generated. They may accomplish annual planning, but things change weekly. Do you see the gap?

Due to a lack of organizational discipline, and ongoing coordination, everyone's work is the right work. And everyone's work must get done. That means people are faced with more, more, more, more, more, more work to do.

In today's work environment there is no focus on 'less' - there is no focus on 'better.'

There is only a focus on doing 'more.'

Let's test this out. Here are two conversations you can have right now to either simplify work or improve what is created by cross-functional teams:

• Conversation 1: The conversation within your team. Simply discuss which work is best to accomplish and why. Identify ways to improve the quality of what is produced. Document the results of that conversation with a set of agreed-upon actions.
• Conversation 2: The conversation with your peers on other teams. Simply discuss which work is best to complete and why. Identify what it means to improve the quality of what's produced. Also, try discussing how to simplify or automate what the combined broader team is creating together. Document the outcomes of those (likely multiple) conversations with a set of agreed-upon actions.

Please: If you CAN and DO have those conversations, please reach out to me. I'd like to hear what happens and what you agreed to for my research on multiplicative collaboration.

Brain Lock Happens Due to Highly Conflicting Demands

Colliding expectations, coupled with friction points leads to low creativity and stifles cross-functional collaboration, ultimately leading teams down the path of "more."

How does this happen? For starters, the business is set up that way. Leaders have no choice but to double down on their "vertical management" of "horizontal workflows" and focus within their organizational silos. The organizational chart actually rewards and demands that type of thinking.

Let's take a look. To grow revenue, marketing doubles down to focus on closing more deals by generating more campaigns. Sales leaders double down and focus on closing more deals with higher expectations for call volume. Operations teams double down by inspecting pipelines, encouraging managers to have more meetings to prepare. This happens while the product teams are focused on more product launches to bring in more leads. Everyone is well-intentioned, and everyone believes they're helping.

When teams are working in a vertically organized environment and expected to drive horizontal cross-functional business outcomes, people literally end up in a 'brain vice'

(And it's costing your business)

Here are 4 major pinch points that people and teams experience in today's work:

1. "Fight or Flight" Reflexes Due to the High Ambiguity - Brain science tells us we have a triune brain. Our "reptilian brain," at the core, is responsible for our fight or flight reaction and our quest for the status quo and safety. Our "mammal brain" surrounding it is involved with learning, memory, and emotion. And our "human brain" is required for conscious thought and self-awareness, which sits atop the other two. In today's business world, many people are operating from their reptilian brains due to the high degree of ambiguity. Very few people are working within their stated job description. On top of that, emotions are high. Many people are stressed-out and there isn't "white space" to engage our human brain. For example, a lot of people are in zoom meetings all day and they aren't sure what's actually being accomplished.
2. Exhibiting Bias Due to High Cognitive Overload - For starters, the human brain can process 11 million bits of information every second. But our conscious minds can handle only 40 to 50 bits of information a second. To make matters worse, our "working memory" can only handle 7+-2 concepts at a time. When you factor in changing business strategies, working from home, COVID & family changes, process changes due to working remotely, and changes in products & services, there are millions and millions of permutations impacting your people at one time. The variables are almost infinite. To put it into context, a 5x5x5 Rubiks Cube has has 282 870 942 277 741 856 536 180 333 107 150 328 293 127 731 985 672 134 721 536 000 000 000 000 000 combinations (aka 283 trevigintillion). Which is getting uncomfortably close to the number of atoms in the known universe. It's starting to feel a lot like that at work for many people, so their brains have to take cognitive shortcuts which can lead to unconscious or implicit bias. As you've no doubt been hearing on LinkedIn, this can have serious consequences for how you perceive and act toward information and people.
3. Prioritizing "at the Keyboard" Due to Exponentially Increasing Complexity - Leaders and managers are struggling to prioritize initiatives across groups, departments, and functions. For example, "launching a product" brings together a lot of different groups of people. Therefore, it becomes difficult to "see" the end-to-end impact on people. Here's another example. Did you know that most companies have 100+ people been involved in onboarding someone new?. What's more -- that process has over 150+ steps to managers need to manage, from opening up a requisition to getting someone through day two at the company. That complexity creates conflicting priorities across the 4-5 departments involved, so the people doing the work prioritize what's directly in front of them on slack or in their inbox.
4. Daily Micro-Adjustments Due to Rapidly Changing Business Conditions - These ever-changing adjustments create extreme time compression. What used to take people a month is expected to take a week now. What used to take a week, people want in a day. This creates a new time zone that teams must operate within ( I like to call it "Accelerated Company Time - ACT"). Due to the massive amount of fast-moving change, people are becoming highly emotive, where any "small" thing sets them off on a tangent for a variety of reasons. In short, people are becoming extremely myopic, if only to cope with the daily pressure and feel like they are making progress. This Is the extreme example of "focus on what you can control," coupled with survival, meaning collaboration is pulled off the table, replaced with mandates and "should-ing" on people.

What Can Leaders Do?

There is a lot of managers and leaders can do. First, recognize these conditions are real it's very often a hidden challenge that your people won't talk about because either they don't feel like they can, or they literally don't have the words for it. Secondly, recognize this is not temporary. Coming out of COVID could be just as disruptive as going through COVID for many businesses. The demands will continue to go up, and you will have to tap into the power of your team.

Here are four ways to approach it:

1. Recognize Your People Can NOT Do It Alone - When you look around at who is working on what, are you able to determine who is the most productive in this environment? For example, who is doing the heavy lifting? Can you distribute the workload to others? Why not? When you think about it, you may find out your top performers are doing 90% of the work. It's very often the most connected and capable people in an organization are the people others look to in times of change. While people may feel like you're "inspecting them," it's reasonable to figure these things out. If you know your top performers are doing most of the work already and haven't done anything, it's time to figure out how to tackle that.
2. Unlock Creative Production - Most work today is done in isolation. If people aren't isolating, it's likely their team is. Most teams have become hyper-specialized experts in what they do. As a result, they do their 3-5 things really well, trusting others do to their 3-5 things really well. The challenge with this is twofold. First, customers want the value from all the departments and they expect the sum of the parts to add up more than the whole. Secondly, departments "lob their stuff over the fence" to other departments, not knowing how much additive work or re-work needs to happen. All functions are either consuming or creating knowledge. As a result, those who create knowledge (documents, emails, videos, powerpoints, etc) need to think about their creative production as a service provided to other functions. That service requires a lot more than "people working on stuff." As a leader, it's time to map out the creative production processes your team follows and think measure the value of the service you're providing to other functions.
3. Free Up the Hidden Potential Found In the Organizational Cracks - Most organizations think they're operating as a matrix-within-a-matrix. However, the reality is, they're operating as a silo-within-a-silo-within-silos disconnected from customers. Across the isolated pockets (isolated humans, teams, departments, and companies) there are many hidden productivity pockets. These hidden productivity pockets are found anywhere a lack of cohesion across departments occurs -- literally in the cracks within the organization and across the organization. For example, New hire processes, quote processes, recruiting and selection processes, kickoffs, annual meetings, corporate communications, sales enablement, product, field marketing, and even human resources all have gaps between them that someone has to fill. A person has to chase the information, manipulate the data, follow up with the person who missed the meeting, structure the format differently, or argue a key point. As a leader, you must be able to engage with the departments up-stream and down-stream to simplify for your people and your customers, customers, customer. This is why the field of organizational enablement is growing.
4. Prioritize Across Departments and Functions - Managers and leaders have two schools of thought when it comes to leading through change. The first school of thought comes down to "hunkering down" and getting the team to do what's asked. The second school of thought is "reaching out" to share the workload. Your perspective is driven by how much trust you have in your team or your peers. Let's face it, most managers trust their team to deliver than they do their own peers. Especially in today's environment where it's difficult for many people to bring up performance and accountability within their own team, let alone with another team or peer. This is a real challenge for leaders who recognize change requires alignment and galvanized effort. If you're a leader who doesn't trust your peers to work with you to achieve a result, you've got to find ways to address this. If you're a leader who doesn't trust your team to get the job done, and you're not seeing the progressive effort to get there, it may be time to get a new one. Either way, the role of your Human Resource team as an enabler to your operational success is going to be critical.

Being a business leader means being an orchestrator -- and it isn't an easy job. It's not easy to orchestrate the people, processes, information, and technology you need to achieve success. Just remember, it's critical to create an environment where people can do their best work. When that environment is constantly changing, it's important to turn constraints into an advantage. While your team may want to have a simple, easier, and smooth workplace, it's just not right now. How do you work with your team to come to grips with these constraints, and more importantly, embrace them to your advantage? The best leaders are those who understand the situation and adapt, not fight it. Most of the breakthroughs achieved (ie., putting a man on the moon) required embracing constraints and turning them into an advantage. Maybe it's time to call your team together to do just that to help Julie, John, and Anthony.