More On The EQ Gap

New York Times columnist David Brooks posed a question to his readers today. “Would you exchange a professional triumph for a personal blow?” This is problematic. One does not choose between these things. Worse, he gives this false choice more weight because he uses the example of a public figure. [The American actress Sandra Bullock recently won an Academy Award for Best Actress of the year. Shortly after, it was revealed in the public media that her husband, also a celebrity, was in an adulterous relation with yet another celebrity.]

Notwithstanding Brooks particular biases or agenda, he rightly acknowledges that “teams of researchers have been studying happiness ... [with] an impressive rigor”. He also states “Modern societies have developed vast institutions oriented around the things that are easy to count, not around the things that matter most. They have an affinity for material concerns and a primordial fear of moral and social ones”. If there was any doubt of this, consider the billions of dollars spent in education to test literacy and numeracy against the rising costs of school dropouts and bullying, also in the billions. We can teach people to count but teaching empathy is a different matter. Dr. Nancy Snyderman, NBC News Chief Medical Editor, refers to this an ‘EQ Gap’.

Brooks “overall impression from this research’ is a bit muddled. He states for example “that economic and professional success exists on the surface of life, and that they emerge out of interpersonal relationships, which are much deeper and more important.” I’d state this somewhat differently. Economic and professional success is the result of mastery of one’s métier, hard work, good fortune, and strong interpersonal relationships.

The EQ Gap

The news media regularly report on yet another famous individual caught out in inappropriate, injudicious behaviours [often through arrogance and/or greed]. This includes leaders in industry and government as well as popular ‘stars’. Such individuals, despite their brilliance, talent, wealth, and power, are shown to have feet of clay. This metaphor is from the Book of Daniel, written over 2000 years ago. We’ve known about our self-delusional and self-destructive capacity for a long time indeed. As television night show host Jay Leno famously asked of the British actor Hugh Grant, “What were you thinking?” This “EQ Gap” plays out in our own lives at school, work, and the community. While it usually doesn’t become a news story, the consequences are just as dramatic and destructive. The term the EQ Gap is from in an article by Dr. N. Snyderman in which she decried the lack of emotional intelligence on the part of the automakers who flew to Washington in private jets to ask for financial aid.

EQ, also known as Emotional Intelligence, has four broad dimensions - self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. It’s a natural complement to Cognitive Intelligence, or IQ. Like IQ, EQ is also needed at all life stages. However, the development of EQ is largely ad hoc and informal. This is in stark contrast to the importance given to cognitive development within K-12 education. As a result, schools are seeing alarming rates of bullying and dropping out. Both are linked to poor EQ. These epidemics are costing society billions of dollars.

Problematically, this imbalance between cognitive and emotional intelligence continues into adulthood. The continuing EQ Gap is responsible for the same kinds of problems at work as at school. Except now the consequences and costs are even higher. Consider the following negative impacts, all of which are rising: Absenteeism & turnover, Presenteeism, Depression & anxiety, Declining morale, Declining work productivity & focus, Increasing conflict & bullying, Increased disability premiums, Rising health & benefits costs, Employment replacement costs. Bullying in particular is worth singling out. ABC News reported that over 54 million employees experience bullying, this is 37% of the US workforce [10/2009]. The good news is systemic EQ development is being introduced increasingly throughout education and industry. Good social and emotional skills are seen as a crucial prelude to learning academically as well as to workplace productivity and wellbeing. Even better news is that EQ is easy to cultivate and can be done at any age.

The Heliotropic Effect of Abundance

The following is an essay extract from a much larger symposium document Explaining Extraordinary Organizational Performance and Transformation: Lessons from Rocky Flats. The Heliotropic Effect of Abundance is by Dr. Kim Cameron a co-founder of The Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship. The Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship is a community of scholars devoted to energizing and transforming organizations through research on the theory and practice of positive organizing and leadership. It is located at The Ross School of Business. Not surprisingly, it’s consistently ranked as one of the top business schools in the world.

Positive Organizational Scholarship is a relatively new field of study. It looks at organizations in the way positive psychology looks at individuals. “Just as positive psychology focuses on exploring optimal individual psychological states rather than pathological ones, Positive Organizational Scholarship focuses attention on optimal organizational states—the dynamics in organizations that lead to the development of human strength, foster resiliency in employees, make healing, restoration, and reconciliation possible, and cultivate extraordinary individual and organizational performance”.

EXTRACT

To explain the heliotropic effect, let us pose the question: What happens over time when you put a plant in a window? The answer, of course, is that the plant begins to lean toward the light. That is, a natural tendency exists in every living system to be inclined toward positive energy—toward light—and away from negative energy or from the dark. The reason is that light is life giving and energy creating. All living systems are inclined toward that which gives life.

The heliotropic effect is evident in many ways within individuals and organizations—physiologically, psychologically, emotionally, visually, socially, and so forth (see Cooperrider, 1990; Cameron, 2003; Bright, Cameron, & Caza, 2006). At the individual level, the heliotropic effect may be manifest physiologically as the placebo effect. That is, if a person believes that a medication will be effective, it will, in fact, produce the desired effect about 60 percent of the time. Psychologically, the heliotropic effect is manifest as the Pygmalion effect. That is, not only does my system respond to my own positive expectations, but the expectations of others also can produce a heliotropic effect for me. The essence of this effect is that the perception of a teacher appears to affect the performance outcome of the class. If thinks that learners are bright, they are. Those expectations are more powerful than any other single factor, including actual IQ scores (Rosenthal & Jacobsen, 1968) on performance.

New Heliotrope Website Launch

Since the last blog post, Heliotrope has gone through an incredible growth period. As a result, we're about to launch a new, more interactive website on January 6. It will feature a Heliotrope blog as well. This will report on activities related to Prelude and the enterprise more generally. This also allowed us to re-imagine this blog's role in relationship. New Heliograph posts will therefore be more personal explorations of ideas, trends, and discoveries that relate to Heliotrope and Prelude but go beyond them as well.

Hopefully this new approach will also encourage more dialogue with visitors. Martin Buber wrote: “When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.” This brings to mind the late greatly esteemed Sufi teacher Pir Vilayat Khan. I can well imagine him saying this ‘divine electricity’ helps ‘fray new neural pathways for human connectivity and creativity'. Buber also wrote that “play is an exaltation of the possible”. All the research I’ve seen suggests that play is an ideal way to foster integral relationships and innovation. These ideas also reflect Daniel Goleman’s work on emotional intelligence and the power of the limbic lock: -

"In a neurological sense, laughing represents the shortest distance between two people because it instantly interlocks limbic systems. This immediate, involuntary reaction, as one researcher puts it, involves the most direct communication possible between people – brain to brain – with our intellect just going for the ride, in what might be called a 'limbic lock” [Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence; Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee; Harvard Business School Press].

The Dream Chrysalis

The protective outer covering of the pupa of a butterfly or moth is called a chrysalis. The term, of 17th century coinage, derives from the Greek root khrusos, for gold. This was inspired by the golden sheen on the pupa of several species.

“When [caterpillars] finally fall asleep and a chrysalis forms around them, tiny new imaginal cells, as biologists call them, begin to take form within their bodies.The caterpillar's immune system fights these new cells as though they were foreign intruders, and only when they crop up in greater numbers and link themselves together are they strong enough to survive. Then the caterpillar's immune system fails and its body dissolves into a nutritive soup" [Elisabet Sahtouris].

This imaginal cell soup coalesces into buds. These then constellate into a completely new creature. Emerging from the chrysalis, the butterfly flutters away. This natural metamorphosis has become a metaphor of the ages. Imaginal cells indeed.

Holistic Thinking, Innovative Marketing

Brock University in St. Catharines Ontario has 17,000 full-time students. “Brock champions smaller class sizes and - this is key - a whole brain approach to the students ... [This] means a student's social awareness, emotional development, connection to the community - artistic development.... [The marketing firm therefore] created a bold look that explores a whole-brain examination of students, faculty and alumni. And so we meet Rohan Kothari, majoring in biological sciences but working on mastering the sax, and MSc candidate Lisa Neville, a licensed gliding instructor who lauds Brock's dual major course offering (Earth sciences and biology). Each image is bifurcated: an oil painting substitutes for half of Mr. Kothari's face; a raptor for half of Ms. Neville's.” This novel university campaign literally illustrates the primal creative relation between self-identity, language, and image. "Both sides of the brain", as the campaign tag goes, indeed.

Globe & Mail Article - Brock offers a lesson in boldness
Brock University

More On Happiness

As a T-shirt design on zazzle.com archly proclaims, "Happiness is a fragment of your imagination!" Happiness today is defined as a “a state of well being characterized by emotions ranging from contentment to intense joy" [http://wordnet.princeton.edu]. Our original understanding was more complex, nuanced, and pragmatic.


For example, ‘Hap’ in the Old English of the 1300s meant ‘fortune or chance’. This basic link between happiness and luck is found in most northern European languages of that time. Yet, happiness was also associated with two other related emotional states - beatitude and blitheness.

The first is defined as “perfect happiness and inner peace” and stems from the Latin beatus. The second term means, “having a casual and cheerful indifference to convention and rules”. Bliss is yet another related term. Over ensuing centuries, these associated meanings for happiness’ changed in keeping with the West’s overarching worldview and ethos.

For example, ‘silly’ originally meant ‘happy’. It stems from the Latin ‘solari’, meaning ‘to comfort’ and ‘salvus’ meaning ‘whole and safe’. Over the course of six hundred years its meaning devolved from: "blessed to pious,to innocent (1200), to harmless, to pitiable(c.1280), to weak (c.1300), to feeble in mind, lacking in reason, foolish (1576)" [www.etymonline.com].

It’s interesting to consider the continuum of emotional states associated with happiness. Of course, sheer good luck is a common factor. [Anthropological research indicates that the reason most of us can’t resist sweets is because of primal hardwiring. In the long millennia before civilization, our hardy nomadic ancestors rarely encountered sweets like honey. They therefore happily gorged on their good luck knowing it would be a long time until they discovered more.]

Yet our ancestors also cane to understand that the more enduring type of happiness doesn’t depend on blind luck but on an inner attitude. The ancient link between happiness, wholeness, and solace is especially resonant today given recent global events. Interestingly, contemporary happiness research bears out what past generations readily understood.

On Creating Happiness

Two centuries ago, the United States was founded on the ideal that the pursuit of happiness is a human right. The Statue of Liberty with its torch held high perhaps best symbolizes this enduring aspiration for those seeking the American Dream, even now during a global economic crisis. In The How of Happiness, Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky explores the relation between intentional activity and happiness. Research shows there are simple and proven ongoing ways to enhance happiness. These include counting one's blessings, performing kind acts, and seeing negative situations in a positive light. Circumstantial happiness in contrast is dependent on external factors, which often we have no direct control over as recent events sadly show.


The idea of intentional happiness is similar to the ‘broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions’ first formulated by Dr. Barbara Fredrickson in 1998. This holds that positive emotions and intentions help broaden awareness. And this helps encourage new exploration, creativity, and social bonds. Positive emotions are seen as expansive and inclusive. Negative emotions are linked directly to narrow survival-oriented behaviours such as flight or fight.

Although daunting, remaining positive within the midst of adversity has great benefit. Finding intrinsic meaning and value in such experiences helps transmute their painful impacts. It also provides a powerful basis for profound growth and transformation. This can hold true especially for the hundreds of thousands of people being laid off. often from long-held positions. Many will believe they have no other skills or are too old to learn new ones.


In her July/August 2003 article in American Scientific, The Value of Positive Emotions, Dr. Fredrickson writes -

It seems that positive emotions do more than simply feel good in the present. The undoing effect suggests that positive emotions can reduce the physiological "damage" on the cardiovascular system sustained by feeling negative emotions. But some other research suggests that there's more to it than that. It appears that experiencing positive emotions increases the likelihood that one will feel good in the future. Positive meaning can be obtained by finding benefits within adversity, by infusing ordinary events with meaning and by effective problem solving. You can find benefits in a grim world, for instance, by focusing on the new found strengths and resolve within yourself and others. You can infuse ordinary events with meaning by expressing appreciation, love and gratitude, even for simple things. And you can find positive meaning through problem solving by supporting compassionate acts toward people in need. So although the active ingredient within growth and resilience may be positive emotions, the leverage point for accessing these benefits is finding positive meaning.

21st Century Learning

Several initiatives are underway using the rubric of 21st Century Learning. They share similar perspectives about what additional skills are needed in today's global knowledge economy in addition to the 3Rs. -


Partnership for 21st Century for Learning
P21 is a US national advocacy group focused on infusing 21st-century skills into education. P21’s website states: It has identified several ‘soft’ skills crucial for success in the global knowledge economy. These include: problem solving, critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity. "It has become apparent that there isn't a lack of employees who are technically proficient, but a lack of employees who can adequately communicate and collaborate, innovate, and think critically," said Ken Kay, P21 president. However, in a P21 poll virtually unanimous 99% of US voters say teaching students these skills is important to our country’s future economic success.



The 21st Century Learning Initiative
This British-Canadian initiative is facilitating “the emergence of new approaches to learning that draw upon a range of insights into the human brain, the functioning of human societies, and learning as a community-wide activity”. It has just published Overschooled But Undereducated. This argues for the overhaul of the current education system and the reassessment of educational policy and attitudes towards learning and schooling.

The 21st Century Learning Alliance
The alliance “brings together industry, government and teachers to help to make 21st century learning a reality”. It was founded by key UK organizations involved in education including: Oracle, Cisco, Partnerships for Schools, Futurelab, & Northern Grid for Learning.

School of the Future
The School District of Philadelphia and Microsoft collaborated for several years on imagining and constructing a “School of the Future.” This was opened in 2006 to “create a living blueprint for learning environments in the 21st century”. It is part of Microsoft’s global Partners in Learning initiative.


Enquiring Minds
This UK initiative is involved in a comprehensive curriculum redesign that “takes students’ ideas, interests and experiences as its starting point, and provides them with more responsibility for the direction and content of their learning”.

Life Span Positive Development

A number of innovative initiatives are emerging focused on understanding and fostering emotional and social intelligence. These address all stages of life and learning. Each has its own conceptual framework, methodology, and ecosystem of institutions and practitioners. Seen together these initiatives have significant critical mass. They underscore how widely recognized the importance of soft skills are for individual and social well being globally.

Positive Youth Development

Overview
A new dynamic approach to learning in schools is emerging from chrysalis. And like a butterfly it has two wings carrying it aloft. I refer to the recognition that academic knowledge must be balanced with life knowledge, hard skills with soft skills, head with heart, and individual sensibility with that of the group.


Positive Youth Development is a helpful rubric for describing a wide range of initiatives designed to foster emotional and social intelligence along with more traditional education goals. These have emerged in response to a crucial gap perceived by practitioners in schools and youth agencies. Simply put, learning is a social process within which human emotions and relationships are powerful intrinsic influencers.

This is a relatively new field and highly interdisciplinary. Moreover, each of these initiatives has a distinct theoretical framework, methodology, and ecosystem of institutions and practitioners. The Social Development Research Group at the University of Washington has identified 161 PYD programs. Some 3 million young people have been involved in related research projects across North America [Search Institute].


PYD is part of an even broader shift in psychological theory, research, and praxis. Related developments include Positive Psychology, Positive Scholarship, and Appreciative Inquiry. These all share a common perspective. That is, that the positive images we create and share - of ourselves, of each other, and our futures - help drive their actualization.

"As you ramble through Life,
Whatever be your goal.
Keep your eye upon the doughnut,
And not upon the hole."

What Parents Are Saying
Teaching social skills has tremendous importance for the nearly 1,000 people surveyed by Hasbro. 90% of parents consider social skills to be vital to their children's happiness and confidence and nearly 80% consider these more important than academic skills when it comes to happiness.


Social and Emotional Learning
SEL is an umbrella term used to describe the skills needed “to recognize and manage emotions, develop care and concern for others, make responsible decisions, establish positive relationships, and handle challenging situations effectively" (CASEL) SEL has grown increasingly important within primary and secondary schools across Canada and the United States.

Developmental Asset Framework
This framework developed by the Search Institute outlines those ‘assets’, or ‘development building blocks’ essential to the health and well being of Middle and High School students. Young people draw on these assets to make positive choices, avoid high-risk behaviors, and thrive. Internal Assets include competencies and values that young people learn and internalize on their way to becoming responsible and healthy adults. External Assets consist of resources like friends, family, mentors, school, and community organizations.

Resilience Education
Resilience Education is concerned with how some youth, despite terribly challenging lives, are able to overcome adversity and thrive. Research has identified these core characteristics and strengths, which are key to healthy development and effective learning. “Changing the life trajectories of children and youth from risk to resilience starts with changing the beliefs of the adults in the families, schools, and communities”. [Benard, Bonnie 2004, Resiliency: What We Have Learned. San Francisco, CA: WestEd]

Character Education
Character Education is an umbrella-term used to describe the teaching of children in a manner that will help them to develop. Concepts that fall under this term include social and emotional learning, moral reasoning/cognitive development, life skills education, health education; violence prevention, critical thinking, ethical reasoning, and conflict resolution and mediation. This form of education involves teaching children and adolescents’ values including honesty, stewardship, kindness, generosity, courage, freedom, justice, equality, and respect.

Positive Behaviour Support
PBS is the application of evidence-based strategies and systems that work at an individual level and school wide level. This is designed to help establish a positive and safe environment, which in turn is conducive to increased academic performance.

“One of the wonderful features of a “PBS School” is that the ... selection of interventions and programs is often done collaboratively by a school team ... Positive Behavior Support is different from traditional behavior modification in three ways. First, it is focused on the use of positive intervention strategies that are respectful of the individual. Second, the interventions that are developed are individualized and are based on an understanding of the individual, the individual’s communication abilities, and the unique situations of the individual. Third, the intervention strategies that are developed are focused on helping the individual gain access to new environments, have positive social interactions, develop friendships, and learn new communication skills.”

School Climate
School Climate is another term with a fairly broad definition. In essence, school climate refers to the overall quality and feel of the attitudes, feelings, and behaviours of individuals - students, teachers, administrators, staff. School climate establishes the bounds of acceptable behaviour among all stakeholders, and all are deemed responsible for its maintenance. There are four overlapping relation fields.

• The relationship of a student to her or himself
• A student to her or his peers
• A student to her or his parents and community
• A student to her or his school workers, including teachers, administrators, and all staff

Visual Thinking Is A Snap

The following article from eSchool News caught my eye. It's worth noting that in 2008 alone over 110 million digital cameras will be sold worldwide.

Montpelier High School Principal Peter Evans was meeting with a parent recently when the conversation turned to technology in the classroom, reports the Times Argus of Vermont. What is the school's policy on the use of electronics--iPods, MP3 players, PDAs, digital cameras, and laptops--in class, the father asked Evans. He had been opposed to students using tech devices, the dad told Evans, until he saw his son pull out a cell phone while he was working on his homework one night. The teenager explained that he hadn't had a chance to copy down math equations on the board at the end of class, so he used his phone to snap a picture of it. That really changed [the dad's] mind about how wise kids are using technology.

On Visual Thinking

We think in pictures and words and we use both to communicate. We also tend to favour one cognitive style over the other, just as cultures do. Since the advent of the printing press, the written word has had the upper hand in western society, to mangle a metaphor. This is now changing rapidly.

Thanks to easy-to-use inexpensive computers, digital cameras, and high speed Internet, there’s been a profound upsurge in our society’s capacity to think and communicate visually. The following lists a few ways this is manifesting. As Dan Roam, The Back of the Napkin, observes: Drawing things out helps us look, see, imagine, and show ideas that would have remained hidden had we not picked up the pen.

Visual Thinking & Education

Thinking Through Stone
My own study of visual thinking began in earnest in the early 90s. For my doctoral fieldwork, I lived two years in a remote village in western Kenya. Tabaka is the epicenter of a century-old soapstone carving cottage industry. My research focused on how one generation of carvers transferred their visual knowledge to the next generation. Of course, this was largely non-verbal, indirect, and informal. It’s an interesting process to try to externalize a creative visual activity. There’s an entire literature and methodology on this subject. Vera John-Steiner’s Notebooks of the Mind is an exemplar.

Visual Spatial Learners
A significant number of students are visual spatial learners. Dr. Linda Kreger Silverman’s research and website are a tremendous resource. Slightly over half of all early school leavers have a visual spatial orientation. Dr. Silverman makes a powerful case that these young people could be and should be taught to their strengths. -

A computer is as indispensable to the visual-spatial child as a book is to an auditory-sequential child. It is visual, graphic, unconcerned with time, highly motivating, responsive to the inquisitive mind of the visual-spatial learner, and accesses the right hemisphere. It is the skating rink where a visual-spatial mind can perform dazzling feats ... Success in our technological era depends upon different skills than are currently emphasized in school: visualization, grasping the big picture, multi-dimensional perception, pattern finding, thinking graphically, and creativity.

New Innovation: Picturing To Learn
There’s a remarkable pilot program underway called Picturing To Learn through the aegis of Harvard and MIT. One of the co-founders, Felice Frankel, states that ‘visually explaining concepts can be a powerful learning tool.’ Part of the reason is that creating a picture can reveal connections that words alone may not. It fosters a holistic perspective and the ability to tell a complete story. When used to help high school students learn and express scientific concepts, the most amazing results occur. Ms. Frankel and her colleagues have already developed a database with more than 4000 drawings.

Visual Communication Tools

Paper & Pencil
We've been creating images to communicate from the start. The drawing featured below was created in Lascaux 17,000 years ago. How easily we can 'read it' today. The means to communicate visually are almost always at hand. What a profoundly simple and immediate way to convey so much at once.

Mind Maps
A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged radially around a central key word or idea. It is used to generate, visualize, structure, and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, decision making, and writing. There are many variations of this mapping process, for example Concept Maps and Semantic Maps. Each has its own centre of gravity, protocols, and practitioners. Mo st have software equivalents too.

Graphic Facilitation
Practitioners help groups better picture what they are thinking and trying to express to each other. They are skilled in literally drawing out the groups’ thoughts and feelings as they emerge through guided dialogue. The results can be very impressive. A graphic facilitator generally works with marking pens on a large (4-feet-high and 10-to-15-feet-long) sheets of butcher paper.

Image Maps
An image map is an online tool featuring one overall diagram with specific parts hyperlinked to relevant destinations. The example here is from the emerging field of Positive Psychology. As its creator’s note, these image maps can help people get a mental structure for storing information about positive psychology, and the attached articles form a reader’s guide for learning about the subject.

Interactive White Boards
This large interactive display enables an individual or group to write or draw on the surface, print off the image, save it to computer or distribute it over a network. Images can also be projected on the screen from a computer and worked on a life size scale, which in turn is recorded on the computer. SMART Technologies, a Canadian based producer of interactive whiteboards alone generates about a billion dollars in revenues.

Surface
Microsoft Surface is a 30-inch display in a table-like form factor that several people can use simultaneously. The intuitive user interface works without a traditional mouse or keyboard, allowing small groups to interact with visual content and information in a more natural and familiar way, by using their hands, gestures, and creativity.

Vision Boards
This is an interesting trend that takes the dynamics of visual thinking to another level. Vision Boards are just that, boards on which people draw or collage images of their goals and dreams. It is believe by practitioners that creating a vision board and using it as meditation will help their goals and dreams to materialize. As with practically every other tool, a community of practice and ecosystem of enterprise has evolved. There are software companies offering a streamlined online digital approach as well. I will revisit the related practices of visualization and imagineering in another post. Suffice it to say there’s extensive research underscoring the value of these processes.

Black Boards

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

Dylan Thomas

The Kaleidoscope

Sir David Brewster invented the kaleidoscope in 1816 while conducting experiments on light polarization. Its name derives from the ancient Greek kalos ‘beautiful’ and eidos ‘form’. This optical device is made from ‘tube containing mirrors and pieces of colored glass or paper, whose reflections produce changing patterns that are visible through an eyehole when the tube is rotated’. It became a social phenomenon. In 1818 Blackwood's Magazine stated that: " no invention, and no work, whether addressed to the imagination or to the understanding, ever produced such an effect." Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions were purchased in the course of the century. Some adjectives that describe its effect – psychedelic, polychromatic…. ever-shifting, fluid, fluctuating, unpredictable, impermanent.