Stop talking about culture - deal with behaviours

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1:30moment, we were in the midst of a discussion about the things that are easy to define in work, that are easier to create, and that are meaningful to build. It's an absolutely brilliant discussion. Rob Brenner is a professor at London Queen Mary University, and he spends his time really just talking about evidence-led interventions. So the idea that we shouldn't just do something because a best-selling book, suggested it without knowing that it's going to work. Rob takes a position as a contrarian, not a position he necessarily wants, but a position where he marks our homework. He holds people accountable for the claims they make.

2:14If you've found yourself seeing an Instagram reel of something or a TikTok or something and thinking, oh, that sounds like a good idea. Almost certainly Rob would be there with a clipboard asking you to check whether it's actually true. And in that regard, he's an incredibly valuable contributor to the debate about how we do make work better. You know, in the first instance, we kick off with the discussion about engagement. And his whole point is, why do you need to measure engagement? Engagement doesn't seem to correlate with anything. It doesn't seem to demonstrate anything. It doesn't seem to achieve anything.

2:50Why do you need to measure it? And in that regard, it's a, I think, a really valuable contribution to just the discussion about why we're doing stuff. You know, a point we have sort of a quite a sort of pointed disagreement over things, but I left thinking very explicitly that Rob is a really important person to listen to on this stuff. You know, if you've seen yourself picking up a book in an airport to try and get something done, almost certainly Rob would be there standing next to you saying, I'm not sure that's going to work. And I suspect he's right. Brilliant discussion. I've put loads of stuff in the show notes.

3:30Firstly, Rob is involved with something called the Corporate Research Forum and the Work Psychology Network as part of that. If you're interested in this podcast, almost certainly you should at least click the link and explore that because it's all about evidence-based interventions, either as a leader or as an HR person. Absolutely brilliant discussion. I think you're going to enjoy this one. this is my conversation second conversation actually i did speak to him a long time ago pre-covid second conversation with professor rob brinner

4:06thank you so much for joining me i wonder if to kick off you could introduce who you are and what you do yeah so my name is rob brinner i am a professor of organizational psychology at queen mary university of london and i'm also director of research at the corporate research forum so i have a kind of partly academic job, but partly a job working with HR practitioners as well. Not only have you been on the podcast before, sort of talking about everyday-led work, but you're one of my favorite follows on LinkedIn, and I've linked to you on the top of the show notes, largely because you feel to me, like you play the role of the kid sitting at the back of the classroom saying, I'm not sure there's any proof for that.

4:48To me, you've got this compelling ability to ask us to check the facts of what we're being told is that how you see your role is that how you see your role as sort of the yeah the troublesome challenger well i was i happened to be doing things and then people told me like you well that's what you're doing and that's what i realized i was doing and i kind of thought well doesn't everybody do that and i realized after some time no everybody doesn't do it um it reminds me a bit it's a bit like maybe the kid at the back of the class or it reminds me of course of the emperor's new clothes so everyone's saying aren't the emperor's clothes beautiful they're lovely aren't they great and the kid's going but the emperor isn't wearing any clothes so i see a lot of naked emperors and i see a lot of people saying how beautiful the clothes are and i suppose yes it's not even necessarily consciously what i'm trying to do but it turns out that's what i am doing and i say i think it's because I hope, I generally hope, everyone's doing this, but as I say, apparently they are not.

5:50What's the origin of your cynicism? What do you think the origin of your scepticism is? Yeah, well, I'm definitely sceptical, not cynical, because a lot of what I do is not driven by the idea people don't want to do good and want to help. I think people do want to do good and want to help. So the scepticism, though, is about saying what you're often trying to do, I don't think is necessarily kind of very useful. and i guess what it's what it's driven by in a way is a number of things i think it's things like waste so i see businesses and organizations and individuals within them just wasting a lot of time and effort on energy on things that just aren't very effective or maybe are even quite harmful and i find that sort of irritating it's an irritating thing like the kid saying the emperor's got new clothes the kid gets irritated because everyone's saying they can see something the kid thinks isn't there so i think it comes a bit from the waste but it also comes from and this is why it's not skeptical so not cynic i think it's skeptical is i think organizations and businesses could be doing so much better and i'm sure you'd agree they could manage people they could manage businesses it could be much more effective if they got rid of some of this stuff that just isn't helping very much so it's driven i think by that i think by a it's a waste b i think organizations just could be doing so much better than they are yeah so like you know as someone who comes across your posts pretty frequently actually i think because i i sort of tend to like all of them um you've taken on some of the the big topics i just wonder if we could do a sort of a fun a little run through some of the not necessarily fads but terms we've pushed back on the first one is the idea of workplace engagement i wonder if you could sort of talk about whether that's a helpful term you i've seen you sort of talk about the challenge you've tried to categorize that yeah so my engagement with engagement has actually been quite long term so i think i first got interested i think we're probably past peak engagement now but it's kind of plateaued into a very common practice that lots of organizations appeared appeared to get involved with and when it first appeared and got popular i guess the the issues i had with it were many fold but i think the most important ones are firstly this whole issue what on earth do we mean by engagement and you know i've had the experience I'm sure many of us have, if you ask organizations, HR managers to tell you what they mean, they don't really know, or they give you multiple different definitions, or the definitions they give you is nothing to do with the engagement survey that they use every six months, every year, every month, or whatever.

8:22So people have multiple different definitions. The thing they're measuring with it doesn't seem to often coincide with what they think it is. So the first fundamental problem from an evidence-based practice perspective is, can you define what it is you're trying to affect or understand and are you measuring it in a way that's consistent with that that's one thing the second issue is that broadly speaking measures of engagement correlate really highly with standard almost a hundred year old now measures of job satisfaction so there's an issue there they're not measuring anything new but what it also means is we can look at some of that job satisfaction literature if they overlap hugely, which they do seem to, is job satisfaction particularly relevant for job performance?

9:08And the answer is not really. So the search for the link between job satisfaction and job performance has been described for decades in the scientific literature as the holy grail, something really desirable, but it's actually very hard to find in terms of the research we conduct. Now, of course, some people are probably thinking now, well, sure, someone's really, really satisfied. Won't they perform better than someone who isn't well no they might be too satisfied they might be just complacent they might love work and not performing well similarly someone who's not satisfied may be doing a fantastically good job so a lot of assumptions there about it and people often talk about extremes if someone's really unhappy then they won't perform well well maybe if someone's really happy then they will well maybe but that's not what this is about there isn't actually doesn't appear to be a very general or strong relationship between those two things so in the case of engagement going back to that people are happily merrily investing again going back to waste a lot of time and energy measuring engagement looking at scores pouring over spreadsheets where on a seven point scale it's gone from 3.5 to 3.7 double thumbs up for that or it's gone down from 4.6 to 4.3 oh my god what's going wrong these things on the whole probably don't really matter much if at for performance and to that most organizations that i certainly work with rarely check that their measures of engagement actually predict anything anything important for the business there's an assumption they do it is rarely checked and again if you look at the scientific evidence i would say this there's almost not well it's not a particularly strong link between those two things or to flip the whole thing another way.

10:51If your goal is to increase performance, focusing on engagement is a very bizarre thing to do, given all the other things that might affect performance. So job performance might be one thing that you measure. What else would you measure if you were going to do something that's slightly more meaningful, slightly more predictive? Well, I wouldn't measure anything because I think this is one of the tendencies. Well, it depends what the issue is. I think you have to start with a business problem, start with an organizational issue. So I think underlying what you're saying there, Bruce, is there is an assumption that we should measure stuff in employees.

11:26My question is, well, why? Why? Maybe you want to, maybe you need to, maybe it's important, but it shouldn't be a routine thing we do. We should think about what the organizational business is trying to do, what we want to do, and then try and make sure we're putting things in place that will help to do that. It may be somewhere along the line, a measurement thing comes up, but it also may be it's not particularly important or relevant. So I think, again, I think behind your question is what's the alternative to engagement? The answer is, well, there isn't one because engagement's not particularly useful.

11:59But what is useful is going back to say, what are we trying to do as a business? That's a useful starting point. Got it. So if someone said, I'm going to set about trying to measure the retention of customers or the happiness of customers or whether people leave our business satisfied, those things might be measurable things because they're about business objectives, but they're not necessarily going to be focused on what the employees. That's right. In general, customer retention could be a very important thing for a business. For another business, it might not be that important. For most businesses, it is.

12:31Similarly, if you get customers, new customers, that's also quite important. However, suppose 80 % of the new customers you get leave within six months, then that's not really very good. So even measures you think are good and obviously good, it still is very contextual. What are you measuring? What is it telling you? Does it look to business performance? So in some kinds of businesses where you may be losing customers, it doesn't matter if you regain those customers overnight. So again, it sort of depends. Got it. Because a lot of businesses measure employee attrition, like the quit rate. And that seems like to be quite a helpful thing to measure from my perspective.

13:05Do you not see that as helpful? I think it can be. So again, it comes back to the point, who is quitting? In what kind of roles? How easy or cheap is it to replace them? As a very vague indicator, it's something you measure might tell you there's something worth looking at. But again, it depends crucially who is quitting, why they're quitting, if your level of quit is higher or lower than organizations you can really compare yourself to. So simply, again, having a dashboard where these things go up and down is only vaguely kind of indicative. But in the case, I think, of quitting and attrition, yeah, there's often a cost associated with that.

13:46But I would say it still depends on who is quitting. So if people in absolutely key roles are quitting, that's disastrous. If it's people who are quitting because maybe you can replace them again fairly quickly or they're quitting for other sorts of reasons. Maybe that's fine. It's just a normal thing you have to cope with as a business. Got it. I'm just so informed by the work of Zeynep Tan. And Zeynep Tan initially started working in retail stores, but she says that the one thing that is ruinous for any sort of experience of work is if your organization is carrying a very high attrition rate because it kills productivity and it ruins the experience of work for a lot of people.

14:24but i hear your point you know it might it might yeah well i've been some meta-analyses looking at quick rates attrition rates in businesses and trying to connect that to business performance and again some studies showed there might be a link other studies showed there's not a particular link uh that may be obviously in some context supported but in other contexts it doesn't seem to matter very much so i still think it depends i think the idea we can look at one thing or another of things saying that is an indicator of something great or terrible is probably not very wise unless you could link it to actual business performance of things you're trying to do.

14:59So we've put a cross through engagement. I'd love you to talk about psychological safety. And this is probably one of the things that I was, I saw a long post by you, psychological safety. Is it even a thing was the, but psychological safety has sort of probably been the most cited idea in this work. And I'd love to know, you and Peter have an objection with it. I don't have an objection with it. I love it. I love the idea of psychological safety. So it's not about whether I like it or not. It's totally irrelevant. The question is, is it a useful and helpful concept for organizations and businesses?

15:33That's the key. That's what I'm asking. So not if it's useful, whether I like it. Sorry, not whether I like it. So the yes, is this the thing? So there is this thing. I think I've done about eight or nine nowadays where I try to look at the kind of logic and theory and evidence behind quite popular concepts and i did this as part of the work psychology network which is set up at the corporate research forum which is trying to look at theory and evidence from work psychology and how it's used or misused kind of in the workplace and yes i chose psychological safety which is a very common very popular thing so the questions i would always ask about this is can you define it and again you know there's a lot of question marks over actually how define it and one of the challenges here is that is that people kind of instantly they know what it means they feel it's very intuitive oh yes i get it well do you do you actually get it or is it just what is it you're getting are we all getting different things so because it's intuitive and instant that's a big red flag for me normally with most kind of constructs so can you define it yes to some extent but again the definitions are rather different secondly can you measure it or assess it and there are again questions over the validity reliability of the measures even some of the quite popular ones and again if you look at the actual items in those measures it's often quite hard to link it back to the definition so you're measuring something potentially but what is it a little unclear so a bit hard to define sometimes a bit hard to measure sometimes as debates about the measures but the key thing is is does it predict anything important so you can measure this stuff back to engagement there's no point in measuring it unless it's telling you something important the challenge here scientifically is that just are not many longitudinal studies looking at whether if engagement say sorry psychological safety goes up whether it has these outcomes or whether psychological safety goes down it has other kind of outcomes so we just don't know too much about it and i think psychological safety is an example of maybe you know if i wrote the same thing in five years time ten years time it might look very different so i'm just talking about what it appears we know at the moment what seems the case at the moment so is this idea does it is there a cause and effecting and the trickiest thing of all about all this is can you actually intervene can you do something to increase psychological safety and again there's very little data and evidence about that so even if it does link longitudinally to something kind of important we don't know much yet about how you can increase it the challenge therefore i think like a lot of these concepts in the is this a thing series it's people seeing an idea like psychological safety and they grab it so can we use this thing to help us and again my question was but what are you trying to do what are you trying to do not is there a thing out there you could use that might be useful it seems to be working completely backwards what are you trying to achieve and lots of these concepts like culture change or engagement or attitude they're starting with a thing and then trying to work out if it's useful instead of saying do we actually understand what the issue is.

18:34So maybe in some context, psychological safety is very important and it links to important things and you can actually do something to improve psychological safety. That may be the case, but it also may be the case to a huge number of other contexts where it just doesn't really matter very much. But you have to start off with what is it you're trying to do. Psychological safety may be the intervention you want. It may not, but it may be something totally different depending on what you're trying to achieve. But you've got a leader here, and a leader has just done sort of an internal piece of work and maybe it says we've been tolerating bad behavior inside the organization or that, you know, some sort of bullying or something has come to light.

19:13And the leader says, look, our objective for the next year is we want to build a psychologically safe environment. We want to have a place where people can speak up. We're not going to have those domineering characters, displacing things. All that being said, then what would you advise them to do? That's their goal. It's quite a noble objective they're trying to do. You know, you've said, look, I want you to tell me what you're trying to do. So how would you achieve that goal, even if the concept is a difficult one to measure? What actions would you take in that situation? Well, the first, I think, is to understand the specific behaviors you're talking about.

19:53So you said people are bullying, people are unpleasant. There's been some incidents of people feeling like they can't speak up. Are they related or they're not related? People can be horrible and mean, but people still speak up. So they're not the same thing. One doesn't necessarily affect the other, but they might. If, for example, you're interested in specific behaviors, so again, we did a report on behavior change in organizations. The first thing you need to focus on and understand is what are the specific behaviors you're trying to change, number one. And secondly, what's the incidence and frequency of those sorts of behaviors?

20:24And typically, if you look across lots of organizations, it may be psychological safety they turn to but often what they turn to is culture so time and time and time again you've seen various reports for example from police services from the grenfell tower disaster in the uk from other kind of incidents people see to your point bullying what this is bullying and negative behavior and they say we must change the culture uh and typically i don't think that works at all it's not clear what people are trying to change so the starting point is if you think there are and behaviors which you want to change fairly obviously you've got to understand what those behaviors are and the incidents the frequency where they're happening that's the most important starting point so so i was going to come on to like if we've gone through engagement we've gone through psychological safety i was going to ask you about culture next and and you know i've seen you write a lot talking about sort of um with a culture with talking about the climate whether they were talking about behavior.

21:21Could you break down your frustration then when people talk about culture? And how would you tackle something as holistic then as the idea of culture, as sort of far-reaching as the culture in the NHS or the culture in the... Well, I think you just identified one of the key problems, all-encompassing, holistic. It's everything, isn't it? It's everything. and you can't you know tackle something that's everything it's just impossible uh you can't do it it can't be done so that gives you an important clue about some of the i think the main issues i think really is is that but is but is that true i mean you know i again yeah of course it's true i get that you're sort of the contrarian voice who's pushing back but let's look specifically some of the issues in the police, an issue where WhatsApp groups were openly sort of undermining the authority.

22:21There was a sense of, they were tolerating things that there was almost like a counterculture within the organization, just tolerating bad behavior or in the NHS one, the Nottingham report, senior leaders for whatever reason, weren't participating in the, in the exploration of wrongdoing. I get you can say, well, this is not just a campaign. This is not just posters on the wall. It's not just one person standing up. But I just don't fully buy that you cannot re-engineer an organization to eliminate certain behaviors. And I get it. I get standing up and saying this is difficult or beware of simple answers to complicated problems.

23:05But I just don't fully buy that being cynical about things gives you a pass and that sort of is the is the solution so can you repeat that question bruce what's the question yes yeah specifically you seem to be suggesting that you cannot change no i'm suggesting i'm suggesting no i'm suggesting the absolute opposite i'm suggesting you absolutely can change okay it's really important bruce i'm not saying you can't change behavior there's hundreds of years of theory and evidence and data that you absolutely can so i have no doubt about that. So let's just dispel that. I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is culture is not a good route to doing that.

23:50It's not a good way to do it. In fact, it's a very poor way to do it. So I agree with the objective. Let's say we have, and it doesn't happen much, but let's say we have got good measures and good assessments of these behaviors. I totally agree. They are things we want to change. My question is, what is the most effective way of changing them? And from my understanding is culture is pretty useless and i'll tell you some of the reasons why you actually mentioned one of the problems that we talked about kind of counterculture one thing is so people assume organizations have a culture that is highly contentious because it's making assumptions we feel we can see the culture you go to a new workplace you go to a new office you you say i can feel this culture the amount of data you have about that organization is minuscule so you're not in a position to judge it but i guess as you know cognitive biases we want to see patterns and things that are consistent in the world around us we think kind of make may help us make sense of it it's kind of a bit ridiculous it's a bit like it's going to the north of england and say oh i went to sheffield where i lived for six years oh everybody was really friendly it's a really friendly culture it's just nuts where you know how can you possibly have enough data to make that kind of judgment are the norms of behavior sure but then like example the whatsapp group in the metropolitan please the question is how many people doing that is it shared is it not shared what actually is the problem with that so the first issue around cultures is there a culture and people never really ask that question just to see well you just can feel it just a vibe you can sense it no you can't but is there is there not you know your whole point quite frequently is you know demanding a specificity of definition saying look rather than sort of uh being um non-specific about what you mean yeah but could we not define uh culture as the norms of behavior you can but then you're not absolutely that's exactly what i'll go on to that's exactly my next point so the next point is culture often defined as the way we do things around here right what's the way we do things around here it's behavior so you get into the bizarre situation you say let's change the way we do things around here to change the way we do things around here you know it's entirely circular you want to get away from the way we do things around here to what's the specific behavior you're trying to change because again the way we do things around here is assuming there's a there's a series of norms that may be but there also may not be let's go back to the metropolitan please i don't think the way that group was behaving as you yourself pointed out was a norm in the whole the metropolitan police it was a some groups of people as far as we can tell so again it isn't the way we do things right this is the way some people do things around here the way other people so there's a different sort of things going on so it's very very kind of circular and typically culture actually describes behavior it doesn't cause it so when people talk about i can feel a culture i can see behavioral norms behavioral norms are description of behavior they're not necessarily the cause of it and even as you say and i agree with you norms of behavior might affect other people's behavior or when you observe those norms that that is absolutely the case but the key thing is you still then need to change the behavior so if there's a group of people behaving in a way and maybe there is a norm for that behavior what you need to do still let's just put culture out of the picture and say we still need to change those behaviors then that's the real question is how do we change behavior and as i say there is hundreds of years of research into this in many different kinds of fields from psychology from health psychology to social policy which is almost never used in organizations got it so when i use the definition of culture which is the behavior inside an organization whether encouraged rewarded or tolerated i guess what you're saying is it's too oblique to talk about that for that and actually if we want to change the behavior inside that organization let's specifically target the behaviors inside the organization yeah yeah exactly yeah and your point about the specific behaviors that are rewarded or tolerated well hold on a minute it's ambiguous you know there's people behaving badly getting rewarded there's other people behaving well also getting rewarded it's not that straightforward organizations are quite complicated particularly larger ones there's different things going on so i think there's some rewards going on here there's some punishments going on here there's other things going on there but it's not this monolithic single thing i think it's absolutely not it there might be subcultures and other kinds of things as you said but it's not a single thing but exactly the point is you need to target the behavior if you were sort of i'll give you an example i did did in the behavior change report if you wanted say your mate or your mate said i want to go to the i want to get fit i want to go to the gym more often you want to say well what we need to do, we need to change the culture about all your attitudes about the way you think about going to the gym.

28:45We need to really work on that and change the way you think about it, your norms. No, you just help them go to the gym. You say, let's go to the gym. I'll come with you tomorrow. We'll go at two o 'clock. We'll just go for half an hour. We'll do these kinds of things. I'll come with you and then we'll do it again at the end of the week. And then we'll do it again in the week. And through that process of doing it, it wouldn't necessarily work, but it's more likely your mate will learn that going to the gym is not a bad thing they will change their attitudes towards it and again typically attitudes are often regarded as a consequence of behavior within psychology whereas often organizations attitudes are seen as a cause of behavior particularly they're not it's usually kind of the way around so to change behavior you actually have to change the environment and it is a bit to do with rewards and incentives those sorts of things as well and it might be also role modeling it might be there's lots of techniques you can use to try and shape behavior particularly but specifically it's around changing the context of the environment of those behaviors and focusing crucially on the actual behaviors you want to change and my feeling often with culture change when it comes to bad behaviors is people say this because it's a way of kicking the can down the road so let's say you're aware of bullying behavior other kinds of things you know i think just saying it's the culture it's a way of not really tackling it it's a way of kind of avoiding it and creating a lot of kind of confusion around it and not say come on what are these behaviors who is engaged in these behaviors where are they going to be why are they is it because we selected people badly it may be nothing to do the culture it may be your selection process maybe like in the metropolitan police is absolutely awful and you keep recruiting people who are just going to behave like that.

30:27So it's not the culture, it's just the way you selected people. But the key thing always is to start the specific behaviors. So I wonder if, notwithstanding your frustration with the term culture, it almost feels like the way that people describe culture is what you perceive as the consequence, the outcome of behaviors. So for example, after we witnessed culture when when something has been tolerated, bad behavior has been tolerated by a person. And so we might perceive, you know, there's a perception of culture, whether it exists or not. There's a perception of culture, and people might go, there's a toxic culture around here because those managers are allowed to do this.

31:07Yeah, they're describing behavior, yeah. Got it, got it. And so it's the attitudinal outcome of behavior and the sort of consequence of that, to some extent, inasmuch as it exists, you would say. Yeah, so if we observe behaviors and we think we observe a pattern, which again is still highly questionable, but let's say we think we observe a pattern, then yeah, we tend to sort of call that culture. That's, oh, there's a culture of this in this organization, there's a culture of this in this bit of the organization. Yeah, it's a description. So if you want to change something, you don't change the description of it, you change the cause of it.

31:42And that's where all this other stuff comes in. And a good example of kind of some of these, if we move away from the negative behaviors towards sort of more positive behaviors, quite often people are asked to be proactive you come on bruce you've got to be more proactive you've got to you've got to collaborate more these are meaningless terms these are not behaviors these are just not behaviors what do you mean by collaborative what do you mean by practice give me the behaviors tell me what they are let you observe them model them you know it doesn't mean anything so you might get you know things like 360 appraisals where people got these vague terms in and then no one knows what they mean or be innovative what on earth does that mean so again if you want someone to say it's like saying to your mate who's trying to encourage oh come on you've got to be get fit it's utterly meaningless if you say no let's go to the gym on tuesday bang at two o 'clock bang you've got something telling someone they've got to get fit it's pointless no we've sort of taken on that you've written about engagement is it a thing psychological safety is it a thing culture is it a thing what other what other topics have you taken on there i've seen you at one point took on wellness apps but um the what else have you sort of said is is this a real thing yeah and i would say that in these in this thing i'm not i'm i'm not uh debunking them uh my i like to think of my role well actually someone told me i'm not a thought leader i'm a thought provoker and to go back to the beginning why because i think some of these concepts are not necessarily helpful and people need to think a bit more about where they are or not so i'm not trying to debunk and also because if you debunk people don't like it so if you tell someone bruised it their favorite thing is organizational culture and then you tell them it's not very useful idea they don't like it so i'm not trying to do that in those columns i'm trying to sort of say let's think about it a bit more so other ones we talked about some of them are more obvious and i guess that probably are a little more like debunking just because the evidence is so clear things like mbti or personality type indicators and the issues around that they're not really valid psychometric measures however in that one i also pointed out that there's maybe other kinds of validity that people just like it so people just like using them so although i may be coming to it and a psychometrician might be coming to it is is this a good measure of personality actually the users don't really care and that's kind of okay as long as they're aware they're not measuring personality there's still questions around the ethics of that but anyway that's another one learning styles is another fairly kind of straightforward one where there's a reasonable amount of evidence now and it doesn't seem a that people have learning styles to begin with their preferences sure uh but if you match someone's preferred way of learning with the way to live the learning it doesn't seem to make any difference that's kind of that's kind of another one another classic one is 70 percent of change initiatives fail fail yeah that's a very common one another one is growth mindset so the idea you can split you know you can measure people's their belief in how much they can change and learn and this again will predict outcomes and this is a really good example so growth mindset is used really widely in schools for example so anyone listening to this who's got probably kids in primary school even high school would probably have come across their kid coming home with something about growth mindset and what's interesting about that is a you've got the problem of defining it it's all very clear b you've got the issue around measuring it whether it's measured to valid and the third thing is uh some of the biggest kind of meta-analyses that pulled together lots of studies in the educational setting seem to suggest reasonably clearly that it doesn't actually predict much at all about whether people will learn and progress and attain more so therefore why have interventions to try and increase this thing called growth mindset even when it's quite difficult to do if as a consequence it won't actually help attainment very much so again it's another really good example i mean growth mindset sounds like a great idea doesn't it we all want to have a growth mindset we don't like a fixed mindset and let's help everyone have a gross mindset the problem is maybe it doesn't really matter very much for attainment so we can try and measure these things but it's just pretty much a waste of time and actually going back to the school example there are probably other things you can do to really help kids learn that is probably not one of them yeah i mean you're speaking my language there i just wonder though i mean one of my favorite podcasts is there's a podcast which sort of disabuses us of of all of these things about growth mindset that it's called if books could kill and it's sort of like a yeah i know yeah yeah yeah it's quite um uh a gently caustic dismantlement of all of these popular things and it's brilliant because you know especially sort of taking on books that are i think disprovable like grit by angela duckworth It goes into it and really sort of savages the pseudoscience behind them, which in its own way serves to discredit the whole field of psychology when people are sort of putting these things out there.

36:42Sure. And it extends beyond that. The Jonathan Haidt book is probably one of the most influential books in the last couple of years, the books about anxious generation, and most of the science in that is disprovable. So it does damage the field. It does. I guess the question then might be, in that perspective where so much evidence that is presented to us turns out to be untrue, if someone who finds themselves listening to this podcast with the goal of trying to improve their work, trying to make their work better, how would you help them orientate themselves? what would you say to them as a manager, a leader, listening to this thinking, I want to make my own work better.

37:28I've heard that engagement isn't good. I've heard that we shouldn't just be doing these sort of pulse things. Psychological safety, I've now put a sort of question mark through it. Growth mindset, I've decided not for this year. What would you advise them with a sort of a slightly more positive perspective that they would set about trying to use to sculpt their own workplace? well i think first i sort of say i don't think it it's negative just to say maybe that's not very useful it can sound negative in an age where everyone has to be very positive about it but actually it's incredibly positive thing to say to say to someone that thing you're doing probably isn't really helping maybe you should think about it another way that's fantastically positive you know i know it doesn't sound like that and it's framed because of this positivity bias we have uh but it is but what i'll suggest is it's a bit like if someone is surrounded by a box of tools uh and they said well you know i tried a hammer that wasn't really good then i tried a pair of pliers that wasn't great use a screwdriver yeah mate you know what you say to them what we say you say what are you trying to do what are you trying to do forget the tools just put them aside put all these solutions grit psychological safety whatever put them to one side and think about what you're trying to do.

38:45And I think that is the key starting point. And in the case of organizations and businesses, what is the business trying to do? What is the business trying to achieve? And how can you as a manager help the business achieve those things? So firstly, you need to know what the business's objectives are. Don't just assume, find out what they are, or hopefully someone would have cascaded those to you. Think about your role and think, what can I do to help the organization achieve those objectives? And be very clear about understanding what the issues are before you do anything around thinking about solution so i would say the key thing is to not get distracted by all these shiny objects and think you know come on let's go back to basic and the problem i think that is it sounds really boring that's the problem it's not exciting it is actually you know going back a sense to what are the issues you're trying to deal with it's not about finding a best-selling book it's not about having an inspirational TED talk person telling you about a great thing with wonderfully inspiring stories sorry it's a bit dull but it's about trying to do what works given what you're trying to do so I think that's a really important starting point I would say all those things you mentioned I think typically are just distractions from helping the organization be successful there may be circumstances absolutely where you go through that whole process you identify you understand the issues really well you understand what you're trying to do you look at a range of options and solutions you look in this toolbox and it may turn out yeah you do actually need a screwdriver but it may also turn out you don't need any of those things you need something completely different so again it's about saying what is the issue and then once it's understood what can we do about it is the villain here scale because what you sort of described to me is that if i had a manager running a team of six people, ten people, their issue is going to have a specificity to it.

40:38It's going to be involved in, it's going to be very precise. And the problem is when organizations scale to 100, to 200, to 1 ,000, to 10 ,000, there's an attempt to try to bring a consistent holistic solution. And that's where conversations scale come in. And you're exactly right. When you attempt to measure culture across 1 ,000 people, there's no consistency about what people perceive the values to be, what people perceive the incentives to be. So it's to some extent, if the actual enemy here is scale, that you're trying to say the problem for our whole organization is screwdrivers, when actually there's going to be someone who needs to, or someone who needs to, that actually the solution should be potentially gifting some degree of agency to everyone in every situation and removing this sort of disempowered scale and trying to allow people to use their own initiative in there is that what we should be thinking about then yeah that's i haven't actually thought about that before but i think that's actually that is one of the main barriers here in that within a small organizational small team people can see what's going on are for much better and there's a lot more nuance whereas if you scale up you kind of lose that a bit so i think that's absolutely right i think the problem is that people try to impose from the top a kind of solution to problems they don't even know exist or maybe exist a little bit in some context within the business which just is going to be irrelevant and not work even harmful to the rest of the business so certainly in most of the work i'm doing at the moment it's very much exactly to your point, say, be specific.

42:21So it's a bit like saying a business leader might say, we want everyone to be proactive and entrepreneurial. No, you don't. No. A, you can't even define it. You can't say what the behaviors are. And maybe, why does everyone need to do that? Maybe some people do. So to your point, it's a really good example where you've got scale. Some leader perceives we're not entrepreneurial, proactive enough. What they mean is, I have seen some people in some settings in some parts of business where if they behave in that way i think it would really help fantastic do that don't do this we all need to be entrepreneurial and proactive because most people are going to scratch their heads and say i just don't know what you're talking about why is that relevant to me quite rightly so maybe that is an issue it's about trying to to sort of to impose from the top which is a scaling up solution that might be really helpful here to everyone and everything.

43:12I think that is a major barrier, actually. Yeah, quite often when you see some of the challenges that organizations have, I think, firstly, I think of the United Airlines flight 3411, which was a few years ago, flying out of Chicago to Louisville on a Sunday night. And it hit the news, it hit people's social media feeds because one passenger was dragged off the flight, ended up suing the airline, made$140 million in a settlement. but the issue when they did a post-mortem on it was that there was not a single person on the flight who was able to increase the amount of incentive to get passengers off.

43:49And so because they had no one who was empowered to make a decision, there was no agency there at all. They dragged someone off with catastrophic consequences. And quite often, that's sort of a parable for modern work for a lot of people. They're just not allowed to make decisions. Yes. So you've got this sort of environment where someone comes along and says, the new culture is dot, dot, dot. And it's a vague and irrelevant term for you, but trying to do anything at scale ends up producing an answer to something that isn't there. Yeah. I wonder if that's it. Absolutely. That's really good. And also, yeah, we want employees to think critically.

44:26We want managers to think critically. And a great example of this is so-called resistance to change. and most times i've seen this and my understanding of it is most times people have resistance to change it's because they have genuine and if you like well-founded objections to what is being proposed they have a view about why it not work organizations may say that as a negative thing oh don't resist change but actually they can see what might be going wrong with this and i think often it is that level of the individual or small team where you want people to push back to think critically to wonder whether what they're being told to do is useful or not if people just as it were follow orders and just do oh we're now having this culture then it's very difficult i think for business to apply intervention solutions they're actually going to be effective and i think yeah i think a lot of people feel they can't object to things and going back to psychological safety i don't even think it's about that it's just about oh we just have to do this because you know head officers say we have to do it so we just need to get on with it and it's back to your point about rewards is often people are rewarded for getting stuff done and this is one of the most depressing things i think our organizations in general this whole concept of deliverables and targets and outputs all that sounds marvelous but the problem is if you reward people for that that's what people will tend to do rather than say i don't agree with this deliverable i don't agree with this output uh i don't think it's going to work whatever whatever the objection might be they just say well you just have to do it get on with it so i think that's that's again in some of the stuff i've done i think i'm trying to get away from the idea of outputs and targets and that sense of performance more towards trying to facilitate and encourage behaviors that will lead to those outcomes you want because by the time you get the outcome it's too late it's a bit like i don't like sports analogies but it's a bit like a sports analogy where you might say my team performed really well but they lost and what you mean by that is they were engaging in all the kinds of behaviors that should have led to success and the outcome you wanted but it didn't quite work i think we should be focusing much more on helping and supporting people engage in the behaviors that you think will lead to the outcomes rather than just looking at the outcomes themselves as a kind of guide to how well people are performing because often it's not sales team that gets terrible leads a sales team that's trying to sell a tough product you know judging them by their performance by the outcome just doesn't make any sense I wonder if you could help us there's a couple more things I want to ask and one of them is sort of helping people navigate their way out of this so you know you you've sort of you've marked our card to say that beware of some of these things that sort of seem simplistic and maybe sort of thing that you see marketed to you in a book I guess the the the new and emergent danger is that someone who maybe in the past had found themselves picking up a book thinking, I'm going to try and apply this to my team.

47:22Now they might find themselves going to AI and saying, how could I solve this? And the AI gives them a pretty articular description of what they need to set about doing, presumably drawing on the same flawed evidence that we've had before. yeah so what would you do so so that someone's taken your advice they've decided specifically what they're trying to do um they've specifically sort of sat there and and define their product problem design the challenge they've got a small team what's their next step from your perspective because the challenge is quite often that people now might have brought some precision to the problem they're facing yeah they don't know where to go next where do i go next what what would you advise them what would they do next yeah so i think that's a really good question i think i think so understanding the issue is one thing and then thinking what can we do about it's the second stage of this evidence-based uh process and again you know i would really encourage people to have more confidence in their ability to sort of work it out for themselves right so what i mean by that is quite often my sense is people do have a good understanding of what might be effective.

48:40But what it means is, is rather than just saying, oh, I need a solution, most of the problems we're dealing with, there aren't solutions. Solution implies there's a thing you can do that will fix it. There isn't. There's multiple things you can do. We're not solving a maths problem or an algebra thing. There isn't an answer. There are no answers. There are lots of things we can do. Each of them will have costs and benefits and maybe have no effect so i think that that second stage of what can we do about it is thinking what are the different options we could have we maybe could do this go back to the metropolitan police example it could be a selection problem okay that's one potential solution it could be a leadership problem maybe that's another thing it could be a blah blah whatever it is look at those potential interventions and actually try and understand which ones do you think are more likely to work and actually put them actually compare them so again a really important thing in general decision making processes is never just looking at one intervention saying is that going to work that's a big mistake you always have to have like at least three or four different things you think you could do and start to actually compare them and it may turn out the two are equally you think equally and that's fine toss a coin but i mean i think that second stage is really thinking what are the different things we could do i would say generally speaking when you're thinking about solutions looking at a best-selling book uh is i can't i think it's highly unlikely that's where the solution is going to lie it may be absolutely but it seems to be very unlikely that one idea that someone has promoted the hell out of often using dodgy data or exaggerated data or partial data i just can't see that it could it could be but it seems quite unlikely as opposed to think about other kinds of interventions other kinds of solutions so i would really encourage people to sort of think it through for themselves and back to the beginning where i'm sort of being skeptical or cynical you know in that sense i'm not at all i think people can work out more stuff for themselves but they go over time in all kinds of ways and for a better word they're being slightly disempowered to feel they can do that they've been a bit beaten down by look this is what google's doing this is what this best-selling book does i saw this i have to do those things because they're the smart people and i should do no they're not you're the smart person you can work it out but it does require critical thinking and it does require using data and evidence of different kinds i've got it so it's sort of advocating for trusting yourself building experience sort of learning on the job pushing back against the tick tockification of of advice really you know like if you see something in the sort of 90 if a 90 minute clip it's probably by 90 second if you see something in a 90 second clip almost by its very nature it's too simplistic to be meaningful to be universally applied yeah i think so as i mentioned before this sense that if someone if you instantly get an idea which is supposed to be very complicated almost certainly that idea is wrong because it went straight into some cognitive bias and made you feel good and oh i understand that's fantastic and you liked it so what if you liked it this is we're not trying to do things we like we're trying to do things we think are effective and work and will help i think your other point is it's a bit about reflecting you write a lot of it is about experience and craft but it's also particularly around what evidence-based approach it's about being explicit is sharing and collectively thinking about the what you're doing or why you're doing it and sharing those at that evidence and that data you're using to both understand the problem and think about what you can do about it i think that sharing of it is also a really important part of the learning as well rob you've mentioned the corporate research forum quite often when you post stuff you you put links to stuff that you're working on or you seem to be from the outside you seem to sort of building a movement of people who are interested in this stuff i wonder if you could give us a pointer of where people might go next what would people if they're interested in your perspective here what would people find themselves doing next so if you go on the corporate research forum website itself you can get access to some reports including ones about things like changing employee attitudes whether they're changing or not things about evidence based hr things about how hr can drive organizational performance there's other kinds of reports there but also there's a sort of subsection of that website there's something called the work psychology network which we set up a couple of years ago and if you go on there you'll find access to quite a lot of reports and overviews and videos i can give you some for the show notes as well where you can actually look at some of the work psychology theory and evidence report together to try and help managers and hr people and this is based on you know and this links to what what you're interested in as well i know bruce but it's based on the assumption that often what HR and managers are trying to do is they're trying to shape behavior.

53:41They're trying to shape employee behavior, whether it's through training or incentives or punishments or rewards or the way you select people, you're trying to shape behavior. The challenge is most, as far as I can see, most managers and HR people have almost no access to the underlying scientific theory and evidence around how you change behavior at work so that's why we set up the word psychology network is is to write reports are very accessible but still critical of the word psychology stuff but also giving people frameworks they can use thinking about these things a bit more because the problem is now it's really hard to get access to that so what do you do you get access to the best-selling book or the 90 second tiktok but you get access to the stuff it's easiest to get access to getting hold of scientific evidence as you know is quite tricky so what we try to do these reports is kind of summarize it in a way that's quite kind of accessible.

54:34So I think there's those two things. There's the general CRF website and also there's the Work Psychology Network, which is trying to really give people, say, sort of educate them, train them into the underlying science that should underlie what you're doing when you're trying to change behavior at work. This podcast is brought to you by Thompson Reuters. The best don't just do their work, they change what's possible. Cases won, audits completed, jobs saved. Behind every one of those moments is a professional who needed to get it right, and did. Thomson Reuters builds the technology that sharpens insights, speeds up decision-making, and powers the outcomes that matter.

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56:05Love it. I've linked to those in the show notes. I'm so immensely grateful. I think, you know, there's a lot of people who, if people have listened this far, then they've probably had something that they took to believe challenged. changed and you know it's forced a reappraisal for them and i think that's almost certainly the most positive thing that they can do that you know sometimes shaking yourself out of a really uh simple belief that you've had is a good way to provoke yourself and sort of actually expand your understanding i think it is and and i think it's also really crucial that people want to feel that idea they loved isn't maybe very useful the key thing is not to just jump on the next popular idea that seems really appealing it's almost to say i'm going to you know get onto a better diet of theory and evidence and knowledge rather than a lot of this stuff which probably isn't very sound because the temptation people often say to me what's the alternative to engagement what's the alternative to psychological safety well there isn't one it doesn't work like that it's not it's not about that it's about saying what's the issue and what can you do about it so yeah absolutely questioning some of these ideas you hold to be true is always important but equally it's not jumping on to the next thing you think is cool i love it i loved that discussion thank you so much thank you for taking so long out of your your day to do it i'm immensely grateful thank you thank you to Rob great discussion I've included a transcription of that and all of the links in the show notes as ever best place to stay in touch with the podcast and everything to do with this is on the newsletter and you can see the link to that at the top of the show notes I've been Bruce Daisley I'll see you next time

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