Driving Organisational Change – 7 Tips to Help you Succeed

Geoff Roberts change, choice, flexibility, focus, opportunity, Risk, selection, strategy, time management

“The one constant is change” – and perhaps especially so in these difficult times.  These tips will help you make the most of your investment in consultancy.

 7 Tips to help your change succeed

  1. Lead as well as manage

Hundreds of books have been written about the need for change management and I am not going to disagree because any project needs appropriate management. Yet project management is not enough – it is about processes and the biggest challenge in change is that it affects people. This is where leadership comes in – be active in showing the future and the way to get there, support individuals and groups, listen as well as speak, be there when you are needed.

  1. Value and use resistance

You will meet resistors – they have their own reasons for not wanting to change and those reasons make absolute sense to them (if not you!). Listen to them – have they perhaps spotted something that has been missed? Have they got personal challenges (lack of training, concerns about future security, etc) that you can help them with? Resistors can cause more damage than the supporters can help. Treat them carefully, respectfully and individually – a ‘convert’ will be worth their weight in gold.

  1. Do what you can, where you can, when you can

I have yet to see the path of any change effort go smoothly; some things prove more difficult than expected and others simpler. For a big change you night think of it as lighting little fires all over the organisation – some will die out and you will need to come back to them but others will flare up and those you fan and help spread more widely.

  1. Ignore losses, consolidate wins

If you focus on losses or failures, they get bigger and more overwhelming, you then pull in even more losses. So find ways to ignore these losses. Shift your attention to something positive, stop talking or thinking about them. What can you do to consolidate your successes? Write them down or put them on a wall. Keep a record of your wins. Talk about them to everyone you can. Celebrate them. Make a habit of finding and focusing on the wins of others. The more attention you put on success, the more success you get.

  1. Communicate, communicate, communicate…

THE most important issue. Everyone involved in the change needs to know why it is happening, what the future is going to be like, how it will affect them and their colleagues (don’t underestimate ‘solidarity’). It’s not just about newsletters, much more effective is routine face-to-face discussions in formal and informal (canteen, coffee machine…) settings – use your apostles (see Tip #6) to spread the word and explain what’s happening. And remember that you have two ears but only one mouth – this is where you sense the resistance that is so useful for Tip #2.

 

  1. Recruit sources of power

The power you can exercise is in direct proportion to your ability to meet the needs of your people. Power comes in many different flavours and they are all needed to create effective change as different individuals will respond to different power bases (the fact that you are the boss may matter more to you than them!). Your, and your apostles’, Personal Power will be much more valuable than all the Formal Power you can muster – the latter might create compliance, the former commitment.

  1. Find and nurture your apostles

You can’t do it all yourself, you need a small and growing number of individuals who are totally with you and actively supporting you. These advocates need constant support – ‘feed and water’ them because your change really does depend on them. Keep them close to you, allow them time and actively encourage them to get out on the shopfloor convincing others through the sheer commitment they show. Finally, reward them for their efforts.

What do you think? Can you offer any tips of your own?

 

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Manifesto of Possibilities – Set your people free

Geoff Roberts change, choice, flexibility, paradox

This is an emerging piece of work outlining my ‘manifesto’, designed to give you a feel for what I do, why and how I do it. I will be really interested on any thoughts this provokes for you – whatever they may be and whether you regard them as critical or praise.

empoweredManifesto of Possibilities – Set your people free

The answers are out there, the people need to be free. One would think that organisations are there solely for the benefit of some ethereal entity ‘the company’, but the company is there for the benefit of its many stakeholders and without the engagement of those stakeholders it can and will only survive in the short-term.

Mindless, thinking-less, managers believe that if they only set SMART stretch targets that all will be well, without really understanding the individual motivations of the people who work for them but should be working with them. Yes, money does matter in a way, but only in the societal ecosystem we have allowed to be created for ourselves; how much more inspiring is the possibility of an autonomous response to great leadership challenge. “Set your people free” applies not only in its original context but also to those within organisations. Allow them to master their science, there art, their whatever… and in the process they will develop beautiful systems capable of spectacular outputs. We only need management, especially old-style Plan/Organise/Control management, when we feel the need to control other people. Well, I ask, do you Mr Manager want to be controlled or would you rather develop your practice in pursuit of some greater good? Inspired by Bill Clinton “It’s the people stupid, not the stupid people”.

So set your people free – ask a good question, and answer is out there somewhere, let us go and find it. The search is not aided by plans and timescales but by the passionate search of somebody doing what they can, where they can, when they.

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Habitual Behaviour

Geoff Roberts change, choice, flexibility, opportunity

man-brushing-teethI am staying with my sister in south-west France. I go there fairly often and so have a small selection of toiletries left at her house. This includes a toothbrush. Now I was brushing my teeth yesterday when a thought occurred to me. (Bear with me, this setup is quite important.)

I realised that even though on this occasion I had brought my electric toothbrush with me I had not pressed the little button to make it work and was brushing my teeth manually as I normally did there  because the stuff that I leave at her house does not include an electric toothbrush. I realised that my behaviour was situationally dependent. Even with a simple task like brushing my teeth I was doing what I normally did in that environment. (BTW – the photo is not me, I’m much better looking! 🙂 )

Our context or environment influences our behaviour in all sorts of ways. Actually the reason I was at my sisters was to attend a funeral; at funerals we tend to wear black and be a bit sombre; in libraries, we tend to be quiet; for work we tend to wear sober suits; in pubs we tend to go for an alcoholic rather than non-alcoholic drink – and I am sure that there are lots of other circumstances where our context triggers habitual behaviours.

So, my personal development challenge to you is to notice and observe these habitual behaviours then consider the implications and what might happen if you choose to behave differently in that context. I will be interested to hear your reports.

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The immovable object and the resistible force

Geoff Roberts change, choice, flexibility, focus, metaphor, opportunity, Risk, selection, strategy, time management

In the second of my pieces on guiding principles for delivering effective change I want to talk, in a tangential way, about one aspect of how to handle resistance.

The one thing that is certain when you embark on a process of change is that you will meet resistance. Perhaps that ought to be two things of which are certain, because the other is that you cannot predict where, from whom or in what form that resistance will appear. But appear it will and you must address it. The point of this particular piece is one way of addressing it – not that  this is only one way, indeed there are several other tools that you will need to use. This tool is particularly useful in the early stages of the change efforts.

So, many moons ago I completed my masters degree in organisational change and my then boss asked me “What was the most significant thing that you have learned in two years of very expensive study?” My answer might seem somewhat glib, let me assure you it wasn’t and isn’t. The answer was “Do what you can, where you can, when you can”. And this is the second of my guiding principles for leading change effectively.

 Do what you can, where you can, when you can

When you get involved in change you will find some people who are really keen (the marketeers would call them early adopters), some who just sit and wait but will follow the crowd once they know which way the crowd is going ( I will call them ‘the herd’)and some who will actively or passively resist. My question to you is “Why would you want to spend time, especially at the beginning of a process, working with resistance when you could be creating change and generating enthusiasm by working with the early adopters?” As you work with early adopters they start to show the direction for the herd and slowly but surely the herd will follow. The contrary scenario is one in which your efforts are frustrated by and your energy sapped by resistors from whom the emerging messages to the herd are negative. All you do by working with resistors in the early stages is tire yourself out, build up more resistance and risk and entrenching yet further resistance in the herd.

So, perhaps my principle to do what you can, where you can, when you can is not so glib after all. I have likened the job of a change agents to lighting a series of small fires in an organisation. Sometimes the fire will take hold and it is those ones, especially in the initial stages, that you pay attention to, giving them whatever support they need to burn effectively whilst not becoming a wildfire. Some of your fires will just burble along, not dying out nor turning into wildfires – these you also support, looking for easy opportunities to help them along and maybe connect to different yet related places that are all part of the overall thrust of what you are trying to achieve. The ones you ignore are the fires that just flicker before dying out. Fire dies because it does not have enough fuel or enough oxygen, or enough people to supply it with fuel or oxygen. So let it die out until such time as you can find enough fuel enough oxygen (enough support and energy) to be able pay it some consistent attention.

To me this Principle –  “Do what you can, where you can, when you can” – is probably the most important principle in leading change. We only ever have a limited resource available so let’s make sure we commit our resource to areas in which we can make a short term difference, after all John P Kotter did talk about realising quick wins.

 

What stories could you share about how this division of effort, or perhaps lack of it, helped or hindered your change efforts?

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There is no such thing as “Best Practice in Change Management”?

Geoff Roberts change, flexibility, metaphor, opportunity, Risk, selection, strategy

“ What is best practice in change management?”

This, and variations on the same theme seem to have appeared as questions in a surprisingly large number of the forums that I inhabit recently. And every time I read the answers with a falling heart.

Respondent A suggests the following six steps, Respondent B has a nine step process, Respondent C has a commercially secret process which they will sell you the several thousand pounds a day and so on… I can rarely resist the temptation, so I weigh in with my answer “There is no such thing as best practice in change management.”

 

Now I know that this is probably not what the questioner wanted to hear. Typically the questioner will be an enthusiastic, newly appointed change agent or middle manager who believes that you can manage change in the same way as you manage their process for producing widgets or appointing a new member of staff. I fear that most of these people are going to find out the hard way that change is more about leadership than management and that there is no such thing as a best practice process.

 

Now I am not denying – indeed far from it – that the likes of Kotter have a role to play, for indeed they do. But their role is to inform an emerging process which, if it is to be effective, also needs to be informed by the scale and scope of the change, the current and anticipated future culture of the organisation, the willingness of the participants, the capability of the change leaders and their teams and a host of other factors.

A recent piece by Alastair Dryburgh in Management Today reminded me that, in my experience, successful change rests upon adherence to some core principles rather than processes. His analogy, that if you cannot write an eight step process to guarantee winning a (deterministic) game of chess then how on earth can you write an eight step process to guarantee effective change in the much more complex and chaotic  human and physical environment of a corporation? Really illustrates the point.

 

The current reality of any organisation I have ever experienced is that they are a mess. Now admittedly some are more of a mess than others, but even the best tend to have a mess of policies that do not necessarily integrate with each other, an even more complex mess of procedures driven by those policies, an even more complicated mess of what actually happens in practice regardless of the procedures and policies and a way of working that has very little to do with the formal organisation charts so beloved of our colleagues in HR.

You don’t have to be involved in an organisation for very long to recognise that how things should work and how things do work are two different concepts. How things do work has typically evolved to get round the problems created by how things should work, and yet how often have I seen consultants trying to work with theory rather than reality? They are doomed to failure. So perhaps this is the first of my principles for leading effective change –

work with the current reality

I guess it is a bit like me setting off for London from where I live. In order for any map to be useful it needs to know where I am starting from. And that fact is not always easy to discover. If, in an attempt to understand the ‘As-Is’, you ask me what my postcode is you might reasonably assume that I live in Bradford. However if you asked me which city I live in I will tell you Leeds. So which map are you going to provide me with? In fact, because of the detail of where I happen to live, you will need to provide me with a much more detailed map than would be provided were I to set out from Leeds or Bradford. And always remember Korzybski’s compelling aphorism “A map is not the territory”.

So, in an attempt to keep this blog to a reasonable length, I will discuss some of my other guiding principles in subsequent entries. Meanwhile, what are the core principles that you use find a leading of facilitating change? I would love to know.

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On forgiveness

Geoff Roberts change, choice, flexibility, procrastination, stress

forgivenessA few days ago I posted on our Facebook page what was described as a Buddhist prayer of forgiveness

If I have harmed anyone in any way either knowingly or unknowingly or through my own confusions I ask their forgiveness.

If anyone has harmed me in anyway either knowingly or unknowingly or through their own confusions I forgive them.

And if there is a situation I am not yet ready to forgive I forgive myself for that.

For all the ways that I harm myself, negate, doubt, belittle myself, judge or be unkind to myself through my own confusions I forgive myself.

 

This came to mind when I met a very old friend of mine a couple of days ago and we started talking about our joint experiences in the industry that we both served for over 30 years. What that conversation brought to my mind was an incident towards the end of my career when I believed, and continue to believe, that I was treated very poorly. The details are irrelevant, what is relevant in this context is my becoming aware just how passionately I spoke about this particular incident and how strong was my ongoing dislike of the perpetrators. Even talking about this 12 year old incident triggered feelings of anger that quite surprised me.

Interestingly, the outcome of the incident was satisfactory because somebody who has, in my view, a significantly stronger appreciation of the impact of the decision, not only on me but on the several thousand people who hear, about it stepped in and reversed the decisions that had so infuriated me. So in practice, the bad behaviour (and even 12 years later I still consider it to be extremely bad behaviour) had no long term objective impact. Yet here I am writing a blog about how that emotionally charged event can and does still leads to negative emotions even 12 years on. For some reason I have been unable to forget the perpetrators. And I wonder why.

Those of a religious persuasions tend to be advised to either turn the other cheek or pluck an eye for an eye – I do not fall into this camp and anyway I cannot agree with an eye for an eye and really don’t see the point of letting someone abuse me twice. Over recent years we have heard a lot about the importance of the psychological contract between employer and employee and it is clear in retrospect that not only was the legal contract broken but the psychological contract didn’t appear to have even been considered. I had trusted that my employer would honour the terms of the written contract we agreed and would continue to act honourably. Well neither of those things happened and it is now clear that that fundamental breach of trust, and in my eyes it was a very fundamental breach, lies behind my unwillingness to forgive.

Yet the paradox is that I really do believe that the individuals involved were doing the best they could in the circumstances. That it failed to meet my needs was perhaps a function of both me being unable to express those needs and them being unable or unwilling to hear and act on that request.

I have not met either of these individuals in the last 12 years, nor do I intend to, and yet the episode has been there in the back of my mind gnawing away and occasionally surfacing to sap my energy. That stops here and now. I forgive you ‘R’, I forgive you ‘K’.

 

So, my query to you dear reader is what events in your past are still there in the back of your mind, occasionally gnawing at your energy? Who do you need to forgive for what, and how are you going to do that? And as you are forgiving, remember that  your own ‘un-forgiving’ has served some purpose so perhaps the degree level question that follows your forgiveness is to explore what that secondary gain has been and how you replace it with something more constructive and life affirming.

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Am I deluding myself by studying world class leaders?

Geoff Roberts change, choice, flexibility, focus, opportunity, strategy

So many article, blogs, books, presentations etc are based on the proposition that we can learn from ‘world class operators’ – if they can do it, so can you; if you just model how they do it, you can do it too, that sort of territory. Some NLP’ers even propound the view that “if anyone can do it, you can do it”.

I want to open an enquiry into the legitimacy of that view.

World class operators are, by definition part of a very small tail in a statistical distribution of performance, and many (most?) of these outstanding performers have physical or mental attributes that I cannot attain:

  • Usain Bolt is blessed with a super-abundance of ultra-fast-twitch muscle,
  • Richard Branson is dyslexic and didn’t really get on well at school,
  • many others around the world had ‘challenging’ childhoods.

So some have physical advantages that no matter how hard I try or visualise or set challenging goals I will never be able to replicate and others have a past that I managed to avoid. Moreover, their performance is so far removed from mine that it lies well outside my comfort zone, maybe even in the “Here be Dragons” territory that is more disabling than empowering.

What if we were to challenge ourselves with performance that lies in the stretch zone instead? What of we were to model our performance on those who perform 10/20/30%  better than ourselves, rather than the zillion% outperformers whose achievements are practically unobtainable?

Now, let’s be clear here – I am not saying that these people cannot be and are not inspirational, what I am suggesting is that their performance is so far from the norm that us mere mortals might be better off concentrating our learning on how our local business, charity, church, theatre etc leaders do it. When I look for a book on “What you can learn from you above-averagely successful but not world-class leader” they don’t seem to be there.

Is this a field for research? Do you find such global inspirations too far out of sight as to be really helpful? What do you think of this topic generally? Go on, comment away…

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If you always do what you always did – the global economic crisis

Geoff Roberts change, flexibility

In case you hadn’t noticed from my various postings elsewhere, I have recently been delivering some stuff on leadership and change in the Middle East to students of the Abu Dhabi Department of Transport. Now, we teach them that change can be precipitated by either internal or external trauma (as well as many other things) and that such trauma typically requires different responses to the ones we have historically used. While at ADMC, our venue for the events, I picked up an anthology celebrating the 22nd anniversary of the higher colleges of technology of the United Arab Emirates-the prologue is written by the Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research and Chancellor of HCE. In it, he writes “It is now clear that the global economic policies and practices of the past require major structural changes for the future. It is also clear that these changes must be accompanied by appropriate social policies, greater emphasis on ethical and transparent transactions and wider individual and institutional participation in or economic activities”. Among the many questions he asks is one that particularly struck me “What differences must come about in the social and economic policies, programmes and theories if we are to smoothly and promptly reserve this global recession, live in peace and deal humanely with the needs of the world’s growing and ageing populations?”.

The global economic crisis (well, perhaps it was global but that would be how the Western-centric commentators would describe it) was surely both a trigger and an opportunity to do something different. Instead what we got, politicians doing what they know best-cutting budgets, injecting money into the economy and telling the poor that they must dig a bit deeper while rich the need to be encouraged by tax cuts for their private and commercial ventures. Has anyone seen any evidence of a radical new approach? To those of those who studied Spiral Dynamics, this crisis was a potential opportunity to shift from the rampant self-centred capitalism of orange to a more socially enlightened inclusive and green meme. Unfortunately, it looks like we have missed the boat.

Now I am a change expert, not a political theorist and so I will not suggest any solutions. What I do however suggest is that we have really really missed an opportunity. An opportunity to recognise that the capitalist system has led to massively increasing economic division even within the well-off Western Societies and even more in the developing societies of Russia, China, Africa etc.

Perhaps the young of the Arab world saw an opportunity in the global crisis that led to the Arab Spring in which case admittedly bloody revolutions might ultimately result in better life chances for their populations. Perhaps the economic pressures on the West have been spotted by China and who knows what will happen there?

If this were a single company suffering in the way that our economies have suffered, I might urge them to greater feats of employee involvement, seeking their input and their ideas to save the company and move it forward. What do we get instead – autocratic powerful managers with titles like Chancellor or Prime Minister or President deciding what is good for is all? This would not be the right answer in a commercial organisation, why should it be the right answer in a national economy?

 

I read a joke piece a few months ago (at least I think it was a joke) that one option might be for the government to give every adult in the UK £1 million with the proviso that they must buy a house and a car and gave 10% to charity and invest some of it in their own pensions etc-thus stimulating the housing market, the automobile market, the big society etc. A joke, or a radical option that just might generate something different and new? Of course, as with all change, we will never know unless it is tried. And it is always easier to try and do what we always did. The problem is that we will always get what we always got-an economic crisis.

Go on-have your say and please make it change centric rather than Political

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There is no failure, only feedback

Geoff Roberts change, choice, flexibility

Head in hands with failure

 

My friend Andy Green has decided to label this week “Failure Week” and it set me thinking. Those of you who read this blog will recognise that it has become rather occasional – one might say that I have failed to write something every day, which was my original intent.

However in my world failure is only really failure if I fail to learn from it. So what have I learned?

  1. I am most successful blogging daily when I have a plan – usually to write a series of articles on a particular topic (see Twixtmas or Metaprograms earlier).
  2. I need to sort out the ‘Schedule’ function in my WordPress – it doesn’t work and it bugs me that I have to go in every day to workaround the fact that my scheduled post didn’t make it to your wonderful eyes.

What I have learned from earlier experience is that a list of more than 2 or 3 items is less likely to get completed than a very short list – eat the elephant one bite at a time. So that’s it. I suggested elsewhere that I might write an A-Z of personal development, so I am off to compose the first few, any suggestions for topics (especially for Q, X, Z) will be very welcome.

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Myths or Facts about your brain?

Geoff Roberts change, flexibility

I just read a very informative blog article exposing some myths and facts about our brains – you can find it here  and I hope that the author does not mind that I copied it here…

 

Top Ten Myths about the Brain: The Answers

by Dr Trish Riddell

Recently, I posted a number of questions about the brain and challenged this community to see if they could say which were supported by evidence, and which were myths.  I promised to provide my answers and the evidence to support them.  So, here are the questions again for those that might have missed them.  See if you agree with me on which are myths:

1. We make no new neurones in our brain after we are born
2. Men have fewer connections between the right and left of their brain than women
3. There are left brain and right brain people
4. Listening to Mozart does not make you smarter
5. Your memory can hold 7 + 2 things at a time
6. It’s all downhill after 60!
7. We know what will make us happy
8. Our memories of past events in our lives are inaccurate
9. The reptilian brain controls our emotional responses
10. The adult brain is able to be changed

And, here are my answers with some evidence to support my position.

10.  The adult brain is able to be changed: TRUE

Our brains are designed as learning machines and two main mechanisms for learning have evolved.  The first is called experience-expectant learning.   The human infant brain creates 100% more connections (synapses) between neurones than are found in the adult brain.  The original wiring of the brain is based on thousands of years of evolution and is the product of the unchanging environment over this time – things that can be expected in that environment are coded into the original connections we make in our brains (e.g. the ability to process language). Over the first years of life, the experiences of each individual child determine which synapses should be kept and which lost due to lack of use.  So, connections that represent the sounds that we hear in our own language are kept, and those for other languages that we do not experience are lost. However, as we approach the appropriate number of adult connections, this mechanism for learning becomes less useful.

Therefore, not all learning can be based on the expectation that our environments will contain certain information.  We have to have a means of learning about new technologies, new environments etc.  So, in addition to using the loss of synapses as a means of learning, we also create new synapses to code novel experiences.  This is called experience-dependant learning, and this is available throughout the lifespan.  Learning results in strong connections within networks of neurones so that behaviours become habits.  But, just as habits are learned through overuse, a new set of behaviours can replace old habits if they are used frequently and therefore develop equally strong networks of neurones.  An old dog can learn new tricks!

9. The reptilian brain controls our emotional responses: FALSE

This seems to be a slight misinterpretation of the literature.  I would agree that there is a more primitive, reactive, emotional system that responds in a characteristic way to emotional events, and then a more developed, proactive, system that can over-ride this in most circumstances to give us more control over our emotional responses.  The problem is that what McLean defined as the reptilian brain contains no more than the brain stem and cerebellum which is responsible for highly stereotyped emotional responses (e.g. the aggression response that you see in an angry cat).  What I think of as the reactive emotional brain is based more in the amygdala and structures at this level (which MacLean defined as the Limbic brain).  The context specific, proactive emotional system is probably found in the orbitofrontal cortex which is one of the latest evolutionary areas to be developed in primates.  This is the part of the brain that allows us to change our response to events that perhaps would have triggered strong and unproductive emotional reactions for us in the past. 

8. Our memories of past events in our lives are inaccurate: TRUE

In a series of studies, Elizabeth Loftus has demonstrated that it is possible to plant false memories.  In one experiment, participants were given an individual booklet containing three true stories from childhood (verified by relatives) and one false story about being lost in a department store at about the age of 5 (an event which relatives confirmed had not happened).  After reading the booklets, participants were asked to write what they remembered about each event, and, if they did not remember anything, to say “I do not remember this”.  This writing exercise was repeated on three occasions.  Six of the 24 participants claimed to remember the false event on each occasion asked.  As a result of a series of research studies, Elizabeth and her colleagues have been able to outline the circumstances under which false memories are produced.  These include: social demands to remember (in this case by the experimenters), memory construction by imagining events when participants are having trouble remembering, and encouragement not to think about whether the imaginings are true or not.  This reveals something about the nature of our memories – while we might think they are a true reflection of events, they can be modified by suggestion and so, over time, might become a mixture of memory and imagination.

7. We know what will make us happy: FALSE

You probably have experience of this in your own, or your family’s, life.  Think of something that you really thought you wanted, and quite quickly received.  Then think whether your expected happiness corresponded with your actual happiness. Or think of something that a child said they really wanted for Christmas or a birthday, and remember how long it was played with before it was superseded by a new toy or pastime.  Research by Daniel Gilbert and his team suggests that we are very poor at imagining the consequences of both happy and sad events.  We over-estimate both how unhappy we would be if something bad happened (in reality we bounce back very much quicker than we expect) and also how happy we will be if something good happens (the happiness lasts for a much shorter time than we expect).  In fact, we can maximise our happiness through anticipation!  We are happiest just before we receive something that we have wanted for some time.  Think how that might save on the shopping bills!

6. Its all downhill for the brain after 40 (or 50 or 60): FALSE

While it is true that working memory for facts decreases with age, and that we do slow down a little, the picture for the ageing brain is not all bleak.  Laura Carstensen, a professor at Stanford University has theorised that some differences in memory between younger and older adults arise from a difference in temporal focus.  Young adults who feel that their lives will stretch on indefinitely focus on saving as much factual information as possible since this is likely to benefit them in the future.  In comparison, older adults have a more restricted sense of their future and so concentrate on emotional well-being.  Laura’s group have shown that manipulating this sense of time by either telling older people to imagine that a new drug has been invented that will expand their healthy life by 20 years, or by testing young people immediately after a disaster that increases their sense of mortality, reduces the memory differences between young and old people.  In addition, older people attend to and remember more positive than negative events, and have better emotional well being than younger people.  Again, this difference can be decreased by manipulating expectations of longevity.  Thus, while there are some deficits in the ageing brain, the picture is definitely not all negative – in fact, it becomes increasingly positive with age!

5. Your memory can hold 7 ± 2 things at a time: FALSE

This “fact” is based on one of the most highly cited papers in psychology “The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information” published in Psychological Review in 1955. In this paper, he described studies that estimate the number of categories of a single dimension of sound (e.g. tones) or space (e.g. locations) that can be identified accurately as about 7 (though this ranged from 5 to 10 depending on the nature of the category).  He also described experiments that suggested that the number of chunks of information that we could remember immediately after hearing them was about 7 (again with a range from about 5 to 10).  Since 7 appeared in both estimations, he tested to see whether these were limited by the some aspect of human brains (i.e. that the number 7 was a “magical” representation of some human neural capacity).  He showed quite clearly that these were not dependent on the same mechanism and so that 7 was not magical.  Indeed, subsequent research suggests that memory span varies depending on what is being remembered (7 for digits, 6 for letters and 5 for words) so even the number of things we can remember is not described by the magical number 7.

4. Listening to Mozart does not make you smarter: TRUE

I have to admit to being a fan of Mozart, and even sometimes listening to this when I am working.  However, I do not do this on the chance of being made smarter!  The original research into the Mozart effect was conducted by Gordon Shaw and Frances Rauscher at University of California, Irvine.  They tested the spatial reasoning of a group of college students before and after listening to 10 minutes of Mozart Sonata for two pianos in D Major.  They found that the students showed short term improvement in spatial reasoning.  Attempts to replicate even this very modest finding have failed (a good summary of studies can be found here).

3. There are left brain and right brain people: FALSE

Most myths are based on some truth, and this is no exception.  Clearly, the two halves of the brain have evolved to perform different functions.  On balance, the two sides of our brain are much more similar than they are different.  However, in order to increase our brain’s potential,  we have evolved so that some tasks are performed preferentially with brain tissue located in one half of our cerebral cortex. Thus, for instance, our language production centre, Broca’s area, is in the left frontal lobe. However, not all language abilities are confined to the left hemisphere, and our right and left hemispheres communicate with each other, so we have only relatively better language function in the left hemisphere. Similarly, the right hemisphere processes complex spatial patterns relatively better than the left. So performance in a particular task in most people can be slightly better or faster in one hemisphere than the other – but it is not exclusively processed in only one hemisphere.  The corpus callosum allows information to pass quickly between the hemispheres so that information is shared.

What does this say about training that purports to increase right or left hemisphere function?  A study by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences concluded that, while training could enhance different styles of learning (logical vs intuitive), this was not as a result of improvement in function of the left or right hemispheres respectively.  Improved functioning in both hemispheres contributed to any changes seen.

2. Men have fewer connections between the right and left of their brain than women:  FALSE

A classic example of this which I heard recently is that men have a quarter of the connections between the two halves of their brain (corpus callosum) when compared to women, and therefore are less able to bring together logical with more holistic perceptions.  Leaving aside the differences in processing style of the two halves of the brain, is there any evidence for the difference in size of the corpus callosum between men and women?  The most recent imagining techniques have been used to update older studies, and these show that there are no differences in size in this structure between men and women.  A study by Yokota and colleagues found subtle differences in shape exist between sexes.  However, as in most studies of sex differences, some women had a corpus callosum which was more male in shape and some men had a corpus callosum that was more female.  If shape was used to try to identify the sex of a participant, 25% of brains were assigned the wrong sex.  Subtle differences of this kind are unlikely to produce the types of behavioural differences that are often asserted to exist between the sexes.  Most of the behaviours that we need to survive are not sex specific, so men do not perceive the world, direct attention, learn new skills, encode memories, communicate, empathise, or judge emotions differently from women.  We are moslty more alike than we are different.

1. We make no new neurones in our brains after we are born: FALSE

Our neural networks control our behaviours, our emotions, our memories.  As adults, much of our behaviour is fixed (though not unchangeable) and so creating lots of new neurones throughout the brain is unnecessary.  Most of the change we require can be accomplished by creating new synapses (connections) between neurones that already exist.  However, each new memory that we keep requires electrical activity in a set of neurones.  It might be possible, therefore, that we could run out of neurones to store new information and therefore would not remember new experiences as we grew older. This problem is overcome by creation of new neurones in the one part of the brain where we need them most – the hippocampus.  This part of the brain is responsible for keeping an address book of where each of our memories is stored.  We know that creation of these new neurones have important functions – you might remember a time when you were very stressed and found it difficult to retain new information.  We make fewer neurones in the hippocampus when stressed or depressed.  However, the good news is that there is a simple condition in which we make more new neurones – when we exercise.  And, this creates more new neurones than we lose when we are stressed.  So, if you want to keep a healthy body and hippocampus, go and have some exercise.

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