Korean War EQ

One of my favorite eras and actions to read about is the Korean War. A colleague of mine brought up a book about a military company commander going against orders to make the ethical decision reminded me of a book I recently finished, On Desperate Ground by Hampton Sides. In the book Sides writes about two aviators Jesse Brown and Thomas Hudner. Hudner as I recall deliberately crashed landed his plane on the side of a snowy mountain despite orders not to in an effort to help his wingman Jesse Brown who had been shot down. He later received the Medal of Honor for his actions. Throughout a book that tells of many valiant efforts, that one stuck with me the most for Hudner's devotion to his buddy. Wondering if you've read On Desperate Ground. If not, you should.

I too had a boss who was a true salesman, and it wasn't until I read this article by Goleman several years ago that I realized how finely tuned his emotional intelligence was. I look through the characteristics that make up someone with a high degree of emotional intelligence and this boss has them all. It was a little like looking behind the curtain and finding out that Oz wasn't so great and powerful, but it did help me begin to develop my own emotional intelligence. 

I liked the passage in the article that discusses an executive with little empathy. Goleman states "to enhance emotional intelligence, organizations must refocus their training to include the limbic system," which is the part of the brain that focuses on emotions and memory. "That not only takes much more time than conventional training programs, it also requires an individualized approach." More time. More individual attention. Both of these would be tough to sell to any organization's leadership in an era where training budgets are so tight and will probably be cut as companies re-org after the COVID-19 losses. 

Emotion in Conversation

The other day my roommate and I had an argument over something. 

I brought up the bodycam footage and been released regarding the George Floyd killing. Although it doesn't exonerate the officers it does show certain things that I didn't know about and that I  think the media has deliberately not looked into and have missed lead to their audiences.

This could go into a long discussion about perspective which I’ve talked about before. Instead of looking at six or nine, I believe the media is actually set themselves up so that everything looks like a nine and totally disregarding the six. If you don’t understand go check out this one (here). Imagine that fella in the cartoon looking at the 9 and then moving to look at the 9 so it's a six and completely disregarding the 9 perspectives. 

But what this post is really about is about emotion. I was stunned by how heated and how quickly emotion became a part of our conversation. My roommate was actually yelling at me at one point. I naturally started yelling back. Emotion completely dominated the argument. Logic wasn't considered, other sides, thoughts, nothing. Emotion overwhelmed it all. I wonder how that plays a part in all the protests, rioting, looting etc.

Worse, lately I had to deal with a friend who I've written about here before. In that friendship I never let emotion play a part in any of the decisions. Finally, I did allow emotion to play a part. All of a sudden the path forward became easy to see. Whereas before, without using emotion, I was stuck in a vicious circle, once I allowed emotion into the equation it was easy to determine the right way to move forward. 

Looking back I wish now that I had used emotion much earlier in that relationship and seen the path forward much earlier. I wonder if they had done the same to me? Had they kept emotion out of things? Do they look back and wish emotion had been a part of our friendship earlier too? 

Long and short, my roommate and I were able to move forward easily after the dust-up. Infact the emotion might have helped things move forward quickly. 

VR Moments at the Office

 As anyone who reads this blog can figure out, I'm heavily involved in developing a virtual reality (VR) training solution for my organization (see here and here). I'm new-ish at my organization. In a company where the average time at the organization in the double digits, someone who has been there about 1 year is a rarity. Truthfully, I'm surprised I was able to get a job with this group. That being said, I feel as though I have to constantly strive and achieve to prove that I'm worth keeping. 

The other day, Russell, my boss, came into my office while he was on the phone with someone else (this is not rare). What was rare was that he plopped a magazine on my desk and tapped his finger heavily on the cover without stopping his conversation. The cover of the magazine had a picture of someone taking a VR training, and the magazine was from the National Safety Council, the national organization for our industry (see the full magazine here). 

Why is this an interesting or funny moment? Russell was telling me that I should read the article in the magazine as it was in my wheel-house of VR development. We were walking into a meeting at that moment, and as soon as Russell got off the phone I asked, "Have you read that article?"

"No," Russell said. "I just saw the cover and thought you'd be interested."

I opened the magazine to the page about the article and let my finger linger on a page with a "pull quote." It isn't a very compelling pull quote, but the name under it was. Turns out I was a major contributor to the article. I was their primary source. 

Back in December or January, someone had called me for a long and extensive interview on what we were doing with VR and how VR might change the industry. I thought I did a pretty decent job with his questions, and apparently, I did. Russell's mandate for me has always been to provide proof that our organization is the pre-eminent industry training solution. Having an article about VR in the industry where I am the primary source certainly helps with that. 

Russell was initially proud and amazed, then that turned to slightly miffed. He was upset he didn't know about it and wanted to know why I hadn't told anyone or at least let the Marketing Dept know. Thankfully, I had. I had told our marketing team several weeks earlier. They had failed to do anything with it. So that miffed-ness was transferred to them, and Russell made sure to give the magazine to our CEO and this time when he plunked his heavy finger on the page, it was right under my name. 

Emotional Intelligence in Leadership

After this week's readings on emotionally intelligence, I wonder if we are truly developing our leaders effectively with our training if we don't have a class that focuses on this aspect of their personalities and leadership. The other week I posted about our LEAD series of training classes that is made up of Foundational Leadership, Insightful Leadership, and Speaking as a Leader. There is one more class we have on the shelf that we take down every now and then, it's a class on Emotional Intelligence.

The reason it's on the shelf is that our lead facilitator treats it very carefully. He has provided the class to leaders within the oil field industry only a handful of times and each time he does he feels as though the emotions that are brought about, the feelings that rise to the surface, get too raw and things get too powerful for the class. Our facilitator has worked in the oil and gas industry for almost 50 years, as a field tech, a supervisor, an HR analyst and consultant, a trainer and a mediator. He has a depth of knowledge into the industry and the type of people who work in the industry that few people in the industry could hope to have, yet, he has lad leadership development courses for decades yet here is a class that he feels is too raw and inspires too many emotions for the audience.

When I have talked to him about making this class on emotional intelligence a standard offer he demurs and never endorses the idea. He does not undervalue the benefits, he just doesn't feel as though the trainees are up to the task of exploring this side of their nature. I can certainly understand his concerns. Many of our trainees do not come to our leadership classes because they look through a catalog and select our class. Usually, they are sent here by a manager or an administrator. Sometimes they are in trouble and this is part of their corrective action. It could be a part of a career growth plan, but it's rare that organizations willingly spend that type of money on their primary leaders. Chuck's belief is that the trainee should willingly select to explore their emotional intelligence, not be told by their employer that it might be a good class to go to.

For a long time I have agreed with Chuck, but having read (for the second time) Daniel Goleman's article What Makes a Good Leader, I think I might press Chuck again on hosting these classes more often. One passage resonated with me in particular. "Emotional intelligence increases with age. There is an old-fashioned word for the phenomenon: maturity. Yet even with maturity, some people still need the training to enhance their emotional intelligence." Our mission is to help improve the safety of the oil and gas industry and part of that is done by developing better leaders. By not focusing on the emotional intelligence of our leaders we are doing them, their organizations, and the industry a disservice.

The same article states, "the higher the rank of a person considered to a be a star performer, the more emotional intelligence capabilities showed up the reason for his or her effectiveness." Just like being able to understand the personality types of the people we may lead (which we develop in Insightful Leadership) or being able to change our leadership style for the type of employee (which we develop in Foundational Leadership) or even being able to present ourselves and talk cogently (Speaking as a Leader), we should be developing the emotional intelligence of our leadership.

There may be some folks who attend our classes because they are told to by their leaders or their training scheduler to come to the class and they are ambushed into raw discussions and emotionally revealing moments, but that potential positive outcomes for the growth of leaders in our community is being marginalized to defray this risk.

GOLEMAN, DANIEL. "What Makes a Leader?" Harvard Business Review, 1998. Accessed 6 June 2020. http://jbedwardsandassociates.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/HBR-What-makes-a-great-leader-D.-Goleman.pdf

 

Maturity, Experience, and Age

I was struck during this week's reading when I read in Adult Leadership and Development, A Contrsuctionist's View by Kegan and Lahey when I read about more mature or older readers; "Their current feelings seemed not so much about changes in the intensity of their commitment but reevaluations of the shape of that commitment" (p. 201). This statement came in the section about how Levinson views many of life's changes as age-related. The reason this struck me is two-fold, first, I'm in or near the age range that was mentioned as being a part of that change, ergo, I may be experiencing a change in my own views on work right now. Secondly, it struck me how similar it was to something we read last week in Goleman's, What Makes a Leader? article. 

In Goleman's article, he states in the aside titled, Can Emotional Intelligence Be Learned? "One thing is certain: Emotional intelligence increases with age. There is an old-fashioned word for the phenomenon: maturity," (p. 5). Last week we read in this article how it is Goleman's belief that emotional intelligence isn't a necessity for great leadership, but that most great leaders have a high degree of emotional intelligence. It is for this reason he wrote that being able to study, develop, and refine tools that make up emotional intelligence is so important in leadership. 

For a long while I thought most of what went into this aspect of leadership and emotional intelligence, this ability to be more self-aware, detached, regulated, and more socially engaging, was more linked to Mazlow's hierarchy of needs. Once the air, water, food, and shelter is attained, and once personal security, employment, and health are met, then one can begin focusing on belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. This I believed lead leaders I have worked for to become more capable in their leadership, more emotionally intelligent, and more successful in their businesses. Once the high salary kicks in instead of the hourly payment, once there is the investment of years in a company rather than being the new kid on the block, once there is the financial security and a network of associates, then the feeling of confidence and capability can take root. 

What this week's readings have shown me is that it is not one thing or another. The life changes that make up the development of a good leader and a leader's use of more tools and techniques can not be attributed to one aspect of leadership, but rather that it is a cocktail of leadership facets. Maturity, age, experience, external factors that contribute to a feeling of security, all play a part in creating the setting that allows leaders to flourish and further develop. What that cocktail might include will be different for each person but it is intriguing to begin to see the ingredients that are needed for that to take place. 

It would be intriguing to begin to determine how much of the different ingredients are needed and in what order and how to mix them that helps attain the best solution or soil for leadership growth. Does maturity and experience alone provide the necessary fodder for leadership development or must it come with happiness at home and financial security? Does hitting the age of fifty create the correct temperament, or must it be accompanied by the development of empathy and learning how to be more self-aware. How do all of these work to create that leadership mindset that great leaders have, or is each so individual that it must be taken uniquely and developed singularly? 

Goleman, D. (1998). What Makes a Leader? Harvard Business Review.  http://jbedwardsandassociates.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/HBR-What-makes-a-great-leader-D.-Goleman.pdf (Links to an external site.)

Kegan, R. & Lahey, L.L. (1984). Adult Leadership and Adult Development: A Constructionist View. Leadership: Multidisciplinary Perspectives.

McLeod, S. (2020, March 20). Mazlow's Hierarchy of Needs. Simply Psychology. https://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html

eLearning Opportunities

When I worked for a former company we had a 40-hour hazwoper training mandate (a full week of training before a new employee could go into the field), and over 50 locations across the nation. Prior to this Virtual Classroom being set up we had safety managers flying around training people in small groups, taking up their valuable time, and some were not great trainers. By creating a virtual network of classrooms we improved consistency, sped up the onboarding time significantly, and saved tens of thousands. Still, quality compared to a live trainer was lacking. 

To counter this 1) we recycled iPhones and set up quizzes (retrieval practice events) throughout the training, 2) provided videos and required the class to provide safety analysis regarding mistakes made in the videos, 3) created hands-on training lockers that allowed the class to try on and use the equipment during the training in a controlled environment, 4) created an interactive workbook that kept the trainees engaged during the training, and 5) set up spaced retrieval practice and reinforcement to follow and begin each day. At the time the project ended we were on the cusp of sending mobile coaching directly to the trainee's phones via text during their off-hours and after training. 

The purpose of all of these accouterments to the primary training deliverable was to engage the trainees in a variety of ways and constantly keep them active. We won several best in class safety and training awards for our work and it was a terrific standard to keep within the industry. Sadly, it was not scalable. A class of 20 was our virtual limit, while classes of 50 were standard with a live trainer. 

All this being said, I wonder how universities will be able to justify their class price tags when they increase their virtual classroom offering. Will parents who were content to pay 20K to 50K a semester in tuition want to pay that same amount for classes that are primarily online? I think it goes back to what we found. How many other reinforcement tools and engagement devices can they integrate into the training to make the class more effective and justify the price? 

Since we found that our limit was reached quickly, that our quality suffered when we had too many students, I wonder if this new COVID era of teaching might allow smaller colleges and universities to flourish? 

And as an aside, I provided training via the virtual classroom many times from my office, my home office, from hotels on the road and from my parent's house during the Christmas holidays once. The flexibility can't be beat.

Social Media and Civic Reasoning

In the article for this week's reading, The Challenge that's Bigger than Fake News; Civic Reasoning in a Social Media Environment the authors make several statements that as a parent to one lower school student and one middle school student, are worrying. Both of our children use social media to stream videos, play video games and interact with other players in those games, and to connect with friends. Despite our best efforts to limit their interactions with social media and to help develop their minds through more traditional means like novels, newspapers, and more well-established print periodicals, as the article states, "today's students are more likely to learn about the world through social media than through traditional sources like print newspapers" (p. 5). And despite saying how critical it is that young people be taught how to properly evaluate what they see on those social media channels, "when it comes to evaluating information that flows through social media channels, they're easily duped" (p. 5).

The other challenge is being able to identify, confront, challenge, and correct what our children see on social media before it becomes encoded in their memory and a part of their understanding of the world. The speed with which a false narrative or story can travel around the world using social media platforms is far faster than in the past with print media. As the quote commonly (although perhaps erroneously) attributed to Mark Twain states, “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes” (Chokshi, 2017) is even more true in the era of social media, video and is made worse by a lack of critical thinking on behalf of the young viewers.

My thirteen year old commonly asks me to help clarify information that he gets from online resources and from friends. These are pivotal moments in my helping him be able to think critically. As the article states, "our findings show that many young people lack the skills to distinguish reliable from misleading information." My son lacks the ability to think critically about the information he absorbs and naturally comes to me as a bell-weather for his critical thinking. Instead of just helping him, I realize I need to ask him questions to help him develop his own critical thinking skills.

Chokshi, N. (2017). That Wasn’t Mark Twain: How a Misquotation Is Born. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/26/books/famous-misquotations.html (Links to an external site.)

McGrew, S., Ortega, T., Breakstone, J., & Wineburg, S. (2017). The Challenge that's Bigger than Fake News; Civic Reasoning in a Social Media Environment. American Educator, Vol 41, (3), Fall 2017, p 4-11.

Kolb and DiSC

Wading into the Kolb Learning Styles Inventory,  I was excited to find out where I landed. When reading about Transformative Learning experiences in our textbook the other day I thought about moments in my life that might have met that threshold of the books cited definition from Mezirow, "Transformative learning is essentially a learning process of making meaning of one's experience," or "an enhanced level of awareness of the context of one's beliefs and feeling, a critique of their assumptions and particularly premises, an assessment of alternative perspectives . . ."

With this in mind, one moment stood out. Years ago, during a contentious merger of two large, rival companies, our executive leadership staff was tasked with performing a DiSC personality review as a group.  There was no greater transformative learning moment for me in my business life then when I found out I was an S in the DiSC personality assessment and that my nemesis Bob, was a D. There it was in black in white that we were opposites in what we were looking for from life, how we wanted to work, how we wanted to interact, and what techniques worked best to communicate with one another. We continue to use DiSC personality assessments in our Leadership Training in my new company as well as Myers-Briggs. I understand and have read numerous articles like Ron Soak's A warning against using DiSC/Myers-Briggs profiling in the workplace from Medium magazine where he states "And it’s this absence of any scientific credibility that should really be the biggest red flag that gets you to seriously question the likes of DiSC, Myers-Briggs." Perhaps I'm the type of learner who needs to be pigeonholed or and categorized first before I can build more. Despite the warnings about it's ability to profile, Bob and I did communicate more effectively following that exercise.

For a while, I worked with a major upstream oil field development organization on the West Coast that had bought into the idea of these personality assessments that all field and office employees had to take them, then wear a badge that told others what their assessments were. The intent was that just by approaching and reading the badge the employees could better able to communicate with one another. My subjective interviews of whether or not the system provided for better communication found that the employees did not think it helped much.

Was it merely knowing my personality and Bob's that helped during our merger misunderstandings? Was that the transformative experience. No. It was the experience of working through the characteristics of the different personalities with the group and hearing from Bob what exactly makes him tick that made the experience memorable and transformative. It wasn't just the knowledge that made the learning meaningful but the experience that led to the use of the knowledge. Regretfully, mine and Bob's working relationship wouldn't be healed by the understanding of our DiSC personalities alone, but it certainly made things more bearable while we did work together. I now enjoy seeing and creating those same moments of learning and experiences whenever we use these personality tests in our leadership training and always provide the same caveats to the trainees about the ultimately imprecise nature of the exercise.

Because of this experience, I found myself eager to determine just what type of learning style fit me.   Turns out I am a Diverging learning style and have a personality that balances along two or more learning styles. Secondly, as I read the characteristics of this style, much like reading my horoscope, I found my self agreeing with the characteristics that define me. Although I know this is not definitive nor might it help me in a conclusive or decisive way, in nonetheless reminded me of Bob and my DiSC experience and how much easier my life became once I was able to put him and myself into the correct category.  Fun, certainly. Intriguing and possibly helpful, hardly. Definitive, not at all.

Virtual Training at HASC

For this week's discussion, I wanted to write about a project that we've been developing at our work. Part of our work revolves around virtual reality (VR) training (see the screenshot below for a glimpse at our deliverable). I wrote my final project paper on how VR can potentially help influence long term memory making and retrieval. How VR will stimulate place cells, grid cells, head-direction cells, and sensorimotor cells to create more resilient and more easily re-traceable memories for the users. It could be a very distinct improvement for our training center. 

Understanding how memories are formed in the brain, starting in the hippocampus for the short term, then being "moved" to the neocortex for long term, . . . understanding how multiple trace theory works and functions, and finding out that creating more traces that trainees can access, and how multiple retrieval attempts strengthen and make memories more durable, also all became a part of my final project paper on our VR project. What I did not get a chance to weave into my paper was anything about the teaching perspectives.

Traditionally our training is quite one dimensional. The training is all presented flatly and is very much a "transmission" perspective. But when delivering computer-based training (CBT), transmission is the most probable outcome of any CBT development. We can add some activities and some short video snippets to make the training more interactive, but for the most part finding a way to make a safety or compliance training CBT a "developmental", "apprenticeship", "social reform" or "nurturing" perspective is just too much to ask for from a powerpoint style CBT. VR can liven things up in terms of the interactive nature, but still, it's nothing but transmission perspective. 

One feature we have added to our VR CBT is a series of test questions that encourage the trainee to consider scenarios where they are on the job. These scenarios ask the trainee to use and apply the information they may have learned while reviewing the CBT training and working in the VR exercises, and apply them to the job in their mind's eye. This more than any other tool or technique helps us move from a transmission to a developmental perspective. By asking our trainees to consider the learning objectives and apply them to their jobs, we are moving the information from simple, easy, question and answer with rote memorization to one that includes application of the information into a job. This is new in our community and something I intend to continue to develop with our training. 

• Having found out more about these teaching perspectives in this class, and understanding more about CBTs and training for large numbers of people, I wonder if anyone else has dealt with this type of difficulty?
• Has anyone found another way to move CBT style training from a transmission perspective to a different perspective? Either developmental or other?
• What other tools or techniques might be worthwhile to try and include in CBTs to help make them more fully fleshed out and worthwhile training tools?

VR for HASC

Recently I had to write a white paper about a new project for work. I was excited by the opportunity to tackle, writing a paper that reflects research into Neuroscience and Learning and the Learning and the Brain, specifically for learning that takes place using Virtual Reality (VR) technology. Currently, my organization has developed and deployed a VR training that reinforces procedures and techniques for a "fire emergency" situation. The trainees that we host are used to taking training in a Computer Based Training (CBT) or eLearning format. Our new VR training provides reinforcement exercises and simulations that take place as a part of that typical or traditional CBT style of learning. By providing both this CBT mixed with VR exercises, alongside the same CBT without VR exercises, our hope is to analyze the results to determine if VR is an effective tool and is worth the investment.

I really enjoyed writing this paper for it gave me hope that we are moving in the right direction and that the results for long term memory and memory retrieval using this style of training is positive. Although I saw some results in the articles I studied that did NOT show the results I was hoping for, there was some reason to be positive.

Incidental Memory - One study on incidental memory asked test subjects to enjoy a VR exercise then asked them questions that had nothing to with the exercise. They were quizzed on what they saw and experienced tangential to the primary exercise. The results did not show a higher degree of incidental memory retrieval in the 3D VR simulation as the 2D simulation.

Place Cells, Grid Cells etc - I had the chance to read and understand much more about grid cells, place cells, head-direction cells, sensorimotor cells, border cells, and boundary vector cells and how all of these play a part in memory making and potential memory retrieval. All of this was new to me and I look forward to finding out more about how all of these affect memory.

Multiple Trace Theory - Dr. Fishback had discussed this memory theory before in this class and in our former class, but reading about it in more detail was intriguing and finding how our VR exercises can potentially lead to more traces, stronger memories, and the chance to access the memory more easily later is interesting.

Long-Term Memory - One of the most promising aspects was a study that showed that although there might not be a significant difference between immediately recalling VR experiences (ie. after a 2-min break), after one week there was a 25% difference in favor of VR. This is very appealing for my organization in that so much of training is needed well after the initial training.

The last few months of developing our VR exercises as small snippets rather than what we have found the VR developing community advocates (more large scale and long VR exercises) has been a labor of love that is finally being launched. Seeing that the idea we had has promise in these studies has helped build confidence that we are on the right track. I look forward to the next few months as we gather and begin to analyze data that we gain from this venture.

I'm sure the white paper will make an appearance here soon. But already the VR exercises are becoming a hit in our training areas.