Autonomy - how do you feel when you lose control?

It can't be avoided. When working in a team situation, the individual players lose a bit of autonomy.

Autonomy is that sense of control and ability to make choices which is intricately connected to people's feelings of freedom and their ability to handle stress. Funnily enough, in this game of life, autonomy is often a matter of perception.  Do people "think or feel" that they have the power to choose?

Crazy rat experiments showed that inescapable stress can be highly destructive, whereas the same stress interpreted as escapable is significantly less destructive. (Donny et al, 2006). The difference in some rat studies was life and death (Dworkin et al, 1995). (My stress level goes up just thinking of the trapped rats!!) Think Hotel California:

Last thing I remember, I was
Running for the door
I had to find the passage back
To the place I was before
"Relax, " said the night man,
"We are programmed to receive.
You can check-out any time you like,
But you can never leave! "

When people experience a loss of autonomy, they feel threatened, hemmed in, pushed around, bullied... None of which are reactions that would help teams to work collaboratively, build relationships or leverage creativity and innovation.  Often policies that exist in our systems set boundaries that can make people feel like they are losing control. Examples include an inflexible work week, shared and depersonalized work spaces, directives, and micro-managing.

Working in community, or in other collaborations, there is the dance of give and take - so a loss of autonomy lays persistently beneath the surface of partnerships and group efforts. So how can you, as collaborator and community builder, help to diminish the AVOID responses of people when they feel like they are losing autonomy?

Our number one, best tactic is to ensure everyone's strengths shine. When we are acknowledged and honoured for how we can contribute to something using our strengths/passions/greatness, there is a much better chance of being ok with others doing the same...even when it means WE don't get to have as much say.

Example: if your schtick is coming up with poetic and powerful words and the project allows you to contribute your best writing, you are going to be a little softer when someone else brings images that maybe you would have done a bit different. When you have a chance to shine and also see how other people shine when they have their chance...the control is shared more peaceably.

Here are other great ways to bring more autonomy (and the perception of autonomy) to groups:

• self-directed learning
• seek creativity through flexible and open processes
• ask lots of questions and seek clarity constantly
• have decision making processes that work towards or embrace consensus
• level the playing field when different partners have more power (both real and perceived)
• identify the key pieces of the work and how we are all needed and important to the issue
• an escape route!

Next week - Relatedness, SCARF brain-based engagement and the 4th (of 5) domains of social experience.

photo by indi.ca

Certainty - brain chocolate.

Certainty is to the brain as chocolate is to Tracy & Tammy.

The brain is constantly seeking patterns and is trying to predict the future. It CRAVES certainty. A primary reward or threat for the brain, it causing people who experience an increase in the unknown to AVOID engagement. It causes a negative response in the orbital frontal cortex, we fixate on the threat.

Certainty is the second of five principles of brain-based engagement.  Read more in our previous blogs on SCARF: Overview, S-Status.

Here's an example. A local big box store recently went under massive renovations while still having part of the store operational.  There were tarps hiding what was being worked on, and the layout of the store gradually shifted.  Things were not as they usually were.  People were seen pushing their buggies with glazed expressions, not knowing where to look or where to go. Others couldn't help themselves and peeked behind the tarps, hoping to get more information about what was going on. While others, whose AVOID response was most activated, voluntarily stopped shopping at the store all together.

When you transfer this concept to a situation where an agency is doing a re-org or when someone is new on the job or just moved into a community, or implementing a new software system you can see that a great deal of attention is required to satisfy the huge need for information. It also explains a great deal of the negative behaviours we see during change. When people are AVOIDING due to a lack of certainty, expect some behaviours driven by fear, threat and/or feelings of loss.

So how about you?  In what kinds of situations or level of uncertainty do you begin to AVOID?

Can you arrive at an event to offer your help only to be told to "deal with the catering"?  For some people, questions like; how many people, who is in charge? what's on the menu? screams out.

Are you eager or hesitant when someone is talking and you're not sure if they are asking something of you?

How do you feel if you don't know what your employer's/client's expectations are of you?

Can you tolerate not knowing when you'll next get some chocolate? (just joking!)

What's your certainty threshold?

When dealing with others, remember that we all react differently.  Your threshold might be much more sensitive than another person's.  How do you support a situation if you want someone to be engaged and not running away with fear? Here are a few ideas;

• Clearly map out plans.  Even though things rarely follow a plan, having one appeases our brains craving. Dates and timelines are important in these plans.
• Communicate before, during and after change. 
• Break down complex and confusing tasks into bite sized pieces.
• Establish clear expectations for all involved.
• Regularly provide chocolate!

Status: Break the Pecking Order!

Status: Break the Pecking Order when it comes to engaging with others.

Your supervisor or board chair rushes into your office and says “Can I give you some feedback?" Or someone close to you says “We need to talk".

What is your first SNAP response?

Does this engage or dis-engage you? Does it make you lean in, eager and ready? Or does it make you step back, wary and hesitant?

For a great many people this may invoke an AVOID response based on the social need for status.

Last week's blog talked about Dr. David Rock's brain-based model for collaborating with and influencing others. This week we begin to explore his SCARF model, starting with the "S" - Status, which translates into how we perceive our relative importance to others.

Let's explore another example... Your group has worked long and hard on a collaborative initiative. You open the morning paper and read about it. There is no mention of your organization’s contribution at all.

What's your response now? Approach or avoid? Engage or dis-engage? If you feel a bit ticked off, the status "pecking order" could be ruffled. This is not only socially normal, but biologically normal.

Equality is often what people are seeking. But, chemically, studies show that dopamine levels rise when feelings of status are invoked. It often feels good to receive positive feedback because of the perception of increased status and the resulting reward circuitry being activated. On the flip side, another study showed that a reduction in status resulting from being left out of an activity lit up the same regions of the brain as physical pain (Eisenberger et al., 2003).

Feeling a threat in our status can put us in a defensive mode (not an easy place to collaborate from). Things like performance reviews or situations where we feel a "less than/more than" can generate BIG dis-engagement.

Village Raising Question:

What activates a STATUS approach or avoid response for you?
Where do you notice a status system or pecking order?

This week, start to notice the places in your work and life where a status threat occurs (for you or for others). Share your experiences on facebook, twitter or here.

Stay tuned...after the SCARF domains are explored, we will share some strategies for increasing positive interactions in all the domains.

Brain based engagement? Really?

What stops you from engaging?

Do you truly approach or avoid when working with others?

Personally, we figure ourselves to be fairly "switched on" in the engagement department. And then we discovered Dr. David Rock’s materials and had to think again!

There are obstacles to working together, no doubt. There are familiar conflicts such as; time, resources, power struggles, differing values and agendas, and communication (or lack of) to name a few.

With all of these obstacles – what is happening or NOT happening is engagement. There are two responses we can take when engaging with others. We can approach or avoid a situation or person based on the way our brain perceives the interaction. Our response is based on neuro-biological social triggers. Knowing our triggers helps us understand (and potentially increase) our positive interactions and collaboration with others. Approach or avoid is with us in every interaction we have in this world and it happens in a SNAP (yes, snap your fingers right now, it’s that quick).


How we are with people can be linked to 5 domains of human social experience. Dr. Rock, the creator of this model, proposes that DEEP engagement occurs when people experience rewards from all five domains of SCARF. (See http://www.your-brain-at-work.com/files/NLJ_SCARFUS.pdf for more).

1. Status (relative importance to others)
2. Certainty (ability to predict the future)
3. Autonomy (a sense of control over events)
4. Relatedness (sense of safety with others)
5. Fairness (perception of fair exchanges between people)


These five domains are social needs and in fact are treated in our brain the same way we need food and water. How our brain is wired, however, is that the avoid response is the default setting which means we have to work much harder to be in our approach responses.


Now while this model reflects only ONE way to consider engagement and is not the be-all-and-end-all, it has inspired us (so much so that we have created a workshop around it- see http://www.raisingthevillage.ca/ for more.)

Stay tuned for next week’s blog as we dive further into these five domains and pose some scenarios to find out... what activates an approach or avoid response for YOU?

Everyday Leadership

With the brilliance of a master story-teller, Drew Dudley (TEDx Toronto) shares a delightfully funny and poignant story representative of the moments in people's lives (that they perhaps don't even remember) that make profound impacts on others.

Watch it - a quick 6 minutes that will have you smile.

We have ALL played one of the roles in these "lolly-pop" moments of everyday leadership.  His argument is that;

 "... as long as we make leadership something bigger than us, as long as we keep leadership something beyond us, as long as it is about changing the world, we give ourselves the excuse not to expect it everyday from ourselves and each other.

...And yet, when we can value the impact we can have on each others lives, we can begin to re-define leadership in terms of lolly-pop moments: how many we create, how many we acknowledge, how many we pay forward, and how many of them we say thank you for."

Similarly, when we take away the glory and pedestal from "leadership" and welcome everyone to step up to the plate in their own way, the concept of shared leadership becomes concrete and attainable.  Whether actions impact the life of a child, a stranger (in his story), an organization or a whole community, the intentional valuing of everyday leadership will make it happen more.



In our book, we identify three actions that both foster shared leadership and celebrate the kind of everyday actions that stimulate profound and positive change;
1.  seeking out leadership in others
2.  balancing power
3.  learning along the way. 

Dudley touches on the biggest barriers to all three actions.  Fear.  He quotes a poem by Marianne Williamson which we have dug up for your to enjoy in full. Wow!

Our Greatest Fear —Marianne Williamson

it is our light not our darkness that most frightens us

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous,
talented and fabulous?

Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small does not serve the world.
There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other
people won't feel insecure around you.

We were born to make manifest the glory of
God that is within us.

It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone.
And as we let our own light shine,
we unconsciously give other people
permission to do the same.

As we are liberated from our own fear,
Our presence automatically liberates others.

—Marianne Williamson

[Often said to have been quoted in a speech by Nelson Mandela. The source is Return to Love by Marianne Williamson, Harper Collins, 1992. —Peter McLaughlin]


Village Raising Questions
What role can you play to encourage others to value everyday leadership?
How will you foster shared leadership?