 Okay, hello everyone. I'm thrilled to have people standing here. Thank you so much for coming. Oh, welcome. So let's have a fair deal, you know. When I'm about half the way of my presentation, some of you will stand up and exchange places with the people who are standing, okay? This is Sweden, so we are very solidar, what do you go, solidarisk? Huh? Very good. Hello everyone, my name is Rina. I am doing lots and lots of emotional regulation currently and trying to recalibrate my thinking because you know the situation when you as a speaker, welcome, just join us. Okay, no problem. Better choice maybe in next door. You know when you as a speaker are listening at the keynote and you realize, okay, about 50% of what I'm going to speak is right there. It's priceless. So I had like 30 minutes while I was listening to think about how will I make this different? So I tried my best, so let's see how it works out. I think brain science, neuroscience, social cognitive neuroscience is not anything you learn in one hour. So I hope that this will for some be a bit repetition, for some be new, okay? Is that okay for you guys? You are very okay to leave if you find this, not as a good sales pitch actually, but yeah. Okay, so I work in People Geeks. I co-founded the company last summer with a person very interested in people analytics. We work with, we want to co-create a healthy future work. So really work with clients together and we use agile and lean methodologies. We use people analytics, data driven decision making and I've worked with HR and organizational development my whole life, so that's where we come from. That's a bit how I've tried to explain what we do is that we are kind of the architect. If you want to build a house, you might have an old house that you want to renovate or you might have a green field where you want to start a whole new building of some kind. We are the architects that will help you with the organization, with leadership development, with agile transformations to build what you need with what you have. We have a portfolio of technology. We have partners with trainers, with consultants. We have analytics consultants and houses helping us with the analytics, but we are the architect. We know what the organization needs and we can get that in. That's what we do. Okay, agile transformations. Yay! Yay! Who are working with agile transformations here? Yeah, very good. So the usual story is somewhere along the line some teams have been started to work with agile scrum or Kanban, working with software development or product development and they're realizing we're banging our heads against the portfolio level. Then we start scaling to portfolio level and then they start hitting their heads against the structures and processes of the organization, right? Sounds familiar? Okay. Then what happens is the... Okay, this is a bit, you know, of the transformation. Then what happens is that the leadership team is realizing, okay, you know, there needs to be change. Let's recruit the CDO who is responsible for the digital transformation. Yeah, congratulations. Here's the company with 1,500 people who need to understand what digital transformation is all about, understand that it's totally going to transform your leadership, your structures, your communication, your planning, your budgeting, how you work, but you're responsible for it and we're looking at the reports here with our leadership team how it goes. Good luck. Very good. This is how, you know, the normal way. What I'm working with a lot now is that I'm trying to explain this to leadership teams. I want to go into board as well to explain what's going on because they really need help. It's such a huge mental shift that we need to help them. Today I'm going to talk about the social neuroscience of agile transformations. What is going on on the social side for managers? Why it's so damn difficult for them to change? I hope this will be an explanatory thing so you would get explanations. I hope you will get some tips on what you can do as well. First of all, some neuroscience disclaimers. Thank you for being a PhD in neuroscience. I'm not. I've applied neuroscience for about three years so I've studied a lot of the stuff that the real scientists are doing. I try to translate that into Swedish, Finnish or English or a pantomime. What I'm going to tell you today includes lots and lots of simplifications. Lots of simplifications because neuroscience is huge. The technology is moving on a light speed, exponential growth in computing power. You can see imaging techniques developing now into more and more detail. We can start seeing granular things about people. Most of what I'm talking about today is actually known from psychology, social sciences. Neuroscience is just an add-on layer to that. I want to give you a very big warning first. People tend to think that whenever you put a brain picture or refer to neuroscience, it's facts. It is not. Neuroscience is far from linear thinking that A leads to B. Neuroscience is just a tool to look into what might happen. You have to understand these tests are run. When you do science, these tests are run for a very small group of people because the fMRIs are so expensive. So we might have 12 often students between 20 and 24, male, 25 to... male, white, Asian, two groups. One group which is the control group and one group that you do manipulations for in the fMRI. And then you write a paper of that. It's a paper where the scientist tells the restrictions and the limitations of the study and concludes something. Then you have some popular science writer reading that, writing about the conclusion, yeah, this is true for all of the people in the whole world that left brain and right brain, you know, you are left brainer and your right brainer. That's the biggest bollocks in neuroscience. There is no left brainers and right brainers that I want to bust right here. It's like saying you drive your car with your right foot, you know, as true because you use the gas pedal with your right foot. There is no left... So you see, this is what happens in neuroscience. Somebody are doing a very limited test, writing about it and then it's popularized into something that spreads in Facebook and stuff. So be careful when you see neuroscience. At least go one step if not two steps back. Read the abstract and the conclusions of the paper before you start referring to that. Reward and threat. Ha! So this is a basic, basic organizing principle for us. Everything is regarded in our unconscious minds as either reward or threat. This is how we are coded, starting from when we are kids. This is building the algorithm in our unconscious mind to deal with most of the stuff. 90% as you said is unconscious decision making. According to how we are coded from the beginning. Everything what we go through which is relevant for our survival or for our reward seeking is coded into our unconscious mind. So what I'm going to do today is I'm going to take you through quickly because I thank you for taking through the theory. I'm going to go very quickly through the theory and getting to the transformations how it links to this. Welcome. So what we're going through is coding us, is conditioning us and building our autopilots and our habits. Our habits are so strong. Who can figure out habit of your own? Can you find a habit? Name some habit that you have. Coffee? What else? Order books in the evening. I thought you were sitting ordering books. What an expensive habit. Good. Anything else? Yeah, we all have. And those are only the habits that you are aware of. You come a long way because you are aware of these. There are so many habits that your wife may be aware of or your husband that you are not aware of which they point out very often. Yeah. So habits are formed to help us deal with our everyday life. They take care of 90% of decision making. Otherwise I couldn't be here, you know, talking to you if I would be thinking about how I will stand, how my pose is, how I will breathe. It is taking care of the habit system, the autopilot. Even my... And when we have habits which are physical, like ordering books on Amazon every evening, we also have habits which are thinking habits, emotional habits. And those are the ones that we are dealing with a lot as professional coaches. We dig until we find what is your thinking pattern here and where does it come from and what is that thinking pattern because that changes behavior. That is the route to change behavior. Who has read Kahneman? Daniel Kahneman. Okay, if you haven't, it's a really, really, you know, difficult book to read. But... But it's really good. It talks about system one and system two, which system one is the autopilot, taking care of most of the stuff. This is the one which is automatic, the one which is decision making. Our sensory information goes there first. It's reacting. It has a flight or flight reflex. And this is fast, automatic, works in parallel. It's as big as... If the conscious thinking would be one cubic meter around here, the unconscious, the system one, is as big as the milky way. So that's the processing power of that system one. Long-term memory is there. Emotional processing. What I love about the unconscious, actually there's a huge debate going on unconscious decision making in science, and I love looking at these scientists, you know, trying to hit each other with their research. But what's going on there is that if this unconscious system one cannot find the solution, if it doesn't fit the models which are there, if it's irrational somehow, it doesn't fit the models, it has to recruit the PFC. It has to recruit the conscious mind. It knocks on the conscious mind and says, you know, hi, I can't figure this out automatically. Please help me. That distracts what you're going through. It also is knocking on your conscious minds if it sees a threat. Here's something that you need to know, conscious mind. Please take care of this for me because you know, you need to make decisions maybe if it's not a big fight or flight because then you just react. Anything which is out of the ordinary novel will take, you know, the attention from the PFC. Let's go to the system two. Deliberate rational, rational, linear, logical thinking. This is the slow system two. This is the cubic meter over here which is taking care of basically one thought at the time. That's what we have. That's our capacity. Our working memory is there. It is very easily distracted, as you know. So, for instance, for instance, if it is easily distracted, it is required for deliberate learning, weighing alternatives, inhibiting reactions or automations. So, for instance, it's distracted if somebody does something which is out of the ordinary and you are thinking that, oh my God, what is she doing? What was your reaction when I just turned my back to you? Yeah. That is your autopilot going, what? I need help. What's going on? And this is sometimes fun because if it's a fun event that was unexpected, it brings you reward. But if I do it again, you know, if I started to, it's not fun and it's not rewarding and it's not, you know, it's not very good anymore. So, here you can see what's going on. Anything you need to do deliberately, learning new stuff requires this system. And this is like a stage when something is in there, just one thing is in there. If something else comes out, this drops out. You know what you're going through and you have all these emails pinging and LinkedIn and Twitter, they're all jumping into your PFC, your conscious mind, taking away your concentration and you're doing something that people think is multitasking, but it actually just ruins your performance. Right? Stress reaction. You talked about stress reaction. What I want to say about stress reaction is the less the PFC is working, okay? That's the only thing I'm saying. The more stress the bigger the kind of either social or environmental threat, the less the PFC is actually shutting down the PFC because you don't need Excel sheets when a lion is behind your back. You need to run. You need to get blood running all over your other places of your body. Habits. So if you have a habit, it's like a highway in your autopilot. It has been used so many times. It's like a motor highway which your brain doesn't need to use a lot of energy for because it flows very easily. The network is used every day and what you need to do if you want to change that habit is that you have to use inhibition as you talked about. The PFC is the conscious mind. There is the inhibition. You have to inhibit yourself from going on that highway and start building a small path beside that highway. A new path. This is how change is happening in the brain. So it actually physically creates a new circuitry that you start using but what happens with that circuitry if you don't use that? Have you heard about plasticity? You know, it goes away. If you don't use that circuitry, it goes away. But you don't automatically start using a new circuitry because you have the old motor highway right beside it, right? So what you need to do is inhibit yourself from the ongoing habit. That's the key point in change. Inhibiting the ongoing habit is helping with some kind of reward or fear of a threat if you want to to go on that new path of creating a new habit. When you start creating that new habit the stronger it gets, the easier it gets, the more it's used. When it's going to take over as a dominant circuitry what happens with the old motor highway? I don't have to say it. This is how you change people's behavior. Inhibitation and a new pathway and you help them take that pathway go on and on and on and on until it's stronger. Here I come to the agile transformations. It's not enough that somebody somewhere wrote a power point with some digital things on that power point. It's not enough for inhibition and ongoing new path walking. We need system 2 for inhibiting reactions and building new habits. I'm going to tie this up in a logical reasoning chain in the end, so hopefully. What I'm going to do now is to talk about reward and threat from a certain point of view and that is social. That is social. We have a very high need of social connectedness. It impacts our health in a huge way, huge, tremendous way. Anyone got that? It was Trump's most used adjectives. I'm not connected to Trump. I just like the word tremendous. So let's watch a video about how strong this actually is. I really look up to Matt Lieberman who is my favourite neuroscientist. I saw him actually use this in a conference and I thought, what's better than this in Sweden? Okay, just give me a sec. Can you see that? Can you shut the lights so everyone can see? Many of you feel bad for this lamp. That is because you're crazy. It has no feelings and the new one is much better. Yeah, that's how we... We are so... What's going on? Okay, thank you. No, I lost my clicker. Here. We are so coded to be social. It is so important for general health. We have studies saying that people who are socially connected, that's even more important than education or money or whatever. It's very, very important. So when our autopilot iterates through cues and makes decisions, social plays a huge role. Now I want to come to a very... Ah, right, good. Let's have the switch. Okay? 30 seconds, starting now. Everyone doesn't have to stand up. Your Swedes are so lovely. There's about 25% of the room. Okay, now everyone who wants to sit down, sit down. Don't make it a big deal. And give yourself a hand. That was brilliant. That was 30 seconds. Good, well done. I'm going to share with you a model which is very useful. It's based on psychology, social sciences, cognitive sciences, and it's starting to be backed up by neuroscience as well. Anyone heard about the SCARF model? Yeah, very useful model. I'm just going to run through these very quickly. It is Mr. David Rock. He has been kind of popularizing this model, studying a lot of neuroscience, thinking about it. How could I make this useful for organizations, people, managers, and wrote the SCARF model? It is very, very useful, I think. What we look at here is five social domains that can either put you in a threat mode, threat mode, or reward mode. And we all are a little bit individual. You can probably, when I go through this, you can probably identify your red button, which really, really pisses you off if somebody does something wrong in that domain. For me, it's basically a lot of the fairness part. In Nordic region it's a lot of the fairness thing. If somebody treats you unfairly or treats somebody else unfairly, even worse, for me. So let's see. Status. That can put you in a threat or reward mode, and this is known from anthropologists to current neuroscientists. This is not the status as in what your card says about you. It is your status in relation to whoever is in the situation you're in right now. In relation to. We have an ongoing mechanism I'm looking at. What's my status here? Who is the most important? Who has the most power? That comes from the reptile brain and the monkey brain. There are studies where... The Whitehall studies were very interesting. They were studying 18,000 people over 10 years. I mean, that's a data mass which is relevant already. They studied that there is a strong association between the level of the civil servants, the people working for cities and tensed them in. Their rank and their mortality rates. That was after they controlled for all of the other cardiovascular diseases or economic status. Only the status in the organization had to do with that. It's a very, very strong correlation. We actually used a bit different circuitries when we are working with people with higher status, when we perceive higher status than ourselves. If we look at the neuroscience it does not tell a nice picture because if we are looking at these low status groups, like homeless people or drug addicts or people that we really feel are low status, we don't use the same brain circuitries where empathy lies. We treat them as objects in the brain. The brain treats them as objects. This is very, very disturbing for many, but it's very good to know that we need to start humanizing, start somehow connecting the status part into when we talk about this. Anyway, it's very important. There are tons in the workplace of interactions that has to do with status. You can figure them out yourself. It's not difficult. The next one is certainty. We basically want to predict what's going on to be able to survive because we want to be able to predictively be careful for threats and go towards rewards. We have a different level of intolerance against ambiguity and uncertainty, which you can find at the workplace as well. Some people tolerate ambiguity very well, some not. But this is still either pushing us in the threat or reward mode as well. Any kind of novelty, any kind of paradox will create this. And what's not full of paradox if agile, right? There are so many paradoxes in agile, especially when you try to do the transformation part. Let's go further so we have time. Autonomy, importance of having choices and listen to this, perceived control. Perceived control over what's going on. Even if you don't have one, perceived control impacts the threat or reward. In workplace, lots of things going on with the autonomy concerning the agile transformations. Relatedness, we have a fundamental need to belong and connect with each other as we saw with the lamp commercial as well. Our social is hardwired into us and we read people, we read the atmosphere. And now I find this very rewarding. When I started the talk, I was a bit uncertain how it went, but I was telling ourselves, I'm in Sweden, Swedish people are nice. And even if they don't like it, they laugh and say, yeah, thank you. Yeah, so just labeling, relatedness has a lot to do with in-groups and out-groups. So just labeling somebody as an in-group member, as somebody as close to you, your group similar to you, will make you use the same circuitries as thinking about yourself. You will have better empathy. You will try to understand them in a better way. You will have more maybe tolerance with them. If you think about somebody as an out-group member, you are using different circuitries thinking about them. A lot to do with adult transformations for sure. Fairness. We have brain regions that light up with primary reward and fairness is lighting up these areas very well. And unfairness will light up the same areas as we have when we have disgusts. It doesn't mean it's the linear relation, but the same areas are used for disgust and unfairness. It's a pretty good statement for what fairness means for us. You can read about the ultimatum game. I'm not going to use time for that, but it's a very interesting study. They are using that a lot in neuroscience currently. So look that up. I'm not going to use time for that or anything that we want to get into the point. So what my point today is, is if you take an agile transformation and let's just narrow that down to the experience that the managers have. The experience that the managers have. Somebody is telling them that this is happening. Agile is self-organization, self-organizing team, who needs managers? That's what's going on. Who needs managers? What's the role of the manager? Look at the scar, what's going on there. Look at the scar for that manager. Status. The system from now I'm trying to use this part because I like to walk around. This part is the traditional part. Here's the agile part. I'm just making it physically for me. The traditional part, my status as a manager is high. I make decisions. People come to me. It is higher than the teams. Certainty or a false sense of certainty as we talk about, we who know about agile with the budgeting, the planning, the waterfall. We make the plans. We sit there and look at what's going on. We think that we know what's going on. The certainty is pretty high on the management level. Do you agree? The uncertainty is on the team level. Who decides? Who made these decisions? Who should I go to? What's happening now? There's an organizational change. Nice. Autonomy, pretty high on the management level. You are the one deciding. You can go wherever you want. In Finland we have this ridiculous manager saying I can't have people working on a distance. Why do you have those people working for you in the first place then? They make the decisions. They're autonomous. They can work on a distance, but God forbid if these people who worked for them would fold laundry during the day. That was what I heard. They can't because they might fold laundry. Relatedness. Pretty high on the management level. You go to a strategy meeting and you make good plans and get certainty there. You bond with your body managers a lot. Relatedness can be good with teams as well. You can be a good manager and relate to the team and have a good atmosphere and engagement there. Fairness. Very fair if you think about, for instance, salary levels, bonuses. Fair for the manager. So this is the social kind of experience of that system. Now let's look at the scarf for the manager in the agile system. It is turned around. The social experience for this manager's brain is turned around in the agile transformation. Suddenly, you are stripped from status, basically, because the status comes from people who are very, very skillful, who are good in technology, who help each other. It comes from the social, you know, the self-organization. The coaches suddenly have status. What is my status? What should I do? You're not needed here. Pretty scary things. Certainty. Certainty and agile. You know? No certainty there. What is beautiful about agile is that if you can turn... This is very important. If nothing else, take this away from this hour. Certainty in agile comes from... Here we have this meeting. We don't know what's going to happen, but we have this slot where we're going to decide. That is the certainty in agile. We have a system of how to handle the uncertainty. That's the certainty in agile. The uncertainty is all about the content. We have no clue what's going to happen one year from now. We have no clue what changes are coming up. We might know what tech is needed. The client knows what they're going to... If they're going to have a pharmaceutical system or an application for using it at conferences. What happens to the autonomy? The teams get more autonomy. Managers? I'm not sure. What would you say happens to autonomy in agile teams? Four managers. Only somebody is going to say to you that you need to be more coaching. You need to get rid of impediments. Your job is to help support this team. Support this team. Servant leadership, suddenly. You need to be the one serving these teams. Autonomy. In a social experience, it might go down. Relatedness. I hope that this is the social domain which goes up for agile managers as well. It might go down depending on the situation. Fairness. I'm not sure what happens there as well but definitely the system is more fair for the teams, for the people working. Fairness for managers. That might be, again, a relative thing. It might go down. Hopefully it goes up. These two last ones are not as drastic as the third ones. Look at this. Here is my point for you guys. When you work with agile transformations have compassion with the managers. Have compassion with them because it is basically painful, threatening for them, threatful for them. Social threat through the expectations because it changes. And going from this one, we need to change them or they need to change to understanding what's behind this. And now I'm going to tie this up into a hopefully logical kind of chain of thought with you guys. Are you ready? If you want to tweet something from this session, this is the next slide you need to tweet because this is a useful slide. You can call me if you need some help with the transformation. Let's do the math together. Agile transformations. If you look at SCARF, these are the domains of threat and reward which are not the only social domains but very strong social domains. You create social threat for the manager. New SCARF is lessening the emotional social reward. This lowers, because you have a threat going on, it lowers the system to the conscious thinking systems activation. If that conscious system is lowered, we have less inhibition, we have less deliberate conscious thought, we have less control. We are thus using more habits and going on autopilot, which means we have more old behavior coming up with the autopilot, which means that we have more old reactions, non-agile behavior, which means that we have more threat and stress in the organization with the teams who are doing the agile already. I just wrote here, I'd like to repeat this, but I don't know coding, so I'd like to write here code that said, repeat this. Which means that less agile transformation. This is a kind of Schrodinger's loop. More agile transformation to managers leads to less agile transformation. Because we don't care for these parts here, basically we are shutting down their ability to learn agile transformations if we don't consider the social domains. Here are my tips for agile transformations and managers. Remember that social is ridiculously strong and it's not just the teams, it's also the leadership team, the managers, the coaches, whoever finance, HR who is there trying to do this. Understand reward and threat as the fundament of people's behavioral change. Help managers understand the new scarf. Make it explicit to them that in this agile system you get status by doing these kind of behaviors. Your certainty is raised with, you know, you know when you're going to take care of things. You don't know what, but you know when you're going to take care of things. That's the certainty, use that. Help them with creating more relatedness in the new agile system and fairness. Help them with the new scarf. Explicitly work with inhibition. Work with the managers, explaining that this is the old behavior which is not helping with the agile transformation. How can you stop yourself from automatically doing that when under pressure? When under pressure because our inhibition goes down when we are under pressure. Create space for system 2 and this means you need to explicitly give people time to calm down, breathe and think for themselves. This is a trick that I think very, some organizations have been using already, how you kind of build in a bit of addiction is with instant gratification and if that surprise is even better, so that there are small rewards when you start working as an agile team. That's for the team there already is, but how do you bring in these rewards for the managers? And if there's some gamifying that you can put in even better, which is not kind of a fake gamifying, but somehow some small subtle elements of that, that creates stronger habit formation. And last, have compassion with these poor managers. Really. So I hope that I gave you something useful to think about and connected the dots with social neuroscience. I'm happy to help if you're interested and I'm going to be here the whole day today. So thank you very much for joining me and have a great day. Thank you.