 Aloha, and welcome to The Creative Life, a collaborative production between Think Tech, Hawaii and the American Creativity Association. I'm your host, Darlene Boyd, and joining me today as our guest is Ann Herman Nady, coming to us from Landrum, South Carolina. Ann is the Chief Thought Leader and Chairwoman of Herman International, author of Whole Brain Business Book. She is a frequent keynote speaker about leadership and cognitive diversity. And of course, Whole Brain Thinking. Her research has been featured in the New York Times, Scientific America and Harvard Business Review. And her research is used by nine out of 10 Fortune 200 companies. Through her, through two of her popular TEDx talks, she has reached a half a million people, and today she is reaching the viewers of Think Tech, Hawaii's The Creative Life. Welcome to The Creative Life, Ann Herman Nady. It's a pleasure to have you with us today. With your permission, I thought we'd like to start with just a minute or so talking about your family life because we're going to be talking about the inspiration and the founder of Whole Brain Thinking and that is your dad, Ned Herman. That's right, delighted to be here, Darlene. And Cindy, my father was an interesting guy. You got to know him well as part of your interaction with him around the American Creativity Association. And he was actually a physicist by training, but while he was head of management education at GE, he became fascinated with the brain and he was trying to find the nature and source of creative thinking. So he actually went out and got EEG equipment. And I used to come home after school and get wired up to the EEG for testing after school, which some people say explains how I turned out. I guess that's for you to judge, but... And so he was, this is where it really all started. It was looking for the source of nature of creativity and by using brain research, he was able to begin to discover a whole new way of looking at creative thinking, which he brought to GE and then later on many, many organizations around the world. Thank you, thank you for sharing that. I find that just really interesting about your arrival home and being wired up. So we don't have you wired up today, but certainly the wiring lives on in the loveliness of you and what you have to share for us. So today we'll be talking about the whole brain theory. And I think to me, we take the brain for granted. We wake up, we do everything we do and we don't think about our brain. And if we do start to think about our brain, I'm not sure we think in the appropriate manner. And by that, I mean we might be thinking about the brain in its parts, right, left, middle, whatever else is there. But it's been a pleasure to be exposed to whole brain thinking and to really with your help go a little bit deeper. So what do we need to know about our brain? Well, of course we could talk for hours and days about this, but I did a TEDx talk, my first one and it was called the one thing you need to know about your brain that will change your life. And it was hard to pick that one thing, but I believe it's really the most critical thing. And that is the brain is a pattern-seeking machine. It looks for patterns in almost everything we do. And the reason is because our brains are lazy. And so we tend to look for a pattern because it allows us to then relax and rely on that pattern and not have to put out so much energy when we are encountering whatever it is that we might be engaging with. And so we see that there's lots of advantages to that. When we're writing something down with our preferred hand, we don't have to sit there and think hard about what it is that we're doing because all that patterning is there in place. Language is a great example of a pattern we use all the time. So there are lots of advantages to it. The challenges associated with it are that we do tend to stop short and often think we know what's going on. When in fact, we don't, we're just relying on the pattern. So it has its traps and it certainly is something that became very clear when my father was doing his initial research because he was trying to understand if there were certain patterns that some of us adopt more than others and how that all worked. And what emerged from that initial research was an understanding of four different clusters of thinking preference that we all have access to and for which we pick one or two or three that we rely on most because we've developed a comfort with that kind of thinking. And that really was the basis and the birth of the whole brain model. When was that birth? The birth into the world out of your home. The birth of the whole brain. When was it? Your wiring. Well, it all started really, the research actually started in the late 70s and then it emerged into the 80s and the real whole brain model as we know it today emerged in the mid 80s in its current form once all that research was done and we went beyond the oversimplified left brain, right brain notions that existed back then which led people to believe that some were only working with half a brain which of course you may think is true for some people, you know, but it's absolutely not the case. We all have access to the whole brain and so that was an important finding and continues to be. And so this notion of whole brain thinking really started then and it was fascinating because it was actually in the quest of understanding the source and nature of creativity that, you know, my father Ned stumbled upon the brain literally as part of his research and the two came together really once he understood this notion that we have these patterns and preferences that emerged throughout the course of our, you know our lives and growing up and that that would influence how we approached the creative process and certainly also led him to an aha that I think went beyond what he had certainly expected when he first looked at this work. So big aha. So as it evolved this whole brain study evolved into this theory of your dad's it's grown to such a superlative activity and process and service to a number of diverse population of people and businesses. So let's get into and you start us out by telling us whole brain thinking, how does it work? Okay, so it's pretty easy to conceptualize and understand but if we could put up the slide you can see that we have these four distinct clusters and even though there are four of them you wanna make sure to remember that we all have access to all four. So because we like to type things in our brains don't let yourself think, oh well I'm just one of those but you probably could relate to one or two maybe more than others. And so all of us have access to that analytical self that part of us that loves to solve problems and break things down and come up with data and we're often more technically inclined and love to have the facts and the key question here is what, what's the problem? And so you might know somebody in your life who likes to think that way or perhaps you do. And that lower left green B quadrant is all about the structure and the details and the plan and starting at the beginning and ending at the end and understanding all the bits and pieces that need to be discovered and unearthed in order to understand any given situation and perhaps you have someone in your life who reminds you of that kind of thinking. And the right side of the model and the lower right hand quadrant, the red C quadrant we have that relational part of who we are. That's the people oriented part. So if the green lower left asks the question how the red lower right asks the question who and that's that part that's processing the emotion and engaging with others through communication and expressiveness. And then finally that upper right yellow quadrant the D quadrant that experimental quadrant which many people often think of when they think of the word creativity is looking at the big picture and is very integrating, synthesizing, taking all different disparate parts and pulling them together into a new whole. And the question here is why? Why are we doing that? Why can't we do that? Why is that happening? So all of those four come together to form our whole brain, which luckily we all have access to but certainly we, for most of us we tend to prefer two or three of those quadrants as we look at any given situation or solve a problem. And that allows us to understand how when you're sitting in a room with very different kinds of thinkers you all be talking about the same thing and seeing it in completely different ways. I was, you've answered a question that I was had forthcoming and that was why four quadrants and if I understood you correctly four quadrants because there's a commonality in most people is that, did I hear you correctly? Well, we all have, the four quadrants really emerged from the initial research really studying the brain and the research also involved once it became clear that wiring people up even though he could do it with his daughter and family and friends and ultimately my, the person who became my husband it was clear that there might be some other means to begin to detect these patterns. And so an assessment was created called the Herman Brain Dominance Instrument and throughout that very initial research it became very clear that there were these four clusters of thinking patterns that emerged and those represented metaphorically different parts of the brain but really the power of the model was in its metaphoric nature and how you could understand your thinking. So again, all of us have access to all four but that's really where the four quadrants came from it came from the research. All right, so then, so now we're at the point where we have a view of the thinking model what happens next with the model? Where did you take this next? I'll tell us a little bit about its pathway till today. Absolutely, so initially and this was at the very beginning my father was working at GE they funded all of the research and in this notion of whole brain thinking whole brain creativity and the assessment the Herman Brain Dominance Instrument and it took on a life of its own, right? And people became fascinated with this idea that everybody could be creative and but we would go about it in different ways and it was, that was the big, aha, I think for my dad initially because at the time people kind of said, well, you know, there are the creatives over there and then they're the rest of us and what his research demonstrated through the application in the workplace at GE and then later on as he continued to do this work outside of GE is that we all can contribute to the creative process we'll just do it in very different ways based on our preferences and so that application focus of the model really became the heart and soul of the work and after he left GE there were many, many programs creative thinking on a whole brain thinking on how to be a better manager using whole brain thinking and that ultimately led to his involvement in the American Creativity Association which is where you had a chance to meet him and it took a life of its own again, after that I became involved in the business and we have been growing ever since and in fact we're now in our third generation of leadership, my eldest son, Katting Nadi is now running the company so we've had to reinvent ourselves several times throughout the course of the process so we're actually an example of creativity and innovation as an organization we've applied what we know about the brain and our thinking to our own business so it's been quite the adventure. Do you have a series of trainings for trainers? Do you have training with trainers and folks that go out to companies to administer the instrument? And I'm calling it an instrument. Yes, absolutely. So, you know, really the heart and soul of what it is that we do is that we help people bring their whole brain to work as we titled this podcast and I think that's through an understanding of how we think and the best way to understand how you think is to get a measurement of that so if the whole brain thinking model is a framework for thinking the HPDI assessment is an assessment to allow you to see to what degree you have preference across each of these four areas and it allows you to understand that, you know my profile might be a little bit leaning more and let's say that analytical and experimental quadrant where somebody I work with in my organization might be all analytic and structural thinking so we then can begin to say hey, how do we come together and make our partnership more than the sum of the parts? So that is the assessment, the Herman Bray Dominance instrument is something that you can get certified in and we have been working around the globe with thousands and thousands of certified practitioners now over the course of our 40 years in business we're celebrating 40 years this year and we really help organizations take this and apply it internally through different kinds of learning experiences that we help them create and that they can then build in to their culture so that everybody appreciates different thinking and at the end of the day that's really what it's about when there's a lot of talk about inclusive leadership today and how you can be a more empathic leader and one of the very specific applications of this work is helping people figure out, well, how do you do that? How do you show up as being more inclusive? And one of the best ways to do that is to appreciate different kinds of thinking and embrace those differences as you're working as a leader or on a team and so much of our work is with leaders and managers across the globe helping them do that as well as looking at our original focus which was creative thinking way back when that's just one piece of the whole puzzle at this point so creative problem solving is certainly an application but it's one among many, many different kinds of applications. How do you go about, you just shared with us that you help people if they are in dissonance to come together in the instrument with its interpretation helps bring that about. So how do you help a business or an institution or a group of folks if they have the dissonance there? How do you bring them? What's your formula? Well, you know, it all starts with awareness and also understanding that there's no good, bad, right or wrong associated with this, right? It's all just about how we think and every single time I continue to do sessions with executives and, you know, there's this aha moment when somebody's looking across the room at another person and they're saying, oh, you mean you weren't doing that on purpose? You just think that way. I thought you were doing it to drive me crazy every single time you go into all this detail in that presentation and I think, oh my God. Yeah, and so part of what that is first and foremost is understanding that we all bring a different lens to the situation that we all have our preferences and biases that we bring and that those can, you know provide part of what makes us very special and unique but we also don't want to become a prisoner of those preferences as we interact with each other. So the first step is awareness and understanding that but then the most important next step is to then understand well, what do I do with this? And that's all through application and application could include communication. So how do I best communicate with Darlene as I'm thinking about, you know, interacting with you and I think, okay, what are Darlene's preferences and how do I make sure that she can hear me the way she needs to hear my message so that she takes it in and the most effective way possible. It's about making decisions and understanding the power of how my perspective might be all about all the possibilities and another person's perspective might be all about the payoff and we would need to kind of come together and understand that and say, how do we get both? Or what is the most important thing that we can look at here? So we work to provide those application areas and I'm really excited because we've just come up with a new way for people to have this become part of their ways of working and that is a new integration into the Microsoft Teams platform where once you're in the Teams platform you can click on a tab that's called Stop and Think which is one of our main philosophical premises which is that we need to take that, you know that moment have a permission to pause in our thinking and say, what kind of thinking is best suited to this situation so that we don't get all wrapped up in that normal patterning, you know flow of thinking that just leads us down the road sometimes way too quickly. So that will now allow people to begin to see, ah, I'm heading into a meeting, let me think about who's in the room so to speak the virtual room, ah, you know I've been struggling in my interaction with Bob and I haven't been able to kind of crack the nut on that, how do I best understand how week two can come together and better understand each other or I'm setting up a chat with two other colleagues and we want to get the most out of everybody's thinking so let's pull that up to the forefront and use it as a way to begin to, you know better appreciate each other and have fun with it rather than getting annoyed by it so I'm super excited about this new Stop and Think application on Microsoft Teams because for me that's a great way to actually bring this into your day to day life and use it in a way that helps you stretch beyond your day to day preferences and then appreciate it when other people are bringing other perspectives to the table. You make it sound so simple. You do. And you anticipated one of my questions but before we come back to that let me ask you how long is it? Is it still a 90 minute instrument or how long does it take for some of it? So the instrument itself, so actually the actual assessment piece where you're answering questions is only about 20 minutes but we have an experience that takes you through an understanding of what your profile is and leads you to your results that takes anywhere between an hour and 15 to 90 minutes so you can walk away from the experience knowing exactly what you're thinking is all about and then move into a discussion about how to apply it. So yeah, the assessment itself is only about 20 minutes but with the learning package it really is a rich kind of full experience that allows you to know, okay, not just what are my preferences but what do I do with them? On this creative life we not only like to talk about the process and problem solving and the methods to be used but we also know that our hosts live the creative, not our hosts but our hosts certainly would live the creative life but our hosts and our guests do attempt to practice and live the creative life which involves often reinventing oneself and I understand that certainly with circumstances and modalities and modernization that probably your company is quite different from the beginning and you talked a little bit just a few seconds ago, how do you keep a virtual workplace engaged and productive and happy? So tell us a little bit about how you had to reinvent yourself in terms of all that's going on in the past recent times. Yes, it's been an interesting time and one of the things that we did, we actually went remote prior to the pandemic for reasons of talent attraction and other reasons that were located in the mountains of North Carolina as an organization and we found that many of the people who wanted to work with us were not located there and so we said, okay, we set up a remote structure and now actually prior to the pandemic went 100% remote so no longer have a headquarters building which was a big change and a reinvention and then we moved from being what I would consider to be a cut more of a creativity company to then a training and development company to now being a platform where we really are focused on talent intelligence and helping organizations better understand how they can leverage the thinking that everyone brings to the table and do that in a way that's very accessible so that's why having a platform that's integrated into many of our day to day systems is really a core focus. So now we are a technology company so we have definitely been through several rounds of reinvention over the course of our 40 years in business and I'm sure there's another one down the road as we move forward but it's been interesting. I think we've had a secret sauce though and I consider that we're very, very lucky because we know enough about how we think and we have the benefit of whole brain thinking as part of our DNA. I believe it's really been part of our approach what's made our approach successful in terms of our ability to reinvent ourselves, be a global company, continue to be relevant, think about ways to take the work to the world in very, very different ways and move away from an exclusively face to face kind of an environment a decade ago to a now virtual delivery system that is infinitely scalable. So it really did require though a complete rethinking and I've been very, very lucky to have had my father to mentor me and then I'm also lucky to have a son who became interested in the business and who has now completely taken it to the next level and he's the one who suggested we go 100% remote and I'll tell you when I first heard that I was like, hmm, okay, that sounds like a very different way of doing business but he was right and it was a tremendous change and it did require a very different view of how you lead, build a culture and grow. We know that those of us who play around with creativity and study creativity into research know that frequently or often than not there's some risk taking involved if you're going to be a creative producer and sometimes those risks are very non-threatening and sometimes they're big risks and sometimes they involve finances and sustenance. So are you a risk taker and how much risk did you have to take with this re-invention? You know, I don't know that I started off in my life thinking that I was a risk taker but I am an entrepreneur at heart. I actually lived overseas, I lived in France for 15 years before coming back to join my father here in the States to work with him and started a company doing similar work in Paris. So I do have a streak of adventure in me which I guess you might associate with some risk taking and of course, you always want that tempered with other modes so I think one of the things that I needed to apply from our research was surrounding myself with people who would provide me with different perspectives and just because you are more inclined to be entrepreneurial and be more of a risk taker doesn't mean that it's always easy to do it and especially many entrepreneurs listening out there can probably relate when everything is on the line and you've got to make that decision it can be a little bit daunting but certainly it's helped me I think tremendously in the way I've been able to navigate the world around us and how we needed to adapt and find ways to show up and ideally be a bit ahead of the curve in showing up so that we could stay really relevant and help the organizations we help around the world with the right kind of tools at the right time. There's one word you used and the use of that word communication comes up frequently with many of our guests and many of the situations and even in the dimension of risk taking how important communication was to talk to those that might be involved or might be act as your guide on the side or mentors that sometimes they've called and the entrepreneur support as well. I've always found your blogs since blogs became a blogging type model very interesting and I certainly enjoy your TEDx talk and I would encourage our viewers to check both of those out but in doing so I learned that you do blog about women and it's an interesting perspective you have and there is a quote on your blog it says feminism isn't about making women stronger women are already strong it's about changing the way the world perceives strength how do we as women and how do men around us as women accept our changes? How do we challenge ourselves to change perceptions? Yeah that's a great question Darlene I believe that and I became interested in women and leadership as someone who was growing up as a leader and who was a woman and found I didn't necessarily have the right kind of role models out there I wasn't exactly sure how to find my own strength and my own voice as I was growing and was very lucky to have several mentors that helped me along the way some who were men and some who were women. I think that part of where it all starts is again through our understanding of bias and I have been studying bias now very, very closely especially in recent years as I've been involved in several initiatives looking at racial inequality and how we can change the workplace to become truly more inclusive. And so bias is tricky because it really requires incredible intentionality to get very real with what your own perspective actually is. And once you do that you can begin to wiggle your way out into a different perspective and I use the term wiggle because it's uncomfortable. It's often uncomfortable to realize that we've got the side of us that maybe is looking at the world in a way that may not be absolutely appropriate for the way the world is working today. So I think- I'm sure it's uncomfortable. I think many of us would agree, yes. Yes, Anne, definitely. And you know, one of the things one of my mentors many years ago I had called him and said, gee, you know, I'm really frustrated. This is really, it's really, really aggravated with something. And his response was, Anne, I'm so delighted to hear how uncomfortable you are. And I thought, oh, great. That's really helpful, thank you. And he said, well, it's because discomfort is a sign of learning. So one of the things that I believe is key is getting comfortable with discomfort because it is a critical part of the learning process. It's often a part of the creative process. And it's really that piece that says, ah, there are two things coming together that don't feel like they line up exquisitely. And if you get curious about the discomfort, then you can begin to learn. If you shut down with the discomfort because you just don't like it, that's gonna prevent you from learning. So for me, one of the best places to start is to use those moments of discomfort as an opportunity for curiosity. And then to begin to explore that and say, you know, what can't, what could I be learning here? And how do I best understand where this can take me? And so as we look at women and men in the workplace, there's still plenty of work to be done there. But I encourage everybody to begin to address their own biases. And as they begin to address those, if you're not feeling a little uncomfortable, then you're probably not looking closely enough. And then get curious about how that might be different if you were to adopt a different perspective. And many of the women that I've mentored throughout the course of my career and I've been very, very lucky and I've learned so many from them, so many things from them have been able to find a way to get clear on what their own voice is and not only build off of their strengths, but also develop other muscles that help them succeed and continue to grow and learn. Growing and learning is really what it's all about to stay resilient in today's world. How does the HBDI, the Herman Brain Dominance Instrument, how does it work with different cultures or have you repositioned or redesigned it to match other cultures? What's fascinating to me is how it has seemingly worked across the globe very effectively. Of course, there's cultural adaptation that happens when we're looking at language and so on and so forth. But we found that the world is really a composite whole brain. All of these different perspectives exist around the globe. They may show up a little bit differently. Some cultures may celebrate some more than others a little bit differently because of the culture or because of the organization that you're working in. But we have seen from whether it be in Zulu or on the other side of the world in China, the model actually is quite effective at describing those different thinking preferences and there's value in looking at whole brain thinking. So it kind of cuts through some of those cultural differences and is really quite effective at giving people a non-judgmental way to begin to see each other because we may be different from lots of other cultural norms, but we might actually think in similar ways. And so it's being used really effectively to help break down those barriers and when there are big cultural differences. We're about reaching our close, but how would it work? How similar if I took the HBDI, which I did many years ago, is there a chance that I would be extreme, check out and be extremely different in the findings or do I tend to, in my life, stay a little bit the same? We've been doing a lot of research on that of late because of the pandemic. And really what the HBDI measures is two things. We measure your day-to-day preferences and we measure what happens to you under pressure. So we actually have two profiles that are part of the assessment results. And what we have found is that people's profiles tend to stay pretty consistent over time if your life is staying pretty consistent over time. However, we all have experienced in the last two plus years a pretty significant global universal life changing series of events related to the pandemic. And what we're finding is I'm seeing more change in people's profiles related to the pandemic because there were values changes that were associated with the pandemic for some people. For others, they stayed very consistent over time and they kind of managed their way through it without having that significant shift. So it's really quite personal. So what we find is people's preferences tend to stay pretty constant if your life and your focus and your values are pretty much constant. But if there's a major change and that could be something like a change due to a pandemic, losing a job, losing a loved one, major life changes can sometimes have that impact. So we encourage people to kind of explore that. And then occasionally people's under pressure profiles change and we saw that pretty dramatically during the pandemic where we did a survey, 60% of the people we surveyed during the pandemic said that they were living in their under pressure profile just due to all of the stress that was going on for them. Well, and we have reached the end of our conversation and I'm so glad that you were able to join us. I know that you're very busy and I know that you're always very busy and you have so much to offer to the world and especially with your global efforts that you're doing now. And it's exciting for me to have had this conversation with you and I hope we can do it again in return and perhaps with one of your trainers we could talk to both of you and see what the thoughts are there. So I hope that that comes about. And with that my thanks to you and the thanks from our viewers to you as well and we'll be back with the creative life in two weeks and until then Aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com Mahalo.