r(E)volutionary Choices

I still find it odd to walk down the street or around the building and see people wearing earbuds as an accessory. Don’t want to miss a single text or IM! Or two people eating together yet glued to their individual phones. Or groups of teens texting amongst themselves rather than chatting.

While these could be seen as somewhat frivolous side effects of the latest technology, they are in fact human evolutionary choices. These people have decided that the right tradeoff is to sacrifice a bit of ambient awareness to be tuned into other frequencies. They have chosen to split themselves between physical and digital reality. It’s a new duality that will only increase when digitally enhanced glasses, AI assistants, and other promised developments finally go mainstream.

In a recent NY Times article, British journalist Mary Harrington described thinking as a "luxury good" and said "The idea that technology is altering our capacity not just to concentrate but also to read and to reason is catching on." Scarcity of the ability for critical, complex thinking is perilous for society, organizations, and individuals.

Neuroplasticity is how our brains change in response to the demands put upon them. It is not a fixed instrument – and we are training our brains in ways that are both required for a hyper-connected environment and that simultaneously disconnect us from each other and the tactile world. We will process more data, but will we lose our ability to feel?

The old saying, “the eyes are the window to the soul,” remains true. Eye contact helps establish trust, create connection, and convey empathy. That’s the essence of our humanity. As primates, we rely on mouth signaling to communicate joy, anger, and other emotions. The ability to read non-verbal cues has been developed over millennia and is essential to our ability to make sense of the world.

Also critical to our functioning as creative, innovative, and adaptive humans is time for the brain’s default mode network to work its magic. This large cognitive network is at “work” when we are not focused on specific tasks – those times daydreaming and letting the mind wander – and is the gateway to introspection and future-planning. That breakthrough idea you had in the shower came from your default mode network. It’s harder and harder for this network to engage when constant alerts for new emails and news bulletins pinging in your ears.

We’ve known for years about the “attention economy” and the unrelenting seduction of social networks, shopping apps, and messaging platforms. You’re tracked, Slacked, and attacked. See books by Sherry Turkle , Jonathan Haidt , and MSNBC's Chris Hayes for lots of research on that topic. If you really want to go deep, see Tom Davenport 's OG book, The Attention Economy, published way back at the turn of the century.

Senior executives have been subject to attention narrowing and capture since long before the digital age. Over-scheduled and “protected” by well-meaning (and sometimes sycophantic) handlers, it was too easy to only see and hear what others wanted you to see and hear – or what they believed you wanted to know. Now abetted by technology, the bubble keepers are more powerful than ever. And it has enabled us to be our own bubble keepers, feeding ourselves more of what the algorithms think (and, sad to say, know) what we want and drowning us in immediacy.

It is incumbent upon you, as a leader, to burst the bubble and engage. Break out. Reach beyond. Connect. And get those you lead to do the same.

I use dog walking time as a sacred space where I ditch the earbuds and ignore my phone. I let my mind wander. In that unfocused time, my mind makes sense of what were otherwise random thoughts and bits of information. A military officer I know blocks parts of his schedule as “loose on base” when he roams, has spontaneous encounters, and sees the unexpected – a variation on the old “management by walking around.” A corporate executive told me about practicing “random acts of leadership” by reaching out to people deep in the organization to ask how they’re doing and hear about their challenges. Label some time for reading and listening as “work” even though you won’t look busy. There are innumerable ways to do it. The trick, as Nike reminds us, is to just do it.

At a talk I gave recently at the CLASS-LLC cyber summit, I reminded the attendees that their jobs as leaders is to create the conditions for high performance now and anticipate the future so that high performance is sustainable. If you don’t create the time and space for reflection and rumination, you neither fully learn the lessons of the present nor sense what’s likely to come next. That’s a surefire recipe for burnout and failure.

Neuroplasticity is one of our superpowers. The more intentional you are about nurturing the capacity for critical thinking, introspection, and foresight, the more future-ready you’ll be. The more time you take to engage with those around you – in person, over a coffee, with sincerity – the more effective you will be as a leader. Leadership lives in relationships, not hierarchical designations. One of the things that leaders do is give or deny permission either overtly or as role models. Give permission to yourself and those around you to think, to ponder, to contemplate, and to simply sit with thoughts. Stillness can be a productive activity (and "productivity" is not always the point).

The pull of the online world is constant. It is essential to be there as so much of our work – and life – happens there. Yet the moments that matter and the most meaningful connections all have tactile touchpoints. Manage your time and attention with care. Choices have consequences. That email will wait.

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