One thing that seems to have increased significantly for a lot of people is uncertainty about our work and personal futures. As I write this, roads around Ireland are blocked for the fifth day by fuel protestors, expressing deep concern about their ability to continue generating a viable livelihood. They, in turn, are creating uncertainty and hazard for others – people who are unable to get fuel and food, or make it to a long-awaited hospital appointment, or get to the airport on time for a flight. In a much more impactful way, several regional conflicts have been started or continue, with mass loss of life and existential uncertainty for those directly involved.

In the world of work, AI has caused both excitement and fear, among other, less extreme emotional responses. Those who profess excitement envision a future in which humans are enabled by AI to become “superintelligent.” Those who are afraid are concerned primarily about massive job losses. While neither camp is likely to be completely right, job losses are occurring, particularly among junior software developers and graduates entering the workforce.

Personally, I don’t know what will happen with any of these things. I’m not a futurist, nor do I play one on the Internet. On the subject of AI, I hope our future will be like the one laid out by Max Tegmark and others, where AI gives us more free time while still allowing us to choose to work. In my opinion, we need to work and struggle to become the best versions of ourselves. We have seen what happens to humans when we have abundant food and insufficient physical exertion – we become overweight, unhealthy and incapable. Without sufficient mental challenge, I am concerned that we will have equivalent cognitive impacts and become less capable of independent, critical, creative thought.

As leaders, we need to help others in a way which is new but familiar. While in the past, part of my role was to reduce uncertainty for my staff, I believe this is no longer possible. In this new world, we need to demonstrate comfort with uncertainty as the pace of change accelerates. We have to model an approach that focuses on curiosity, building new skills and maintaining human connection. We have to acknowledge that the uncertainty can be scary, but that it is likely to be the norm for the foreseeable future (again, see my note above on futurism). Instead of trying to reduce uncertainty, we have to support our teams to dial down their psychological and emotional responses to it. This approach will allow people to focus on building skills, developing new understanding of emerging roles and delivering more value for the organisations we work for.

I’ve said I don’t have all the answers, and I suspect, as is often the case at times of significant upheaval, no one does. I think the leaders who support their teams through the uncertainty we are all feeling, while modelling curiosity and calm, will be the ones who best serve their staff and organisations. If you are dealing with this as a leader and have found an approach that works for you, I’d love to hear from you. Onward!

When I was young, stress was invariably considered a bad thing. It was thought that there was one stress category, which was all negative. Neuroscience and management thinking have moved forward in the intervening epochs, and there is a recognition that human beings need stress to be engaged and to grow.

Mihayli Csikszentmihalyi, the Hungarian psychologist, introduced the concept of Flow. We are in a flow state when deeply engaged with our work. Time passes without our noticing, and the work feels effortless and productive. Flow state is achieved when we can work without distraction and the work is sufficiently taxing to require our full attention.

Developers enter a flow state when coding without stopping for food, bathroom breaks or distractions. Writers constantly seek to enter a flow state to generate high-quality, volume output. We can enter a flow state when working on a new problem or while standing in a river fly fishing (literally being in the flow). To enter a flow state, we also have to be in a state of stress, in this case, called eustress.

Eustress is the state in which we grow and learn fastest. We may feel uncomfortable, like when starting a new job, but not to the point of damaging stress levels. I have learned the most when I’ve been in this state of “not-knowing” discomfort.

Too little stress can be damaging in its own way, particularly if we are used to operating at a certain level of everyday stress. If we have too little stress in our work lives, we may engage in damaging behaviours, spending time doom-scrolling social media or Internet sites. Our motivation suffers, and it can seem pointless to engage with anything. A continuation of this state can lead to a lack of a sense of purpose, which can be very bad for our mental health. Humans need focus and purpose, or we become anxious and perhaps even depressed.

One aspect I have noticed of moving from a high-stress to a low-stress condition over time is that I am more likely to get sick once cortisol levels drop. Several theories address why this may occur, but cortisol suppresses the immune system in persistent high-stress situations. When the stressors are removed, the body switches back to a higher immune response, which may cause pathogens that gained a foothold during the suppressed state to cause an immune reaction. This then leads us to feel sick. Research has shown that persistent, chronic stress can lead to hypertension, heart disease and diabetes, among other serious health issues.

Acute stress can also impact immune response. This tends to be temporary and does not always result in illness.

The key from the above is that maintaining a state of eustress is desirable, and we need to be aware of when we are either under-stressed or over-stressed. Persistent states of stress imbalance can have severe mental and physical health conditions associated with them. The only way to know what our eustress levels look like is to seek out the right challenges for us and know when to disengage from work (or leisure) and when to recharge or re-engage.

In short, go ahead, stress yourself!

Neuroscience-based coaching, which I practice, teaches us that every brain is different. We have the same basic structures, but our experiences shape the physical structures of our brains over time. What we focus on shapes our brains. For example, studies on London taxi drivers showed their hippocampus grew substantially due to learning “the knowledge”. Our brains establish and strengthen connections based on what we consciously or unconsciously place a value on.

We all operate, in addition, with a set of filters and biases which help us make sense of the world quickly. Our brains are expensive to run, so we use these forms of biological shorthand to lessen the cost. If we don’t have to engage “system 2” thinking per Daniel Kahneman, we can save resources. Cognitively demanding thinking is more expensive from a glucose and oxygen perspective.

The result is that we often accept the world as it appears to us. We believe that our perception of reality is reality. This is known as “naive realism”. This is an easy mistake to make – we are primarily visual and have learned to accept the evidence of our eyes and other senses. If we take that visual reality to start, mine will always differ from yours. Depending on my age and optical quality, I may see more or less detail in the world than you. Does that make my visual reality different to yours? Absolutely. Throw in something like red/green colour blindness, and suddenly, my perception of reality is very different to someone without that visual challenge.

Perception is the core of our reality. What I perceive and what you do can be entirely different based on our position in a room, our experiences, our height, gender, and attitudes to life. I may witness precisely the same thing you do, but my experience of that event and my memory of it may be totally different. We do not make good crime scene witnesses as a result. The car was blue, or maybe red. The man was tall, fat or perhaps a powerfully built woman.

Why does this all matter? Because when someone has a different viewpoint from us, it is entirely possible that what they perceive or recall is more accurate (or at least just as valid) than our viewpoint. In addition, the introduction of “realistic” AI-generated imagery or textual output can be sufficient to fool our senses. We must question our perceptions of the world and understand that reality is not a fixed concept – it is fluid, contextual and personal. Some things are objectively real, but even determining those can be challenging. Using the philosophical thought experiment that we may exist in a simulation or one universe of a multiverse of parallel universes should be sufficient to raise questions about our macro-reality.

Being willing to question ourselves and to openly question others to determine why they believe certain things can be helpful for us to ground ourselves. It can also help us develop more diverse ways of thinking about our challenges. And it can help us avoid becoming stuck in believing that our ideas are the best ones and allow us to understand that what we “know” is largely illusory.

To narrow the scope, I’ve been thinking about the articulated purpose of my life. And how long it has taken me to arrive at what I want to achieve with my time.

“Purpose” is one of those words that often gets conflated with other concepts when it comes to people. When we think of an object’s purpose, it’s much more straightforward. For example, a claw hammer has limited functions – to drive nails in or pull them out. You can use a claw hammer for other reasons, but it won’t emplace screws very well or help you cut wood.

People are a whole different matter – we are multi-purpose creatures with an almost unlimited ability to adapt to changing circumstances. It is one of the reasons why when you ask someone what their mission in life is (forgive the conflation), they will often give you a blank look. So many of us go through life myopically focussed on the few steps in front of us. Thoughts about grander themes seem frivolous when you don’t know how to pay the bills or feed your family. Maslow’s hierarchy writ large.

When we’re younger, we may be advised to “find our purpose” or “pursue our passions”. Both of these are challenging pieces of advice for any young person to follow, in my opinion. When I was in my late teens and early twenties, my passions were definitely not focussed on my work life. As to conversations about anything grander? Best of luck with a partially formed pre-frontal cortex. I would have been hard-pressed to tell you what I wanted from my college experience other than an antidote to my school years.

It took me until my early forties to clearly state for myself what my purpose in life is. I recognised early on that I would never be someone who transformed the world in a macro way. I am not wired like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk (for which I am thankful). I am content to change the world in a more localised manner – although I did realise that I do want to change the world.

My purpose is to improve the lives of the people I interact with. That’s it. That is what drives my management and leadership practices. It is why I act as an individual and group mentor. It’s the reason why I am a certified and practising NeuroLeadership Institute coach. And it is why one of my (purpose-driven) goals is to be the best dad I can be. I believe that if I can help other people be better versions of themselves through these different avenues in my life, I will have an incrementally improving impact on the world in a series of expanding ripples. It is why when new managers ask me for advice, my first response is often “treat people as people”.

The opposite of this also holds. When I fail to follow the goals derived from my purpose, I act out of character. I forget to smile and greet the security guard who lets me into the building at 6:15 am. I lose patience with the person queueing ahead of me who can’t produce the correct change at the till. I don’t take the time to acknowledge the person in the lift with me and ask them how their day is going. All missed opportunities to improve someone’s day (and potentially make it worse instead) – thereby creating a different set of ripples. An anti-pattern to my purpose.

Like everyone on their life’s journey, I stumble, dust myself off, and try again. But, by having purposefully-driven goals and by continuing to look for opportunities to improve, I continuously serve my purpose. And by serving it, I serve others. This way, I become more like a human Swiss Army knife than a hammer.

I’m going to head off on a bit of a tangent here, so bear with me.

During World War II, German military leadership developed and relied on the Enigma machine to encrypt all top-secret communications. They believed that it gave them a significant communication advantage over the Allied forces. Everything from weather reports to battle orders was sent via Enigma-encoded messages. The ability to read these messages would prove to be an enormous advantage to Allied commanders. Building on the work of Polish mathematicians earlier in the War, British cryptologists and mathematicians (including Alan Turing) based in Bletchley Park in the UK cracked the initial set of Enigma codes in 1941.

Despite the ability to read a large portion of German communications from that point on, Allied High Command couldn’t act on the majority of intelligence received. If they had, the Germans would have known that the Allies had broken their encryption. They would have re-engineered the Enigma, making it more difficult or impossible for the Allies to decrypt German communications in future.

Allied commanders decided to only act on strategically important intelligence. Unfortunately, this meant that many German military actions took place successfully, leading to the loss of Allied lives and equipment. Essentially, the Allies performed a type of strategic lying to shorten the overall duration of the War, by an estimated two years.

In a work context, radical transparency is a philosophy that Ray Dalio has espoused. For example, all management meetings at Bridgewater Associates, the investment firm he founded, are available in audio form for anyone in the company to listen to (except for M&A activity or other commercially sensitive information). He believes that this level of open communication is required to develop and maintain a highly functional culture of trust in the workplace.

As managers and leaders, there are some pieces of information we may be reluctant to share. For example, an upcoming reduction in compensation because of an expenses challenge or difficult market conditions may not be a welcome message to teams who have worked hard all year.

Another example is in the event of an exercise to reduce headcount. I have been involved in many of these kinds of efforts during my career. They are unpleasant to plan and frankly awful to put into practice. Knowledge of a headcount reduction can be a burden for managers to carry but can be deeply unsettling to staff, leading to loss of focus and even pre-emptive departures of key team members.

However, many planned headcount reductions never took place. On some occasions sales improved, leading to a more positive outlook for the year. On others, a localised headcount reduction was averted by finding savings elsewhere. In yet others, a leadership change resulted in a different focus, on growth rather than reduction.

If I had shared my knowledge of those planned events with my organisation, that information would have had a serious negative impact on my staff. And it would have been for nothing. As a result, a litmus test has to be applied to this kind of event. When it is certain that something negative will happen, it is essential to share it with the appropriate messaging. Until that time, “advance sharing” is just going to cause people to worry, potentially needlessly.

This could be termed a form of lying by omission, but it’s often not only necessary but kinder, in my opinion. It isn’t a “white lie” if such a thing exists. However, it does prevent us from being completely honest at times, which doesn’t always sit well with me. As someone who prizes integrity, honesty and authenticity, making these kinds of judgement calls isn’t always easy. Still, it has been expected of me as a manager many times during my career.

If you have thoughts on this, as a reader, I would love to hear them.

I have just finished doing my immediate team’s mid-year assessments. One of my direct reports, a high-potential and talented individual, told me that he dreads the assessment process – “it’s like schoolwork” was his description.

When I asked him what caused that feeling, it was clear that his past experience with manager-driven reviews had not been either consistent or necessarily positive. As a result, he often left the review feeling that it had no value.

I have been reading books and articles on neuroscience for a while. I recently signed up to do a coaching course from the Neuroleadership Institute called Brain-Based Coaching. The models in use in this course resonate strongly with me. It’s one of the reasons I decided to take a different approach to how I conducted my mid-year assessments this year.

Performance assessments can take many forms. Often how they’re conducted is down to the individual manager, regardless of the organisational framework. This year I decided to keep the SCARF model in mind when giving feedback to my team. SCARF is a model that was documented by Dr David Rock in 2008 and stands for:

• Status
• Certainty
• Autonomy
• Relatedness
• Fairness

From a psychological perspective, we move away from a source of threat and move towards sources of reward. If any of the above areas are negatively impacted, we go into an “away” state.

When we’re in an “away” state, we are less able to listen, less able to appreciate other’s viewpoints, and less able to think rationally. So you can see why putting someone in an “away” state could result in a review process that is perceived negatively.

To create equal status in a review, we can ask for permission – “is this still a good time to have your review?”. To create certainty, we can provide context for the review and clarify that we’re going to focus on positives and not deliver the proverbial “sh*T sandwich”. By asking questions about how the person feels about their performance and asking them how they would like to progress in the coming period, we can establish a level of autonomy. By treating them with respect and dignity, we establish relatedness. And by taking into account their input, playing back their successes to them, and focussing on the future, we behave fairly.

There are situations where we need to be prescriptive – sometimes, people genuinely need to be told what to do and how to do it. More often, though, opportunities exist to enable people to identify their own areas of improvement and focus. We can do this by asking quality questions during reviews and encouraging people to examine their own thinking. Then, once they’ve done so, our job as managers and leaders is to support them in achieving those goals or provide some gentle steer in a new direction.

If you want to learn more about your score on the SCARF model, you can take an assessment here. In addition, you can read more about how SCARF and other NLI models work in practice in David Rock’s book “Quiet Leadership – Six Steps to Transforming Performance at Work“. It’s a great read, and I strongly recommend it – not just for approaches to performance reviews but for improving interactions with everyone in our lives.

The source of the word itself is interesting – to inspire is to breathe in, or breathe into. Inspiring is literally the act of taking breath or life from the world. If we don’t inspire, we expire.

Having recently finished reading Noah Yuval Harari’s “21 Lessons for the 21st Century”, I’m now reading Matthew Syed’s “Rebel Ideas”. They are of differing aspects and are inspired by different ideas, but they have caused me to think about writing again. In their way, each is inspiring me. “21 Lessons” has a lot of common ground with “Homo Deus” but is worth reading on its own merits. As I’ve written previously, I find the idea that we’re all just biological automata, reacting with no more true insight than a trout eating a mayfly, to be somewhat horrific (and a little demeaning). I can’t argue with Harari on it, though – what little I’ve read in this area makes it clear that we often react rather than acting independently.

In “Rebel Ideas”, Matthew Syed highlights situations where cognitive diversity leads to inspired thinking or could have avoided disaster if alternative viewpoints had been available or considered. When I think about how I manage, I try to understand how to get inputs from as many voices as possible without impeding progress. I’m sure I don’t always succeed, but I try to avoid the challenges described in the early chapters of Matthew Syed’s book.

When it comes to sources of inspiration for the writing I do, I’ve identified three:

1. Interactions with other people
2. Reading multiple books on different topics at the same time
3. Listening to podcasts

If I’m missing one or other of these, there is less life in my writing. The breath that stirs me to write is not strong enough to blow me out of my inertia. As a result, I’m looking for more ways to interact with people, albeit remotely. I’m listening to podcasts whenever I can, although my listening is now very fragmentary. And I continue to read multiple books at a time because the intersections that occur can be enough on their own to trigger the urge to write.

I hope, always, to inspire others to think more deeply, to act with fairness and kindness, and to keep learning. In turn, I am inspired by the stories I hear, the people I meet and the words I take in. And I continue to be open to other sources of inspiration, regardless of the medium – there’s a lot to learn, and so many places to learn from!