-- Intro --
Chris Moriarty
Hello and welcome to Workplace Geeks, your regular cerebral cleanse into the world of workplace research and the brilliant brains behind it. I'm Chris Moriarty.
Ian Ellison
And I'm Ian Ellison.
Chris Moriarty
And we're your breadcrumbs laid gently on the floor of the enchanted forest of workplace insight. And we're back from our tiny summer break. I hope you all had fun, Ian did you do anything in particular?
Ian Ellison
I did. Indeed, I went to the French Alps, I managed not to contract COVID along the way, unlike last year, because of that, I spent a good chunk of the holiday riding up and down big hills on my bicycle for 15 miles. It was great. But anyway, whilst I was away, I gather you landed some sort of jazzy Industry award, right?
Chris Moriarty
Yes. So, a few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to be at the very first workplace leaders top 50 events. Now. This is a new initiative that will annually recognise the top 50 influencers in around the sector. And it was at the Hurling club in Fulham, which was lovely. It was a lovely sunny day. We had some keynote talks, we had some drinks, some nibbles, but really the main draw for me was all the people there because there was some heavy hitters there. We got to network catch up, see old faces. So, it was lovely. And yeah, I picked up an industry Recognition Award, which was unexpected, but wonderful, but it you and James also made it onto the top 50 list itself. So, I make that an audio and Workplace Geeks clean sweep.
Ian Ellison
Yeah, we did. Indeed, both of us got awards for different reasons. But also, both of us couldn't make it. We were both on holiday I was gutted when I wasn't gutted because I was in the Alps, but I was sad that I couldn't schmooze with these big hitters that you refer to, but James was obviously delighted because he's utterly allergic to being seen in public lovely.
Chris Moriarty
An Ian whilst I was there, I got something for our mailbag. So, there was posting for the group photo with all the other winners when behind me I had a gentle voice say to me, love the podcast. And I spun around to see Ian Jones, who's director of workplace at ITV and someone I've long admired in the sector. So, it was really nice that he's enjoying the podcast, but Ian I think we've got some other pieces of mailbag to look at, haven't we?
Ian Ellison
We have indeed. So, the first one is from Marwa Abdel Latif in Cairo, Egypt. And Marwa is, amongst other things, Head of Research Unit and business partner at Adze designs, and also the Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at Ain Shams University. Marwa wrote to us, actually about our workplace trends episodes. In particular, she said, as someone who attended the summit virtually I missed the direct interaction with the presenters. However, your episodes filled this gap, adding an invaluable layer of depth perspective and context to the presentations and enhancing my understanding of the findings and key takeaways. Your approach to covering the summit is simply brilliant. It offered thorough insights and complimented the summit and so she hopes that we will keep doing that for future events. So, Maggie, if you're listening please let us back in because we really enjoyed it.
Chris Moriarty
And if you've got an event somewhere hot and tropical then we'll happily come to do events in hot and tropical climates as well. We can do that.
Ian Ellison
The same Marwae just signs off with keep up the fantastic work I eagerly await your future episodes. I particularly like the letter format, a proper classic letter format from Marwae there and we've also got our cracker from postdoc researcher Adrian Recosnie from Paris. She got her PhD in Cardiff, so it seems, and it was the neurodiversity topic from a few episodes ago if you remember with Josh artists and then Joe Jarkko that really struck a chord with her you're and Chris's Workplace Geeks podcast is excellent. I really enjoy how you bringing authors from various disciplines to discuss their work got me interested in neuro diverse inclusive workplace design and management strategies. So, there you go, Chris mailbag done.
Chris Moriarty
So, guys, thank you so much for writing to us. And now for our usual hello to Workplace Geeks around the world. So, hello to the geek in Berlin, Germany, in Brisbane, Australia, Warsaw in Poland, and Royal Lymington spa in Warwick, Cheshire, we'd love hearing for Workplace Geeks around the world. So, do get in touch via LinkedIn. Just search for Workplace Geeks using the Workplace Geeks that's #workplacegeeks, dropping us an email on hello@workplacegeeks.org or signing up to our newsletter for which all the information is at workplacegeeks.org. So, onto today's episode in who have we got lined up?
Ian Ellison
So, for this episode, Chris, we're both wondering slightly off the typical workplace beaten track, which is always as you know, interesting, you never know what amazing stuff you might find. But also, we're gonna join the dots back to a previous guest we are talking to the inimitable Katherine Templar Lewis Katherine is a cognitive scientist, a prolific science communicator and is involved in all sorts of different projects and ventures, including her own kind of studios, which is a neuro aesthetic studio, which essentially unites neuroscience with creative arts projects to explore the human experience.
Now if you do a bit of digging into Katherine's work. The breadth is both fascinating and quite honestly astonishing. But perhaps above all, she describes herself on her own website as a catalyst. And I think you'll agree that certainly shines through in our discussion with her in this episode. So, for the purposes of our conversation with her here, she's the other key person in both the creation and delivery of the uncertainty experts. Alongside chief uncertainty officer himself Sam Conniff, if you remember, we spoke to on Episode Eight of the show, back in series one now we call that episode Omni fear or meta opportunity. And what we get from Katherine today is a richer understanding of just why uncertainty is such a key concept to think about, and also what we can do about it.
Oh, and by the way, there's lots of links about Katherine Templar Lewis and her projects in the show notes for you. So, you can go on a bit of an eyebrow raising journey of discovery by yourself.
Chris Moriarty
And we're joined by Esme Banks Marr from BVN architecture for the reflection section. So, we'll see you on the other side. But for now, let's listen to Katherine.
-- Interview --
Chris Moriarty
Katherine, welcome to the Workplace Geeks podcast just quickly before we dive into your work, could you tell us a little bit about your role, the sort of work you do and some of the interesting things you get involved with?
Katherine Templar Lewis
I've been lucky enough to be self-employed. My entire life. I spent my first decade in academia. I was involved in human sciences and then cognitive sciences and neuroscience at Oxford and UCL and I fell in love with science. But I was very, very aware that a lot of insight gets stuck behind closed doors and wasn't they applicable to the real world. So, I came out of academia and I still have ties I lecture at UCL and Goldsmith's on various aspects of neuroscience, but really set up a studio with a mission to help people use the insight that was coming out of the labs, how can we apply it into programs courses?
How could we even give it to creatives to design experiences, works of art, things that would help us not just understand their own mind, but optimise our lives to create change, whether that was individual change or greater change. So currently, I run a studio called Kinder Studios, which is a hybrid neuroscience and creative studio, it's all women, we work with Goldsmiths University, and then with University College London, I'm lucky enough to work with the brain sciences department. And our main focus right now has been a giant project on uncertainty that came out of the pandemic, with this realisation that the one thing we're not very good at doing is navigating uncertainty. And it is rather fundamental not just to our well-being, but also to our decision-making abilities, how creative we could be, which right now is all rather vital.
Chris Moriarty
Before we dive into uncertainty, because that's what we want to talk to you about today, I am going to declare a fascination with this topic. But I'm always interested when I talk to someone who actually knows what they're talking about when it comes to this stuff. And from what you've described there have been looking at this for a significant amount of time is how has the whole world of neuroscience changed and evolved since you've been in and around it? And what do you make of this, I perceive to be this sort of increased attention and fascination with it. But with that coming, there's a lot of kind of amateur psychologists, you know, making Instagram pictures and putting them out and telling us how we should be feeling and stuff. What's your kind of what's your kind of take on all that stuff?
Katherine Templar Lewis
I think it's really interesting. I actually I started genetics. And then I thought the brain sounded a bit sexier. So, I sort of sidled my way across the two sides is through behavioural psychology. And what I think the first thing that changed in the last maybe decade is your neuro science started to be all about the brain. And what was interesting was there was this sort of gap between psychology and neuroscience, new science of look at the inside of the brain. And psychologist’s kind of look at the outside, it's a bit like someone looking at the engine of a car. And so, I was looking at the body of the car. And there was a slight mismatch there.
But the other thing was, it was all about the mind. And that was great for me, because I was stuck in my mind. And my body just kind of, you know, walked me around the place. And I think probably the most fundamental change really was this realisation that I didn't study brains that much. I mainly study nervous systems, which is the roadway between the brain and the body. And this realisation that actually the brain in the body are completely interlinked in this sort of dual feedback, you know, in is a guy called Antonio Damasio, who about 10 years ago, 15 years ago, wrote a book called de cartes error, and said that, you know, the Cartesian split between mind and body and Descartes got it all wrong. And that was a fundamental error, and that the mind the body were not just linked but fundamental things that we've never thought about, such as where emotions live, was completely turned its head we now believe, and no, no, as far as you can know, understand that our emotions actually live in our body, their physiological changes in our body that are interpreted by our brains.
And so, once you have this sort of understanding, suddenly, your ability to change your brain through the interface of your body to understand well-being in a more holistic sense, in fact, to actually turn around all the Buddhists and hippies and say oh, you are quite well, why on a lot of things, is has been a huge change. And I think that's been a huge shift, which to me is really exciting because it means that there's this huge new opportunity for people to take charge of their own well-being, you know, all these more somatic and body-based tools that we have really are fundamentally helping our mind.
Chris Moriarty
I am without turning listen to a podcast about neuroscience, all it is, but we really need to get to your work. I get sent me regular counselling I have done since 2016. And I say semi regular, it kind of goes through peaks and troughs depending on what's going on in my life. The Counsellor recommended the Body Keeps the Score, what a book that is.
Katherine Templar Lewis
That is a fundamental book is one of the few books I give. That's one of the first books I gave Sam Conniff. And then got annoyed when he quoted every other page back.
Chris Moriarty
You know, that is one of the books, I would say that ranks top in terms of people stopping me in the street as I was reading it to go that books amazing. But your point there and I guess this is where we've got to in modern society. And where I guess it acts as a bit of a foundational stone for what we're about to talk about is I once heard someone described this hole, you mentioned the Buddhists and you know, I'm fascinated by that someone described it once as western science catching up with Eastern wisdom.
And I guess Buddhists, new stuff worked 2000 years ago, and their teachings and their wisdom. But now we're going actually we can sort of tell you why that works. We don't just know it, we can sort of why. So, I think it's really interesting. So, let's use that as a Segway into the work that you are going to talk about now. But also, we've talked about, you've mentioned Sam Conniff, if we spoke to him in the last series, all around uncertainty, which is something you've just mentioned. So just tears out before we get into the research itself just tears up around the idea of uncertainty, where it comes from, and what it actually means in kind of real practical terms.
Katherine Templar Lewis
It’s funny the whole project started about I think, was the first year of the pandemic and I got a call from Sam Conniff, we've been put in touch by a colleague of ours because they said this this guy and you know, it looks somewhat like a pirate's white got that bit. And it is interested in uncertainty, which was interesting for me, because it wasn't something I was studying. You know, I was actually looking at emotions nervous system at the time, I was looking at the impact of things like sound art, you know, how can we have interventions on well-being in that sense. And I was really intrigued because he was like, I think this is the fundamental problem we're facing.
And there isn't that much literature in science around uncertainty, I think because it is a sort of fundamental given of life. And what was happening during the pandemic, because I think we had, as a society, we try and solve uncertainty or avoid it, we don't like this, like negative emotions, we sort of invalidate them and almost shame people for having them. But negative emotions are also fundamental to who we are, they're just messages in our body. So there seem to be this tide turning where people sort of waking up at how you could not be blind anymore to how much change was happening around us, the fundamental uncertainty of life had been exposed, and we really weren't very good at navigating it.
And the crux of the problem was, as Sam pointed out to me, why is it that some people in moments of uncertainty, it seems to give this window of opportunity for updating your models of thinking, being more creative, being more innovative? And yet, the majority of us it seems to increase anxiety as well. So, he was like, this is the problem, how do we help people thrive in uncertainty. Now, he was doing this already, through storytelling, which again, made me really interested because stories are fundamentally how we learn about things that we haven't experienced ourselves. It's how we update the model the prediction models in our brain, and how to learn how to navigate the world.
But he really wanted to distil it, he had gathered all these incredible people from gangsters who turned into CEOs and people have been in prison who become law reformers. And they've all been incredible at navigating uncertainty. And what he wanted to know was, how could we distil this? How can we look at what was happening in their brains? What sort of psychological tricks and traits they had? And then how can we teach that to other people. And this at the time was just fundamental to the micro uncertainties, you know, and uncertainty in life is different to risk and things like that is when you don't really know what's happening, and you can't put a probability on it.
And that could be a micro uncertainty, it could literally be, is that guy going to call me back? You know, some from personal life? Give me about a date. But it could also be that, you know, am I going to be able to pay the bills? What's going to happen on Friday at work? Are there going to be redundancies? It could be is that report going to be good enough? Is there going to be huge digital change? So, there's micro and macro uncertainties all across our lives. And there is an idea that we're living at the most uncertain time in human history. And that's the world uncertainty index. The problem being that hasn't that has they haven't index the entire of human history.
Chris Moriarty
Was that was up and running during the Black Death was.
Katherine Templar Lewis
The AI wasn't working then. But I think what they realised is that we have so many more micro moments of connection and we have so many more moments in our day where we were aware of everything from social media to the news, we're aware of more uncertainty. And because the brain unfortunately, can trigger it every single uncertainty, that's what's very different to our past lives, you know, we are inundated with micro and macro uncertainties that our brain is constantly having to deal with at home that can lead to anxiety, but at work, it can really stop innovation and creativity.
Ian Ellison
Just tell us about the design process, this sort of iterative, presumably really creative bounce between neuroscience and storytelling and aspirations to do something fundamentally different in a world of rather dull online learning, shall we say.
Katherine Templar Lewis
So, Sam go in touch. And I think, you know, all my work has always been about trying to create more dialogue between creators and scientists, I fundamentally think that we do the same thing, we ask questions about the world. And when science at its best is expensive, at its worst, it's productive. And I think there needs to be far more dialogue. So, I've often worked with creators help and why cause a science informed design helping to not tell them what to do, because creative intuition is always far better than anything we yet know in science.
But to guide creative choice, Sam wanted to create some sort of psychological intervention, that was basically entertainment base of entertainment based therapies as he worked, because he knew the power of stories, you know, that's been proven by science, you know, since as long as we know, so how could you distil the behaviours that these, what we call, then uncertainty experts were doing into something people could learn from simply by watching, watching a program. So, what we came up with was a sort of three-part interactive documentary by that it's three-hour long episodes. And in each one, its story driven. So, you meet three characters, and each, you are incredible. There's refugees who have become incredible lawyers, there is a Buddhist monk thrown in, because he had quite a dark path, and you became that and you meet and you hear their stories, we didn't want to just leave it there. We know that stories can lead to behaviour change, we know that we wanted to actually give people skills and tools, as if you would, if you went to a therapist, Now, not everybody, you know, I feel very privileged that I have a therapist that I can talk at basically, once a week.
But we're really aware that not everyone can access that type of psychological support. And we're not providing and of course, many companies and workplaces have wellbeing programs. But interestingly, they're all kind of targeting what we call symptoms of uncertainty. So, anxiety, burnout, things like that, you know, uncertainly sits below these. It's what we call transdiagnostic. It's a sort of, it's our ability to navigate uncertainty, or what we call our tolerance to uncertainty, then determines what level of anxiety we're going to have. So, we ended up with three-hour long episodes in which you hear the stories of these wonderful people. But then we stop. And through QR codes, we asked you questions. Now these questions are based quite heavily on cognitive behavioural therapy. And we had an amazing psychologist and empathy designer work with us.
And we asked you anonymously, we create psychological safety to reflect on these questions. And you reflect on those stories. And this is basically using the principle that runs throughout therapy, that part of the process of therapy is through reflection, you uncover things that you're hiding from yourself, you uncover behaviour patterns, you uncover negative habits that are holding you back. And becoming aware of them gives you this opportunity to basically reprogram them. So through the three episodes, we deal with the three main effects of uncertainty, the first one being fear, and it's fear that can be incredibly limiting to the way you think the way you behave, then we look at fog that can occur in uncertainty, where because what you've known before doesn't necessarily work for what's about to happen, you're a bit lost in what decision to make.
And then the third one is about stasis. And again, our fears of failure, our fears of getting things wrong in this hyper changing modern world, mean that we often get stuck. We don't make decisions. And in each one, we give you tools to tackle them.
Ian Ellison
When I was reading through the material we're going to get into a little bit later in the discussion, Katherine, you talk about a model, which has four things in it. And the way I read it when I was sort of reading it and getting prepped was I could see fear, I could see fog and I could see status, I could see those in the design. There was also this thing of perceived unfairness. Why did you not focus on perceived unfairness in favour of those three things other than it looks like your entire course is designed around three guests, three episodes, three neuroscience concepts in each episode, so was it just that didn't fit? Or was it that that's a different sort of something?
Katherine Templar Lewis
No, it's an interesting one that in yes, there is one of the, and I think this is Isaac Carlson's work and do Gus is burned, yes, the great there's these great sort of og’s of uncertainty music. When I say og’s, only from the sort of 90s really perceived on unfairness is quite a hard one to tackle. Because it's very contextual. And when you say to somebody just in a very psychological sense when you say to somebody, oh, it's fair. You have to know a lot about that. To not anger them. And there's a lot of studies to show that we don't mind when things are unequal. But they need to be fair, we have this inherent sense of fairness, if you give people 10 pounds and ask them to split it between them, it's a famous study, depending on what they think people deserve, so long as they feel it's fair, something you've done, that's fine.
So, with unfairness, we felt that actually, we didn't want to go down that route, where was alienating people by not really understanding their circumstances. And actually, a lot of the quality of data, one of the incredible things was showing that, you know, we've had 1000s of people go through this course, or intervention, I call it this intervention, because my heads always stuck in psychology. And every single one of them, all the data is anonymised, there is going to sort of qualitative review. Now, there is not a single person out there who hasn't had something really big and challenging happened to them. You know, we are all not hiding a secret, but life is very, very, very challenging. And we don't want to start comparing people to each other, or the world. So, we thought, you know, if we tackle the others, then hopefully, by sort of embracing uncertainty, and actually part of cognitive paper therapy is the ability to accept what has happened and what is happening. If we get to that stage, then it helps people be able to tackle that, that feeling of unfairness.
Chris Moriarty
So, I want to wind this back a couple of steps, because there is something I noticed in the notes that you sent over, you've got in there, science communication, and its translation into the intervention itself. You've also mentioned about, you know how keen you are to make sure that we're taking this away from academia and basically putting it into applied projects and stuff. And one of the golden threads in this podcast series has always been and it's since the first episode, we have talked about the tension between the accessibility of knowledge that is developed in scientific circles. And people that don't move in scientific circles, basically, and in a way Ian and I represent that, and I'm a communicator, and I just want to share about things. And sometimes I'm a bit fuzzy with the detail.
And Ian and particularly our colleague, James, he's not on anymore, because he doesn't like coming out of his geek cave will be correcting me as we go to say, you can't say that. He can't say that that's not technically true. And all rest of it. And I've experienced that in jobs, right, where I've had a PR role. And we want to launch a piece of research. And I want to go Bombastic, and I'm getting dragged back. But equally, I want to make it interesting. So just talk about from a scientist’s points of view. And bearing in mind. We know Sam, and creative juggernaut probably doesn't do it justice, he is very on the Bombastic scale. He is right up the Bombastic end of things, without causing problems between the two of you, how was that?
Katherine Templar Lewis
Well, when I first met Sam, if I'm honest, I wasn't going to work with him. I thought what a great, enthusiastic guy, you know, he's intelligent, he's got so much positivity, and really wants to create change that has done so much change in the world, I was very impressed. But I was also just launching a whole studio that was about working with women only, not exclusively, but to promote women scientists, women, creatives. And you know, this is a man who, by his own admittedly used to deal in what he called Future truths, which are things he's sure about to be true. And he chooses not something the scientific community really likes to peddle.
Chris Moriarty
It's sort of a sort of feels like a close cousin to manifesting. Yes. I say this enough, it will happen.
Katherine Templar Lewis
Yes. Which, you know, and was reading an article about some, you know, looking at the news that it's manifesting. So, I really, I think that's great. But there was a definitely a stage where I threw a lot of very dry papers at him, which diligently he printed out. I didn't know people had printers anymore, and read, and then came back to me with this very sort of robust understanding of a lot of the I mean, it is a really ridiculously dry meta-analysis of sort of, you know, certain scales and things like that. And I think that the thing that I was interested in is he really, he had this capacity to create change, he has this reach, you know, he can scale up change. So, we're still in this constant sort of dynamic between what we want to sort of prove scientifically, and how it will help us access more and more people. You know, I think that dynamic is always in the up.
Ian Ellison
I think what you've also done there is in some respects, outed the screen that he hides behind, which is that he's not an academic, and he doesn't think academically and he sort of almost plays to that caricature, when actually what you've demonstrated there is that when push comes to shove, he's rather like you young Christopher, he's very, very capable of completely engaging with it at the right level, and doing that bridge. But actually, the story can sometimes be more powerful than the reality as well.
Katherine Templar Lewis
100% Yeah, at one point, I think you've probably read more papers than me. I was sort of close to the back to me, because I have to up my game now. But I think that I think you know, he's right, because science can put people off It can be really alienating. You know, even in terms of academic papers that are published. It's, you know, though, you know, there's a big call out right now, you know, for more open source of open publications, because of the whole method of peer review often means that you get quite a sort of narrow band of papers being published, because people are putting their names them that, you know, there's a lot of internal politics in terms of science and scientific community, and often more radical edge voices don't get published, because people don't want to take that risk, you know, and it's to do you take a risk on the edge thing, because they, because the really edge thing is really going to be sort of just way off or so radically different that they've actually put nail on the head.
I watched Oppenheimer over the weekend. And you know, I absolutely loved that's a dynamic in classical physics and quantum physics. And Einstein said completely to start with that, you know, he wasn't God doesn't roll dice, quantum physics was it was wrong, and then completely had to change his tune, you know, in terms of quantum mechanics later in his life. So, I think people forget that within science, people are sort of trying to guard their own truths as far as they know it as well. And that can really, again, lock down academia, you know, mean that people don't, you know, there's a lot of power to say, we've seen a trend in this, it's not a statistically proven result yet. But there is this trend, and that's worth exploring. And I think to have people like Sam, who can actually go, okay, this is really interesting.
What can this mean to direct the way we're creating interventions and courses in the workplace? You know, it doesn't have to be necessarily proven yet. But what do we know that can actually just guide the decision making out in the real world, and I think it's that dialogue that needs to be strengthened. But on the other end, you get sort of neuro marketing, which I'm not really into where people start to sort of seriously take neuroscience and say, oh, well, most people are gonna like this colour. So, let's brand something this colour, I think, you know, there's a huge continuum. But there's definitely a point where, if more creative SAP with this program, I started at UCL called others, where we bought creatives into the labs to sit with scientists and discuss their work to allow the scientists more creativity, because also the way that academics are funded means that very often you won't get funded if you're being too radical.
And that can be incredibly dangerous as well, you know, it's it stops trying things that might not work. And you have to try things that might not work to really push the boundaries of what's being done. So, I used to bring creatives into the science lab to help scientists think more creatively. But also, those creators went away rather inspired. It was like, that's an interesting way of looking at it. You know, we're asking the same question, I’ll try x. That doesn't mean that science was proven. It just gave a perspective and insight, a suggestion that can really progress things out in society.
Chris Moriarty
That's a lovely trail into the uncertainty experts’ program. So here we are, we've got kind of a storyteller. That's very interested in a topic. We've got neuroscientists whose interest is piqued by the interest in said topic, I find it interesting that last point you made there about how within academia there's less, I guess, risk taking into like different ways of doing things. But outside of that, you guys were able to create something very different to measure something that hasn't really been explored. In this way. Before. You know, there's lots of academic work that has defined uncertainty talks about uncertainty.
But now we're talking here about changing people's ability to deal with uncertainty. So, Ian and I have been on this course. Right, so we've actually experienced this is quite a unique Workplace Geeks moment here, because we are talking about some research that we are part of, we have taken we are one of the your subjects. When are your anonymised subjects that you've explored our findings, our responses to those surveys, but I would describe it as a kind of almost documentary production values type project, that is taking people through some extraordinary stories, but then relating them back and it felt like yourself and Sam, there was this kind of storytelling bit and then as a kind of a pause for a moment ago, okay, what have we just learned? I've never experienced anything like it.
So just talk us through the structure of these episodes, not necessarily the content, but just what how you looked at structuring these and how an academic study was stitched underneath the same if you like, because all the while, what you're also trying to do is develop a body of knowledge to say, does this work?
Katherine Templar Lewis
I think that to me, was the thing that really interests me is in academia in a study, you're lucky if you get you're lucky to get 100 People in this study, right? And if I'm perfectly honest, you know, despite now, best efforts, many of those people will be some within the department. Often white often male often at an educated level. You know, what we think of as we know as the brain is pretty intuition. It was pretty much a white male brain, you know, so I think the opportunity tests in the real world now people don't like testing in the real world for us. Yes reasons. It's called confounding factors everywhere. You cannot control things, it's very hard to prove anything in the real world because the real world is messy.
There's a big rise and we call phenomenological, which takes a lot to say that word, phenomenological research and out in the real world, but we've got to test in the real world because we live in the real world. So, Sam's offered to basically get 1000s of people into a study on uncertainty, you know, I couldn't turn that down. And beyond that, to prove, or demonstrate the impact of storytelling on people's behaviour, because we need more stories, we are a society and cultures that have lost storytelling, a storytelling, we evolved to help us navigate things that we didn't know how to navigate uncertainty. You know, our greatest tricks are storytelling, and curiosity. You know, and those things can drive us into uncertainty. Because if we don't know what to do, we've had told a story by an elder who has told us about their experiences. And our brain can imagine ourselves like that, you know, when you hear a story, you know, literally mirror neurons light up in your brain, and you imagine yourself being there so that when you're in that situation, you can go back to that information hijacked from someone's story. And you might know what to do.
So, this opportunity to prove that these things are, you know, proving is very hard to demonstrate the impact of these things, you know, I couldn't not go near it. So, we, as you said, to be souped up basically a sort of documentary, because also, you know, not being too ambitious documentary making in filmmaking does need evolving in terms of interactivity, there's so many directions, which is why we got interest in funding from Netflix on the project. So, over the course of the three episodes, when you listen to the stories, you're also being asked particular questions, you're also going through exercises. In the first one, it's all about emotional regulation, the emotion regulation is key, how we navigate fear, but most people aren't taught it. And the second one is all about cognition and reframing your thinking. And the third one's about combining them all and then sort of practicing and improving your intuition that Sam wanted to prove it. And I was like, well, that is going to be pretty hard. Because it's out in the wild.
You know, there's so many factors, we don't know what's going on in other people's lives. And how do you test someone's behaviour change if you can't control these things? So, I went to the fifth floor at UCL, where Dr. Rabinovich sits in and David Tuckett, Professor David Stuckett. So, they're the part of the decision making and uncertainty team at UCL, which was, until that moment, they're pretty niche, and by me slightly ignored department, which suddenly became of high interest. And they were studying, they were the first one to study uncertainty. And for them, it was this understanding that we need to understand the emotions around uncertainty if we're going to be able to learn how to make decisions, especially when it comes to policymaking. And I sort of sat with Avi was like, we've got a real problem. We have to try and test this, but it's completely uncontrollable. So, we actually started to lock it down. And we started to devise a test of measures and assessment that would happen before you watch the three episodes. And after you watch three episodes, we tried out different measures. We did different testing’s, with smaller control groups parallel to control groups themselves to work out how could we, how could he reasonably test a behaviour shift.
There is a scale called the intolerance to uncertainty scale, there's a 12- or 28-point scale to look your intolerance of uncertainty. But we again bit ambitiously thought that was a bit lacking. Because all that really measures is the emotional aspect of uncertainty. We wanted to try and measure if people's actual behaviour towards uncertainty was changing, to watching this three-part series, how they're making decisions, their risk-taking ability. So, we ended up after several sort of beta tests with about five different scales that we landed up this acronym is obviously from Sam Conniff to what he called the Utah scale the uncertainty set opportunity scale. So, I'm never misses a trick when it comes to science and acronyms. He's hoping we're hoping one day to get this published into something and he's just gonna sit there and chuckled to himself.
Ian Ellison
Chuckle to himself at the back of the room.
Katherine Templar Lewis
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And by meanwhile loads of scientists are like so is that sounds like great acronym? Absolutely. But we measured so we measured people's effect. So, there was called the Pascal their emotional reaction and mindset towards uncertainty whether because we have we hold two different emotions towards uncertainty at the same time, we can be both excited about it and fearful of it. And what we want to do is swing people into a more excited approach, basically, to uncertainty because you have approach avoiding the nervous system, if you like, suddenly you get towards it. If you dislike it, you go away. You wanted to send people towards uncertainties. They weren't avoiding it.
We looked at their self-efficacy, how much they believe they had the skills in uncertainty, because of the survey we did. Over 60% of people said they just felt they didn't have the coping tools. And this was in the workplace. You know, there was a great Forbes stat that 50% of CEOs said that uncertainty was the greatest challenge. And when we asked 1000s of people, over 60% of them said they just didn't have any coping skills for uncertainty or weren't being given them. We then also looked what's called the BART the balloon analogy risk test. which is rather than a cognitive sort of conceptual scale, it's a behavioural scale. We watched people during a sort of interactive digital game to see how they were how they acted and reacted to a moment of uncertainty.
Ian Ellison
That made me very grumpy, by the way, just so you know. And I would, I would happily spend an episode discussing the BART test, I think it's all in the wording that frames the task. Because if you're trying to intubate anyway, you can see I'm still jaded by this right?
Katherine Templar Lewis
For anyone listening the balloon test, as is a risk analysis test where you have to basically blow up a balloon until it explodes. And what we do is we watch how you behave in that moment. And your reaction afterwards.
Chris Moriarty
I kind of ploughed into it without thinking, I then got annoyed that I didn't get a good enough score. So, then I might right, start strategizing it, Chris. So, I hit the button over and over and over again until it popped, which gave me a frame of reference. So okay, so it popped around 28. So, I now know that I'm just going to keep going until I get past 20. And then just pick thing. And I was like saying, I’m dead clever. I thought it through and I think I put something on the LinkedIn thing. And then it was like, scores don't matter. We're looking at your behaviour. So, she's really annoying for someone like me, I'm like, like, I thought I was playing a game, but I was being watched. So, is that is that the kind of thing you're looking at? When you say about looking at the behaviours? Is it? Is it almost like, oh, that's interesting that they've got about it this way versus that way? And you know, the rest of it.
Katherine Templar Lewis
Yeah. Because there's a lot of questions early on, in the assessment about how you think you feel about you know, I like ambiguity. I don't like ambiguity. And you can slightly game that we often don't have a realistic impression of at all of what we're like. So, it sounds like the balloon tests, behaviour sets, we're looking at things like how many times you hit it, how fast you hit it. But then also, we ask, is there a particular question afterwards about the game and we look at your reaction, immediate reaction to the game as well.
Ian Ellison
What I'm hearing there, Catherine, is how you approached an evaluation activity in the real world, alongside an intervention, which was still ongoing, so loads of moving parts, but still, you go upstairs to level five, speak to Avri, and you work out a way to approach it, which in itself is absolutely fascinating and commendable. But I think it's even more complicated than that, because you've also got somebody who's this is their brainchild, this is something which is potentially a source of income. This is potentially something which could scale astronomically if Netflix are involved.
So, the word that pops into my head, and I think it will probably resonate with you is positionality. There's a piece here about if somebody believes in something, and it's worthwhile, and they want to prove its validity, but the proving of its validity, has almost skin in the game in and of itself. If that makes sense, then that's really muddy waters. So how did you feel about that when you spotted that kind of unfolding? How would you comment on that generally? And I think the way to frame this is, this is relevant to all sorts of professional spheres, you know, you've got consultants out there, you've got services out there, you've got software services, you've got all sorts of tools, which people want you to buy, but they also want to prove that they work. So what advice would you give people to be able to do decent work to demonstrate them and their validity and their use, you know.
Katherine Templar Lewis
At UCL, we have you know, there's obviously a big ethics board and data protection, all these things you have to adhere too. But beyond that, obviously there is yeah, there's vested interest, which of course has to be declared in any papers. And we have a paper actually going in for review. Next month in the Journal of Organisational and occupational psychology, I suppose the first thing interesting is that all scientists have a bit of a vested interest in the results, you know, because that's about funding, I've been doing a wonderful study with the organisation and an incredible PhD student. And, you know, we didn't actually find any significant results and for the organisation, that was hard, but it's actually hard for the PhD student, because that's their PhD. And so, there is always that, you know, which is, as we refer to before sometimes means that often scientists don't apply for funding unless they think they're going to get a significant result. And that really quite limits sometimes the creativity within scientific exploration.
And the same thing is yes, it was it was really not scary in a way and there was definitely a point before all the analysis had been had been run, all the stats had to be done on the first control, where we discuss what would happen if we didn't see any significant results. Obviously, Netflix had funded this, and we were out to prove that storytelling could show results. I wasn't worried. In fact, I didn't actually think if I'm honest, I didn't think we'd get as good results as we did. That was my first surprise. But the things that I always do and I you know, I've in my past worked with, with lots of different organisations and brands is firstly, you have to be really clear up top and say, we're not necessarily going to be able to prove anything. You know, because there's always confounding factors in the real world. We can demonstrate impact will be demonstrate impact in This instance. But also, there's a sense of exploration.
And I think even if you don't get significant results, you always learn something, you know, and what we were going to learn. Let's say we hadn't seen any changes in the measures. Is that okay? These aren't the particular drivers or traits that this intervention is changing. People, obviously having this very felt positive, you know, self-report impact as well as subjective impact. So actually, are we testing the wrong measures, you know, then if you don't get stupid results, often, it's because the sample size isn't that big, we had big sample sizes, so I wasn't worried about the power of what we call the power of sample size. But then you can look for trends. So in those situations, think okay, right, look at trends, what's happening, what can you tell, and then go from there, you know, if different measures hadn't worked, in fact, we added a measure, we added a resilient scale to it to see at one point to see what would happen, we thought about adding a connection scale, just to see whether it whether it moved or not, we haven't officially put that one in yet we're really explore exploring that option.
So, I think there's this sort of, you have to be sort of honest about the exploration, especially to be companies, you know, and also because we're working on working with companies where sometimes those scales go down, they don't always get the results they want to see.
Ian Ellison
So generally, your trend is that the course has been highly successful. But specifically, you've seen that some instances where for whatever, because these are all open systems, and you might go into one organisation with this particular culture, or this particular set of circumstances, or both. And something happens and something else happens elsewhere, you've witnessed that within the data set or view.
Katherine Templar Lewis
Yeah, absolutely. And to me, that's where it's really interesting, because it's very rare that all the scores that we often just have one or two scores, either don't lift that much, or they slightly go down, or they're much lower, that was really just to me when they're lower than the sort of what we now have as a sort of running average from the sort of 1000s of people who have gone through it. And that provides really interesting insight for them. And that's what we say at the top, we say, you know, when these might change, they might not, but we will be able to tell you something, because we're taking a snapshot of a big cohort of your employees, and looking at what's happening, you know, the interest made, whilst in the, in the different cohorts that we've tested, we've actually been incredibly lucky, we've got significant results, and six out of seven measures, and statistically significant, it Sam was like great.
And as I know, that's, that's really quite rare. Now, obviously, we're now digging into the mechanism. So we're working with next year, we're working within the cognitive decision making lab at UCL to try and work out which bit of that documentary is doing the change, you know, and so that we cannot just show that we can change uncertainty tolerance, but we can then put different topics in and this will be our future facing looking at things like identity, even things like handling grief, all these other complex things we struggle with. So, we can't tell you quite yet, you know, definitively which bit of that intervention is creating this change. But there's definitely significant change across these measures, the one that wasn't significant, but does still have a trend to go up was negative emotion. And although we're also looking into that, if I had to explain it, I think for some people, what we do is we highlight how much uncertainty is in their lives. And that does actually increase a little bit of anxiety.
You know, there's how it's the change curve, isn't it, it goes up first, you hit denial, and then you have to sort of hit realisation, and your negative feelings go up a bit before you manage to go down again. So, I would say that is potentially what's happening there. But their positive emotions also massively up to a point that really outweighs that negative effect. So, it's interesting things like that. And then within companies, we found some quite interesting things. The need for closure score is broken into five different sub measures, things like need for, predictability, need for order, close mindedness. And you saw these sorts of trends coming in. So, in some companies, there was sort of high open mindedness and quite good ability to deal with ambiguity, but really high need for sort of order, things like that. And it was interesting to dig into company culture. You know, in one case, it was revealed that actually, there was a very rigid order in the company. It's a very old, very big, very great company that would had once been family run. And when you ask people sort of, how about doing things differently? They were like, oh, we can't do that.
You know. So it showed these little points of friction, I guess, within the companies, we found other companies, interestingly, one that was facing quite a lot of redundancy, where self-efficacy, everybody had very low self-belief, yet they were scoring other people very high, which was interesting, everyone sort of walking around with this belief that everyone else was going to continue in their role, but they were going to lose theirs. And I think for me, as well as those scores, helping to try and validate this type of intervention as a very powerful behavioural intervention. It was interesting, and that's why we decided to give people their scores to give insight into individuals into companies into those you never get that sort of snapshot, you know, is interesting to find, like, I'm very good with ambiguity. However, I do like predictability. You know, I'm highly open minded and yet some of my need for closure scores aren't that good. So, I'm like, Oh, okay. That's interesting. I don't like rapid change. But once I climatized I can be really open minded. So, it's really interesting, the inciting given you as an individual, but also as a company.
Chris Moriarty
I think I'm just self-diagnosing myself, as you are talking. That's literally me. I think I'm really up for change unless it's, it's a change I wasn't expecting. And then about at the minute, I didn't think it was gonna be this change.
Katherine Templar Lewis
Yeah, I freak out and get well the angry and often go on the attack. And then a bit later, I'm like, actually, I'm fine with it. Now. No, that was great.
Chris Moriarty
Ah, you've just described me and Ian’s working life. That's literally me.
Ian Ellison
I might have just witnessed that, I might have just witnessed that. And interestingly, one of the things that I do next to my work is I'm a Samaritan. And I remember sticking on the LinkedIn channel that you also run next to the interactive documentary thing during the sequence that you go through over the period of time. And it was in the middle of a shift reflecting on uncertainty, because I think I was probably one documentary in thinking, this is the most uncertain situation I put myself in, I've chosen to sit here. And that phone is about to ring. And I have absolutely no idea what's going to be on the end of that phone. It could be absolutely anything. And it very often is. And I am armed with a toolbox of Samaritans listening skills, and policies and procedures, and whatever, with which to deal with that. And it just struck me Bloody hell, uncertainty really is everywhere, through choice and through not choice.
Katherine Templar Lewis
Yeah. And I think that's the thing, I think there's this, you know, what we really want to do is exactly that provide people with this realisation, you know, we all have the capacity to be these uncertainty experts, these people who, in uncertainty, our brain has this ability to become more plastic, and absorb more information. We have these very our brains very much for prediction machines, but we have these windows of opportunity when things will change, to update those models of the world to learn new skills to be more creative. And it really is anxiety that that often holds us back is that negativity bias in our head? Warning us emotions are often that you know, it's not, it's not a reflection of reality, it's a response to reality. And so, we're just giving people a toolkit to be like, Okay, you are going to find uncertainty quite challenging. But let's look at the tools you have.
So, the first is sort of emotional regulation, you can de-escalate that feeling of anxiety. And once you do that, it kind of unlocks your brain to think more widely to think more calmly and clearly. Then you've got tools like you can actually challenge your thoughts you can you can reframe things, you can question them and actually, in doing so, rewire your response, you know, you can even a lot of what we do is so automatic, and especially when it comes to uncertainty, we have these avoidant behaviours that we don't notice. People always say you know, I people keep telling me to get out my own way. I don't know what that means. And to me, that simply means that we have very automatic responses to moments of uncertainty, that take us away from uncertainty to make us feel safe. But in doing so takes away the opportunity to progress to innovate, to be creative, to overcome challenges and thrive and grow because of them.
And I think in learning this toolkit, whether it's in your work life or your personal life, you then have this ability to go, okay, this is a moment where I would have unconsciously turned away and felt stuck. But I can go towards it, I can deescalate my emotions, I can now actually use metacognition, I can reflect and think about what I want. And then I can actually tap into things like my intuition, to help guide me to make a decision. And I can also understand that this is not a natural response. There's nothing bad here. And I have all the tools within me, I just wasn't really taught how to activate them.
Chris Moriarty
We've talked a lot about neuroscience, we've talked a lot about individuals and people's response to this stuff. But there are organisations sending their people on this course. So, what are the implications of this work? And what we're finding out for organisations who will be concerned about how what you're doing through this intervention? Is impacting people's performance, productivity, well-being whatever it might be that's driven them to do that. So, what are the implications for organisations? What have you started? I guess it would be early days, but what have you started to hear employers saying, do you know what it's changed? It’s changed that.
Katherine Templar Lewis
We've had such a positive response by organisations? I think, you know, the ones that came on originally, we wanted to, I think we're trying to be a bit more radical and in their sort of, you know, what they were offering employees, I think that really struck me was that one company said they had 104, different wellbeing programs, but not a single program that also could ladder into leadership, or decision making creativity, innovation, all these different dimensions. And I think that to me, is the power of this course. You know, the word transdiagnostic gets thrown around a lot, but simply that our ability to handle navigate uncertainty, because it's not going away, it never has, it's always been there. It doesn't just affect our personal life. It then affects how we can make decisions.
You know what, that's for us what that's for team. It allows us as a leader to hold doubt and know that that's a really positive important space and navigate that out as well. You know, it allows you to sort of emotionally regulate everyone around you. We love people doing it in cohorts, because what happens is they tend to become really connected through this sort of realisation, that understanding that they're sort of seen together. And they, they now have this sort of joint toolkit. So, I think it'd be really interesting looking at it in different levels within companies, we've had some have sort of quite broad ranges of employees go through it. We've worked with just leadership teams, in some cases. And that was kind of interesting, this sudden realisation, understanding that as a leader, there's an emotional aspect right now to decision making, you know, you have to actually, the first time ever, we realise that the decision making and emotions are all linked up, and we have to learn how to navigate them both, you know, I never thought I'd be standing. You know, I'm a trained breathwork practitioner, I was dragged kicking and screaming to it until I realised the power of the nervous system, the vagus nerve, and never thought I'd be standing in America with a with a really incredible team of leaders, teaching them things like breath work, but also teaching them how that that tool can then actually unlock creativity, innovation, emotional contagion, where they're a better leader.
So, think about the individual on the team level, it has a huge ability to impact really every aspect, just sort of, you know, positivity well-being Yes, absolutely. But also things like collaboration skills, how will you work together as a team, relationships between employees, employees, which incredibly important, how you make decisions as a company level, and also just how leaders are leaders, you know, I think our leaders at this time aren't very good with uncertainty, and learning those skills, you can then teach to others as well. But you know, we look up to people who navigate uncertainty, we had to go and find these sort of uncertainty leaders in the shadows. But now we can teach the skills to people who actually in in these powerful positions.
Chris Moriarty
Lovely, so quickfire round, when you were talking about the cognitive decision lab, I had this image of people's heads been wired up, as they're watching the program, and you're looking for stuff. But once I got out of my little sci fi mode? Well, it got me thinking about is, and you talked about this right, and start the interview about the body's response to neuroscience kind of concepts, and how that link the mind and body is, have you thought about? Are you looking at will there be some work that looks at the body's response to prolonged periods of uncertainty to changes in metabolism? Because they've now more up to the uncertainty stuff? Is there is there a kind of a curiosity in that kind of field, and neurophysiological study?
Chris Moriarty
That's the word. That's the word I was looking for?
Katherine Templar Lewis
Well It’s interesting. There isn't right now. But what I am really interested in is more body based somatic tools to face uncertainty. You know, I think all these things that have become, you know, and Huberman is the great advocate for these things. And Wim Hof, sort of ice bathing and things like that. And I think people don't understand their power yet. You know, I know lots of men and women who do cold showers and ice bathing, and they don't really know why. And the reason why is very simple, it's because it activates your nervous system threat response to elevate your nervous system activates the sympathetic nervous system, in in exactly the same way as your body would respond to a psychological threat.
But in this time is a physical fact it's extreme cold. And so, by actually sort of calming your system down and, swapping it back from sort of sympathetic, they active activation into parasympathetic, much calmer systems and models. And it's in that state that you can have a clear head and things like that, what you're doing is you're basically training the vagus nerve, you're strengthening the sort of muscle of the nervous system, to calm yourself down and keep a clear head quite quickly, so that when an emotional or time of crisis, when you're sort of, you know, in a leadership position, and there's a huge crisis, that same response will happen in your body, but because you've managed the 1000 cold showers and you've calmed down, you can actually regulate yourself a lot quicker. Is that it? That's it?
Ian Ellison
So that’s bonus, listen to the kids, because you'll learn how I showers. Really work.
Chris Moriarty
I’ve got three-year-old twins, I should be three or four times a day, I should be sharing myself just to deal with the daily grind of toddlers. My second quickfire question is, whilst we were talking, I was doing some research, right? We were talking about what you can say what you can't say what, what does proven mean and all the rest of it and I something, something lit up in my head and I was like, I think we spoke to Sam about this when he joined us in the last series. And I went back to the transcripts. Here's what Sam Conniff said about this thing.
The uncertainty experts as I describe it, is the world's first interactive learning documentary that is scientifically proven to increase uncertainty tolerance. So, I pick him up on this I pick him up on this and I say Sam, a bit concerned that we're pretty much gonna get a phone call from the Advertising Standards Authority about the claims on your newly launched course here. And he says, yeah, no, which He's always a tell for when someone's about to give you some horse manure, right? When they say, you no, at the start of a sentence, yeah. Oh, I know, I know what's coming next.
It says My life has been in marketing. So, you know, future truths are my currency, is probably the most predictable thing that Sam Conniff said. I think I just said scientifically proven he backtracked a little bit. I think I just said scientifically proven to tell the truth. So yeah, there you go. That's, that's what I intended it to be. So, there we go. So now, if Sam was here to defend himself, and I'm sure he will listen to this, if Sam was here to defend himself, he would be saying, well, it was right, wasn't I? Did he manifest? It wouldn't have happened if he hadn't said that. Who knows?
Katherine Templar Lewis
I know, when all those countless hours of scientists sitting around trying to construct a robust experiment and running and over and the tests are proven anything? I don't know.
Chris Moriarty
Yeah. Whereas he just got this pirate telling you it's going to be a success. So, Katherine, it's been a total joy, talking to any closing remarks for people that want to find out more about uncertainty and where and what they can read, you know, let's, you know, you've got a great course, which we're going to be talking about, I'm sure in the future. But if they want to go and find out more about uncertainty, where should they go?
Katherine Templar Lewis
Yeah do you know, what's really exciting now is more and more there are books, there's more articles about uncertainty. And I think, you know, even just a Google search on Sunday, now, it's an actual topic. And there's so much sort of interesting things, obviously, you know, come to uncertainty experts.com and find out more there. But in terms of other places to go. I mean, I think some of the topics within it are really interesting. I'm a huge advocate of what's called interception, which is about emotional regulation. And I think that's a great thing if you google search right now, there's some great articles that will come up around that. I think there's some wonderful people you can read Andy Clark, who's is an academic but actually writes on uncertainty write some great material about that.
If you want about emotions, obviously the great Lisa Feldman Barrett learning about emotions, you know, Anil, Seth, about consciousness? Well, I think I really, for me, people get engaging in uncertainty should also be about engaging in understanding yourself. And I think, you know, uncertainty is just one topic. And hopefully, we'll tackle in the future, we're definitely gonna tackle more in the future. And putting people on this, I think, right now, self-development is sort of well-being gets a bit becomes a bit inaccessible, and gets a bit of a bad name, you know, we're not all able, I've definitely, I'm not able to do some yoga every day. And I quite like a gong bar. But I think there's also.
Chris Moriarty
What sorry? Sound bath?
Katherine Templar Lewis
Gong sound. But only because I've just been recently doing a big study on the importance of sound on vibrations on the body. But I think the call to uncertainty to me really is to really start to understand how our brain embodies these tools that we can use, and we can master. You know, we spend a lot of our time quite unconsciously letting our mind master us and take us away from opportunity. And there's this huge opportunity to grow and thrive by taking back control by learning very, not basic, but very simple things about how we react, how we behave, and then knowing that we have the power through courses, like the s&p experts, but also lots of new material available out there to actually change the way we're behaving.
You know, I bet everybody you know, five times a day does something that I wish I didn't do that. I do those habitual responses, and we really can reprogram that. That's the great maybe the other thing we didn't mention neuroscience is this realisation that the neuroplasticity the brain is plastic, we now know we can rewire reprogram our brains to really unlock our potential. So, I'm really interested people actually learning they have the tools within them to thrive at this time.
-- Reflection section --
Chris Moriarty
Esme, welcome back. Is this your third? Is this your third time? This is your third reflection.
Esme Banks Marr
Third or fourth? Fourth, fourth? No. Yes.
Chris Moriarty
Right. Have you reflected on one, twice. Have you done Jo Yarker twice? No, we didn't get you back for
Esme Banks Marr
Jo Yarker, yes.
Ian Ellison
Dr. Brown, Brianna brown
Chris Moriarty
Brown, brown. And now Katherine Templar Lewis, there is only one person we want to talk to after talking to neuroscientists and that's you Esme. What was the what's the stuff that hit hardest?
Esme Banks Marr
So, one of the things that I keep thinking about since I listened to it and unusually for me, I've only listened to this one once. And she talks obviously a lot about uncertainty and what uncertainty does to us and what the idea of fog kind of does to us when we're thinking about uncertainty and I keep thinking is the uncertainty that employees are feeling at the moment and have felt for the past three years but certainly at the moment around am I expected to be in how often am I expected to be if I go in? If I even going to be able to get a desk? Do I even know if anyone from my team is going to be there is keeping them away from coming in coming into the office and therein lies the issue.
So, we've had three years of uncertainty I governmental for at a crazy, crazy health scare level and at a workplace level, am I going to be made redundant? Is my organisation going to make it through this horrific time now, things are slowly starting to look like some sort of normal that we may be more used to. And I think the uncertainty we're all feeling at an individual level when it comes to work and expectations is so the crux of it all.
Chris Moriarty
I think that's a really interesting point. Because one of the things I've said before all the assumptions about work, that we kind of took for granted that it's almost like they weren't on the table to be discussed, you know, it's like people come in most days, nine to five, you don't even need to challenge that thinking. That is just what it is. And therefore, we've got to build around that assumption. All the assumptions have gone, but what you're talking about here is actually flipping it around. And from an employee centric kind of point of view, go, I don't even know what the what the assumptions are now, I so much is up in the air, like you say, am I in or out? A you're going to be in as well? Like, who's going to who else is going to be there? It's? Yeah, I mean, maybe we sort of poked a little bit of fun at Katherine, when she was sort of saying about the uncertainty index. And it was saying it's the most uncertain time and, you know, there's obviously been lots of times where it's been quite scary.
But there are also times if you look at use of Harare, he kind of in Sapiens, he sort of reflects on are we are we the happiest civilisation that's, that has ever been. And he says on paper, you would say so, you know, through medical reasons and societal reason, wealth reads, we've never been richer, we've never been healthier, and all the rest of it. But we've also never had so much choice. And when you have so much choice there is equally by its very nature linked to it uncertainty, because we can't see far enough past those choices to see what's going to happen. Whereas back in the dark ages, your lot was your lot, wasn't it? You know, I can have a fairly good idea of what's going to happen, because I've looked at watch my dad do it, and I'm probably gonna do the same thing. So, yeah, I think that's a really interesting observation.
Esme Banks Marr
And that slog that you feel that she spoke about when you feel uncertain, and it's almost like no wonder we're in the state we're in currently not to make this to sociological and economical. no wonder we're in the state we’re in. Currently, if we have all felt this much uncertainty, and therefore in this weird fog, and have an inability to think in a pure way, not, did we ever think in a pure way? I'm not sure. And if the uncertainty we have all felt in some way, shape, or form the past few years, has impacted our ability to quite literally think clearly and do our work, then it's kind of no wonder we're in the state we're in. Not sure that's the most positive start.
Chris Moriarty
It doesn't need to be a positive reflection section, just we just need to reflect. That's all we need to do that is the job description, reflect, Ian reflect?
Ian Ellison
Well, mine is a more methodological reflection, because of my background interest in I guess, research philosophies. And um, don't worry, I'm not going to go super deep. But I'm really fascinated that there are almost different tribes, different camps of academics who believed that this is the way you do, quote, unquote, scientific research and other people go, yeah, but the social sciences, when you get people involved, you can't do it like that. Because it's more complicated because people have agency and you know, things don't have agency. So, can you apply the same rules, and I am doing the entire debate and injustice, but it's the sort of debate that has raged for decades and creates tribes, and then creates politics within something where you would hope that there wouldn't be politics, because it's knowledge, right? And knowledge shouldn't be political, but it is.
And the reason I'm challenging him about this stuff is when Katherine was talking about this stemmed off my challenge about how do you credibly validate something in the real world which you have an inherent interest in being successful? Essentially a bias challenge, right? How do you step back from that and play the role of the researcher? And Katherine was talking about how well to a degree all scientists are interested in the thing that their research, you can't separate yourself from that otherwise, why would you be researching it? And then she started talking about real world research and compounding factors. And all of those things are just fascinating when we again turn to workplace issues and think about applying that to workplace knowledge, right? Think about Becky's work from the last episode. What Becky's attempt to do real world research with the workplace was to essentially say, Look, we're not going to engage our clients because they're already bias because they've engaged us so we're going to in a way that a lot of organisations to commission, an independent research company polling company to help us with design to help us with data collection.
And that gives us a quote unquote, cleaner dataset. And you can't do that with the uncertainty experts because you need the participants involved who've bought into the premise that it might so it It's really hard to do clean, credible, real world research, but there is no question that we live in the real world. And I'm gonna say one last thing, I'm going to shush because I'm bouncing around different ideas. But there are plenty of academics in our world who cite. And when I say well, I mean workplace workspace industry, who cite, quote unquote, scientific studies because they are, quote unquote, scientific and therefore entirely credible. And they are super controlled and super unrepresentative of the real world. And thinking about certain ones around plants always stand out to me as what am I saying?
Chris Moriarty
We're about to lose our Biophilia audience here, aren't you? You're gonna slag off by feeling I'm not.
Ian Ellison
Gonna go about Biophilia at all.
Esme Banks Marr
No, actually, not at all. We haven't because Katherine even said, didn’t she, that we're not setting out to necessarily prove anything, we're demonstrating the impact. And it's an exploration. So, it's not that you necessarily have to set out to prove any.
Ian Ellison
Yeah, but I the whole thing of it, you have to be you know, there are academic wars waged on these very topics, which create different journals, which create different tribes, different camps, different perspectives, different politics, different textbooks advocating different techniques and methodologies. This stuff is really important, and it manifests everywhere is I guess, what I'm trying to say. And here it is, in a really progressive piece of research, really progressive. Katherine calls it an intervention, we would call it an interactive documentary, because he really is a sparkling thing. And I recommend anybody to do it. Because it's just really, really thought provoking about the future of learning and development as much as about coping with uncertainty and how you can get better at it. Personally, it's a really interesting thing to experience.
Chris Moriarty
You talk about knowledge is political. Right? But so is the challenge to knowledge. The scrutiny of knowledge is political as well. Right? And it might be that at worst, it's because someone might think, Oh, well, I've been studying this for years. Why don't I think about doing the training course? Well, that's because I went with the rules. I did what I did in the system, then why aren't they in the system? Because that's, there's a reason we have the system. So probably, you weren't thinking provocatively enough to get out the system. Or it might be and where it probably should stay is, I think this is great. But let's apply some scrutiny to it. Because that might help Katherine and Sam, in this instance, go, actually, yeah, we didn't think you're right. We didn't think about that. But we're going to tighten that up. Because we think that's important. But some bits, we thought that we made a choice, and we've moved on.
And what it gets me thinking is, I think what we're describing, in a way, this combination of Sam and Katherine, and we're making it very personal about them. But we can't escape that because the kind of face and the thinking behind this program is, I think, one of the examples of a perfect blend of what we try to advocate here on this podcast, which is solid science. And there's no doubt and we've just listened to Katherine for just under an hour, there is solid science behind this. But the energy and gusto of someone like Sam, Katherine going with that and adding more energy to it, and getting stuff done. Now, if they come out and say that it will increase your uncertainty, tolerance by x, and you personally don't get that. I think the net effect, and you talked about this Ian a bit when you're talking about the difference between the very individual results and sort of global results, the net effect is better. And I think there's loads of studies that would benefit from having a little bit of turn it right back to Sam's first adventure on to this podcast, a bit more of a pirate attitude to go, we're just going to pick this up and see what happens and spend less time talking about it.
Esme Banks Marr
There was two things that stood out for me that I was like, guys, that's actually brilliant. And it was the uncertainty to opportunity scale. And I thought that's such a simple, wonderful way of kickstarting and engagement with a client with an organisation to start somewhere there, right. Here are all of your uncertainties at the moment. Let's do this engagement journey with you and end up at opportunities. And I thought that's so simple. And I suppose we will do that in a roundabout kind of way. But the way that she articulated it I really liked and then it was the need for closure score.
And I thought, gosh, if we all have our own score against the need, we all have as individuals for closure in our worlds in our working worlds. That’s, that's powerful, but also that only directly relates to one thing I recommend is leadership. If you have the leadership that are truly leading your organisation, your need for closure is probably lower. Now there's a hypothesis for you.
Chris Moriarty
Are we, are we guessing that there is a another axes of trust and need for closure. If you trust someone that need for closure might not be there. So right you go, actually I trust you? I’ll do it, we should all wear our need for closure score on our forehead. This is like when we're chatting to someone say, by the way, if we leave this conversation, and I'm unclear what's going on, then I'm going to struggle for the rest of the day.
Esme Banks Marr
I just think a lot of this kind of study and way of looking at things, there's a lot more powerful than what organisations tend to do, which tends to wrap around personality profiling, I just think there's absolutely something in this and our relationship to our daily work and the things that we do at work. And I don't know, yeah, I just like that I need for closure.
Chris Moriarty
The thing I mean, the thing for me whenever we talk about this, and weirdly, weirdly, I'm going to sort of price rationalise this and say that we meant this to happen. But this is just another example of something that we've had a number of times in this little run of Workplace Geeks have stuff that is around us that we didn't understand. And now we're able to quantify it, and then measure interventions against it. And I think this is just an exciting time for stuff like that, because it kind of spins off the comment I made about Eastern wisdom and Western science, right. You know, the human race has been around for a long time, right. And it's learned a lot. And I wonder whether we kind of had to take a few steps back when we started going, Oh, no, we're science. We're a science race now we understand stuff. And it's like, we went back a little bit, whilst you know, all that wisdom that was locked up somehow. They were like, we knew this guys. But now we can explain it. But I just think what it adds to is this theme of workplace leaders that have got this kind of portfolio of responsibility, let's call it that now having stuff introduced to them that they just had no idea about, because no one had any idea about it. And how do we get it from the journals to the practitioners into maybe qualifications or competency frameworks or whatever it might be? There's, there's kind of a drip down effect, this waterfall effects, we've got to try and get it. And I guess that again, is another example of doing something like what Katherine and Sam are doing with the uncertainty experts is getting this quite complicated. And Ian I’m sure you’ll agree that, you know, there's times on this course where they have to explain something quite complicated, like a neuroscience complicated type thing, but they do it in a very slow way. And they do it in a very plain English way.
And it's that sort of stuff that we can then absorb and turn into practice and turn into what we do daily. And I think that is just, you know, put this down on another on that list of things like spacing texts, you know, that we talked about on that thing about evolutionary psychology and on the stuff that Becky talks on workplace do all these things, we're having to start to bring these into what makes up a professional, workplace person. And I think that's exciting, maybe a little bit scary at the same time. But you know, it's shaping up to be quite an exciting learning landscape for people. Well, Esme, thank you so much for joining us again. I'm sure I'm sure there will be a fifth time that we get you on. So, thank you for joining us.
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