Employing Differences

Employing Differences, Episode 115: What do we think? What do we feel?

July 26, 2022 Karen Gimnig & Paul Tevis
Employing Differences
Employing Differences, Episode 115: What do we think? What do we feel?
Show Notes Transcript

"We will have some people who are really good cognitively and some people who are really attuned emotionally, and they can miss each other. Instead of getting the benefit of both, we get this competition between them."

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Paul:

Welcome to Employing Differences, a conversation about exploring the collaborative space between individuals.

Karen:

I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul:

And I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen:

Each episode, we start with a question and see where it takes us. This week's questions are, "What do we think? And what do we feel?"

Paul:

So there's two questions here because we think it's important to do both. One of the things that we run into a fair bit in the work that we do is around this idea of the cognitive and the emotional. And so the cognitive is the logical, the planning, the process parts of our experience, of our being, of our working. And that is super important for a lot of different things. And then there's also the emotional, which is the sense of feeling, often of relationship, the experience we have of a thing. Oftentimes, this shows up in our bodies – when we pay attention to it. And that is also super useful and super important. And in fact, both of these strands of working with problems, of being in the world, of figuring out how to move forward tell us different things and give us different information. And what we've tended to notice is that in different situations, we will often marginalize one or the other. So we want to explore today this idea of the relationship of the cognitive and the emotional, and how we can use that relationship more effectively.

Karen:

I feel like in our mainstream culture, we're very likely to favor the cognitive. What do we think? What do we know? What can we prove? And dismiss the the emotional – what we feel. I think that's the more common trend, although there absolutely are cases where we go the other way. So you want to be cautious of both. But it's almost like it's two parts of our brain. In the triune brain model, which is not the latest science but I think still a useful thing to think about, it's actually in different physiological parts of the brain. And our best work, I think, happens when we can have those two parts of the brain talk to each other. So that when the emotional is saying, "Wait, there's a problem here," the cognitive can say, "Hmm, what is that problem?" They can feed each other and actually get the cognitive and emotional in the same space. And I think that same thing happens often in groups. We will have some people who are really good cognitively and some people who are really attuned emotionally, and they can miss each other. Instead of getting the benefit of both, we get this competition between them. That especially happens if we have the experience – as a lot of us do – of, from early childhood, what you feel doesn't matter. It's what you can make a logical argument, what you can defend. We watch the court dramas or even scientific theory. I mean, the whole scientific method of "you can prove a thing" is pretty new and human experience, actually, but we all grew up with it. So very much in our culture, there's this, "What can you prove?" That is what we value. For a lot of us, what happens is, "I have a feeling that this thing would be good, but I don't name that feeling." I don't name that I'm excited about it and passionate and encouraged – or on the other hand, that I'm fearful and worried and anxious about it. I don't say any of that stuff. But based on those feelings, I make a decision about which way I think we should go, and then I get busy manufacturing facts that will support it. You know, finding arguments, finding logical statements, finding facts. And what I lead with is,"Well, because of all of this cognitive stuff, this is what we have to do." And the problem is somebody else has different cognitive stuff, and they may not be coming to the same conclusion. And because I haven't put into the group the thing that's really going on with me – which is a feeling – because I felt like I was more likely to be listened to on the cognitive side, I've sort of split myself in two and the part that the group is able to deal with is actually not the part that's true. I've watched groups that back and forth for days on the cognitive, "But this is better because of this," and"Well, no, but that's better because of this," and back and forth and back and forth and sort of trying to one up each other on what's important. If they can just settle back and look at the feelings, now we've got humans involved. Now we have whole flesh and blood people here, and we can care enough about each other to actually make a far better decision.

Paul:

Part of that is about making space for both. Making sure that we're actually inviting both into the room in ways that are useful. I mean, a very simple example. I used to work with a lot of different Agile teams. They're getting ready to do some planning, do some work for the next few weeks, and they have a system that helps them to figure out what's their capacity to do work. And so there's math involved, it's all very logical, and it looks at data. And so based on that, they'd go, "Okay, well, then we should be able to complete this set of however many things." And I'd go."Great," because that's the cognitive part. And then I'd ask, "So when you actually look at that set of things that you've said the system says you should be able to do, how do you feel about that?" And sometimes they go, "Yeah, it feels right." And so you've got both systems giving you the same answer. And sometimes you get the, "No, it seems like we should be able to do way more than that. What the heck is going on?" Or more likely, "Yeah, actually, no." But the thing is that it required them to slow down and go okay, the cognitive says,"Great, we could totally do this," and if we pay attention to what our what our gut is telling us, then we go, "Well, what's that telling us?" Does it agree or is there disagreement? Because when there's disagreement is where it's really useful to create a conversation between the two. But we have to make space for it. Because I also have experienced that, where we do have a tendency in a lot of situations, and in a lot of cultures, to favor one over the other. The other thing that happens is that we have our own natural setpoint of where we tend to be most comfortable working cognitively or emotionally. And when someone else is at a very different point along that spectrum than we are, it's like they're speaking a different language. It doesn't make sense to us, and we have a tendency to dismiss it– as not being different, as being wrong. So those are two of the primary things that I tend to notice, because then that also points to the fact that if we have can make space for many places along that spectrum, it means that those things are much more likely to come out in ways that other people can understand them. That can be accessible to other folks. But it's not going to happen necessarily naturally.

Karen:

I want to really highlight two words that you

said:

slow down. A lot of the things that will make that space, especially for the emotional – although for some people, cognition happens at a different pace than for other people, so if you want those folks on board, you need to slow down too – but an awful lot of the types of mechanisms that help with that what they have in common is that they slow things down. And often this is quoted as a bad thing. "But that takes so long, and it'll slow us down." And what I find myself saying is, "Yes, it will." Yep, that's exactly what it will do. It will slow things down. There was some brain science and I can't point to this stats on it, but that the the ability of the emotional to take over, literally the speed at which messages go from the emotional part of the brain to the cognitive, is five times faster than the other way around. This is because we needed it that way. If we get this instantaneous, we haven't processed a bunch of data, we just get an instantaneous"Danger!" we want that to stop the thinking and influence the behavior and the decision making instantly, because we could be in danger. The problem is that relationships don't work at that pace. That gets us into all kinds of trouble relationally because the things that make me get a cue of danger are not the same that give you that cue. It puts us on different planes, and we don't even have a shared space between. We're not sharing that space. But if we can slow down, then the cognitive messages have a chance to get to– they're slower – they have a chance to get to the emotional and say, "Wait a minute, wait a minute. It's okay. We see that there's a reason that you think this is dangerous. And we have reason to think that it's not." So if we can get those two things communicating together, that's not going to happen at full speed ahead. The two systems don't all work at the same speed. And of course, slowing down also helps people who just operate in either system at a different pace to get aligned and caught up and everybody in the room. But that slow down piece, I think is so important.

Paul:

This is where, Daniel Kahneman's is work around Thinking Fast and Slow, and the two different systems – the idea that oftentimes we think we are making a logical argument, but it's actually rooted in our emotional response to a thing. And that's where all of our different biases come in. Where we throw out data that doesn't conform with the thing that we have latched on to. We get confirmation bias, we get selection bias, we get all these different things. So we are using logical tools, and we often don't even realize that we're not doing it from a place of logical reasoning. We're doing it from a place of emotional response. And the slowing down actually allows us to start to do things that can overcome some of those. That can bring in more perspectives. That can that can actually allow us to really operate from that space of thinking cognitively through it. And then also being able to really look at it and have an honest emotional response to it, rather than an in the moment instinctual hit, that then drives all sorts of other behaviors. And that's kind of one of things that I want to point to is that oftentimes we have a tendency to sort of say,"Hey, you can come up with this great plan, right? And we can do all this cognitive work, but you're ignoring the emotional part of it." Like this is a big thing that shows up a lot of my coaching clients. "So here's the plan, here's the steps that I need to go through." And then I'll ask, "So what's going to throw you emotionally off balance when you go to try to do that?" So it's very easy for that marginalization to happen. And I think that's the thing that we talk about a lot is the marginalizing of the emotional and of the relational. But that in and of itself is potentially problematic, because the cognitive is super important for making sure that we actually come up with a plan we can carry out. That we can actually make happen. It's very easy when we're in a group and we're all really excited about something – we've got that emotional charge of, "Yes, we're gonna move forward with this, this is going to be really great," and we don't even realize the plan we've come up with doesn't hold water. We get carried away on that wave of emotion. And that the cognitive, the planning, the logical, the process stuff is super important there. And it's important not to marginalize that. Because we also need that to get to where we want to go, to get the results we want to get. We need to develop the ability to work in both. And so we need to create space for both so that we've got sort of all of our resources and all of our intelligence being brought to bear on the situation.

Karen:

I want to give one nuance to that. In addition to the emotion can drive us forward, the emotion can just as easily stop us. If the emotion is passion and excitement in a room, that's that's one thing. If it's fear and worry and anxiety, that's exactly the same amount of effect in the opposite direction. And we may need logic to say those things aren't actually likely. I see this happen a lot with the groups I work with. "We could get sued!" And, yes, we could get sued. Yep, and we could get sued no matter what we do. And if we did, what would happen with that. You can really follow that down. That fear thing. Okay, wait a minute, that emotional thing. So again, bringing both together is really the thing that's going to serve. And ironically, sometimes the way you get both together as a facilitator is to separate them out. It's to say, first we're going to talk about – and I don't have a preference for which; I usually have an instinct about a particular thing about which one's going to work better – but first, we're going to talk about emotions. Then we're going to talk about facts, knowledge, logic. Typically, I think if the emotions are already running high and we know we've got some conflict, then I tend to go there first, because they're going to run things until they've had an opportunity for expression. If we're not in that situation, it can be very nice to say, "Okay, we're gonna go cognitive. We're gonna go facts and knowledge. What information do we have that relates to this?" Because that might give us some boundaries that we know are solid because that's just the reality. This is our budget and what we could or couldn't afford, or this is the timeline that we have. Get some of that data there that gives us parameters, that then when we start to get in that feeling kind of space, we don't go way outside of what is reasonable. And you can then go back from one to the other and back to the other again. There's no limit to that. But if, as a facilitator, I'm watching the room depend very heavily on one or the other– or if I'm anticipating that as I'm planning a meeting – I'm going to probably very distinctly call that out explicitly and say, "We want to make sure we get both into this conversation. And so we're going to reserve this time for this kind of thing. And that time for that kind of thing." Or even in a more casual way. "Okay, so I've heard a lot about what people think and what they know. I'm interested in what are people feeling." You can just get a few comments like that and often shift the conversation. So that's the thing just as facilitating in a meeting to be thinking about. Are we heavily one side or the other? And how do we invite the piece that we're missing?

Paul:

What you're pointing to there that's important is that we tend to think there's just one bucket and everything goes into that bucket. And what you're actually doing is you're saying, "So there are multiple buckets, and we should actually be clear about what goes into each bucket. Both buckets are useful, so we want to make sure we have enough in each of them. Are we filling them up enough?" And so by pointing out that there are multiple things, and by naming which ones are going where, and then by saying,"Let's get a little more over here," that really helps the group. And that's a thing you can actually do even if you're not the facilitator. When you're a member of a group – I find myself doing it. Part of this is I'm attuned to this, because of my facilitation background and the work that I do. But even when I'm not, I will often notice which of those we're talking a lot about. We're talking a lot about feelings here, talking a lot about things that are that are pretty emotionally charged. They're useful, and also, we're not talking about any of this other stuff. And so what I'll tend to do – and this gets to something we've talked about in previous episodes – also normalize that."I'm hearing from a lot of people about a lot of really strong feelings, and that makes total sense to me that would that would happen. Also, I want to name, I want to point out that we've got this other thing that we need to deal with, are we ready to deal with that right now? Or do we want to stay here?" And so I think that's it's a facilitative move, it's a process-oriented move, but you can do that from whatever seat you're in. You can do that as a participant in a group that doesn't have a facilitator. If you can notice that we're talking a lot about one or the other, that we're spending a lot of time and we are marginalizing one, and that doesn't seem to be serving us, naming it and checking to see if the group is willing to shift. Because if you're noticing it, maybe other people are actually experiencing it too. Where they've also got something that they want to put into that other bucket and that isn't being heard by the group right now.

Karen:

So I think what we're saying is we broke our usual pattern and asked two questions to start this episode: "What do we think? What do we feel?" because we really think that it's very important to be asking both of those questions. In any given group, in any given person, there's probably a tendency to go more heavily in one direction than the other. In mainstream American culture, we think we more often live in the space of logic and just discount or under use the value of emotions and sharing emotions and talking about emotions. And when we can get both of them into the room by various mechanisms, what we get is a better decision that's going to hold up better and turn out to be a fuller, more workable solution to whatever it is that we're working on. So really suggesting that we as facilitators pay attention to making sure they're both there and as individuals make sure am I looking at both parts of what I can bring to this and then am I seeing the group look at both parts of what we can bring.

Paul:

That's gonna do it for us for today. Until next time, I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen:

And I'm Karen Gimnig, and this has been Employing Differences.