Ori Brafman
Appearances
3 Takeaways
Your Brain’s Being Hijacked: The Hidden Psychology Behind Everyday Decisions (#247)
Thank you, Lynn. It's great to be here.
3 Takeaways
Your Brain’s Being Hijacked: The Hidden Psychology Behind Everyday Decisions (#247)
So this is Captain Jacob Van Zanten. And Van Zanten was literally the poster child for KLM Airlines. He was in charge of safety and he was also known as getting people there on time. Van Zanten just finished running a course about safety in the cockpit when he was behind the cockpit of a 747. He was heading from Holland to the Canary Islands.
3 Takeaways
Your Brain’s Being Hijacked: The Hidden Psychology Behind Everyday Decisions (#247)
And when he was still mid-flight, the destination airport radioed in saying that they had a terrorist threat and that his flight would be diverted to a much smaller airport in Tenerife. He lands there and immediately what he starts thinking about is that he's been in the air for so long that if he's on the ground for too long, his crew would have to be replaced or get some rest.
3 Takeaways
Your Brain’s Being Hijacked: The Hidden Psychology Behind Everyday Decisions (#247)
And that would mean that all the passengers would have to deplane, they'd have to stay overnight, and they wouldn't get there on time. So he does everything he can to try to hurry things along. But this is a small airport. The tower was a little busy. They were distracted because they were watching a soccer game.
3 Takeaways
Your Brain’s Being Hijacked: The Hidden Psychology Behind Everyday Decisions (#247)
And he tries everything to get, come on, let's get back in, let's get back in, let's get back in. And finally, the terrorist threat in the destination airport is lifted. And they're able to get going. And he's just like, come on, come on, come on, let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go. But by the time that he leaves the gate, a thick fog descended upon the airport.
3 Takeaways
Your Brain’s Being Hijacked: The Hidden Psychology Behind Everyday Decisions (#247)
And that's when Jacob Van Zanten does the unthinkable. He starts taking off without clearance. And unfortunately, there was a Pan Am plane that was blocking the runway. He couldn't see the plane as it was careening down. He tries to lift up, but it's too late. And he slams into the Pan Am flight. And this is the biggest loss of life in aviation history in terms of an accident.
3 Takeaways
Your Brain’s Being Hijacked: The Hidden Psychology Behind Everyday Decisions (#247)
And what's interesting is KLM, one of the first people they called in order to investigate the accident was Van Zanten, the head of safety, not knowing that he was the one who actually caused the crash. And you think about it, why would the head of safety for the airlines take off without clearance? And I wrote this book with my brother, who's a psychologist.
3 Takeaways
Your Brain’s Being Hijacked: The Hidden Psychology Behind Everyday Decisions (#247)
And we looked at specific elements that create irrational behavior. And with Van Zanten, there's a couple of elements. The first is the escalation of commitment. The idea that he just needs to go, he needs to go, and he starts being stressed out about it.
3 Takeaways
Your Brain’s Being Hijacked: The Hidden Psychology Behind Everyday Decisions (#247)
And think about in your life, how many times you're like, I'm doing this, I'm doing this, I've already committed, I'm running, I'm running, I'm running. And the second is this hugely powerful force of loss aversion. We feel the pain of the potential for loss, much more than the happiness we get from a gain. He was so afraid of being late.
3 Takeaways
Your Brain’s Being Hijacked: The Hidden Psychology Behind Everyday Decisions (#247)
He's so afraid of the passengers having to spend more time at this tiny airport. that his vision became single-focused on getting out and avoiding that loss, as opposed to what was far more important, which is keeping the safety of the passengers. And we see this over and over and over again in terms of trying to avoid a loss.
3 Takeaways
Your Brain’s Being Hijacked: The Hidden Psychology Behind Everyday Decisions (#247)
We all know that the draft is, it's not pure science here. It's a very good educated guess. But still, if someone is a low draft pick, even if they play their heart out, and even if they're a very accomplished player, they're going to get less playing time. That's because of a force we call value attribution.
3 Takeaways
Your Brain’s Being Hijacked: The Hidden Psychology Behind Everyday Decisions (#247)
That the value that you instill in something from when you first encounter it is going to stick to that person or object for far longer because we just devalue based on our first impression. And the same happens with high value attribution. You're going to be viewing a job candidate as incredibly accomplished.
3 Takeaways
Your Brain’s Being Hijacked: The Hidden Psychology Behind Everyday Decisions (#247)
And just because they have that huge high value attribution, you're not going to be looking at their performance as much as they should be because of that value attribution.
3 Takeaways
Your Brain’s Being Hijacked: The Hidden Psychology Behind Everyday Decisions (#247)
Yeah, this one's wild. So you have a college class and you have a professor who is introduced as just a substance professor. All the people get a description of the professor, and they don't know that half the people are getting one description, half the people are getting one description.
3 Takeaways
Your Brain’s Being Hijacked: The Hidden Psychology Behind Everyday Decisions (#247)
And half the people randomly get a description of him as being very thoughtful and very caring and very able and just a great guy. And the other half get a description of him also being very capable, but also being more aloof and more distant and more kind of hard to get to know. The professor comes in, gives the exact same lecture, and everyone's in the same class.
3 Takeaways
Your Brain’s Being Hijacked: The Hidden Psychology Behind Everyday Decisions (#247)
And then they have to evaluate him and say, like, how good of an instructor he is. And lo and behold, the people who got the descriptions of the professor being more aloof and more distant thought that he wasn't a very good instructor. And people who got the description saying that he was incredibly approachable and a great guy said, oh, yeah, he's a much, much better instructor.
3 Takeaways
Your Brain’s Being Hijacked: The Hidden Psychology Behind Everyday Decisions (#247)
And it's so amazing because, again, they all sat through the exact same lecture in the exact same classroom. It was just the descriptor that they saw of him.
3 Takeaways
Your Brain’s Being Hijacked: The Hidden Psychology Behind Everyday Decisions (#247)
Exactly. And think about that. I mean, you teach at a university. You think about the enormous amount of prep that you do as an instructor and that you are right in front of a class.
3 Takeaways
Your Brain’s Being Hijacked: The Hidden Psychology Behind Everyday Decisions (#247)
And that their perceptions of you from when they just first met you, before you even said anything, might actually have a huge correlation to how they value you, but also how well they're going to be learning from you.
3 Takeaways
Your Brain’s Being Hijacked: The Hidden Psychology Behind Everyday Decisions (#247)
Very similar. So here you have commanding officers. They're getting a fresh batch of soldiers. And a couple of the recruits were randomly kind of assigned to be described to the officers as very high potential and just these great finds. And lo and behold, the officers after the training thought that those recruits were actually much more capable. But here is where it gets interesting.
3 Takeaways
Your Brain’s Being Hijacked: The Hidden Psychology Behind Everyday Decisions (#247)
The soldiers themselves actually performed better in the trainings. And when the officers were told, hey, this was just randomly assigned, like it has nothing to do, they disagreed. They said, no, no, no, no, no, you don't recognize it. There is something special about that person.
3 Takeaways
Your Brain’s Being Hijacked: The Hidden Psychology Behind Everyday Decisions (#247)
So once you have that initial inception, if you will, of how do you diagnose someone in your mind, it stays with you forever. throughout the process and you start dismissing any evidence to the contrary.
3 Takeaways
Your Brain’s Being Hijacked: The Hidden Psychology Behind Everyday Decisions (#247)
Exactly. So the soldiers themselves performed better and the officers viewed them in different perceptions.
3 Takeaways
Your Brain’s Being Hijacked: The Hidden Psychology Behind Everyday Decisions (#247)
People take on the characteristics that we imbue upon them. If we diagnose someone as being a genius, lo and behold, they'll actually rise to that challenge. If we diagnose someone as being aloof, lo and behold, they'll probably rise to that challenge as well.
3 Takeaways
Your Brain’s Being Hijacked: The Hidden Psychology Behind Everyday Decisions (#247)
Without even knowing, we treat them differently. We go through life labeling people constantly, but we don't really recognize the enormous amount of implications that that has.
3 Takeaways
Your Brain’s Being Hijacked: The Hidden Psychology Behind Everyday Decisions (#247)
We start being much more myopic in our view. We start disregarding evidence that is contrary to our diagnosis.
3 Takeaways
Your Brain’s Being Hijacked: The Hidden Psychology Behind Everyday Decisions (#247)
we need to remember is that we are all subject to these irrational forces and because we're all subject to them we need to take measures to counteract those forces so one of the examples we'll look at is interviews and interviews job interviews are very weak indicators of actual performance What is actually a good indicator are two things. One is looking at someone's actual experience.
3 Takeaways
Your Brain’s Being Hijacked: The Hidden Psychology Behind Everyday Decisions (#247)
And two is conducting interviews within a structured environment and with a group of people. Because you're able to take away each individual's bias more. And all the candidates get the same question. They are put through the structure. And then the committee decides on their viability as a candidate. And I've been talking about this for years with folks, with hiring managers.
3 Takeaways
Your Brain’s Being Hijacked: The Hidden Psychology Behind Everyday Decisions (#247)
I can't tell you how many times I've had people come to me and say, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. But actually, I'm really good at interviewing. Actually, I'm like, no, we're all subject to this. And we need to be cognizant of that. We give ourselves a pass when we think that we're rational and everyone else around us is not.
3 Takeaways
Your Brain’s Being Hijacked: The Hidden Psychology Behind Everyday Decisions (#247)
Exactly. Because not only do we create the expectations, but people live up to the expectations and they transform because of our perception of them.
3 Takeaways
Your Brain’s Being Hijacked: The Hidden Psychology Behind Everyday Decisions (#247)
We need to first recognize that we're all subject to these forces. And the second element is that we can also rely on the power of those around us. Whether it's on the job or even we look at dating, and lo and behold, people around us are better predictors of who's going to be a better match for our dating than our first impressions of individuals.
3 Takeaways
Your Brain’s Being Hijacked: The Hidden Psychology Behind Everyday Decisions (#247)
And that we think about also, whether it's kids or students or people who work for us, that our perceptions really, really matter. And how do you form then positive perceptions of folks? And how do you start thinking about it from a perception of, hey, we're all going to be subject to these forces. It's up to us to try to identify what they are, not to say like, no, we're immune.
3 Takeaways
Your Brain’s Being Hijacked: The Hidden Psychology Behind Everyday Decisions (#247)
It never hurts to gush over people. When I talk to, whether it's a student, whether it's a person working for us, whether it's a kid, it never hurts to gush. And my gosh, those positive elements make such a powerful and long lasting impact on people.
3 Takeaways
Your Brain’s Being Hijacked: The Hidden Psychology Behind Everyday Decisions (#247)
The first takeaway is I don't care who you are. We are all subject to irrational forces that affect our psychology. The second is we need to recognize that we are all emotional beings and that decisions fundamentally have an emotional component. The third takeaway is that the lie that we tell ourselves and others is how do you perform under pressure?
3 Takeaways
Your Brain’s Being Hijacked: The Hidden Psychology Behind Everyday Decisions (#247)
Under pressure, we are going to start being irrational. And the way to overcome that is to have very lifelike simulations. And I've been really interested in virtual reality and how it's impacting our abilities to put people into very realistic situations of leadership and how they perform in those stressful environments.
3 Takeaways
Your Brain’s Being Hijacked: The Hidden Psychology Behind Everyday Decisions (#247)
Thank you so much.
3 Takeaways
The Power of Leaderless Organizations: How Decentralized Groups are Changing the World (#238)
Hi, Lynn. Good to be here. Thank you.
3 Takeaways
The Power of Leaderless Organizations: How Decentralized Groups are Changing the World (#238)
Sure. So you think about the metaphor of a starfish and a spider. You take a spider and you cut off its head and obviously the spider dies. But what happens when you cut off the arm of a starfish? It grows one back because unlike the spider, the starfish doesn't have a central brain.
3 Takeaways
The Power of Leaderless Organizations: How Decentralized Groups are Changing the World (#238)
And you think about that as a metaphor for business and society, organizations that don't necessarily have top-down leadership. Everything from Alcoholics Anonymous to Wikipedia to, unfortunately, Al-Qaeda are organizations that don't have command and control.
3 Takeaways
The Power of Leaderless Organizations: How Decentralized Groups are Changing the World (#238)
They don't abide by the same rules that traditional organizations do because they're able to capture the power of networks and of decentralization.
3 Takeaways
The Power of Leaderless Organizations: How Decentralized Groups are Changing the World (#238)
The internet has definitely unleashed this force because it allows people to contribute in ways without needing central coordination. And the second force that has happened is that people can also contribute very little, but in aggregate, the organization grows. So you think, for example, contributors to a Wikipedia page. You don't need to have one expert on a topic.
3 Takeaways
The Power of Leaderless Organizations: How Decentralized Groups are Changing the World (#238)
You can have a bunch of people who have some knowledge about it all come together.
3 Takeaways
The Power of Leaderless Organizations: How Decentralized Groups are Changing the World (#238)
You have the power of the crowd and you also have the ability to coordinate either for positive or for negative means. But it enables people to be able to work towards a shared value, a shared goal without the central coordination.
3 Takeaways
The Power of Leaderless Organizations: How Decentralized Groups are Changing the World (#238)
That's where it gets super interesting. In a way, yes, it might be harder to make a very concrete decision. But in another way, because these organizations don't have central power, they're much more flexible. They're much more able to respond to changes in the environment.
3 Takeaways
The Power of Leaderless Organizations: How Decentralized Groups are Changing the World (#238)
And what's also interesting about these organizations is that the harder that you fight them, the stronger they become because they become more and more decentralized.
3 Takeaways
The Power of Leaderless Organizations: How Decentralized Groups are Changing the World (#238)
So you think about our war on terror for the last 20 years plus. And you ask, who's really in charge of these terror organizations? And we've fought them. We've been fighting them. And you take out leaders. And you hear about that in the news once in a while, right? This leader was taken out. This leader was taken out. But what happens to the overall organization?
3 Takeaways
The Power of Leaderless Organizations: How Decentralized Groups are Changing the World (#238)
It tends to actually keep on going. And it tends to actually maintain its power. because it doesn't have the centralized power. You think about the ability of a bunch of small investors to come together through Reddit and all of a sudden manipulate the stock price of GameStop.
3 Takeaways
The Power of Leaderless Organizations: How Decentralized Groups are Changing the World (#238)
And you think about them versus the hedge funds, and how were they able to just, you know, people who are owning a couple hundred dollars worth of stock, how are they able to have such incredible power to manipulate the price versus a traditional bank, a traditional hedge fund? It's because you have a whole lot of folks, you don't know necessarily who's in charge of them,
3 Takeaways
The Power of Leaderless Organizations: How Decentralized Groups are Changing the World (#238)
but you have them working on a similar cause, similar ideology and able to enact quite a bit of change in the financial markets.
3 Takeaways
The Power of Leaderless Organizations: How Decentralized Groups are Changing the World (#238)
The three things that hold them together that are most important are first and foremost, shared values. that you're going to be contributing to this organization, not because someone's telling you, not because of top-down hierarchy, but because you believe in the shared values of the organization.
3 Takeaways
The Power of Leaderless Organizations: How Decentralized Groups are Changing the World (#238)
The second is instead of CEOs and instead of bosses, top-down bosses, you have what we call catalysts, people who start a network and then get out of the way. And the third element is the power of the circle, that everyone joins as equal partners, that the responsibility is shared amongst all the members, and that the formation is in that circle.
3 Takeaways
The Power of Leaderless Organizations: How Decentralized Groups are Changing the World (#238)
So one of the super interesting organizations that I've learned about since the book came out, it's called the Home Church Movement. And as the name suggests, rather than meeting inside churches, physical buildings, they meet in people's homes. And once you get, I don't know, beyond, how many people fit in someone's living room? 15 people, 20 people?
3 Takeaways
The Power of Leaderless Organizations: How Decentralized Groups are Changing the World (#238)
Once you get beyond that circle, they create another circle, and they create another circle, and they create another circle. And you'd ask, who's in charge of the home church movement? Well, no one's necessarily in charge. Well, how many members do they have? And when I ask this to people, I get, I don't know, maybe they have 1,000 members, 2,000 members.
3 Takeaways
The Power of Leaderless Organizations: How Decentralized Groups are Changing the World (#238)
The conservative estimate, the conservative estimate is 200 million worldwide. Wow. This is one of the huge religious movements that so many people are not aware of because they don't have the structures, because they don't have the buildings, but they're having power in terms of people.
3 Takeaways
The Power of Leaderless Organizations: How Decentralized Groups are Changing the World (#238)
When it gets attacked, when a leader is taken out, a new leader would oftentimes take their place because of the structure. And that actually enables the organization to become even more decentralized and even more difficult to control. So I've been doing quite a bit of work with the U.S. military, and they talk about... That the fight on terror is oftentimes a whack-a-mole kind of scenario.
3 Takeaways
The Power of Leaderless Organizations: How Decentralized Groups are Changing the World (#238)
And the reason for that is that you take down one leader and then a new leader comes, the network becomes more and more resilient as you attack it.
3 Takeaways
The Power of Leaderless Organizations: How Decentralized Groups are Changing the World (#238)
They constantly mutate. And that's why they're so resilient, because they're able to constantly mutate, because they're able to constantly adapt.
3 Takeaways
The Power of Leaderless Organizations: How Decentralized Groups are Changing the World (#238)
This is super interesting. So giving these organizations assets actually centralizes them and actually has the ability to actually destroy the organization. So one of the examples we looked at in the book was the Apaches and specifically the Spanish who fought so strongly against first the Aztecs and the Incas. And they had the playbook down.
3 Takeaways
The Power of Leaderless Organizations: How Decentralized Groups are Changing the World (#238)
They said, hey, give us your leaders, talk to the leaders, kill the leaders, took over the societies and had effective control over the entire South continent. And it's with the winds of victory in their backs that they showed up to the Southwest and encountered the Apache. And they had the same playbook. Show us your leaders and kill them and try to take over the society.
3 Takeaways
The Power of Leaderless Organizations: How Decentralized Groups are Changing the World (#238)
But the Apaches didn't have centralized power. The leaders were catalysts. They were called non-tons. The phrase you should does not exist in the Apache language. So the moment that the Spanish took out a leader, a new one would just come and replace them. And the Apache became more and more decentralized, more difficult to control.
3 Takeaways
The Power of Leaderless Organizations: How Decentralized Groups are Changing the World (#238)
And their area of influence actually increased as they fought the Spanish, the Mexicans, eventually the Americans. What did change, however, is when the Americans came and gave the Nantans, the leaders, cows. And now that they had cows to give out within the tribe, all of a sudden the Nantan's power became much more centralized.
3 Takeaways
The Power of Leaderless Organizations: How Decentralized Groups are Changing the World (#238)
And when it became much more centralized, they also became much easier to control.
3 Takeaways
The Power of Leaderless Organizations: How Decentralized Groups are Changing the World (#238)
Yes. So a few things would happen, right? One is that the editor would start having a whole lot more power to decide who gets to edit an article, who doesn't, whose voice gets heard. But you also have the interesting contribution question. If you know that one person is earning a lot of money to write articles, would you be willing to spend your free time to write articles as well?
3 Takeaways
The Power of Leaderless Organizations: How Decentralized Groups are Changing the World (#238)
And once you lose that economic benefit of the distributed network, you're not able to quite effectively be as agile and gain from the mass amounts of people who want to contribute. So people want to contribute. They want to be engaged. The question is, how did they feel that their contribution was worthwhile?
3 Takeaways
The Power of Leaderless Organizations: How Decentralized Groups are Changing the World (#238)
Sure. You have everything from Wikipedia that we talked about, but you also have in finance Bitcoin. And one could argue that Bitcoin is essentially a decentralized ledger. And I remember when Bitcoin came out and I started using it as an example of, hey, look at this thing that is maybe about to have some impact on the world. And people are like, no, this is just a... This is just a trend.
3 Takeaways
The Power of Leaderless Organizations: How Decentralized Groups are Changing the World (#238)
What would anyone ever use for blockchain? There's no use cases. And it's symbolic of us not seeing the power of these networks until it's too late. We keep on dismissing them because they don't have central power, because they don't have the institutions, the hierarchies. And by the time we recognize their power, they're huge.
3 Takeaways
The Power of Leaderless Organizations: How Decentralized Groups are Changing the World (#238)
The future is definitely decentralized. And the potential is that it's a more economically efficient way of organizing people around a shared cause. And I like to say that if you're in any industry and you don't know who your decentralized opponent is, you're like the poker player who doesn't know who the weakest player is in the table.
3 Takeaways
The Power of Leaderless Organizations: How Decentralized Groups are Changing the World (#238)
You need to know, regardless of the industry, even if it's a traditional industry, even if you've had historical dominance in that industry, you need to know that decentralization is coming and that it is going to be affecting the industry.
3 Takeaways
The Power of Leaderless Organizations: How Decentralized Groups are Changing the World (#238)
Leaderless organizations are becoming incredibly powerful and they're out to eat our lunch, regardless of whether you're in finance, whether you're in construction, whether you're in technology. Decentralization is the future and we're marching to it in an incredibly fast space.
3 Takeaways
The Power of Leaderless Organizations: How Decentralized Groups are Changing the World (#238)
Our natural reaction is to ask, who's in charge? What happens when there's no one in charge, when there's no hierarchy? You'd think there would be disorder, even chaos. But in many arenas, a lack of traditional leadership is giving rise to powerful groups that are turning industry and society upside down. In short, this is a revolution ranging all around us.
3 Takeaways
The Power of Leaderless Organizations: How Decentralized Groups are Changing the World (#238)
So I'm in education and I've started looking about how decentralization is going to be affecting education. And I think this is where it gets really interesting is I think that the future is not only going to be decentralized, we're going to be learning much more from each other.
3 Takeaways
The Power of Leaderless Organizations: How Decentralized Groups are Changing the World (#238)
But we are starting to look at how the future is going to be in a virtual space, in either the metaverse or in virtual reality. And training is going to look much more decentralized into the future. So you think about industries where lives are on the matter, whether it's defense, medicine, aviation, the trainings are incredibly lifelike and you learn from each other.
3 Takeaways
The Power of Leaderless Organizations: How Decentralized Groups are Changing the World (#238)
You think about a pilot coming on the cockpit and saying, hey, ladies and gentlemen, good news. I've never been inside a cockpit, but I've read every book there is to read about aviation. Would you stay on that plane? But when it comes to business education, what do we do? We give people case studies. We... give them some books, but we don't actually put them inside situations.
3 Takeaways
The Power of Leaderless Organizations: How Decentralized Groups are Changing the World (#238)
And I think that that is where the future is heading in terms of gamified multiplayer environments that replicate leadership challenges.
3 Takeaways
The Power of Leaderless Organizations: How Decentralized Groups are Changing the World (#238)
The first takeaway is to look at organizations through a network model. And you look at the specific nodes of the network and how they contribute. The second takeaway is as you think about each node and as you think about your own performance within that network, how do you focus on internal locus of control? That is, what can you do to affect
3 Takeaways
The Power of Leaderless Organizations: How Decentralized Groups are Changing the World (#238)
the actions of your life, as opposed to what is happening to you and how do you feel most empowered. And the question is also, how do you get people around you in your network to feel most empowered? And the third element is that the future of organizations and of interacting with each other in a training environment is going to be in a virtual environment that is gamified, that is multiplayer.
3 Takeaways
The Power of Leaderless Organizations: How Decentralized Groups are Changing the World (#238)
Thank you, Lynn. It's been a pleasure.