Please take 7 minutes to watch this video. It's funny, engaging and the introduction to the conversation I'd like to have with you and I believe that it will get you thinking in a new way...
Here are my 2 main takeaways from Destin's research...
Deliberate practise is needed to become an expert in anything. You can't simply believe that you can do something; you have to schedule time to practise and you have to measure your progress so that you can understand the impact. It took Destin months to re-train his brain, through 5 minutes of practise a day. What if he had said, "I am going to learn to ride this bike in 3 months" - focusing on the outcome he wanted with no evidence to support that 3 months was long enough? He'd either have given up or would have found himself practising 8 hours a day to meet his aim. This teaches us that we must give ourselves time to be able to do new things and not set arbritrary goals that we may not meet until we know the result of the efforts we take. The speed at which the old way can be re-learned is also telling. That shows that unless we continue to practise the new, our brains will happily accept going back to the old way because it is easier.
We see the world in a self-defined way; a way that is engrained with us as a result of our experiences, who we spend time with, what we watch or read, and who we are impacted by. If our brain ends up enabling us to do one thing one way (riding a bike) and it takes many months to re-train it to ride a different way, imagine how that translates to other things in our life. How many of the things we think are naturally cognitively biased because of who we are and what we have been exposed to? So now what happens when someone comes along with something new? Do you have the curiosity to consider if this could apply to you? Clearly brain plasicity (the ability for our brain to change through our lifetime) reduces as we get older - so are you open to creating those new pathways so you can consider things without your congnitive bias preventing you from achieving something new?
As I relate the story of the backwards bike and the impact it had on Destin to what I am doing with LINQ, I realise that the cognitive bias that exists in the people I am talking to is something I have to acknowledge and overcome. Of course the way you are doing things today feels like the easiest option - but the easiest way often isn't the right way. If you haven't been able to create the success you wanted to create, then what you are doing needs to change - and change takes determination and effort.
Without gaining the commitment to learn something new and schedule that use into the daily routine, there's every chance that the outcomes LINQ enables (and anything else new) will never be realised; the old way will take over. It can take one individual with influence to prevent change. It is their bias; their way of looking at the world and a lack of curiosity, that can impact an entire organisation. Don't be that person! Engage your curiosity, challenge your biases and perhaps, just perhaps, something new will come from the experience.