[music] I assume that was hard for you to go out and make some animal sounds in some way.

If you see the piece of video from my class, you can see there's lots of nervous giggling, and people are averting eyes, because they're nervous, so there's a nervous tension there. So, what is it about that? Why is it such a hard thing? If I say, go in your closets go by yourself, go find the space where no one can see and you make the noise. I'm a sheep, right? It's easy, no problem, you can do it. On the other hand, when other people around, it's really different. And so, that's what we're after try to understand what are the role these other people play in making us feel differently. I think of the animal sound in my own case, is often when we have a faculty meeting. That's when I have the animal sounds. Because they're, people are talking down there. And I'm thinking, like, what's going on? And I'm afraid to say something because I worry that it's going to come out like an animal sound. Everyone will look at me, and, and possibly criticize me and think, like, what is wrong with Owens? Why is he baa'ing like a sheep? That's not even his last name letter. You know, you get the idea. Okay, so, let's talk about emotion. So, let me go ahead and, and talk a little bit about the understanding. So, the experience was to make the animal sounds and now we want to make sense of that. How do we make sense of what was going on there? And there's also some of this in the video that you watched also, the Super Bowl vid video as well. Okay. So, some of the problems in groups. We could think about the issues of, of ego, the issues of social status in, in terms the following. We're generally afraid to be criticized, we don't like to be criticized in public. You know, if we, in private there tends to be okay, but we really don't like to be criticized. Criticism is considered a negative thing. We're afraid of making mistakes.

On our own, if I'm writing in my notebook myself, I'm not that afraid of making mistakes but when there are other people around and the people are watching me, I'm very much afraid of making mistakes and we also tend to avoid conflict. So, all these things make us feel that is from an emotion perspective, make us feel not very good and so let's think about why that is, I mean, so I want to talk to you little bit of why that is. Well, Sigmund Freud suggested that creativity actually is a response to this thing called the ID, the animal, the inner, there's like an inner consciousness. The ID is the inner drive, the ID, the inner drive. And this inner drive was this thing of, was a force for creativity, in fact. But the problem is, is that the, if everyone behave that way, it would be really, really problematic. And so, what we do is you know sort of, you know, put on the yolk of society. That society says, you can't act that way and we begin to internalize that and we, we, we, his term for that was the ego. So, we have this ego that sort of moralistic sensor, it sorts of sits on our shoulder. You know, that sensor says, like don't say that, you can't think that, don't do that. For Freud, this was the source of lots of neuroses, that people, in fact, were sort of suppressing this, this inner drive. And so in a way, he's saying that everyone's creative, everyone has this drive to be creative. And the problem with creativity is that we stop it, that we're pushing it back. And so, we're going to keep an eye on this ego thing and try to understand how it is that we can remove the ego sufficiently that we can actually get things done. We're afraid of criticism. Criticism does not feel very good. Let me tell you about a study about criticism that was kind of interesting. So, there's a research study, and the person doing the, the researcher, what he did was, he hired two actors, and these two actors played a different role. So, there's one actor who was, the being criticized and another actor who was, the criticizer. So, this person said to this person, you could have done this better. And then, they switch roles, and they said, well, you could have done this

better, right? So, they're the same 2 actors, and they switch roles so we can take the individual out, and what did they find? They asked people, they said, to watch one piece of video of the actors in the one situation or the actor in another situation. They said, please estimate the IQ of these two people. What do you think happened? Well, it turns out that the IQ of people who were being criticized was rated as being much lower than people who actually were doing the criticizing. That's kind of interesting. Because it, it doesn't really seem like it should make sense because it's probably easier to criticize. Well, you probably know this. It's easier to criticize someone than it is to think of ideas and to, to put yourself out there, to put yourself at risk. And so, why would it be that criticizing is perceived as smarter? Someone who criticizes is smarter. I don't know, I could just conjecture that it has maybe something to do with the way we're, we're raised was when we're small children, we're always told don't do this, don't do that, that's wrong, that's not very good, this isn't very good. And we become to believe, somehow, that maybe it's that people who criticize us are smarter than us somehow, and that's when we begin to internalize that. And so, criticism really does not feel very good. So, there's a problem when people criticize in groups. Criticizing is easier and it destroys group functioning, right, because we don't want to criticize, we don't want to be criticized. So, you've probably been in a brainstorm session where you say, well, we could do it this way. Someone says, oh, that won't work. Well, we could do it this way. Well, why would you do it that way? Well, we could pretty soon, after lots of criticism, we just stop. We understand, we get the message, we're not to say anything else. So, that's the problem with criticism. We're also afraid to make mistakes. Making mistakes is problematic, because if we make mistakes in front of other people, they start to judge us, they think I'm

wrong, they might eject us from the group. I love looking at a picture like this. Probably every year, I see a picture like this in the newspaper that says, you know, someone has misspelled the word school, in front of a school, right, because that's where you paint it on the ground, it was, at a school. So, I mean, think about what would happen here, we would probably be really afraid to make a mistake like that. Because what happens if you make a mistake like that? Well, probably you'll get fired and if you get fired, probably your spouse leaves you and if your spouse leaves you, probably your dog hates you and your dog bites you and your car breaks down. Wow. If all that bad stuff happens from having a mistake, I don't want to have any mistakes. And so, what's the safe way to go is to not do anything that, that will incur any risks, right, just do something that really keeps myself real nice and easy, and simple, do what I've done before so I don't make a mistake in front of other people. The third kind of constraint on, on this sort of emotion when we're talking about ego and social status is avoiding conflict. We absolutely do not like conflict. I mean, some of are, are better at managing conflict. And some of us know when there's time to go have conflict. But for the most part, we really don't like it in groups, especially not in brainstorming groups. And so often, what we'll do is we'll just go ahead along with someone's idea, even though we don't think their idea is good. We may throw out some, oh, that's really good, what a great idea you had there, in order to avoid any kind of conflict, in, in order to say, well, that's dumb idea, we shouldn't really do that. And also we have the problem now, if I say that's a dumb idea, now I've gone to the criticism place. And so, there's really, is a really difficult to step through here in a way that works. Well, let's think about it this way. In a group, we all want esteem. We want to feel like we're you know, an established member of a group. But we could use Maslow's hierarchy as a

way of arguing that. There's all sorts of, of research that suggest that people have the desire to be with other people and they want to be valued by those other people. And so, if I am wanting to be valued by a group, how could I do that? Well, I could help a group gain resources or I can go find resources for the group and bring it there. So, if my group is working on a problem, I can say, well, I can go get us some coffee, or I can get us some money, or I can get us some information and bring that to the group. Wouldn't that be a good thing? I can help lead the group to a solution to another solution. I mean, we're worried about not being known, not being seen in the group. But, in fact, if we can bring the group something, then they might actually like us. The group also has this giving them good information, bringing new information from the inside and also, what we want to do is stop bad decisions in a group. So, if I'm a val, a high value to a group, if I can say, let's not do that because there, that road is we'll, we'll go over the cliff at the end of that road or if we try to do it that way, it won't work or the boss doesn't want us to do it that way so let's do it a different way. And by stopping a bad decision in the group, I am creating value. I'm being valued by the group if they recognize that. A problem is that there are these unattended consequences, potentially. So, if I wanted to lead the group to a solution, right, that's how I show value and that's how I get esteem in the group. Well, I might stop other people's solutions from being considered from going out. So, if I criticize someone's, like, that won't work, like, I have a better solution, I'm implicitly criticizing someone else's solution, and that may stop the group functioning that way. I may through, by desire to give the group information, I may drown out other people. I may stop other people from giving their ideas,because I'm dominating, because I want everyone to hear my ideas and hear my good information. And to stop bad information to stop bad decisions making in a group because I may go out of my way to not share decisions

making responsibility. I take over and I say, I'm the one who decides and you guys don't get to decide, and that I preserve it for myself. And that would allow me to be in charge and to produce that value. On the other hand, what does it do for everyone else? It puts them out of it. Makes them not really willing to participate. And that's this kind of stuff here, like emotion or motivation, excuse me, groups, if you're not motivated in a group, you're not part of something special, you're not a part of something, and that's going to reduce your motivation. That's going to make you less likely to innovate, which we saw at the individual level. Commitment, you know, I'm with these people, do I want to stay with them till the end? Do I, is this feel good, does this not feel good? What about risk tolerance? Do I feel like I could take a risk by saying something in front of these people? Or if I try and experiment will, and that goes wrong, do I feel safe about it? Are they going to ridicule me? Are they going to throw me out? Are they going to tell other people what a fool I was? So, these are all the things going through people's heads as they participate in groups. And so, that's what we want to be thinking about, how can we stop those things from happening? So, how do we overcome these constraints, these emotion constraints? Well, there's a number of things we can do. First of all, we can really support psychological safety. Psychological safety is this idea that when you're with a group, with you, when you're with other people, that it feels okay, like you feel like they're not going to attack you, they're not going to make fun of you, they're not going to ridicule you, they're not going to eject you from the group. And there are ways that we can actually facilitate that psychological safety. First is to have some rules. How are we going to do this? When we brainstorm together, what are the, what are the rules?

Are you allowed to criticize or not? Or if you behave in a certain way, what's the penalty of doing that? Groups also can have a dissent channel. The dissent channel is when you not during the meeting but maybe after the meeting, if someone has been afraid to say something. For example, someone might say, this project won't work or that's a really dangerous way to do that. And this, this dissent channel is something used by NASA. They can go in afterwards, and say, well, I don't think that's going to work without the fear that the, they're going to be fired, they're going to be made fun of or ridiculed or put down, because of their dissent with the groups ideas and decisions. So, that's psychological safety, a very important thing. We can also suppress idea egotism. I often see groups, groups in my class, I'll have them present their ideas. And they'll say, well, I thought of this, and she thought of that, and he thought of that. And when we start talking about my ideas versus our ideas, then the egotism is in there. What we need to do is we need to break that, we need to break it from my idea to our ideas. One way to do that is to generate lots, and lots, and lots of ideas. And so, when you're doing brainstorming, see if you can get the group to generate a ton of ideas and that way, people are less attached to any one of those ideas. Putting ideas on the wall, and if you could get a chance to watch the idea video, actually I'll put a link to it in the next week's session, you'll see when they brainstorm, they put their ideas up on the wall, and that way, when people evaluate each other's ideas, I don't have to watch you evaluating my idea. And by putting the idea on the wall, I'm not showing you my idea, saying, hey, you know, what do you think of my idea, isn't this a great idea? That creates lots of demand on people to actually like your idea, socially, even though that informationally they may not understand it to be a good idea. And also as a manger, as a leader, you need to model the right behaviors. That is, show people how it is that they should be doing this stuff.

Some more strategies, having good arguments. There's interesting research in conflict, different kinds of conflict. And so, there's a kind of conflict called task conflict, which is say, for example, we're trying to calculate a number and I say it's 3.2 and you calculated it in a different way. You say, no, no, it's 3.18. And I calculate so, no, no, no, I got 3.21 this time. And we're arguing, we're having conflict but in a good way because if the answer really matters, we want that kind of conflict. The second kind of conflict that researchers talk about is process conflict. That is, decisions about what are we going to do first, what are we going second, what are we going to do third. Process conflict is good to have early on. So, get the team to get some idea of how it is they're going to proceed but then you want that kind of conflict to go away. Once the team decides how you're going to proceed, then you don't want any more process conflict. The third kind of conflict is the conflict that always is the one that derails groups. And that's called a relationship conflict. And so, instead of saying, I think it's 3.2 and you think it's 3.4, what we tend to see people do is say, wow, why do you sit so close to me, I hate it when you eat garlic at lunch, like why, go away, I don't like you anymore. And that kind of conflict is a relationship conflict that's never good in a group, it creates problems. And so, to the extent that you can keep the conflict as task conflict, and watch carefully because the task can slip into relationship conflict. And so, you want to be aware of that and make sure that you can keep those things apart. Then, there's this idea of celebrating failures. And so if, if my, my good friend Robert Sutton, Bob Sutton talks about rewarding success and failure equally, but the thing you want to punish is inaction. So, when people don't do something, that's when they need to be punished. And if you think about innovation projects, really it's not as just, as, as making a mistake or failing or succeeding,

we really think about it as hypothesis testing, I'm going through this process to sort of say, we though this might work and it won't work, great, let's, we've figured that out. Hopefully, we figure it out before you spend a lot of money, before you spend a lot of time, before you spend a lot of political capital or social capital, figuring out that this thing won't work. And so, these are the ways that you can overcome some of these emotion constraints. Next, we're going to talk about culture constraints.