Jean Gomez: "Most people use between four and seven words to describe all their emotions. That's very few"
Posted: Sat Dec 07, 2024 10:55 am
Author of the book Leading in a Non-Linear World about how to use emotions to make decisions and why our body reacts faster than the brain.
cover-644a1a64e0031112334678-644a4717cf210273774056.jpg
Lab's business
Laba Business School,
Editorial Team
Jean Gomes is not just a leadership guru. He began his career studying neuroscience and founded the consulting firm Outside, which helps the world's leading corporations (Coca-Cola, Nike, Warner Music) use the emerging science of "mindfulness" to improve their performance.
In his latest book, Leading in a Non-Linear World: Building Wellbeing, Strategic, and Innovation Mindsets for the Future , Gomes delves into the fields of neuroscience and experimental psychology to explore how business leaders can shape their mindsets to better cope with today’s challenges.
In our interview, Gomes shares his thoughts on how emotions shape our behavior and what mindset can make an organization future-oriented.
Why do we live in a non-linear world and what can companies do to adapt to it?
Our world is inherently uncertain list of armenia cell phone numbers but from an economic and political perspective, we have entered a new era where most of the challenges (such as climate change, Chat GPT, war in Ukraine) we face are unclear in nature and we do not know how to solve them. In a linear situation, the problem and solution are more obvious – in a nonlinear world, input and output are not proportional. To accept new challenges and learn to respond to them, we need a new approach.
First, companies need to learn to distinguish uncertainty from risk. Risk is about assigning a probability to an event. This is how most organizations work, “eliminating” risk through planning and action.
Uncertainty is accepting that we don’t know the problem well enough to implement solutions with confidence. To overcome the fear this creates in a risk-averse culture, we need to adopt a “test and learn” approach, running many small, short-term experiments at a time so that the knowledge we gain can be mutually applied.
What are “test and learn” and “plan and act” strategies and how do they differ?
These are two different methods of creating value. "Plan and act" is about implementing what we already know very well and can manage well. This is how large organizations operate - this approach works when we definitely know what we are doing, in specific, predictable conditions.
When we operate in a first-time environment, a test-and-learn strategy minimizes risk and accelerates learning. We run the smallest experiment as quickly as possible, with the fewest resources, to minimize risk and understand what works.
The problem is that this creates feelings of fear, uncertainty, doubt, incompetence and failure. That is why you need to not only implement this approach in a process but also have a "test and learn" mindset.
What is mindset and why is it important for business leaders?
I became interested in the concept of mindset while working in Silicon Valley twenty years ago. It was a word that was being used by business leaders, but they didn't really understand what it really meant.
They described it as something about people's beliefs and attitudes - which is the dictionary definition - but that's not what they meant. They were more about people's motivations and how they orient themselves in reality. The second way they described mindset was not about personality, but rather about a mental model, a worldview.
I spoke with hundreds of leaders in more depth, and ultimately they were interested in how people make sense and meaning of the situations they encounter. I went back to my roots in neuroscience and talked to leading scientists over the past decade about the revolution in understanding how the brain and body interpret. The result was our redefinition of mindset as the fundamental sense-making system that encompasses how we feel, think, and perceive.
What types of mindset did you explore?
The first one we focused on was how people personally manage their well-being in a world of increasing uncertainty. We called this the “more human mindset” because, working with over 60,000 people in 43 countries, we found that overwhelming experiences at work for most people leave their mindset feeling drained, defensive, and isolated.
This mindset forces you to adjust to your basic needs in order to manage your own well-being. We have found that increasing various forms of self-awareness creates the conditions in which people feel better and are more successful in long-term behavior change than trying to use habit-forming techniques. Your body and mind begin to direct you toward what you need, and you begin to eat, sleep, and exercise better by default.
The second mindset we call “future now” which for us is a strategic mindset. Om helps leaders maintain a balance between delivering value today and creating value tomorrow, which is not easy to achieve. This mindset helps us focus on both thinking and acting.
cover-644a1a64e0031112334678-644a4717cf210273774056.jpg
Lab's business
Laba Business School,
Editorial Team
Jean Gomes is not just a leadership guru. He began his career studying neuroscience and founded the consulting firm Outside, which helps the world's leading corporations (Coca-Cola, Nike, Warner Music) use the emerging science of "mindfulness" to improve their performance.
In his latest book, Leading in a Non-Linear World: Building Wellbeing, Strategic, and Innovation Mindsets for the Future , Gomes delves into the fields of neuroscience and experimental psychology to explore how business leaders can shape their mindsets to better cope with today’s challenges.
In our interview, Gomes shares his thoughts on how emotions shape our behavior and what mindset can make an organization future-oriented.
Why do we live in a non-linear world and what can companies do to adapt to it?
Our world is inherently uncertain list of armenia cell phone numbers but from an economic and political perspective, we have entered a new era where most of the challenges (such as climate change, Chat GPT, war in Ukraine) we face are unclear in nature and we do not know how to solve them. In a linear situation, the problem and solution are more obvious – in a nonlinear world, input and output are not proportional. To accept new challenges and learn to respond to them, we need a new approach.
First, companies need to learn to distinguish uncertainty from risk. Risk is about assigning a probability to an event. This is how most organizations work, “eliminating” risk through planning and action.
Uncertainty is accepting that we don’t know the problem well enough to implement solutions with confidence. To overcome the fear this creates in a risk-averse culture, we need to adopt a “test and learn” approach, running many small, short-term experiments at a time so that the knowledge we gain can be mutually applied.
What are “test and learn” and “plan and act” strategies and how do they differ?
These are two different methods of creating value. "Plan and act" is about implementing what we already know very well and can manage well. This is how large organizations operate - this approach works when we definitely know what we are doing, in specific, predictable conditions.
When we operate in a first-time environment, a test-and-learn strategy minimizes risk and accelerates learning. We run the smallest experiment as quickly as possible, with the fewest resources, to minimize risk and understand what works.
The problem is that this creates feelings of fear, uncertainty, doubt, incompetence and failure. That is why you need to not only implement this approach in a process but also have a "test and learn" mindset.
What is mindset and why is it important for business leaders?
I became interested in the concept of mindset while working in Silicon Valley twenty years ago. It was a word that was being used by business leaders, but they didn't really understand what it really meant.
They described it as something about people's beliefs and attitudes - which is the dictionary definition - but that's not what they meant. They were more about people's motivations and how they orient themselves in reality. The second way they described mindset was not about personality, but rather about a mental model, a worldview.
I spoke with hundreds of leaders in more depth, and ultimately they were interested in how people make sense and meaning of the situations they encounter. I went back to my roots in neuroscience and talked to leading scientists over the past decade about the revolution in understanding how the brain and body interpret. The result was our redefinition of mindset as the fundamental sense-making system that encompasses how we feel, think, and perceive.
What types of mindset did you explore?
The first one we focused on was how people personally manage their well-being in a world of increasing uncertainty. We called this the “more human mindset” because, working with over 60,000 people in 43 countries, we found that overwhelming experiences at work for most people leave their mindset feeling drained, defensive, and isolated.
This mindset forces you to adjust to your basic needs in order to manage your own well-being. We have found that increasing various forms of self-awareness creates the conditions in which people feel better and are more successful in long-term behavior change than trying to use habit-forming techniques. Your body and mind begin to direct you toward what you need, and you begin to eat, sleep, and exercise better by default.
The second mindset we call “future now” which for us is a strategic mindset. Om helps leaders maintain a balance between delivering value today and creating value tomorrow, which is not easy to achieve. This mindset helps us focus on both thinking and acting.