Hyper-Learning

How to Adapt to the Speed of Change

Edward D. Hess

• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781523089260
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Industria alimentare
• Index: Business

“Ed Hess's Hyper-Learning is uniquely practical and is the essential starting point for charting new ways of thinking, living, working, leading, and being fulfilled in our new world.”
—Gary Roughead, Admiral, US Navy (retired) former Chief of Naval Operations The Digital Age will raise the question of how we humans will stay relevant in the workplace. To stay relevant, we have to be able to excel cognitively, behaviorally, and emotionally in ways that technology can't. Professor Ed Hess believes that requires us to become Hyper-Learners: continuously learning, unlearning, and relearning at the speed of change. To do that, we have to overcome our reflexive ways of being: seeking confirmation of what we believe, emotionally defending our beliefs and our ego, and seeking cohesiveness of our mental models. Hyper-Learning requires a new way of being and a radical new way of working. In Part 1 of this how-to book, Hess takes a practical workbook approach and helps readers create their Hyper-Learning Mindset, choose and embrace their needed Hyper-Learning Behaviors, and adopt their daily Hyper-Learning Practices. In Part 2, Hess focuses on how to humanize the workplace to optimize Hyper-Learning. Featuring case studies of three business leaders and two public companies, this book shows how to harness the power of human emotions, choices, and behaviors to enable the highest levels of human cognitive, emotional, and behavioral performance—individually and organizationally.

PART 1

Hyper-Learning Requires a New Way of Being

CHAPTER 1

Achieving Inner Peace

Inner Peace is the foundational building block of becoming a Hyper-Learner. To engage in Hyper-Learning requires your Best Self—your highest-quality performance emotionally, cognitively, and behaviorally— and you cannot operate at that level until, as a baseline, you cultivate a state of Inner Peace.

Inner Peace is an internal quietness or stillness, which I define as being fully present in the moment with an open and nonjudgmental mind and a lack of self-absorption. It’s a state of positivity with limited stress and fear. With those internal qualities, you are more open to:

■Learning

■Stress-testing your beliefs (not values)

■Listening to learn, not to confirm

■Embracing opportunities, differences, novelty, and the unknown

■Considering opinions that differ from yours

■Building caring, trusting relationships

■Having High-Quality, Making-Meaning Conversations

■Attaining states of flow and collective flow with colleagues

■Cultivating openness and trust with others

■Managing your fears and insecurities

With Inner Peace, you’re more able to exercise choice in your thinking, emotions, and behaviors.

You can decide between allowing your mind to wander and being present.

You can either engage with the negative emotions that hinder learning or take steps to mitigate their impact by taking deep breaths to relax or by actively thinking about something else or by reframing the situation. For now, the key point to recognize is that you can choose to let emotions control you, or you can choose to manage your emotions. You can choose to actively generate positive emotions and “own” your emotions, or you can give others the power to determine your state of mind or state of heart by allowing their behaviors to heavily influence you for long periods of time.

Inner Peace can help you mitigate natural tendencies that can get in the way of Hyper-Learning, such as:

■Being risk-adverse and insecure

■Wanting to be liked and fearing exclusion from the “right” groups

■Wanting too much to win and generally viewing others as competition in a zero-sum game

■Being heavily influenced and consumed by your ego and constant mind chattering

■Overestimating the importance of “smarts” and underestimating the power of the heart

■Overvaluing logic, speed, and efficiency

■Undervaluing slowing down to really engage and really listen with a nonjudgmental, open mind

■Undervaluing the power of emotions and the power of your subconscious

■Undervaluing just being rather than always doing

■Dismissing the need to master self and emotionally invest in building trusting relationships

Another way to think about Inner Peace is as the foundation of certain powers.

The 10 Powers of Inner Peace

■The Power of Serenity

■The Power of Humility

■The Power of Slowing Down

■The Power of Presence

■The Power of Reflective Listening

■The Power of Positive Emotions

■The Power of Reflection

■The Power of Emergence

■The Power of Being

■The Power of Owning You

Cultivating Inner Peace can help you remove internal noise and distraction and help you align your inner world—your mind, body, brain, and heart—so you can better engage with the outer world. From this quiet state, you can allow your uniqueness to emerge.

This chapter describes the four underlying elements of Inner Peace—a Quiet Ego, a Quiet Mind, a Quiet Body, and a Positive Emotional State—and provides practical guidance on how to cultivate them.

Reflection Time

Reflection Time means taking your time to think deeply—reflect and illuminate, illuminate and learn.

Please take your time and reflect on the questions I pose below.

Please think back to a recent time when you had back-to-back work meetings. Did you walk into each meeting with a calm, quiet mind?

Were you fully present or were you thinking about something that occurred earlier in the day or about what was coming next?

In each meeting, were you in a listening mode? Or were you critiquing or making judgments while another person was talking?

Was your body relaxed or did you feel tightness? Did you feel some nervousness, fear, or anger? Were you even aware of your body? Your breathing?

Did you spend time thinking about whether you looked good or appeared smart or were well liked by the others?

What does internal noise mean to you? Does your mind “talk” to you? Does it critique your performance? The performance of others? Does your mind like to judge others?

Did you know that with training you can quiet your mind?

Did you know that with training you can influence how you feel?

Did you know that your mind, heart, and body are all influencing each other?

THE SCIENCE OF US

To fully understand the power and necessity of Inner Peace for Hyper-Learning, you need to have a basic understanding of how the human brain, mind, and body work together. It’s beyond the scope of this book to explain in detail the science of human thinking, emotions, perceptions, and behavior, but the following is a high-level summary of what the research says and how it challenges common beliefs. Making you an expert on brain science is not the object of this book. The purpose is to give you some background on how your thinking, emotions, and perceptions emerge so you have a sense of your starting point.

Each human being is a complex adaptive system influenced materially by his or her genes, social environment, and past experiences.

Humans are wired to seek safety and to fight or flee when survival is threatened, but we’re also wired to make meaning and connect with others.

Evolutionary science and psychology have also shown that we are social animals at our core. We survived as a species because we learned how to work together to adapt to volatile changing circumstances.

Research into our history and biology shows that we are not primarily competitive but have deeply ingrained tendencies to cooperate with others.¹³

We have our brains and our bodies—made up of physical matter, chemicals, and electrical parts. And we have our minds—mental phenomenon and experiences created by complex neurophysiological processes.

Our Brains and Our Bodies

The human brain makes up only about 2 percent of the body’s mass but uses 20 to 25 percent of its energy. For that reason, it has to work efficiently. Rather than lying dormant until triggered by stimuli to react or perceive the world, your brain is intrinsically active at all times, predicting what to do next to keep you alive and well.

It is constantly guessing which combination of past experiences and prior knowledge this current situation or sensation is most like in this context and what should be done about it. Neuroscientists describe this process as one of active inference according to Bayesian probability.¹⁴

Your brain isn’t just making predictions about what you will experience, however—it’s actually constructing your every experience. Because the brain can’t experience the world directly, it has to constantly create a simulated model of those experiences based on the bits of information it receives from internal and external sensations. Your brain makes meaning of that information—both anticipates it and explains the consequences of it—based on the data it already has from your past experiences and social and cultural learnings.

In other words, your brain is always predicting what you will see, feel, and do well before you have conscious awareness of those predictions, and then based on those predictions, your brain actively constructs every thought, perception, and emotion you experience.

Put simply, your brain does not experience reality, it constructs it.

As neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett explains it, “Your brain is wired for delusion: through continual prediction, you experience a world of your own creation that is held in check by the sensory world. Once your predictions are correct enough, they not only create your perception and action but also explain the meaning of your sensations. This is your brain’s default mode.”¹⁵

To keep you alive and well, your brain has to anticipate and make sense of what’s happening externally (in your environment) and internally (what’s happening with your organs, tissues, nervous system, heart, hormones, immune system, etc.). The state of your physical body and the accompanying sensations (what is called interoception) are key to your brain’s predictions and thus key to every thought, perception, and emotion you have.

Most of the time your brain makes the right predictions about internal and external sensations. When actual stimuli do conflict with a prediction, however, your brain can either update the prediction (i.e., it can learn or update its mental model) or it can ignore the conflict. The latter happens far more often than you’re probably aware of, be...