How tuning into emotions is the key to unlocking the superpower of consortium projects
“..we should not be afraid of using our feelings to implement and to catalyze fact-based science and innovation. Emotions and logic do not oppose each other. They complement each other, and they reinforce each other.” Ilona Stengel Ted Talk
Ilona Stengel is a material researcher who was part of a large team working to build better OLED materials.
Unfortunately the company decided to close down the program. Stengel and some of her colleagues were really put out by this because they were passionate about their work. They felt they were doing something meaningful.
What made it particularly frustrating was the fact that they were just starting to make major headway.
Because of their passion, Stengel and a few of her colleagues continued to do the work.
They achieved a major breakthrough in increasing the lifespan of the materials used for the OLED which resulted in a major success for the company.
Its easy to develop a similar sort of passion for the work one is doing in life sciences.
After all work in the life sciences has the potential to change the lives of individuals suffering from disease. But awakening passion is only a fraction of the value of tuning into emotions.
You cannot escape the fact that emotions affect decision making.
When you keep the emotions just in your mind and you do not 'feel' them in your body you can get stuck revisiting a problem over and over again. This is called emotional looping (1).
Your mind is constantly checking your body’s reaction to assign an emotion to it. If you have a habit of ignoring or resisting those physical manifestations of feelings in your body, emotions will be trapped in your mind.
Furthermore, emotions confined to the mind alone will be compared to past experiences leading to rumination. One then tends to respond with hard and fast rules for how to deal with a given situation.
When you are dealing with the complex problems that need to be solved in life science rumination or hard and fast rules are the opposite of the creativity that is needed.
What if the racing heart, or tightness in the chest is an indication from your subconscious that you conscious mind is missing something?
The subconscious is a powerful mode of thinking. It is after all the subconscious, or slow thinking, that is often credited with the coming up with creative ideas and solutions to problems.
Another example of how avoiding emotions affects your decision making is uncertainty.
Uncertainty can paralyze a consortium.
The same issue gets discussed time and time again. Just when it looks like a decision is going to be made the discussion veers in a different direction as if the uncertainty of the decision acts as a deflector beam.
Yet uncertainty is a requirement for meaningful achievement.
Ideas where there is certainty about being able to achieve success and certainty about what needs to be done are usually not ideas for long.
The feeling of uncertainty may be borne out of experience.
Everyone has had the experience of a project that is so complex and/or under-resourced that is frustratingly slow to progress.
As a consequence most are biased towards focusing on more immediate and simpler to reach horizons, yet immediate and simpler to reach horizons are anemic compared to what is possible in a longer term ambitious project.
"Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years." - Bill Gates
The consequence is that if enough people feel uncertain and default to the minimalist ambitions, decisions to move towards more ambitious and meaningful goals can be delayed.
There is a real risk the discussion on the issue that requires a decision is repeated endlessly.
The consortium or disease foundation becomes frozen in mediocrity.
It should be clear now that ignoring bodily manifestations of emotion is not an optimal strategy for thinking through situations and making decisions.
The key then is to feel in your mind and your body.
What should you do with emotions manifested as bodily sensations?
Before making a decision or advocating for a given decision pause and think about how it makes you feel.
For example if you have a physical response that indicates fear, pause and ask yourself why you are having that emotion. What are you afraid of?
Then ask yourself if avoiding what you are afraid of in the consortium's best interest?
This may not be obvious.
For example when there is a conflict between partners you might feel fear as a clenched jaw or a tenseness in your arms.
When there is a conflict it is almost always that there is something that needs to be resolved.
While you may think that by avoiding conflict you are serving the consortium. But will that conflict get resolved?
A festering conflict is a much greater risk that a short term blow out.
Or maybe the emotion you are trying to avoid is loneliness or separation, which you feel as a hollowness in the pit of your stomach.
So you decide not to speak up and go along with a decision, even though you know better.
But is groupthink good for the consortium or are contrarian opinions helpful?
Strategies to Prevent Feelings from Harming the Best Interest of the Consortium
Som Bathla defines decision making as a process of deciding what to do based upon values, preferences, and beliefs (2).
Bathla’s individual bases of decision making are equivalent to the foundational elements of strategy: values, mission, purpose, and vision.
Thus, consortium wide alignment on strategy can serve as a guide for decision making both for the consortium and for individuals who are feeling uneasy about a decision about to be made.
Does your reason for having a particular emotion line up with the consortium's values, mission, purpose, and vision? Or is it something personal?
Take for example a decision to share a dataset with a group outside the consortium.
This can create a level of anxiety and unease on an individual basis, particularly if you are planning to do something with the data being shared.
When you feel uncertain that the data should be shared, but one of the consortium values is openness, you can use that value as a reminder about what it means to align with the group. Such a process can help accelerate decision making, but it does not necessarily mean you are sacrificing your own interests for the sake of the greater good.
Openness is not just a value it is also a strategy.
As a strategy openness is about leveraging the relationships built through being open to do more.
Knowing this you could then plan to reach out to the group with which the data is being shared to work together and develop new ideas.
This is why it is important to take the time to carefully craft a strategy that includes a set of values with your consortium partners.
Passion to persist in doing crazy things
As Google’s Larry Page said everyone should be doing some crazy things:
“If you are not doing some things that are crazy they you’re doing the wrong things.”
Rationale thinking cannot motivate you do crazy things, while passion can. Often the challenges in life sciences require attempting to do seemingly crazy things.
As per Ilona Stengel, emotions can reinforce logic.
When you notice the manifestation of fear or uncertainty in your body threatening to paralyze you, and subsequently your consortium or disease foundation you can evoke your passion for achieving something crazy to help you push through the uncertainty and fear.
Emotional intelligence and collective intelligence
While Emotional Intelligence is best known because of Daniel Goleman's book of the same name where he argues that Emotional Intelligence is a better predictor of success than IQ.
However, Emotional intelligence was first defined in 1990 by Salovey and Mayer (3).
They were reacting to the fact that many view emotions as something to overcome and ignore. They saw emotions differently:
"We view emotions as organized responses, crossing the boundaries of many psychological subsystems, including the physiological, cognitive, motivational, and experiential systems.”
They also believed emotions were adaptive:
"We view the organized response of emotions as adaptive ,and as something that can potentially lead to a transformation of personal and social interaction into enriching experience."
They defined emotional intelligence as:
"the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to differentiate among them, and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions."
In a consortium project or when working with multiple stakeholders to co-design strategy, emotional intelligence helps guide the collective thinking of a group.
By identifying your emotions, understanding their origin and then speaking up you provide an insight that might not have been considered before.
Transparency and open communication, both of ideas and emotions, is the key to successful decision making within a consortium.
If anything, take the emotions you are feeling as a cue that you should open up and listen, truly listen to the dialogue that is happening.
See if you can build on the ideas making them better instead of tearing them down because of your personal fear of uncertainty.
Such insights may help avoid groupthink and they may inspire others to share their own uncertain fears and insights.
Not only does it enable you to understand your own emotions and how they influence your decisions, but it also creates awareness of how your emotions affect others.
You may notice a member being quiet during a meeting and understand that they could be uncomfortable or uncertain.
By addressing the situation with empathy and understanding, you can strive to create an environment that encourages honest dialogue.
It is often the quieter individuals who have the best solutions.
One of the biggest, if not the most important advantages to working in a consortium is that you have immediate access to a diversity of expertise and perspectives, what is otherwise known as collective intelligence.
If you standby while those who are feeling uncertain clam up, or decide to align with the group, making group think more likely, you diminish the group’s collective intelligence.
This is probably what is behind the “The magic of collective emotional intelligence..” described by Curseu et. al. (4)
They found that in learning groups the more collective emotional intelligence the more effective a group was.
They also found that the more women in a group the more collective emotional intelligence the group developed. Paying attention to your emotions and the emotions of others is a great way to build up relationships and trust what is known as social capital.
Having a large amount of social capital enables a consortium or disease foundation to embark and riskier and more ambitious projects (5)
By not paying attention to emotions, your own and those of others, you are not benefitting from the collective intelligence of the group.
Its like driving a Ferrari but never shifting out of first gear.
Emotions as a key to consortium project success
Acknowledging and managing emotions are essential components of effective consortium projects.
Emotional intelligence is not just a personal attribute, but a collective one; it fuels discussion, prevents groupthink and contributes to collective intelligence.
Harnessing the power of emotions means embracing conflict, uncertainty, and discomfort, but it also promises richer dialogue, more thoughtful decisions, and greater potential for innovation.
To run a consortium project to its full potential, we must engage not just our minds, and not just our logic, but our hearts as well.
It's about knowing when to switch gears, and this knowledge comes from listening to our emotions, being aware of how these emotions affect both our decisions and others, and using these insights for the betterment of the consortium and its mission.
The key to unlocking the superpower of consortium projects truly lies in tuning into our emotions.
Don’t settle for mediocrity
I help develop and guide consortium projects and the co-design of strategy. When you are ready to build a new project or develop strategy as a way to improve an ongoing consortium project or disease foundation let’s set up a call.
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The Best Decision Making is Emotional - Johnny Miller Every https://every.to/p/the-best-decision-making-is-emotional?sid=21977
Make Smart Choices, by Som Bathla
Salovey, P.; Mayer, J.D. Emotional Intelligence. Imagin. Cogn. Pers. 1990, 9, 185–211.
Petru L. Curseu, Helen Pluut, Smaranda Boros and Nicoleta Meslec “The magic of collective emotional intelligence in learning groups: No guys needed for the spell!” British Journal of Psychology (2015), 106, 217–234
Fountain, Jane E.. “Social Capital: A Key Enabler of Innovation.” Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
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