EFFORT VERSUS TALENT

Yesterday, the Irish international soccer team kicked off their European Championship adventure with a match against Croatia. Despite qualifying for the finals, the team has shipped a lot of criticism. Under the guidance of Italian manager Giovanni Trappattoni, they eschew fancy, skilful football for a pragmatic approach that emphasises organisation, discipline and effort.

Today’s fast paced, information-rich world is a demanding and competitive environment as well. Work is increasingly mentally tough, requiring the ability to process large amounts of information quickly and to come up with creative and innovative solutions. So should we recruit talented people or hard workers? And more importantly how should we manage them over time?

To this end it is worth revisiting a classic piece of research on children which was published by Carol Dweck over 10 years ago. She took several hundred New York schoolchildren and gave them a test. Afterwards she praised half for effort (‘you must have worked really hard’) and the other half for intelligence (‘you must be smart at this’). Then she offered the children a choice of two further tests – one at the same level as the first and another more difficult. The results were fascinating. Of those praised for effort, 90 percent chose the harder test and the numbers were reversed in the case of those praised for intelligence. Dweck’s conclusions were that the intelligence group were scared of failure while the effort group were keen to learn from their mistakes. This conclusion was reinforced when the pupils were offered the choice of looking at the test papers of those who had done better or worse than them. Almost all the intelligence group chose to boost their self-esteem by looking at the work of those below them, while most of the effort group examined better test papers to understand their mistakes. In subsequent tests, the effort pupils raised their average scores by 30 per cent, while the intelligence group average dropped by 20 per cent.

The implications are obvious. Whether you are working with children or knowledge workers (and sometimes the differences are not all that clear!!) it is much better to focus on effort than on outcomes. You want your employees to be challenged by complex problems and to be keen to put the effort into coming up with solutions. Moreover, you do not want them to be afraid of failure because discontinuous innovations almost inevitably have high failure rates. These have to be tolerated to ultimately get the results that you want.

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Is the Internet Changing Your Brain?

Chris Horn, co-founder of Iona Technologies and commentator on matters technology raised an interesting question in a recent article in the Irish Times, when he asked do we really need to keep tabs on all the information that floods to us daily through tweets, feeds, inboxes and so on? Related to this is the issue of what is all of this information doing to our brains, as many of us, who have grown up processing things in certain ways struggle to cope with the overload that we now currently face. The notion that these machines are impacting on how we think is something that deeply troubles many people.

The bottom line is that, yes, using the internet is changing our brains. But then so does everything that we do because that is how your brain works. Brains are characterised by plasticity, which means that new connections are being generated all the time. So your brain changes if you learn how to play the guitar or do Sudoku. That is why, contrary to some conventional wisdom, you can choose to start learning a new language at 70 if you want to. The ability of the brain to adapt to new stimuli is probably one of the key reasons why we have been such a successful species.

The more interesting question is how the internet is changing the brain and this is the subject of a very insightful recent book by Nicholas Carr entitled The Shallows. In short, he provides compelling evidence that it is causing us lose some of our ability to think deeply as we scan content quickly moving between text, images, sounds and hyperlinks. Just as the neurons that fire together wire together, those that do not fire together do not wire together. Time spent scanning Web pages crowds out the time for reading books or contemplating ideas. As we gain new skills and perspectives, we lose old ones. There is a growing body of research which shows that our level of understanding is lower when we consume information through the Web than through print for example. With its characteristics of immediacy, interactivity and sensory stimulation, the internet is a distraction medium which impacts on the ability to think deeply.

Carr reckons that the Net might just be the most mind-altering technology that has ever come into general use. Ever the entrepreneur, Chris Horn surmises that a facility which enables us to quickly find the insightful things that we have read while using it may just be the next big opportunity!

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