By | David Klaasen | Helping You Create Clarity, Inspire Your People & Drive Performance | Retain your best people | Changing Management Mindsets and Behaviour | Practical Behaviour Analytics
Is your fear of losing out clouding your thinking? Are you persisting with a poor strategy just because you have invested a lot of time, effort or money in it? Our evolutionary hard-wiring and hyper-sensitivity to danger and loss has helped us survive and become the most successful species on the planet, but this ancient survival strategy can inhibit growth and damage important relationships because it becomes the Thinking Trap of Safety.
Thinking Traps are the unconscious biases that we have developed as hard-wired survival strategies over the millennia of our existence. While biases are a convenient shortcut to making quick and efficient judgements, they can blind you to important new information or better alternative options when making a decision. The key skill of a modern leader is not to try and stop the biases (which is simply impossible), it is to notice them. Once we are aware and mindful of these thinking traps we can recognise them for what they are and explore if they are really serving us or not.
This is the final article in a mini-series that discusses the SEEDS® Model developed by Dr. David Rock and his colleagues at the Neuroleadership Institute. For a brief overview of the model click here. For the other articles in the series click here.
S is for Safety
The second ‘S’ in the model is for Safety. This is about recognising that the power and influence of ‘Bad’ feelings and experiences are far stronger than those of ‘Good’.
