I've spent much of the last 20 years developing the science of interpersonal trust and showing how powerfully trust drives outcomes. Mary Slaughter, a Managing Director of People Advisory Services at EY, kindly asked me to contribute to an article she wrote at the digital magazine Reworked on optimizing organizational performance by building a culture of trust. Connecting trust to culture was not fast or easy.

Data analysts like to say that more data is always good.

Steamed mussels, white wine, and espresso. Mihaly, or Mike as he preferred to be called in America, had lived here for 45 years but his Hungarian heritage was clear from his lunch. Sitting outdoors on a warm day in a Southern California café, my Claremont Graduate University colleague Mike Csikszentmihalyi described how he discovered the psychological state he named “flow” in the early 1970s. He observed and interviewed painters and other artists who described being so absorbed in their work that they lost track of time. They also reported a sense of bliss during the experience. Mike characterized flow as the pleasurable experience of being actively engrossed in a task. This research has been, and continues to be, very influential.

"I INTEROGATE TERRORISTS FOR A LIVING AND I NEED THAT STUFF TOMORROW!"

"Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others." So said the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero.

Years ago, I served as a consultant to a large ad agency and was invited to join a meeting with a client. The agency presented rough-cut videos of six approaches for an American automobile manufacturer's Super Bowl commercial. The 30-second air time would cost $4 million and toss in another million to the agency for creative and production and you're talking real money.

Neuroscience is awesome! Also, very complicated.   Specially trained scientists need a lab and lots of expensive equipment to figure out what the brain is doing. Especially human brains.

The oil rig Deepwater Horizon exploded in 2010 causing deaths and a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The rig was operated by British Petroleum. BP's CEO, Tony Hayward, issued an apology immediately after the accident saying, "We're sorry for the massive disruption it's caused... There's no one who wants this over more than I do. I'd like my life back." This after 11 men lost their lives in the accident, mothers lost sons, children lost fathers. Hayward was forced to resign a few weeks after the incident due in part to his feeble apology. A month after oil spill, BP's market capitalization had dropped in half, losing $105 billion in value.

Pirates of the Caribbean—that's easily the best ride at Disneyland. At least for me.

On Being One's Own Rabbit is the title of a 1927 article by British scientist and mathematician J.B.S. Haldane (1892-1964). Haldane wrote about a scientific approach with a long history: self-experimentation.  Haldane first did this at the age of eight in his scientist father's home laboratory testing poison gases.  A self-experiment he did as an adult testing high levels of oxygen saturation caused a violent seizure that crushed several of Haldane's vertebrae.  That's commitment.

The editors at Training Magazine asked me if I could identify best practices from the training data collected by Immersion's clients. Excellent idea! Immersion is a prediction engine, so I reviewed anonymized data to identify training that generated high immersion.   Across several analyses, we have found the correlation between immersion and recall runs from 0.60-0.70.   In human-speak, this means if one delivers high immersion training, participants will remember more of the content weeks later. I contacted learning architects at companies that consistently generated high immersion and asked them to share how they structured their training.  The approaches they shared with me are immediately applicable now that the majority of training is being done remotely.

It was such a great idea.  Capture people's emotional states from facial twitches.

TD Magazine invited me to write an article discussing what our clients have learned using the Immersion platform to optimize the delivery and impact of training.  The article explains that the problem with post-training surveys is that people lie.  Yes, shocking! People have great difficulty identifying the value of training and how it can be improved because value comes from the unconscious and emotional regions of the brain.  This is why measuring neural activity during training is absolutely necessary.

I love to sweat.  When working out.

That's me and Dr. Jorge Barraza, Immersion's co-founders, calibrating a high-density electroencephalogram (EEG). Immersion's foundational studies measured brain activity multiple ways using EEG, electrocardiograms (ECG), skin conductance, and changes in neurochemicals in blood.  Over and over.  For hundreds of people. 

Immersion is full of neuro-nerds. In the last 15 years I've done about 10,000 blood draws to measure neurochemicals in order to figure out when the brain knows that an experience is extraordinary.  That's part the comprehensive science that forms the foundation for Immersion—years and years in the lab. 

The Problem

Superfans are thrilled by an experience and they respond in an oversized way.  The scientists at Immersion wondered if superfans just appeared randomly during an experience or if they shared commonalities.  We traced a propensity to superfandom to two personality traits: agreeableness and empathy.  These warm and friendly human beings have high "affect intensity" meaning that they experience stronger emotional responses to experiences compared to other people. 

Ben.  The little boy's name is Ben.  He looks so happy.  So, why is his father heartbroken? 

Every year cars have more automated features, but some people still want to get on the road simply for the fun of driving.  Driving is especially enjoyable when one has the right vehicle for the journey.  I have a Hummer that my dog and I take out to the mountains. I did some research on on off-road vehicles before I bought my Hummer, drove a couple of used ones, and then took the plunge.  Just like dating, it is hard for people to know which car is the right match for them. 

My knees were shaking as I walked onto the stage at the Edinburgh International Conference Center.  I had been invited to give a talk at TED Global, the biggest of the big leagues of public speaking, and I was beyond nervous.  So nervous, that a TED production assistant agreed to click through my slides because I couldn't do it myself in rehearsal.  Speaking at TED was a life-changing experience—my talk has been viewed over 1.6 million times.  But not every TED talk goes viral.  TED curator Chris Anderson warned the speakers that only 80% of what appears live at TED makes it online; the other 20% are just not good enough. So, what makes a TED talk great? 

Teachers get too much and too little credit for student outcomes.

After two days, I resolved that Canberra is the world's most boring city.  That is why I went back to Sydney. 

The global pandemic has forced meetings, teaching, and training to be remote.  Running a remote event, as we have discussed before, is not like running an in-person meeting.  It needs to be structured to keep people immersed when the social pressure of being in a room together is missing.  Immersion's scientists combed through client data who are using our Distributed Neuroscience^TM platform and spoke to users to identify best practices when running remote events. Here's what we have learned.

News or entertainment?

The largest advertiser in the world, consumer products company Proctor & Gamble, cut their digital advertising by over half a billion dollars between 2018 and 2019 because they could not show it was effective. 

Will your attendees stay tuned or click away? 

Fears of the COVID-19 variant of the coronavirus are impacting all unnecessary gatherings, including attending conferences and date nights at the movie theater.  While many of us are now working from home, how is this impacting industries where gathering groups of people are the core of their business?

Many companies built their reputations on surveying a thousand or more people to capture national opinions or TV watching habits.  Today, online survey companies may maintain panels of respondents and can deliver several thousand data points in a week.  We all know bigger is better.

At Immersion, we are "on the ground" technologists.  By that I mean we have partners not clients.  When our partners find new applications for our technology we ask to observe what they are doing to see if we can suggest improvements.  This is just what we did when a partner brought Immersion into K-12 classrooms.

The first time you met your life partner.  Birth of your child.  The destruction and death of 9/11/2001. They are seared into your memory. 

In the 1980’s Coca-Cola was losing market share to Pepsi. The solution, the Coke people thought, was to make a new formula that tasted more like, ahem, Pepsi.  Coca-Cola conducted 30,000 blinded taste tests and found that 55% of people said "New Coke" was better than the original. People also said New Coke tasted better than Pepsi.  Coca-Cola spent over four million dollars to decide if they should launch New Coke.  The people had spoken so the launch was on.

The American Psychological Association christened the 2000s "The Decade of Behavior."  They even invited me to give a keynote address on behavioral neuroscience at their national convention.  The result?  Research by prominent psychologists has shown that fewer studies that seek to explain and predict behavior are being published.  What psychologists have focused on, because it is faster to research and publish, are studies of introspection, feelings, intentions, and other self-reported data that copious research shows are only weakly related to actual behaviors.

Are you ready?

Content is king. 

Great trainers are artists.  You may have seen a few of these: everything they present comes alive and tattoos itself onto your brain.  The experience is extraordinary.

There was a time when answers were delivered to you on paper, or in a PowerPoint slide deck.  If you wanted to know your monthly sales, a person printed it out on big sheets of green and white striped paper for you to review.  If you wanted to dig deep into your product plan for the next year, someone sent you a slide deck.

"Do you mind getting beat up a bit?" 

What do people really feel?

Paul talks with our friends Derek Lundsten and Todd Staples about Immersion Neuroscience and it’s ability to accurately predict market outcomes.

"The challenge with meeting engagement is that it’s really, really tough to measure. Conference planners look at session attendance, session polling, social media buzz, post-event surveys, and more. But understanding the impact that certain ideas, speakers, or live-event environments have on attendees is an inexact science. That just might be changing. Immersion Neuroscience, a company founded by neuroscientist Paul Zak, has a wearable technology that measures immersion in live experiences and video content."

Meetings Today’s Tyler Davidson talks with Bishop-McCann’s Vice President of Sales & Marketing, Tracy Kinsey and Paul Zak of Immersion Neuroscience on using the Immersion Neuroscience software to measure the return on experience in the events/meeting space.

Bishop-McCann powered by Immersion Neuroscience has now created: Return on Experience.

People don’t always tell the truth – watch this video to see 5 examples of how Immersion measures unconscious emotional responses to let you create extraordinary content and experiences!

Trust is the enabler of global business — without it, most market transactions would be impossible. It is also a hallmark of high-performing organizations. Employees in high-trust companies are more productive, are more satisfied with their jobs, put in greater discretionary effort, are less likely to search for new jobs, and even are healthier than those working in low-trust companies. Businesses that build trust among their customers are rewarded with greater loyalty and higher sales. And negotiators who build trust with each other are more likely to find value-creating deals.

El pasado miércoles 5 de junio, estuvimos en las oficinas de Accenture Argentina en el barrio porteño de Parque Patricios.