Marie-Hélène Budworth

My research partner, Basak Yanar, and I are recruiting participants for a new study.  We are investigating the effectiveness of a few workshops that train people in job search skills.  All sessions focus on how to use social media to differentiate yourself during your search.  We have put together a program that we believe teaches valuable skills to those looking for work in today’s competitive market. 

Each session is one day long – a variety of dates are available starting this month and running through June 2012.  If you are interested, please feel contact us directly at careerwk@yorku.ca, follow us on twitter @careerwk, or join our Facebook group.

Please pass along this notice to anyone who might be interested. 

Up until this point, this Blog has been largely for students in my Master’s course at York University.  I am not teaching Learning and Development this semester.  In fact, I am about to take a long hiatus from teaching.  On July 1, I will be starting a sabbatical.  If I continued to relate the Blog to my teaching alone, it would be dormant for almost a year with the exception of a few weeks in May. 

I am hoping that I can open the Blog up to a wider audience.  Perhaps I can connect with more practitioners in the HR community, and hear your thoughts on learning and development.  I would also like to reconnect with Alumni from the programs where I have taught.  Please do subscribe and no matter where you are, please consider commenting on the entries.  

It is that time of year again when the media is creating the lists of the top 10, 20, or 100 in whatever discipline is important to them.  I woke up this morning to a tweet from Jian Ghomeshi inducting Amos Lee and his album Mission Bell into the Top 20 Albums of 2011 – a pop culture reference, I know, but a great album regardless. (It is also worth taking a look at National Geographic’s top 10 photos of the year).   There are of course lists that are far more relevant to this Blog – WXN’s top 100 female leaders, the Financial Times business book of the year, Fast Company’s top 100 creative people, and so on.  In the spirit of the end of the year, I created my own list – the top three people who have inspired my thinking this year.  Here we go…

1. Adam Grant.  This guy has been doing really interesting work in motivation.  His work is creative, interesting, and compelling.  One of this themes is to look at what motivates people to help others – prosocial motivation.  This is an interesting question in itself, but he has also developed interesting methods for testing his ideas.  The elegant research designs bring me back to some of the classic psychology experiments that really got me excited as an undergrad when I first took a glimpse into the field of research.  Love it.  I think Grant is the same age as me, but I want to be him when I grow up.

2. Dan Roam. And the whole visual thinking movement.  I blogged about doodling some time ago.  I have been really interested in the idea of visually organizing ideas all year.  I have not yet incorporated it into my own research, but I have brought it into my teaching.  I use it to organize my planning for the class and to convey some ideas in class.  I find that I have to really know what I am talking about in order to be able to represent ideas in this way.  I have always been a writer and reader who enjoys sophisticated simplicity.  You have to understand something thoroughly before you can express it elegantly.  The visual representation of an idea is entirely connected to this notion.  I am still working with this one, but it certainly has shifted how I try to represent my ideas. 

3. Albert Bandura.  This is an oldie but a goodie.  Dr. Bandura has been inspiring me since I began as a researcher.  He is the founder of Social Cognitive Theory.  No matter where I go or what I research I am always struck by the relevance of this theoretical framework.  It really does explain so much much.  As you may know, I am particularly partial to self-efficacy.  This year, I have begun to really focus in on the theme of how people succeed under conditions where others fail.  I have been reading a great deal of positive psychology with constructs such as resilience and persistence, but I keep coming back to  Bandura.  I have come to understand that I see the world through the lens of Social Cognitive theory.  I am inspired by Bandura … and I thank him for a career!

I recognize that I draw my inspiration from places at are completely entrenched within my discipline and connected to my research.  The world is much bigger than this.  Where has your professional inspiration come from in 2011? 

There is a very interesting article about Steve Jobs in the New Yorker magazine written by one of the most gifted non-fiction writers around today, Malcolm Gladwell.  The piece asks us to rethink the contributions that Steve Jobs made to the world.  Since his death, Steve Jobs has been called a large scale visionary.  Gladwell argues that he did not have vision, but that his skill was the ability to take the ideas of others and adjust them so that they became better and more appealing.  As always, Gladwell’s arguments are pretty compelling.  He describes how Jobs “stole” ideas from Xerox and Microsoft and he points out that Jobs’ contributions are pretty narrow.  There are also bits and pieces describing Jobs as a tyrant and bully – likely true but included in this piece largely for colour and storytelling.  The details included in this piece paint a picture of an angry, mean man who was difficult to please and relied on the genius of others to make his own name. 

So does it matter?  I don’t think that anyone would argue that the iPod, iPhone, and iPad changed the ‘game.’  Does it matter that Apple, or Steve Jobs in particular, did not come up the basic concepts first?  Who is going to leave their mark on the world, the person who invented the motor or the person who put it into a car that the masses could afford?  And there is a moral question, do you feel good about jumping off the ideas of others?  And the philosophical question, who owns ideas (I am sure the law has an answer to this one but that is not the question being asked here)?  And the practical question, would we be without the iPod if we did not have room for the type of creativity and design ability that Steve Jobs was so good at? 

The literature on creativity distinguishes creativity from innovation.  Creativity is the development of a new idea – coming up with something novel.  Innovation is the application of that idea – using the creative invention in a meaningful way.  I think it is pretty fair to call Steve Jobs one of the best innovators we have ever seen, but I am a bit of an Apple evangelist.  I am biased by the beautiful design and smooth functioning of all of my Apple products working in concert.  I am blinded by my shiny iPhone 4 and completely in awe of the iMac on which I type this Blog.  I am probably not the one to ask about Steve Jobs’ contributions.  He had me at iPad. 

Yes, that is right.  I said it.  Daniel Kahneman is a rock star.  I recognize that the man in the photo above bears no resemblance to Mick Jagger or Axl Rose but I have to admit that if I saw him out in public I would elbow my girlfriend in the gut and giggle as though I had just spied Justin Bieber. 

Daniel Kahneman is an academic powerhouse who has changed the world with his research and his writing.  And I am not the only person who thinks so.  In 2002, this psychologist won the Nobel prize for Economic Sciences.  The prize was for the work he pioneered with Amos Tversky.  Kahneman and Tversky helped us to understand that we are not always rationale thinkers – in fact, we are incredibly flawed decisions makers largely because of the short cuts our brain uses to make sense of the vast quantities of information that we are required to process at any given moment. 

In my view, the coolest thing about Kahneman’s work is in the design of the studies he conducted in the 60s and 70s.  As an example, he demonstrated that when people are asked to make an estimate when they are uncertain about the boundaries, they rely on anything in the environment on which to ‘anchor.’  He demonstrated this by asking people to estimate how many countries were in the United Nations and then spinning a roulette wheel in front of them.  Their estimates were consistently closer to the number on the roulette wheel than to any other value.  Wicked awesome Kahneman!  This finding is the basis for my paper  on anchoring in the performance evaluation process (see latham budworth yanar whyte.pdf). 

Kahneman is in the news again because he released a new book, Thinking Fast and Slow.  It is an excellent combination of his classic work with Tversky and his understanding of the new advances in the field of decision making.  He describes two mental processes – the thinking that we do automatically and that which is deliberate.  These are the fast and slow processes.  In classic Kahneman story telling, he explains how we think and describes the errors that we are prone to make given our tendency to rely on our automatic processing. If you have the time, pick it up and read it – slowly and deliberately.  If you don’t, check back in a couple weeks and I will provide the Cole’s notes version – and perhaps some inspiration that it has given me for a new piece of research. 

Last Saturday Anne McIlroy wrote a piece for the Globe and Mail entitled ‘A workout program for your brian.’  The basic premise of the piece is that we can exercise the brain and through that exercise the brain becomes ‘smarter’!  This is interesting because it flies in the face of our accepted assumptions about intelligence – you are either smart or you are not (sorry).  Intelligences are believed to be a part of who you are in much the same way that personality defines how you behave.  Intelligence does not change over time.  Moods change, abilities change, skills change – but intelligence you either have or you don’t. 

The research conducted by Sylvain Moreno questions the assumptions that intelligence is defined.  (Take a quick look at this video by Dr. Moreno where he outlines his research program.)  In his research, teaching kids about music activates the part of the brain that is involved in language skill and alters how a child performs on an IQ test.  There is no doubt that this is fascinating work but I question the conclusions that Ms McIlroy has drawn in her review of this work. 

There is a growing body of work on a phenomenon called priming.  This is where an idea is put into someone’s mind without overt conscious awareness.  For example, research participants have been found to walk slowly after having been exposed to words that are often associated with elderly people.  People have been found to report hunger when indirectly primed to think about food. There is also an established line of research on memory that indicates that people are able to recall material that falls on neurological pathways that have recently been activated – even for other purposes.  So really, it could be that activating the parts of the brain that are required for an IQ test allows the brain to prime or activate the pathways required for the test.  By implication, this ‘advantage’ would diminish over time as the exercise wears off – if you don’t use it you loose it!

Despite my lack of clarity on what these findings really mean, there are some interesting organizational applications.  Can we get people ready to perform well on a new task by preparing them with related activities?  Is it fair to give someone a new task and expect superior performance?  Should we giving them some time to get their pathways charged before we expect genius?