Do Your Slides Pass the Glance Test?

An audience can't listen to your presentation and read detailed, text-heavy slides at the same time (not without missing key parts of your message, anyway). So make sure your slides pass what I call the glance test: People should be able to comprehend each one in about three seconds.

Think of your slides as billboards. When people drive, they only briefly take their eyes off their main focus — the road — to process billboard information. Similarly, your audience should focus intently on what you're saying, looking only briefly at your slides when you display them.

Keep It Simple
Research shows that people learn more effectively from multimedia messages when they're stripped of extraneous words, graphics, animation, and sounds. Lots of extras actually take away meaning because they become a distraction. They overtax the audience's cognitive resources.

So when adding elements to your slides, have a good reason: Does the audience need to see your logo on each slide to remember who you work for? Does that blue swoosh add meaning? If not, leave it off. The same goes for text. Keep it short and easy to skim. Scale the type as large as possible so the people in the back of the room can see it.

It's also important to stick to a consistent visual style in your slide deck. Select one typeface — two at most. Use the same color palette throughout (limit yourself to three complementary colors, plus a couple of neutral shades, like gray and pale blue). Photos should be taken by the same photographer or look as if they are. Illustrations should be done in the same style.

Consider the "before" slide below. It fails the glance test because it's packed with text. It's functioning like a teleprompter — which may help you remember what to cover but won't make it easier for the audience to digest it.

Instead, streamline the text and incorporate simple visual elements (and save teleprompter text for the "notes" field, which the audience can't see). You'll reinforce your message and make it easier for people to get what you're saying. Here's an "after" slide to illustrate:

Arrange Slide Elements with Care
Another way to help people process your visuals more quickly: Think like a designer when you arrange slide elements.

These five design principles will help you simplify your slides so they'll pass the glance test:

Flow. You can direct people's eyes to certain areas of a slide to emphasize important points. Here, for example, your eye takes in the cluster of grapes, then moves to the message about quality, and then focuses on one beautiful grape from the "yield":

Contrast. Our eyes are drawn to things that stand out, so designers use contrast to focus attention. Create contrast through your elements' size, shape, color, and proximity. In this example, a presenter compared cross-sections of skin and soil to show that tending to both requires an understanding of the microbiological activity beneath the surface. The blurred backgrounds set off the stark white illustrations for quick visual processing:

White space. White space is the open space surrounding items of interest. Presenters are often tempted to fill it up with additional content that competes for attention. But including a healthy amount of white space sharpens viewers' focus by isolating elements. In this example, if we'd paired the text with a larger or more detailed image, your eye wouldn't know where to begin, and the quote would have lost its power:

Hierarchy. A clear visual hierarchy allows viewers to quickly ascertain a slide's most important elements:

Unity. Slides with visual unity look as though the same person created them and make your message feel cohesive. You can achieve this through consistent type styles, color, image treatment, and element placement throughout the slide deck. Here's a pair of slides to illustrate:

Presentation software gives us many shiny, seductive elements to work with. But there's beauty and clarity in restraint. Use simple visuals that support your message, and you'll free people up to really hear — and adopt — your ideas.

Do Your Slides Pass the Glance Test?
Nancy Duarte

Know Your Customers Wherever They Are

Jane wants to buy a TV and starts her shopping journey with a Google search. She finds an electronics review site, clicks on a banner ad, reads about the product details, and decides to go into the store to see the model. She speaks with a sales associate and posts a picture of the TV on Facebook for her friends' feedback. She also uses her smartphone to do a quick price comparison, and scans the QR code to get additional product information.

Welcome to problem #1 for retailers: The company knows that a potential customer has interacted with it across a lot of touch points but it has no idea that all these interactions are with Jane. It can track each of these interactions across touchpoints, but doesn't know how to tie them to an individual customer. Since each touchpoint yields a particular piece of data, this becomes a complex data management challenge.

Retailers are desperate to unlock this intelligence so they can make more personalized offers. Research shows that personalization can deliver five to eight times the ROI on marketing spend and lift sales 10% or more.

Here are four keys to tracking today's multichannel customers.

Be systematic
Many companies assign unique customer IDs but lack a systematic way to enrich them to form an integrated view of the channel-surfing customer. A systematic approach requires you to identify and evaluate all of the touch points where you interact with a customer. Too many retailers miss out on valuable insights by stopping at either the data that's at hand or data that is already easily matched with a customer, such as purchases across multiple credit cards. When building your enriched customer views, start with priority customers or segments (big spenders, loyal spenders, future spenders, and so on).

Focus on the important data
Even though your goal is to track all touchpoints, don't try to harness 100% of the data. Most companies already have plenty of customer data, but don't tie it together to create a richer picture of their consumers. In our experience, the most fruitful insights come from combining transaction data (such as purchase amounts over time), browsing data (including mobile), and customer service data (such as returns by region). Focus on data that will help you achieve specific marketing goals. For example, if you need to build customer loyalty, concentrate on gathering data from post-purchase touch points like customer service logs or responses to up- or cross-sell emails.

These data rarely exist in one place in the organization so you'll need to pull in people from multiple functions such as marketing, sales, in-store operations, IT, and beyond. We've seen companies create small "SWAT" teams that assemble people from these functions to break through bureaucratic logjams.

Fill in the data holes
There are three main types of external data sources that can be invaluable. Following are examples of each - but these just scratch the surface.
Data you can buy

1. Broad census data from companies like Experian or Axiom can match hundreds of public and private sources to identify consumers, for example through credit card matches or telephone numbers.
2. Panel data from companies like Nielsen and Compete provide access to a full set of customer actions of about 2 million people. These provide granular views of the customer, such as records of every web page visited and consumer purchase made over a one to two year period.
3. "Traveling cookie" data build a digital footprint of a consumers based on their logins at popular sites (for example, on airline sites or Facebook). Once the customer logs in, the cookie follows that customer wherever he or she goes on the web. Datalogix aggregates data across hundreds of logins and matches it back to a database of more than 100 million households. This connection helps marketers identify consumers on their own sites and others' and link sales to prior behaviors.

Data you can request from customers
Retailers should encourage customers to self-identify by logging in to the website, using a loyalty card in store, or identifying themselves when calling customer care. Gap, for example, will always ask for your email address when you buy a product. Other companies provide mobile coupons in exchange for cell numbers.

Data you can partner for
Companies with complementary data sets can combine insights by partnering. Vendors such as Visa have partnered with retailers to introduce highly targeted location-based offers to consumers as they make purchases. Scan your Visa at a Gap to make a purchase, and get offers on your smartphone for retailers within walking distance.

Match the data with the customer
This wealth of data is only useful if you can build the complex algorithms needed to connect data collected from these streams to your unique customer IDs. You'll also need IT systems that automatically update a customer's profile each time he or she interacts with you at a given touchpoint and scrub the data to ensure accuracy (e.g., validating emails). The organizational and technology challenges are significant, and we have touched on only a few of them here. But we've seen big pay-offs for retailers who can follow individual customers across media and channels. Increasingly, such a capability is not just nice to have; it will be essential for any retailer who hopes to stay in the game. 

Know Your Customers Wherever They Are
Josh Leibowitz, Kelly Ungerman and Maher Masri

10 Reasons to Stay in a Job for 10 Years

When we looked at the newest data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, released in mid-September, what we found was quite alarming.

As of January 2012, the median time that wage and salary workers in the U.S. had been with their current employers was just 4.6 years. Other recent data points are equally disturbing: The staffing company Randstad says that 40% of employees are planning to look for a new job within the next six months. Another survey notes that 69% of employees are already at least passively shopping for new job opportunities via social media today.

Clearly, statistics show the majority of employees at every level are unhappy enough in their current positions to be actively or at least passively considering new jobs.

As business owners, we have big incentives to do all we can to keep our talented people around. But beyond our own motives, we think it's often good for employees to stick around, too. Here are the 10 reasons why we think executives and employees need to think carefully before making a jump:

1. Seniority: Executives who remain at a single company are able to rise in seniority, rather than having to compete for a stronger role at each new company as they go.

2. Leadership Opportunities: With seniority comes the chance to lead others and mentor newcomers through the transition to their new jobs. Executives who build loyal followings are naturally upheld by their teams, rather than having to defend the authority they've been given in a new firm by decree.

3. Stability: If executives are perpetually moving, it's difficult to make long-term plans. A little stability in career and workplace can help them cope more effectively with the stresses that are sure to occur within the rest of their lives.

4. Homeownership and retirement funds: Job hoppers pay a high price in home equity and retirement accounts. Every job change that requires a move will also enact a high transaction cost to change homes, which is never ideal outside of chosen opportunities to move to a more suitable home. Stability is also appealing to banks--lenders look more favorably on prospective borrowers who've held consistent jobs for a minimum of two years, and preferably more. Vesting in 401K and stock option programs is generally badly affected by hops. So while executives think they may gain an advantage by jumping for a sign-on bonus or raise, in the long term, the employees who maximize vesting schedules and maintain their retirement accounts will likely excel.

5. Increased Benefits: Many companies increase paid time off for employees who stay at a job for a certain number of years. Executives who stay can spend more time with their families and achieve more lifestyle goals with the extra time off and the extra stock and retirement savings long-term employment affords.

6. Self-Improvement: Executives who show the resilience to address their weaknesses rather than jumping ship and blaming their discontent on former co-workers and bosses may often be further ahead.

7. Dependability: An executive who is willing to stay the course for 10 or more years (which is typical in Japan and other European countries) demonstrates a level of dependability that companies will generally reward and respect.

8. Flexibility: Most people who stay at a company for a decade or more progress through multiple increasingly challenging roles while they're there. They typically try their hands at a variety of roles to help determine what they're most passionate about. The difference between moving within a company and moving between companies is that executives are able to retain their status and benefits while also being free to experiment and try some new things.

9. Perseverance: It's easy to quit over perceived unfairness or serious challenges. But it shows much stronger character to persevere, to find and enact solutions to problems, repair damage, and to take an active role in turning a situation around. (However, anyone who works in a genuinely toxic corporate environment should absolutely take their leave, as quickly as possible, and move on.)

10. A Say in the Company's Future: An executive can have a positive influence on their company's direction if they're willing to stick with the organization through good times and bad.

This is true for our company, and it's especially true for the opportunity we're beginning right now. Our team had a very direct role in buying ownership of our company back from a former investor in May of 2010. 

We're in the process right now of granting stock options to nearly half of our employees, and many more will receive shares within the coming six months. Now the employees and management own the company. Stock option ownership is based on behaviors that align with our 7 Non Negotiable principles, which you've heard us mention before.

In essence, we're creating opportunity for our employees to engage as entrepreneurs at every level of the company, without the risks or the drawbacks of founding a startup firm on their own.

We're working hard to give our employees good reason to stay with our company for the very long term, if not for life. We hope and believe we're far from alone. But regardless, given the many solid reasons for staying the course in a single company, shouldn't you take a second look at staying put in your own current job?

10 Reasons to Stay in a Job for 10 Years
David K. Williams and Mary Michelle Scott

Never Say No to Networking

When new entrepreneurs ask me for advice, I sometimes tell them to NYFO — Network Your Face Off. Nearly everything I've accomplished in the past two years, from speaking on CNN to watching my company cross 1.7 million users in less than a year, can be directly traced back to connections I've made and help I've received from a network that is vast, diverse, and active.

The best networking suggestion I can offer? Always say yes to invitations, even if it's not clear what you'll get out of the meeting. I'm not arguing for long, pointless, unstructured conversations with everyone you meet. But many of my most fruitful relationships have resulted from a meeting or call in which I was not entirely sure what would or would not come of the conversation.

You could call it making your own luck, by increasing the odds of making the right connection. Because you can't assume that you know much about someone you don't know very well. You may know their occupation, industry, and job title — but you don't know what they may be an expert in, and you certainly don't know who they know.

Of course you can't possibly take every meeting. But regularly connecting without a reason or purpose — with people who seem to be doing interesting things — can have unexpected benefits. Two of the people who were instrumental in recommending me for Forbes 30-under-30 were serendipitous connections. Some of the best partnerships we've secured for The Muse (the company I founded) came through casual acquaintances who saw me and made a mental connection — even when I didn't.

Hand in hand with this philosophy comes another, highly complementary strategy: When you want something, broadcast that to everyone you meet. When talking about your desires for your business, be honest. A little candor, a little vulnerability, goes a long way in turning a conversation from trite to meaningful. For a period in January, I desperately wanted to land a partnership with Yahoo. For an entire month, I answered every "How are things going?" question with some variation of: "Great! I just started YCombinator, which has been an adventure. Now I'm trying to put together a partnership with Yahoo. How are things with you?"

Ninety-seven times out of a hundred, the conversation continued as normal, with a reciprocal introduction or update and additional exchanging of information and small talk. But three people I spoke to were different: They immediately responded by suggesting they had a former colleague, relative, mailman, or friend at Yahoo, and would I like an introduction? In thirty days, I went from no relationships at Yahoo to three warm introductions to power players who could make my desired content syndication partnership happen. Six weeks later, Daily Muse content went live on Yahoo! Shine.

I didn't know any of those three people had a Yahoo connection; in fact, they were hardly the ones I would have deemed most likely. And quite frankly, if I had sent out an email asking one hundred people in my network if they knew anyone at Yahoo, it would certainly have felt like an imposition. But the strategy of taking a broad range of meetings and letting everyone know the problem I was tackling — that strategy worked, and it has worked again and again in the months since. When doing this, be sure to deliberately pick problems that can be solved by introductions (fundraising, talking to certain companies) rather than those that require the sustained thoughts of individuals (product decisions, specifics of growth strategies).

You may be asking, how can I make these connections in the first place? Show up, and often. This should be obvious, but as a busy entrepreneur it's amazing how unappealing it is to socialize with people you don't know when you're working 16-hour days. But everything starts with showing up.

Commit to going to one industry-related event per week, then three, then eight. Sign up for events newsletters in your industry (The Fetch and Charlie O'Donnell's This Is Going to Be BIG are good examples for the New York City area). People also tend to offer opportunities to those who are most recently in their memory. I can't tell you the number of times I've gone to an event and exchanged a few warm sentences with someone I haven't connected with in a while — only to hear from them a few days later: "This opportunity to speak / present / fundraise / partner / win an award crossed my desk, and I thought of you." Why did they think of me? Because I'm a good fit for the opportunity, and they saw me yesterday. Be the person they saw yesterday as often as possible.

Networks are powerful, and when done right leave you surrounded by a core of individuals who are all rooting for your success and happy to help you. The building blocks of a great network aren't purpose-driven meetings — they're casual encounters, agenda-less coffee catch-ups, and even favors for people who don't seem to be in any position to help you right now. Build your network that way, and when you present your acquaintances with a problem they realize they can solve for you — they'll be right there with an offer to help.

Never Say No to Networking
Kathryn Minshew

Put Failure in Its Place

You've started a company and it goes belly-up. Or you launched a new product and not only does it fail to sell, customers actually hate it. Or you get fired.

What happens when you dare to dream, make that dream real, and then fail?

There's the plucky Henry Ford quotation which admittedly, and almost embarrassingly, I have used: "Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently." Since Ford was eventually wildly successful, this aphorism does reassure, but it also jauntily skips over the emotional precipice on which we teeter when we fail. No matter how many chirpy quotes I may tweet out, when I fail my initial response is despondency, pessimism, and the feeling that perhaps I need to relocate to another city because I can never show my face in public. Ever. Again. I tend to identify with Margery Eldredge Howell, who said: "There's dignity in suffering, nobility in pain, but failure is a salted wound that burns and burns again."

As I have grappled with my own this-just-may-break-me failures, I am increasingly convinced that dreaming must be a process, an engine of experimentation. As we practice innovating we are propelled up a personal learning curve — and we begin to accomplish our dreams. But implicit in daring to disrupt the status quo is daring to fail. As we learn by doing and do by learning something will eventually (and inevitably) not work. As former DARPA official Ken Gabriel said, "An important part of disruption is having the nerve to take on a really big failure." At this critical juncture in the process of dreaming, we must decide how we will approach failure: Did I fail my way into a black hole? Or is failure a tool that will help me innovate more effectively?

For those inclined toward the latter, consider the following:

1. Acknowledge sadness. When you start a company, launch a new product, or take on a job, there is the fantasy of a simple linear world: you will work hard and your dream will happen. And then it doesn't work. My whales of fails have ranged from not making cheerleader during high school (mortifying at the time) to bombing a speech in front of hundreds of people (still mortifying). Then there was the experience of being fired and backing a business that imploded. Apart from feeling mortified, I was heartbroken. I had been all-in. I had envisioned a future in which I would achieve a goal, perhaps be hailed as the conquering hero. And then I wasn't. I've learned it is important to grieve. When we sublimate the sadness, we risk losing our passion, an essential lubricant for the engine of innovation.

2. Jettison shame. If you let a failure become a referendum on you, the millstone of shame will drown you and your dreams. According to the groundbreaking research of shame and vulnerability expert Dr. Brené Brown, this is especially acute for those involved in professional sports, the military, and corporate life. Paraphrasing from the book Daring Greatly, Brown writes, "When the ethos is 'kill or be killed', 'control or be controlled', failure is tantamount to 'be killed'." Being perceived as weak elicits tremendous shame. For example, that speech I bombed: by the time I finished, it looked as if I'd just run 3 miles, I was perspiring so much. The business I fronted that went belly-up: shouldn't I have better read the situation? How could I purport to be a savvy investor? The shame we feel when we fail must be deep-sixed, labeled as the detritus that it is. If it isn't, we may never speak in public again, throw ourselves into another job or invest in another company. Failure doesn't limit dreaming and innovation — shame does. Once we pull shame out of the equation, we eliminate the drag on innovating and gain the lift we need to accelerate back into daring.

3. Learn the right lesson. One of the reasons we love the Henry Ford quote is the context: Ford failed and learned, rising triumphantly. It's also why I like this quote from J.K. Rowling: "Rock bottom became the solid foundation upon which I rebuilt my life". As we are faced with interim failures in our innovation process, the narrative we construct is key. It's not just that you learn a lesson. It's about learning the right kind of lesson, or what Lean Startup guru Eric Ries describes as validated learning. Which elicits the question: what valuable truth did you discover about the present and future prospects of your start-up (or your dream) by failing? For example, did I learn to never speak in public again? Rather, I discovered that standing behind a podium became a barrier that made the speech about me, which made me overwhelmingly nervous. I learned that moving away from the podium helped me have a conversation with and connect to my audience. Was my takeaway from the business that imploded to never invest in another friend's business? Instead, I gained the valuable insight that vetting prospective partners is vital, as are clear rules of engagement. "Learning is the essential unit of progress for start-ups," writes Ries. Learning, I would argue, is also a basic unit of progress for dreaming.

I say it's time we put failure in its proper place. For most of us, the mere prospect of failure is a take-no-prisoners mind game, pushing us to the edge of an emotional cliff, where shame would happily push us over. But in a world in desperate need of innovation, it's time to bury shame and to see failure for what it is — an opportunity to learn valuable truths and a signal that our start-up, job, product or idea matters, really matters, so much so that we are willing to invest not only our minds, but our hearts. That's something worth dreaming about.

Put Failure in Its Place
Whitney Johnson

Three Symptoms of a Vulnerable Team

A number of years ago, I worked on an executive team in which everyone was located in the same building but people seemed frustratingly far apart. Yet at my first job out of business school, I worked on a number of teams in which we were scattered across the globe but I felt closely connected with those individuals. What accounts for such huge, seemingly counterintuitive differences?

One model that explains the disconnect comes from some interesting research by Karen Sobel-Lojeski at Stony Brook University. From her research studying more than 600 teams, she has developed a new concept — called "virtual distance" — that measures the perceived isolation of members in a team that relies on electronic communications. Three categories of different factors determine virtual distance:

1. Physical distance: the geographic separation of the members (including differences in time zones) and whether everyone works for the same company or for multiple organizations.

2. Operational distance: the type and quality of communications (whether, for instance, the team is able to meet face-to-face at crucial junctures of a project), the outside demands of members (whether they are also working on other projects), their technological fluency (how comfortable they are with using virtual tools such as online collaborate software, and the availability of technical support), and the member distribution (the degree to which the team has a centralized location versus being scattered across numerous sites).

3. Affinity distance: the cultural differences and communication styles of members, their disparity in hierarchical status in the organization (and whether their contributions are acknowledged), their past familiarity with each other, and their interdependence (whether they have a sense of "shared future and fate.") 

In her work, all of these factors were measured and plotted, allowing managers to determine whether a team was vulnerable to problems and, more importantly, where those problems were likely to arise. For example, a team at a large financial services firm in her study displayed medium-high physical distance, low-medium operational distance, but high affinity distance, indicating potential issues there. For the teams that I worked on right after business school, we might have had high physical distance but low operational and affinity distance, which defined our working relationship and ultimately our success. Sobel-Lojeski's plots are like a patient's medical history — with blood results, cholesterol numbers, x-rays, and so on. Just as doctors use such medical information to assess a patient's risk of heart disease, managers can use "virtual distance" data to predict whether a team is likely to fall short of its goals.

What's the cost of such failures? Sobel-Lojeski has done a quantitative analysis, and her results are eye-opening. Teams that have high virtual distance suffer a 90% drop in innovation effectiveness, more than 80% plunge in trust, and 60% decline in finishing projects on time and within budget, among other negative effects. To avoid such costly problems, here are a few best practices we have culled from a number of primary and secondary sources, including our own work in this space, coaching high-impact teams at Reuters, General Motors, Lincoln Financial Group, Ebay, and many other companies.

Don't overestimate the effects of physical distance. Co-located teams can have a much higher virtual distance than those that are dispersed. People who have worked on numerous teams of different types will probably not find that result surprising. But here's where it gets really interesting. Sobel-Lojeski found that, by far, affinity distance (and not physical or operational distance) has the greatest effect on innovation, trust, learning, and other team outcomes.

Avoid being penny-wise but pound-foolish. Many companies have slashed their travel budgets, especially given the current economic downturn. But that might be penny-wise and pound-foolish when it comes to teams with a high virtual distance. For such teams, a company needs to consider investing in measures that will help decrease the virtual distance - for example, spending $40,000 for face-to-face meetings during critical junctions of a project. Otherwise, the total cost to the company could be far greater in terms of missed deadlines, budget overruns, lost market opportunities, and so on.

Go for the low-hanging fruit. Shortening the affinity distance of a team will have the greatest long-term effect, but it is also perceived as the most challenging to accomplish. We have proven that simple storytelling among members has a significant impact on the group's affinity, along with a continual personal and professional check-in process we call "Take 5" at the beginning of meetings. Sobel-Lojeski also suggests that managers consider the quick fix of shortening the operational distance, which might have a more temporary effect but is relatively easy to address. For example, a company could free up team members from competing commitments (at least temporarily) and provide ample training and support for the latest online collaboration tools. We have found that even the use of videoconferencing can yield significant results.

Leverage small changes into large effects. When trying to shorten a team's affinity distance, even small actions can resonate into large differences. If a team includes a diverse mix of cultures and backgrounds, for example, the team leader could start off the project by assigning small tasks to pairs of people who are the most dissimilar. In one study, a manager who used that technique later reported: "The virtual bonding that took place within the pairs...seemed to endure and carry over to the full team, contributing to greater collaboration and team cohesiveness."

Albert Einstein once said, "If I had only one hour to save the world, I would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem, and only five minutes finding the solution." In other words, understanding a problem is the key to solving it. The concept of "virtual distance" helps us to understand the problems of virtual and co-located teams. It provides three useful categories (physical distance, operational distance, and affinity distance) to classify the various factors that can hinder co-workers from connecting and collaborating with one other. And, as a general framework, it helps explain why team members who are co-located can, in effect, be thousands of miles apart. I suspect we can all attest to that.

Three Symptoms of a Vulnerable Team

Three Ways to Think Deeply at Work

Most HBR readers can relate to a central dilemma of knowledge work today: We're using rules for how we work in a factory in a time when most of our work product requires deep thinking.

A study of 6,000 people conducted by the NeuroLeadership Group in collaboration with a large healthcare firm asked respondents questions about where, when, and how people did their best thinking. Only 10 percent said it happened at work. At the NeuroLeadership Institute, we've been looking at ways to bring more of that deep thinking into the workplace. More specifically, we've been conducting research into what brain science shows us about how leaders think, develop, and perform, and recently we've been studying the role of the unconscious mind.

We've identified three particularly promising techniques, backed up by research, than can help you think more deeply:

Distracting Yourself

Carnegie Mellon neuroscientist David Creswell can shed some light on this topic. In his recent research, Creswell explores what happens in the brain when people tackle problems that are too big for the conscious mind to solve.

The decision paradigm Creswell set up involved choosing an imaginary car to purchase based on multiple wants and needs. Each car was described by 12 attributes (a leather interior, for instance, or poor gas mileage). Each group of participants was presented with four options, one of which has twice as many positive as negative attributes. Test subjects had to sift through the choices; those selecting the "good" car were defined as making better decisions.

One group had to make a choice immediately. These people didn't do very well at optimizing their decision. A second group had time to try to consciously solve the problem. Their choices weren't much better. A third group were told the problem, then given a distracter task to do first — something that lightly held their conscious attention but allowed their non-conscious to do more work. This group did significantly better than either of the other groups at selecting the optimum car for their overall needs.

To put it plainly, people who were distracted did better on a complex problem-solving task than people who put in conscious effort. That's because stepping away from a problem and then coming back to it gives you a fresh perspective. The surprising part is how fast this effect kicked in — the third group only had two minutes of distraction time for their non-conscious to kick in. This wasn't the "sleep on it" effect, or about quieting the mind. It was something much more accessible to all of us every day, in many small ways.

The Four-Hour Work Flow

With his team, Saku Tuominen, founder and creative director at the Idealist Group in Finland, interviewed and followed 1,500 workers at Finnish and global firms to study how people feel and respond to issues in the workplace. Tuominen's findings are easy to understand — 40 percent of those surveyed said their inboxes are out of control, 60 percent noted that they attend too many meetings, and 70 percent don't plan their weeks in advance. Overall, employees said they lacked a sense of meaning, control, and achievement in the workplace. Sound familiar?

Based on the study and the insights of Teresa Amabile, a professor at Harvard Business School, Tuominen recommends new approaches to changing our work processes that all tap into our unconscious:

• Think about one question/idea that needs insight and keep this thought in your subconscious mind.
• Clear your conscious mind by using this two-step system: move your thought(s) from your mind to a list and then clear your list when you have a short break (if your meeting is canceled, for instance, or your flight is delayed).
• Plan your week and month by listing three priorities you would like to accomplish.
• Make certain you have at least four consecutive, uninterrupted hours a day dedicated to the three priorities you identified.

This last point is key. Tuominen deduced that if you can schedule four hours with continuous flow and concentration, you could accomplish a lot and improve the quality of your thinking. As Tuominen aptly states, "you can't manage people if you can't manage yourself."

Understanding the "Stage"

Tuominen and Creswell know that our conscious thought is a finite resource and thus, it needs to be carefully managed. In my book, Your Brain at Work, I use the stage theater as a metaphor to explain how our consciousness works, with thoughts entering or exiting the stage all the time.

A stage has severe limitations: audience members clamor to jump on stage all the time (we are easily distracted and self-inhibition requires effort); actors can only play one part at a time (that means no multi-tasking); and no more than three or four actors can be on the stage at any one time (that's when we feel overwhelmed).

Once we understand that these difficulties are simply limitations inherent in the way our brains are wired, it's easier to devise strategies to compensate for them. That's why Creswell suggests a short distractor task to help refocus your mind and Tuominen recommends a four-hour block of time to focus on a few priorities. I would add two more strategies to getting things done: scheduling the most attention-rich tasks when you have a fresh and alert mind or grouping ideas into chunks whenever you have too much information.

Tuominen and Creswell along with other experts will be presenting their research at our upcoming NeuroLeadership Summit beginning October 15. We'll be posting some relevant links during the conference, so please visit the site to learn more.

Three Ways to Think Deeply at Work

How to Respond to Negativity

"I'm getting to the end of my patience," Dan,* the head of sales for a financial services firm, told me. "There is so much opportunity here — the business is growing, the work is interesting, and bonuses should be pretty good this year — but all I hear is complaining."

When he passed his employees in the hall and asked how it was going, they would respond with a critical comment about a client or they would grumble about the amount of work they were juggling.

"How can I turn around the negativity that pervades my team?" he asked me.

I asked him what he was doing now. "At first, I told them how much opportunity we had in front of us, and I reiterated our mission statement," he said. "I wanted to remind them what we're all working towards. Now though?" he threw his hands up in the air, "I'm just pissed. I want to shake them out of their slump."

Dan's response is completely natural and intuitive. Unfortunately, it's also completely ineffective.

Initially, he tried to counter the negativity with positivity. When that didn't work, he became negative himself. Both responses reaped the same outcome: More negativity.

Here's why: Countering someone's negativity with your positivity doesn't work because it's argumentative. People don't like to be emotionally contradicted and if you try to convince them that they shouldn't feel something, they'll only feel it more stubbornly. And if you're a leader trying to be positive, it comes off even worse because you'll appear out of touch and aloof to the reality that people are experiencing.

The other instinctive approach — confronting someone's negativity with your own negativity — doesn't work because it's additive. Your negative reaction to their negative reaction simply adds fuel to the fire. Negativity breeds negativity.

So how can you turn around negativity?

I discovered the answer when I made Dan's mistake with my wife Eleanor, when she was complaining about our kids fighting. At first I tried to convince her that all kids fight and ours weren't so bad. Then I became frustrated with her complaining and told her as much.

She got angry. Who wouldn't? But then she did something really helpful to me: She told me what she needed from me.

"I don't want to feel that I'm alone in this," she said, "I want to know you understand. I want you to tell me that we're in this together. And if you share my frustrations, I want to know that too."

In fact, I did share her frustrations, but I was trying not to be negative - which, of course, made the whole interaction more negative.

After my conversation with Eleanor, I had a surprising insight: You don't need to change your response. You just need to redirect it.

What Dan had done with his employees is respond negatively against them ("I want to shake them out of their slump") and positively against them ("I told them how much opportunity we had in front of us").

But a much more productive response is to respond negatively with others and positively with them.

Here's what I'm suggesting, translated into a three-step process for effectively turning around negative people:

1. Understand how they feel and validate it. This might be hard because it could feel like you're reinforcing their negative feelings. But you're not. You're not agreeing with them or justifying their negativity. You're simply showing them that you understand how they feel.

2. Find a place to agree with them. You don't have to agree with everything they've said, but, if you can, agree with some of what they're feeling. If you share some of their frustrations, let them know which.

During steps 1 and 2 you are responding negatively with others not against them. This relaxes and opens them. It helps them feel that they are not alone and you are not out of touch.

Instead of telling Eleanor she shouldn't be so negative about our children, I told her that I shared her frustrations about their fighting. That I was also lost about how to deal with it much of the time and that it made me feel helpless — all of which was true. It's not enough to simply say "I understand how you feel." For this to work, you need to be specific.

3. Find out what they are positive about and reinforce it. This doesn't mean trying to convince them to be positive. It means giving attention to whatever positive feelings they do show — and chances are they will have shown some because it's unusual to find people who are purely negative. If they are purely negative, then make sure they see you supporting others who have shown positivity. The idea is to give positive attention to positive feeling. And to offer concrete hope. It's concrete because it's based on actual positive feelings people already have, rather than harping on positive feelings you think they should have.

During step 3 you are responding positively with others, not against them. You are showing them that you support them. And you are showing them that they will be rewarded — with your support and attention — when they do and say things that are positive. During step 3 you are transforming the downward spiral into an upward one.

In my conversation with Eleanor, I asked her what did work to keep the kids playing nicely together. She talked about a previous morning when we directed their attention more proactively by doing an art project with them. It also worked well, she said, when she and I took each kid individually to do an errand or a project.

In less than five minutes, my conversation with Eleanor reversed its course from negative to positive.

These three steps are not easy to do because we have to fight our own highly emotional — and even reasonable — tendency to be negative about people who are complaining.

When I initially spoke with Dan, he was ready to fire some of his team. That would have, of course, simply exacerbated the negativity of those who stayed.

Instead, he started to listen and validate their negative feelings. What he found underneath the complaining was fear. The company had recently experienced lay-offs and the survivors were still shaken. Were their jobs at risk? (Step 1.)

Dan couldn't say that they weren't — especially since he was ready to fire some of the complainers. But what he did do was listen and tell them that he shared some of their anxiety — not about being fired, but about feeling unsettled with so much to accomplish and fewer people to get the job done. In other words, he was negative with them. (Step 2.)

Then he highlighted some positive things he noticed on his team — people taking smart risks, working together on complex sales, and partnering successfully with clients — that were helping to grow the company and secure people's jobs. In other words, he was positive with them. (Step 3.)

Before, he never missed an opportunity to highlight — and criticize — a person's negativity. Now he didn't miss an opportunity to highlight — and praise — a person's positivity.

And it worked. Eventually the mood in the sales group turned and they worked together to bring in the largest client the company had ever won.

As for me? The truth is, it's often easier to teach this stuff than it is to do it. In the heat of the moment, I can still get frustrated with other people's frustrations. But following these three steps has helped tremendously.

And having a partner who reminds me of them? That helps even more.

*Names Changed

How to Respond to Negativity