Building High-Trust, High-Performance Organizations
Paul Zak’s two decades of research have taken him from the Pentagon to Fortune 50 boardrooms to the rain forest of Papua New Guinea. All this in a quest to understand the neuroscience of human connection, human happiness, and effective teamwork. His academic lab and companies he has started develop and deploy neuroscience technologies to solve real problems faced by real people.
His latest book, Trust Factor: The Science of Creating High Performance Companies, uses neuroscience to measure and manage organizational cultures to inspire teamwork and accelerate business outcomes. His 2012 book, The Moral Molecule: The Source of Love and Prosperity, recounted his unlikely discovery of the neurochemical oxytocin as the key driver of trust, love, and morality that distinguish our humanity. In another obsession, Paul’s group uses neuroscience to quantify the impact of movies, advertising, stories, and consumer experiences. Along the way, he has helped start several transdisciplinary fields, including neuroeconomics, neuromanagement, and neuromarketing.
Paul is the founding Director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies and Professor of Economics, Psychology and Management at Claremont Graduate University. He has degrees in mathematics and economics from San Diego State University, a Ph.D. in economics from University of Pennsylvania, and post-doctoral training in neuroimaging from Harvard. You can check out his academic lab, consumer neuroscience company, and neuromanagement company. He also serves as a senior advisor to Finsbury, a global leader in strategic communications that advises many of the world’s most successful companies.
Reflection
On April 2nd A.P.E.X. Events presented the keynote speaker of the 2019 Festival of Excellence, Paul Zak. Zak's discussion titled, Trust Factor: Building High Trust, High Performance Organizations was met with A.P.E.X. Events' largest audience ever!
Zak research spanning over two decades has taking him to Fortune 50 companies, the Pentagon, and the rainforest of Papua New Guinea. This research has created his model of the "trust factor" oxytocin. Zak has continually visited organizations to help them develop their levels of efficiency and to inspire teams. He used the acronym "oxytocin" to help define a path of improvement between a company and its employees.
- O (Ovation) – Recognize excellence in your employees.
- X (eXpectation) – Design challenges with clear goals in mind.
- Y (Yield) – Giving control of projects to others and allow learning through mistakes
- T (Transfer) – Self management; colleagues can bid to do work. This can increase their interest, energy, and health.
- O (Openness) – Transparent Decision Making, explain why something is done.
- C (Caring) – Intentionally build relationships – recognize the emotions in others.
- I (Invest) – Help your colleagues grow
- N (Natural) – Be vulnerable and ask for help.
"The combination and effective use of all of these elements," Zak explained, "will flow from employees to customers."
Zak went on to explain how companies that exemplify these standards have become some of the most profitable in the last decade. One example he gave was Google. At times, Google employees have experienced more satisfying work lives, often have fewer sick days, and are highly productive.
As the keynote for the 2019 Festival of Excellence, Paul Zak showed our audience that trust can be a clear path to excellence for any team or organization. A.P.E.X. Events couldn't think of a better way to end our 2018-19 season!
Paul Zak Podcast Transcript
[00:00:02] Hey everyone Lynn Vartan and you are listening to the A.P.E.X Hour KSUU Thunder 91.1. In this show you get more personal time with the guests who visit Southern Utah University from all over. Learning more about their stories and opinions beyond their presentations on stage. We will also give you some new music to listen to and hope to turn you on and use them and. You can find us here every Thursday at 3pm or on the Web at suu.edu/apex. But for now, welcome to this week's show here on KSUU Thunder 91.1
[00:00:48] A casual welcome in everyone. Today's Tuesday and it's an unusual day for us here at A.P.E.X. Events at Southern Utah University. But we're so excited because it is one of the best events of the year on our campus today is our festival of excellence. And so, for any of you have been listening you heard us promoting and talking about it a couple of weeks ago. But what today is on our campus is a day where all students are encouraged to attend the festival next month. What is the Festival of excellence. It is a daylong festival that celebrates all areas of scholarship from our students our faculty our staff you name it. There's everything from science to the arts to English to everything going on so we're so excited to be a part of it. And it's also an A.P.E.X Hour day and as is usual we are honored to have our guest in the House today and I can't wait to continue the conversation. So, without further ado I'd like to say welcome to Paul Zak.
[00:01:51] Thank you Lynn.
[00:01:52] It's so great to have you here. And I just can't wait to talk about all the things that you've been studying and to get you to tell everybody about your book. But the first thing I'd like to start with is can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do now and then maybe we can get into your background of how you got there.
[00:02:10] OK. I wear several hats like many people. I'm a professor at Claremont Graduate University in Southern California and I'm in economic sciences psychology and management. So, what the heck is the deal with that? Helped start this field called neuro economics and some associate fields neuromarketing neuro management. So, I run a behavioral neuroscience lab that tries to use neuroscience to solve problems in different human disciplines.
[00:02:37] Yeah it just sounds like such fun to research the science of how we all interact and how we behave and how to make things better. How did you get started? I read somewhere that maybe your mom and that she had a background in the church and that that led to kind of how you came to where you are. Is that true.
[00:02:59] You've been stalking me.
[00:03:01] A little bit.
[00:03:03] Yes so but I'm fascinated by humans. I think I am. Sometimes I think I'm a Martian that I don't really understand human beings because I have to study them I don't have a natural inclination for what they're doing. I think it's like great comedians are always kind of outsiders right. So, feel like I'm a bit of an outsider to a human.
[00:03:20] Wow.
[00:03:20] So I really want to run experiments and allow data and science to kind of inform rather than develop my own opinions because maybe I'll address myself or whatever. Yeah so one of the things we worked a lot on is prosocial behaviors we call moral behaviors moral doesn't have any religious connotation just means good behaviors virtuous behaviors being nice to people being trustworthy being honest those are all behaviors and yeah, my mom was a former Catholic nun. And so, as a kid growing up we had these know she was very strict on every sense you know like follow exactly what the church says and if you drive by a Catholic church had make a sign of the cross I mean I was like deep you know Catholic knowledge. And at some point, I decide. This just seems like too much. Like if I read the Bible it's like love everybody new to New Testament particular love everybody just be a good person. You're covered. Everything's good. And she rejected that view like you have to follow each of these rules very carefully. You don't go to church every Sunday you're going to go to hell. I'm like that just didn't seem like it seems like a bunch of rules that the Catholic hierarchy put in place to control people as opposed to the major message of the New Testament which is love.
[00:04:31] Yeah.
[00:04:31] Which is which is radical 2000 years ago out say love your enemies was the most radical crazy thing that bunch of hippies did.
[00:04:37] Right.
[00:04:38] Right that was insane. So anyway, at some point I started setting social behaviors and I started thinking about these so-called more behaviors and thought maybe we can find brain activity that tells us in experiments why behaviorally people tend to be very prosocial they seem to be very cooperative they tend to give money to charity and they're not doing it because they think they're going to heaven because they are atheistic college students by and large. So, could we find mechanisms that tell us about that. So, my first book was called the moral molecule and it was about this cover of this brain chemical oxytocin discovery too strong a word. I found new a way to measure the acute reaction oxytocin humans by having this tool. We get ask all kinds of interesting questions about why humans by and large get along so well with each other and that sort of is a foundation for support some of use in moral philosophy particularly a view of what's called a sentimentalist view that comes from Adam Smith and theory moral sentiments that we don't have to think in advance was right wrong we have a feeling we were getting feedback from other humans and if I do something that hurts you. If I have any ounce of empathy I get to feel bad right unless as a psychopath or I'm you know mentally ill in some way. And so, because I don't want to hurt other people because I'm a social creature and I have empathy I tend to behave well most of the time and most of the time is where the rubber hits the roadway. And a lot of experiments for many years and millions of dollars' worth of research funding to figure out what are those conditionalities. Right when do I actually get bad behavior I'm a bad person I'm having a bad day. Is there a difference between those neurologically? And then finally put this into a kind of a general theory of you know like the Science of Good and Evil.
[00:06:17] It's just I have so many questions it's so fascinating. Did you feel early on? I mean you sort of had this model that you were looking at with the rules and your mom. Did you start to get into the science early or did the science come in as a way to address those thoughts.
[00:06:36] Yeah. You know looking back now I think a lot of this was influenced by my mom but at the time going forward you don't really know what these influences are. Yeah. So, my undergraduate degrees were in mathematical biology and in economics and I did a Ph.D. in economics and then post graduate training and in neuroscience and somehow, I just thought if I use the tools about neuroscience I could be a better predictor of what the humans are doing and particularly in economics and social behaviors that fall into a discipline called game theory or strategic decisions. Those models really suck. It's a technical term. these don't predict well. And so, you know spending time in the labs of Nobel Prize winners they just couldn't tell me that like now would have no idea. And so, what happens is you kind of get like for the listeners you get the sort of Copernican approach which is like oh add in more stuff like epicycles is what Copernicus did anyway. So just adding more stuff and eventually explain everything. Well you're assuming way the problem that's not a right way to look at mechanism and the mechanism of human behavior is not from your elbow or from your knee it's from your brain. So luckily, I had enough you know of a background in biology and neuroscience that I began begin running my own experiments and. And yeah, the oxytocin stuff was really unstudied so it was this open territory. So, if I found anything it would be interesting. And so anyway that part of thing is actual development and of sniffing out what I think are interesting problems that other people apparently started find these interesting too and then just doing a ton of work to get to 50 100 publications before I can write a book right. (Inaudible) all scientists are born skeptics so. I'm number one skeptical of myself so I don't want to think that if I designed an experiment that's the be all and end all it's got to be replicated back in a different way so we just finished the keynote talk for APEX and I showed a film of experiment done (inaudible) like hey we're testing healthy educated western people. Maybe those brains are different we don't know. Let's go. You know as far away from that as we can now let's in psychiatric populations. We just finished a study setting criminal psychopaths in the prison. I mean really hard to do. And let's really understand where things are coming from and what causes what.
[00:08:58] Oh wow. Well I want to ask you about all of those. And how did I mean oxytocin is something that we know much more about Now as you were saying when you first started getting into it how did that pathway reveal itself to you. Was it just kind of an aha moment or did you sort of say like I don't know there might be something here. I'm just curious about that discovery.
[00:09:20] There is a good story there.
[00:09:22] All right.
[00:09:23] Some of the work I've done as you've figured out its kind of falls into the law neuroscience area. So, I go to these law and neuroscience conferences and one of those I went to every year was in the Sierra Nevada mountains in the summer because academics always poor and so they've to say ski resort to summer is cheaper for a conference. And you know you find a Reno and you have his hour-long shuttle ride to the resort and everyone you know there is like a mountain biker except me and another nice Weld well-dressed middle-aged woman white figure she's at my conference. Say hi to her. Her name is Helen Fisher said very well-known anthropologist wrote a wonderful book called The Anatomy of sex. She's an expert on relationships. I'm working on lots of things at once and so I was also working on parental investment in children like why do we spend so much time getting violin lessons and percussion lessons and you know why do we why do we even care. I mean genetically I know why we have an investment biologically but why do people spend huge amounts of money to get their kids in the school in Manhattan That's you know fifty thousand dollars a year because they're going to get into Yale if they go there. It seems like overkill in a way. So anyway, I was working on this and Helen Fisher said Oh have you heard about oxytocin this is we're bonding chemical in mammals. Never heard of it and so went back to my hotel room back at the resort and went on the NIH has this database. This pre-Google Scholar days and basically have all the published literature in medicine and biology and start looking at all the animal literature on oxytocin and animals. You know this thing was all about recognition and safety and I thought gee I'm also working on trust and we try strangers which is a really unusual thing that basically only humans do trusting strangers is really risky right. So, and so I made the leap from oh this is me about investments children to. Oh, by the way I'm also working on trust. This could be a mechanism. And the problem here is how do you measure this in animals. You drill a hole in the skull and you sample that brain fluid with a needle. And I'm not an expert on humans but I'm guessing humans are going to be so keen on that approach. So, we had to develop another way to measure this very short acting neurochemical and that hadn't been done. So, once we had kind of worked out that tool and I really mean we knew it was me and one graduate student so basically, I was a pin cushion on hand. Yes, we did it basically with very rapid blood draws and some other techniques that we published. And so now we had a tool to say Hey can I get the brain to stimulate oxytocin release. And if so does I have any behavioral effect at all. They started running experiments at a shared lab with Baard equipment and scamming money off my colleagues who had grants to pay participants and indeed we you know we ran a study for about a year and a half before we published it because no one would believe the oxytocin did anything other than contract the during birth and push out breast milk to feed babies so.
[00:12:13] Right.
[00:12:13] So anyway that's what we found and then you know we were very you know feel very blessed. I got money from the John Templeton Foundation. But a million dollars out of the first publications to show to really develop this whole area. And in conclusion that tells us I see why we connect to people so easily. I was as I told you people are talking to a student outside the studio. You talked about being an SUU in building a family here. Right. Feeling like there are people that care and love him. I thought isn't that a wonderful thing. How easily we can form friendships and not only romantic relationships all kinds of important relationships in our lives because we have this essentially overactive oxytocin system that releases when we meet people that we are connected to. So, when we first met like you're a sweetheart like you're awesome. So big oxytocin release right. And so, you know we're super comfortable toward each other gave you a hug earlier. It's not creepy I'm not a stalker just I'm just feel very comfortable around you. And so that's really amazing against other animals that we share a lot of genes with like chimpanzees do not do that right. Either you fear another male I'm gonna have a fight with you and if you're the female try to mate with you. So that's it. There's no friendships. Right. So are some family relationships but basically there's no friendships.
[00:13:30] Well oxytocin originally was thought as you just mentioned to be just a female molecule that were present in women. But what part of what your study found is that now no this is absolutely something that we all have and we can't really CAPITALIZE ON. So that's exciting.
[00:13:48] Well can't tell you a quick story. I started this work because I'm skeptical of myself and I spent a lot in medical schools my wife's a physician. And so, I go to all these medical conferences and it talks like the OBGYNs who should know about oxytocin and I said here's an idea. And when you look at trust and interacting with strangers and this dude it's always a guy said you know it can be very important because it's just for women. I said at men's brains make it to there must be a reason why the brain doesn't produce neuro chemicals that are not useful because oh you know it's like nipples are just it's just it's just vestigial and I'm thinking what an ass. Sorry to use a word.
[00:14:27] it's okay.
[00:14:27] you know. So, I said OK I might be wrong but I could be testably wrong. I think good design experiment to see if men and women have a stimulus that causes the brain to make this chemical. And if so if that chemical predicts the kind of behavior subsequent behavior will see so. So, what will we learn from this. I'm a stubborn bastard.
[00:14:50] Well that's great. You're giving us such great information from that stubbornness that we'll take it any time. It's already time for our first break. And we are in the studio with Paul Zak and we're going to get back and talk about his most recent book the trust factor which we spent a lot of time with today and we've been devouring on campus which is about building high trust organizations. So, stay tuned for that. In the meantime, I've got a few songs for you. . As usual the first song I've got I'm still on this South by Southwest kick from some of these new bands. This song is called the spot and the band is your Smith. You're listening to KSUU Thunder 91.1.
[00:19:29] OK welcome back everyone. We're back here at the A.P.E.X Hour Thunder 91.1. That song was called the spot and the band is called Your Smith. I am joined in the studio with author public speaker neuroscientist neuro economics expert Paul Zak. Welcome back.
[00:19:48] Thank you.
[00:19:49] I'd love to get into talking about your book. We spent a little bit of the last break talking about your study of oxytocin and now I'd like to talk about some of the principles that you bring out in the book the trust factor which I completely devoured. I've been telling everybody one of the things so many people know I'm a musician and you know we work as freelancers we often don't have a team or business until we become a part of something else and in the last 10 years I've now been a part of this university community. And so, I think about teams and organizations in a much larger format. And one of the things that is just amazing is how you build trust and how you build that power in an organization where everybody feels a part of it. They want to work for it. They're excited about it and said this book. I mean I think everybody should read it. It's just amazing. So, tell us about the trust factor.
[00:20:47] Thank you. What a great setup. I mean I think it applies to you know teams it applies to families. Yeah, I've been tempted to write a book about family relationships as well. But you know certainly to any organization for profit nonprofit government we were working around people that we know moderately well sometimes not that well as well. You know how do we work effectively together. And that set of behaviors that people sort of intuitively display in organization we can call that a culture organizational culture. As I said in my talk is culture is just too big of a word to really get a handle on even though it is kind of a key word or an important word in business. No one really has a way to measure very well in my opinion. And I want to get away from self-report if I send you a survey. Do you like your boss? I don't know what day of the week is it.
[00:21:36] Exactly.
[00:21:36] Like how much do I love my wife today. Well it depends on what she talked to me about last night.
[00:21:40] Right.
[00:21:40] Were we having a fight or were we you know kissing. So anyway, I privilege neurologic data over self-report data extremely. I just think the brain doesn't lie and people lie because they don't know. You know it's very hard to accurately relay your unconscious emotional experience. So, when companies started coming to my lab asking for help building high trust cultures you know my first approach was you know let's do some science on that and some companies let me do that which is amazing. Take blood from their employees and measure brain activity and videotape them solving problems in groups and then from that we designed experiments to run in my lab where we just spent time in a very not to be very flopsy (sic) of science here but in the very fit Francis Bacon approach we want to rule out alternative explanations for the behaviors we see and use the neuro neurologic signals to inform us into what's causing what. So, we did that for about eight years and then we developed a survey that lets us measure organizational trust and its foundations and then created interventions where we can now go in and improve trust and as the last three months and organizations and improve outcomes. And so, it's been a great journey to really be kind of a useful human as opposed to kind of just doing basic research to really focused on a hard problem which is what are organizations that are performed but also why does work sucks sometimes. I mean honestly most people listening probably have had a sucky job because your boss was not very nice or that they were just disorganized or they give you too much do or too little do. So how do we figure that out. And I think taking a scientific approach to this and just thinking about just getting better as opposed to some kind of optimal here's the best way to do everything let's get lots of feedback and just learn from our mistakes and just try to solve it get better and better but do that in a way that empowers individuals who are doing the work to feel appreciated to feel successful to give it a chance to grow and to recognize that we're all imperfect because we're humans. You're not going to perform perfectly every day even you a professional percussionist once in a while you have a little flub and what happens? You keep going. That's the key in performance.
[00:23:52] More than once in a while.
[00:23:54] So but you know you've done it enough you know how to how to move around that little hair you don't stop. You don't do a Tonya Harding and say Can I start over please.
[00:24:01] Right.
[00:24:02] You work through it. Right. And then and then you maybe think about it like hey what happened there I lost my concentration I talked to the team to get some feedback hey you know what you came a little late on this beat and that caused me to come a little late. And now we kind of had a problem. So, I just think it's very humble. I think science is a very humble approach to trying to figure things out to get better. And if you take a scientific approach then it's not a he said she said it's not like I'm blaming you. Let's just get some data and see if it can get better at this thing.
[00:24:32] That's one of the things that really impressed me about the book. You know there are so many books out there that talk about this is how to make your organization better. This is how to make your life better. This is how to make these things better. And they're not founded in scientific data. So, I think one of the things I really appreciated about your approach is that is that it comes from scientific data. I mean we get all kinds of surveys all the time as you said and they're so wavy. Yeah exactly. They just don't have that concrete thing or they can be skewed depending on how you're trying to get your results in on these kinds of things. So, I really appreciate that about the book. Just to give everybody a little bit I don't I don't want to necessarily go through all of them but if we could maybe focus on a couple of the key things. I know You go through that oxytocin word and you have a model or a structure or some quality that you really identified. And I love to zero in on a couple of them. And perhaps maybe even just the first two I know Ovation is the first one. I was wondering if you could talk a bit about that.
[00:25:44] Right. So, one of the underlying themes of the book first was get the language right. I do not like the word worker employee like teammate or colleague. Are we all working on the same thing for any team. Exactly. I want to have this hierarchy. I don't want to be a boss I want to be a team member I'm a team maybe a team lead. We need leaders. But I'm still on the team right. So, look at the language right and number two. Everyone is volunteering to do this thing right. No one's forced to do this. Right. I mean even if you're in the military at some point you can actually get out. I mean.
[00:26:15] Right.
[00:26:16] So just treat people like volunteers. and with Volunteers you need to say please and thank you to them. That's a start. Holy crap. Now like half the economists listen this how their heads explode right. So, you don't get the old view in economics and business was that work sucks. I'm going pay you to do this sucky thing. But for many of us now are knowledge workers which is I think most of us we love what you love what you do and how because you light up when you talk about it you get paid and because you got to go somewhere and you got to practice and there's reasons to get compensated but you are bringing a lot of joy to your audience when you perform. The same thing and work. You can have a lot of joy at work but we've got to empower individuals to be successful and one way to do that is what I call ovation which is to recognize people who give extra effort to publicly thank in a very personal way. Highest performers and then you when you do this publicly you set them aspirations for the rest of the team because they're social creatures we want to be part of a community. If our community says we super value the Lynns who are who are super diligent and what they do and perform at the highest levels then the Bobs and the Sues you know implicitly most of us go gosh we like to be recognized. I think I'm work a little harder. So now we're setting standards in which you don't have to work hard. Men could fire you at some level but you know you can just kind of do them in. Or you can really knock down the park let's just give you a chance to do that and when you do recognize that discuss it. Talk about how you did it share that information and now begin to change the way people view work and their work colleagues and colleagues is the key that we're doing this as a group and humans basically anatomically are designed to work in groups. Our brains are very unique in that we like being in groups. Give us a job give us a goal and put us around people that we want to work with and we will grind it out right. So how do I create that team that just wants to grind it out.
[00:28:10] And that's not the group aspect is not just in the corporate world I know one of the studies that you did that you shared with us this morning was your time in Papua New Guinea studying group dynamics and I wonder if you could share a little bit about what you found. I mean it seems like groups are groups no matter where you are.
[00:28:30] Yeah, I think that was the most audacious organizational neuroscience experiment ever run to go the rainforest of Papua New Guinea. And you know all there is this acronym from the World War II called FUBAR. If you don't know what it is look it up. I won't say the words but it was a fubar experiment other than someone getting injured or killed like almost everything happened. Actually, I got hurt. But anyway, stuff went down let's say and now and we had to work around that. But yeah, we found that even groups of Papua New Guineans living in the rainforest without running water without electricity without running water. The same brain mechanism that we see that are active when these Papua New Guineans do group work for their community are active in Western Europe or have active in students are active in children.
[00:29:18] So it's the same mechanism so that gives us confidence that we can generalize the findings into organizations that we all find ourselves in. Again, going from families to school to sports teams we've worked with rugby teams who are like first of all best blood draws ever to allow blood draws. so, you know rugby players they have these veins like pipes and we could blind blood draws on these guys. So, you know we really beat the crap out this topic to really understand it because I'm allergic to sloppiness because of my mom you know I just think there's no place in science for sloppiness and so we want to make sure that this study really holds water. but Now having to work with you know 10000 50000 personal organizations and roll out changes in the way people interact with each other that have a positive impact on thousands of people's lives and improve their organizations performance. Man, what a great space I'm in that I get to actually help people be happier in those eight plus hours per day that you spend working.
[00:30:21] And some of the action items. I mean I remember in the video today one of the things you mentioned is that group the tribe the group in Papua New Guinea they collect together before a group activity. And I think that's one of the things that you also train is the daily interaction that the powwow if you will. And can you talk about that strategy and some other simple strategies to maybe develop some small things in our organizations to develop this trust.
[00:30:54] Sure I know this is not unique to me but I love the five-minute standup daily huddle. So, first thing in the morning get your team together and let's just talk about priorities. When you see really effective organizations image network or the container store which is a really wonderfully run company when I've been with them they will actually put their arms around each other for their daily huddle. They will literally like a sports team they will touch each other and talk about goals are today are these things. We got a sale and aisle seven and we want to help people. And it gives you confidence they do that. And they do an ending of the day huddle to say get together and they just do a quick debrief. So, get real. I work with the military does the same thing after every you know practiced interaction actually real interactions as well. But I trained with them. They stop the action they go okay let's do de-brief three things we did right three things we did wrong. and everyone gets to contribute no matter how Junior you are whatever weirdo professor who helping out can contribute to let's just try to learn from this. Now right now before we wait six months to talk about how you Lynn doesn't seem like she's selling enough widgets.
[00:32:01] Right.
[00:32:01] What the hell. Like ok. Why are you having trouble selling widgets. You know what I do I do this by the way you hold up whatever that is right. So, it's really got to be immediate. And that's right out of the neuroscience that the brain builds these feedback loops but you've got to do it pretty much immediately got to. For our science listeners a term of our neuroscience is long term potentiation. You have to potentiate this pathway you have to use it intensively enough or a short period of time where you'd change the sort of bias in the way the brain activates. And so how do we do that in organizations the same way we do at music we practice practice practice and get feedback. So, if you're a pro now. But if you in the beginning when you were a student learning percussion you had a lot of teachers give you feedback. A lot of colleagues give you feedback.
[00:32:48] Oh yeah.
[00:32:48] Right now you're professional you can critique yourself.
[00:32:51] But still to seek it out.
[00:32:53] Yeah get some feedback. It's working for you right. So, we can do the same thing in organizations and we should be secure enough. We should be we should trust the people around us enough that we can get honest feedback just to get better and to give honesty back and do that in a caring way right not to like Lynn sucks because she always hits the first beat you know. No say you know what Lynn at the side you're a little off you know how can we how do we work around this. The music really you know is perfect. I want to get better.
[00:33:22] Yeah.
[00:33:23] So I have a simple goal in mind by the way I'll share this with you because are so nice. I always want to be slightly less stupid over time. That's a really modest goal. I'm not sure I'm reaching it. But you know I think that's a reasonable goal. I just try to learn a little bit to get a little bit better and help the people around you get a little better.
[00:33:40] So I love that. Well it's time for our next musical break yay. This song is a band called American football some of you may know and it's a newer song by them and it's a song called uncomfortably uncomfortably numb excuse me might be good if it was uncomfortably young but it's uncomfortably numb. Thanks for listening. This is KSUU Thunder 91.1.
[00:37:58] All right well welcome back everyone. This is the A.P.E.X Hour KSUU Thunder 91.1. That was the band American football. This song was uncomfortably numb like to say welcome back to my guest Paul Zak author of The Moral Molecule and the trust factor. So welcome back. Thank you. We've been talking about all kinds of things about human interaction and especially based on your research and writing and I'd love to get to one of the things joys comes up so much in in your talk today in the book. One of the things I loved if you could maybe expound on a little bit is the difference between joy and happiness. And you know that's one of the things that for me as an educator we really struggle with because I think the students a lot of people have this idea that I should be happy I should be happy all the time with what I'm doing and I think one of the things that you articulate really well is this idea that that that the joy of the challenge and all of these aspects of the work then make you happy overall over time but it's not like I am not happy every single day when I'm practicing music. Somedays I don't want to practice. But the overall overarching entity is that I love playing music. So, I wonder if you could comment on that at all.
[00:39:23] It's a great question and there are really distinct differences between happiness which is more an acute state and joy or satisfaction which is more of a kind of long-term state. So, we illustrate with a story that there's a difference between the two. The first time I took my daughter skiing she was maybe 11 or 12 years old and I'm not a good skier so I'm you know just coaster the same. You know pizza French fry thing. Anyway, so we're going to be having a good day doing the baby slopes and then we have lunch and then I'll try the intermediate slope. Now what happens after lunch. There's some sun. (inaudible). So, she went up the immediate slope she's having trouble she falls it's a little Icey she scrapes her knuckles they're bleeding. She gets to the bottom she's crying. Yeah.
[00:40:06] said I want to go home and I say as a very good father. I said no you cannot go home until you do that hill One more time.
[00:40:14] Good for you.
[00:40:15] No I'm not going to go. I want to go home. I said no you can't do it. You got to go on more time. Anyway. So finally, after some cajoling I get her to go up there and she skied all the way down and she felt joy. She felt like I accomplished something that was really hard. And I suffered to do it. Literally. So, what's the difference? And what we see at work is this sense of joy is that I've done something important with people that depend on me that gives me the sense of pride of kind of ownership over I've done and I do like to go home and tell your roommate or your spouse or your parent you know how was work today honey you know what we had this nasty hard problem and you know we thought we never. I helped them figure it out. It was really cool. And like our client is super happy and you know that's different than this kind of a cute happiness. So, if you want happiness you know snort some cocaine or something you'll be happy for 10 minutes. All right so that's a different response. That's a brain response which is just this is super good. As opposed to really making a commitment to the people in the project and that generates this long-term Joy. And as you know from that from the talk and the book Joy's a very strong prediction of satisfaction of work. So, we're satisfied when we accomplish something we don't come in happy so sorry one more example. So, I worked a lot with Zappos.com a shoe and clothing place. Amazing company in fact I take my class on tour there we're going in about a week to go on the Zappos Tour at Las Vegas so if you guys are in Las Vegas being on the tour and check out their cool culture. So that's how much I like them. Tony Hsieh who started Zappos wrote a book called Delivering Happiness which is wonderful I recommend it. But he was mistaken in the sense that he thinks that happy employees are more productive. And all the research shows the opposite. And finally convince Tony that whose an acquaintance that cause I'm at Zappos a lot. That it's the opposite. I'm a satisfied person. I enjoy what I'm doing when I've done something important and that makes me acutely happy as well. It's really that long term satisfaction that I called Joy right. so, I chose the word joy thoughtfully. I didn't. Happiness is too confounding. Satisfaction sounds sort of weird and is used too much on surveys. So just sort of reserved the word joy for this feeling of yeah, I did something cool today. And if it's hard it's important. Like when you when you're sore after a workout. Right. That that's not happiness but you feel like OK. or like for me because I'm old like when I do some hard when I go hiking hard and I get hurt. I'm like OK I got bruised up today. That was awesome. I actually I push the limits enough that I got hurt.
[00:43:04] Right.
[00:43:04] Right. That's super cool to me.
[00:43:06] Yeah well, I love that you make that distinction. I mean I in the musical realm I talk about that all the time because this repetitive practice every day is what makes a craft like music. I mean there are several others. That's what makes you good at something like that but it's not. So, students come in they say well I'm not I'm not happy practicing well you're not going to be happy practicing every day. You know it's definitely something that's going to take place over time. And so, I really appreciate that you make that distinction. To follow up on that a little bit. A lot of the suggestions in the book are great for everyone in every aspect of the organization but particularly for leaders. I was wondering for anybody who's listening or any students that maybe saw the talk today who want to start building their trust from the bottom up so to speak from them right there what could people do if they want to find some of these wonderful things in their life or start pursuing some of these things how can they make it different from sort of the bottom up rather than the top down leadership. Any suggestions?
[00:44:14] That's a great question and there's lots of examples the book or the bottom up approach. So, here's a simple thing that I try to do for every interaction with you dear Lynn as well. which is to have the words service in your conversation. So, I like to end conversations with Lynn how can I be of service to you. Right so if you're of service to people you become important and valuable and necessary and you are helping out the humans. Whether getting paid or not, not's important. So, I do want to offer that to you. We've had nice conversations you know off air. I want to continue to be of service with you we're connected by e-mail. If I can help on stuff you're working on let me know. You're in Southern California. I'm in Southern California. we talked about podcasts and radio shows and the kinds of things so I don't know if I'm useful for that at all but I'm certainly happy to listen and have had to try to connect you to people have can or whatever. so, you know service is a very interesting approach. So, I Said in the talk that I think every organization at its core is about service to others. No Matter what you're doing. That Is why people are paying for this good or service. So, let's go in a service mindset and then begin to serve others particularly from a leadership perspective. I really think that the servant leader model is the most effective model from everything I've seen and read. So, if you are a leader your job is to empower other people to be successful it's not for you just to look good and you know be a superstar. So, for example get rid of the five thousand-dollar suits, dudes. Just get rid of it. right .so that the guy who founded Costco, who just retired, who's a billionaire. By the way he only took a hundred thousand dollars a year in salary. Even his board said They paid him too little. He would wear the Costco white shirt sleeve shirt with a name tag with his name on it. Every day he went to work in the executive office. Do you love this guy? He went to work for this guy. Does he go in move boxes at the store? Is he walked around talking to customers? Oh yeah, they know he's a CEO? No. did he know how to run a company. Damn yeah.
[00:46:14] That is so cool. Well I love that and I think I've been sort of harping on this train of service or sense of purpose because of its ties to building resilience. And one of the things we see in students is where we're concerned about resilience and students and it seems that some of these things developing your sense of service developing your work ethic can really help develop your own resilience so that if you fall down the ski slope the first time you can get up there and do it again. I'm really excited about those concepts. I'd love to start asking you a little bit about future projects. What are you working on now is there anything you can share with us that's exciting you in your research.
[00:47:00] I can. We're working on the neuroscience of extraordinary experiences. No one wants to go to a crappy concert. No one wants to see a crappy movie. No one wants a crappy romantic partner. We want the best. Right.
[00:47:15] Yeah.
[00:47:16] The problem is the best is generally an unconscious emotional response to that experience or that movie or whatever it is. And so over about 10 years of research parallel to the stuff we worked on and trust factor we have identified neurologic signals that quantify second by second, how good something is for you individually. And allows us now to measure in real time for any number of people develop technology so that we can actually go in on the fly and prove something or certainly review and experience a concert a classroom and make it better. so, we're heavily in the adult training space with a bunch of partners. We've created a technology company that rolls out this hardware and software. We're currently doing private pilots in the K to 12 space. So, schools are highly variable we've all been in school for a long time, right? What about that teacher that just nails and turned you on and you're excited about this topic. Other teachers like my kids have been in public school forever. Literally roll their eyes when the kids ask questions. like my kids are smart. Honestly. They ask question. Answer the goddamn question. I'm tired of it. Don't roll your eyes at me or my kid.
[00:48:27] Right.
[00:48:29] Answer the question, doofus, or get a different job. I'm just tired of it. So, if I can measure that objectively. And I say look this teaching method isn't working. Let's do something different and I can provide personalized feedback for each student. What does this student need to really be immersed to absorb this material? What follow up does he or she need as a as a child or as an adult. And working on the entertainment industry were with most of the major movie studios with TV networks so that we're helping them improve content so we don't get so many bombs from Hollywood or from the network TV. You know they got pushback against Netflix and HBO and all these other places right. So, they have a big incentive now to try to create better content. And we just don't know which just kind of guessing. So, let's bring some science to that. And by the way it is this is a work that originally was funded by the U.S. government through the Department of Defense which was teaching special forces soldiers how to use storytelling to be more persuasive. And by that the intelligence community that's looking at things like terrorist recruiting videos. We've done A lot of work with them to help understand what influences people to do terrible acts. So now we're back to my mom.
[00:49:39] It all comes full circle. Well that's exciting. I will look forward to reading more about that as time goes on. And we just have a few minutes left and I left I ask you a little bit about kind of not so much off topic but a little bit looser. Who inspires you. Do you have any writers or scientists that are models that have been your inspiration in your studies or in your career?
[00:50:06] Such an unfair question. I think I'm really interested in outliers and the weirdos. People don't follow the right paths. There's a wonderful book you may know by Steven Pressfield who wrote The Legend of Baggar Vance and lots of other (inaudible) called The War of Art. You know this book?
[00:50:27] Oh yes, I know it well. Oh gosh it is fantastic.
[00:50:30] It's the manual for doing what you think is going to change the world. And he talks about resistance, external and internal resistance to doing something new and novel. It is so inspirational. And I've read it many times and given it away many times. so, you know we all have unique gifts and you know shouldn't be stubborn and stupid you should listen to the world's telling you enough. If the world is not accepting what you're doing does different. just you know you can pivot. but fight that resistance fight Fight that the naysayers. and your internal naysayer.
[00:51:03] Yeah.
[00:51:03] Who are you to do something unique right. Lynn Right.
[00:51:06] Right. So.
[00:51:06] The critic.
[00:51:08] the Critic to fight that inner critic and as Pressfield said the inner critic never fights fair. It's a dirty fighter to fight dirtier. you gonna get up earlier. You got to work harder. You've got to be committed. You've got to tell your friends what you're doing. You've got to you know blast yourself to the sails and sail past and make sure it happens. And then if you do that for five years doesn't work you should try something new. But yeah, I think you know I'm fascinated by the outliers and you know that really inspires me the people who knowingly or unknowingly did something really wacko end up working out.
[00:51:43] My last question for you is one of my favorites. And it's something that we ask everyone and it can be anything and that is what's turning you on this week? And that can be it could be but it could be a TV show it could be a song. It could be an experience it could be a food. It can be anything you like but I'd like to ask you as a parting shot for the day Paul Zak What's turning you on this week?
[00:52:10] You're going to think this is pandering but I'm going to tell you. I have a very very boring life. I work 14 jobs. You know what turns me on today this week. Utah. When I'm on the road all kinds of crazy things happen to me. You have no idea. I met my wife on an airplane. I meet the most amazing people like you Lynn. I am I'm just privileged to be able to travel around the world and interact with people who seem to want to talk me for some reason. So, I am so enamored of this place. This university has such great vibes. I ran into your president recently I told him the same thing like I'm happy here like this. This has got some good energy. Like I don't know what you're doing but it's kind of rockin the world. So, its rockin my world. I'm thrilled to be here. And everyone's been so nice even you Lynn have been nice me even. Shockingly.
[00:53:03] I know I'm not very nice. But every once in a while, a little bit.
[00:53:07] British lip.
[00:53:07] Well thank you so much for your time. Thanks for sharing the book. The there's a there's several of them but the two that we've been digging into the moral molecule which is a bit earlier and then the trust factor by Paul Zak. Also, you can check out his Web site and so his last name is Z A K. So, Paul Zak thank you so much for joining me here today and thanks for your time on campus.
[00:53:31] Absolutely. Thanks Lynn. All right. See you later everyone.
[00:53:37] Thanks so much for listening to the A.P.E.X Hour here on KSUU Thunder 91.1 Come find us again next Thursday at 3pm for more conversations with the visiting guests at Southern Utah University. And new music to discover for your next playlist. And in the meantime, we would love to see you at our events on campus to find out more. Check out suu.edu/apex. Until next week. This Lynn Vartan saying goodbye from the A.P.E.X Hour Here on Thunder 91.1