Approaching things in this way has helped me a lot. For example, with the bond systemization project I mentioned earlier, having this new perspective allowed us to better see the gaps between what we had and what we needed. While Bob was a great intellectual partner to me in understanding the big-picture problem we wanted to solve, he was much weaker at visualizing the process required to get us from where we were to the solution. He also wasn’t surrounding himself with the right people. He tended to want to work with people who were like him, so his main deputy on the project was a great sparring partner for mapping out big ideas on a whiteboard but a lousy one for fleshing out the who, what, and when needed to bring those ideas to life. This deputy tested as a “Flexor,” meaning that he was great at going in whatever direction Bob wanted to but lacked the clear, independent view needed to keep Bob on track.
After a few rounds of not making progress, we used our new tools for understanding people and acted on them, pushing Bob to transition to a new deputy who was especially skilled at navigating the levels between the big-picture ideas and the discrete, smaller projects required to bring them about. Comparing the new deputy’s Baseball Card to the original deputy’s, she excelled in independent and systematic thinking, which were essential for having a clear picture of what to do with Bob’s big ideas. This new deputy brought on other layers of support, including a project manager who was less engaged with the concepts and much more focused on the details of specific tasks and deadlines. When we looked at the new team members’ Baseball Cards, we could quickly see them lighting up in some of the areas around being planful, concrete, and driving things to completion, which were areas of weakness for Bob. With this new team in place, things really started to hum. It was only by looking hard at the complete “Lego set” required to achieve our goal, and then going out and finding the missing pieces, that we were able to do it.
Bond systemization is just one of countless projects that have benefited from our frank and open approach to understanding what people are like. And to be clear, I have just scratched the surface of what there is to know about mental wiring. Lots of data show that relationships are the greatest reward, that they’re more important to your health and happiness than anything else. For example, as Robert Waldinger, director of Harvard’s seventy-five-year Grant and Glueck study of adult males from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds, puts it, “You could have all the money you’ve ever wanted, a successful career, and be in good physical health, but without loving relationships, you won’t be happy. The good life is built with good relationships.” A good book on this is A Whole New Mind by Daniel H. Pink, and a good article on the science of this is “A Wandering Mind Heads Straight Toward Insight” by Robert Lee Hotz from The Wall Street Journal. While many parts of the brain come in two halves, it’s only the more recently developed cortex, which accounts for three-quarters of the brain, that has been shown to have functional differences between the right and left sides. That’s a big question. Entire specialties are dedicated to this question alone, and no one answer is authoritative, certainly not mine. However, because knowing what can change is important for people trying to manage themselves and others, I have looked fairly deeply into the issue of brain plasticity. What I learned coincided with my own experiences, and I will pass that along to you. A brain-imaging study by Harvard-affiliated researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital found physical changes in the brain after an eight-week meditation course. Researchers identified increased activity in parts of the brain associated with learning, memory, self-awareness, compassion, and introspection, as well as decreased activity in the amygdala. This test is helpful for seeing how people navigate levels and which levels they naturally go to. On the MBTI scale, this continuum is described as “Judging” vs. “Perceiving” though I prefer to use “Planning” as judging has other connotations. In MBTI language, judging does not mean judgmental and perceiving does not mean perceptive.
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