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Head, Heart, Gut, Decision Making – a conversation with Eric Staples
18 Plays3 days ago
There are three different ways that people make decisions
Eric Staples is the Director of Growth Strategy at Blue Dog, a Chicago based strategy and innovation consultancy.
In this episode of the Abeceder podcast The Independent Minds Eric and host Michael Millward explore the different ways that drive individual and collective decision-making.
The three intelligence systems, Head, Heart, and Gut create a framework for interaction, collaboration and change management.
In their conversation Eric and Michael discuss
- How each decision-making type makes decisions.
- How each decision-making type responds to stress
- The impact of nurture and nature on the dominant decision-making type
- How to manage the different decision-making types
- How understanding the different decision-making types can help to build a great team
Discover more about Eric and Michael at Abeceder.co.uk
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Transcript
Introduction to 'The Independent Minds'
00:00:05
Speaker
Made on Zencastr. Because Zencastr is the all-in-one podcasting platform that really does make every stage of the podcast production and distribution process so easy.
00:00:17
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to The Independent Minds, a series of conversations between Abbasida and people who think outside the box about how work works, with the aim of creating better workplace experiences for everyone.
00:00:31
Speaker
I am your host, Michael Millward. Managing Director of Abbasida.
Exploring Decision-Making: Head, Heart, and Gut
00:00:37
Speaker
In this episode of The Independent Minds, I'm going to be learning how, well, how we process information to make better decisions and how our head and our heart and our gut impact that process.
00:00:50
Speaker
From Eric Staples, who is the Director of Growth Strategy and Organizational Upskilling at a company called Blue Dog in Chicago, USA.
00:01:02
Speaker
I have been to Chicago. If I ever get the chance to go again, I will make use of my membership of the Ultimate Travel Club to make all of my travel arrangements. That is because membership of the Ultimate Travel Club gives me access to trade prices on flights, hotels, trains, holidays, and all sorts of other travel-related purchases.
00:01:20
Speaker
I have added a link with a built-in discount to the description so that you can become a member of the Ultimate Travel Club and just like me, travel at trade prices. Now that I have paid some bills, it is time to make an episode of The Independent Minds that will be well worth listening to, liking, downloading and subscribing to, and probably good enough to share with your friends, family and work colleagues as well.
00:01:46
Speaker
As with every episode of The Independent Minds, we will not be telling you what to think, but we are hoping to make you think now.
Eric Staples' Career Path and Problem-Solving Approach
00:01:55
Speaker
Hello, Eric. Hello, Michael. Good to be with you. It is very good to have you here, Eric. You are the Director of Growth Strategy and Organisational Upskilling.
00:02:04
Speaker
What sort of career have you had that led you to that type of position? It's a great question, and it is ah a bit of a mouthful of a title and a bit ambiguous. Growth strategy really just encompasses anything that is problem solving that that that helps forward towards goals and overcome obstacles and barriers to how you want to grow. And that can take a bunch of different shapes. The course of my career has taken a lot of different shapes. I kind of started in an administrative position actually about 20 years ago and then jumped from role to role based essentially on problem that was right next to me. Someone had dropped the ball or someone had, there was an outage and I said, you know, let me see if I can do that. And that got me through various roles, copywriting, creative strategy, creative direction, into strategy proper and ultimately into growth strategy, which is kind of like the overarching rung of strategic pursuits. and The second part of that title, organizational upskilling, came along because as you are doing growth strategy, particularly for multinational organizations where you have to work across markets, across teams, across functions, things get really complex. And a lot of the times any
00:03:20
Speaker
growth objectives or strategy involves change and how you navigate change as a team, as a brand, as an organization in a complex human system is something that requires facilitation skills, it requires change management skills,
Upskilling in Growth Strategy
00:03:39
Speaker
e etc. And so as we as a company, myself personally, just had to get better acumen around navigating and helping organizations navigate change The things that we had to upskill ourselves in became things that we found our clients asking us if we could teach them. And over the course of years, that sort of off-the-cuff, word-of-mouth, back-channel upskilling became something that is an actual discipline. I do have to say it is not, so to speak, my day job. It's not a significant part of what I do, but it is absolutely my favorite part of what I do, helping organizations get better at the kind of things that help them get better to use a sort of parallelism to tagline.
00:04:21
Speaker
Yeah. I like that. I wish I'd had thought of that one, but it works. We are here to talk about the decision-making process and processing information and dealing with the complexities of the change management processes, suppose, in a way as well.
Decision-Making Framework at Blue Dog
00:04:37
Speaker
Yeah. The thing that uses to cite the the foundation to build all of those around is this head, heart, gut approach. yeah I really need to know more.
00:04:48
Speaker
Tell me, well, just start from the beginning and and tell me about At Blue Dog, it's about 10 years deep as a central framework for how we think about interaction, collaboration, change management, et cetera. In some cases, they're called the three brains or the three intelligence centers, the idea that you have a head, a heart, a gut. That is well established. I have spoken to guests on our sister podcast, Fit for My Age, who have been dietitians, for example, who've explained the idea that we have a brain between our ears and we also have another brain within our stomach as well, which yeah influences the activities of the brain and there are special nerves
00:05:24
Speaker
that communicate between the two. yes It is true, we do have this decision-making process within our gut as well as in our heads. We do, and there is a neuronal cluster near the heart that is involved in emotional decision-making. Head, heart, gut, as the three brains, as three intelligence centers is nothing new and pretty well established.
00:05:44
Speaker
What is unique to Blue Dog's approach, and it is a central model for kind of everything we do, this distinction, while the overwhelming majority of literature focuses on essentially the truism that you need to know when to lean into your head, when to lean into your heart, when to lean into your gut to be an effective decision maker.
00:06:07
Speaker
What we've found is it is wildly unhelpful because not all of us, and in fact, we would argue almost none of us, have equal propensity fluidity across those three centers, head, heart, and gut. And so it's not like there's just three domains. We each have an equal measure that we can dip into and leverage at will. We don't have equal propensity across all three. We all do have defaults in one of those. And like I said, I've been using this model for the past decade. I have yet to come across a person who doesn't have a default. And the problem is if you don't know your default and don't know the default of the audience members that you might be speaking to, then you can be talking right past each other. Essentially, it's it's a different compass that leads to a very different mental map.
00:06:59
Speaker
How a head sees the world and navigates that versus a heart versus ah a gut person are actually remarkably different. And it's really important to understand those distinctions, understand those defaults so that you can meet people where they are.
Influence of Intelligence Centers on Behavior
00:07:13
Speaker
and understand how to leverage where they're coming from and understand both the strengths and limitations of that and the strengths and limitations of where you're coming from. So in many ways, what you're saying is that we all have these three intelligence centers.
00:07:29
Speaker
They all reflect or are exhibited in different behaviors that we might exhibit and the way in which we make decisions and the way we interact with other people. So somewhat whose largest intelligence was their heart would be very empathetic with other people, would understand things in an emotional way.
00:07:47
Speaker
Someone who was much more focused on their IQ in their head, so to speak, would would want all the data and be making much more factual decisions. Yeah. I get those.
00:07:58
Speaker
i was thinking like the one with the gut is more likely to be just shooting from the hip, acts on the first thing that they think of. Yeah, that is essentially true. And of course, the nuances of a head, a heart and a gut decision maker or information processor, of course, you know it is much more nuanced than that. But reductively, it is essentially what you said. Maybe I'll build on that a little bit. This is such an intuitive human model, but the implications get really, really interesting. um So a head will essentially map their world through reason, logic, thinking, structures, et cetera.
00:08:36
Speaker
um That's different from how hearts lends the world and what their sort of mental maps of situations tend to be. You mentioned empathy, Michael, and that is true. um Hearts tend to have, tend to be people who rely more on empathy and who have more natural strength and empathy. I do want to say, though, empathy is not the thing at the center of their compass. It is a quality more than it is a central guiding core. Hearts actually at their core are more most driven by conviction, beliefs, and connections. say They feel things strongly, but how that aligns to decision-making is not necessarily just emotional lensing, but
00:09:18
Speaker
making decisions based on their deeply held beliefs, making decisions based on the things they feel not just convinced, which is what a head would say, but convicted about, and then making decisions that are towards connection. They are the the great connectors of a team or an organization, and they will prioritize that in the way that they navigate complexity and decision-making. All of those contrast quite clearly against the gut, who is driven by instinct, value, progress, movement, And that again, no one is monolithic. No one is just one. We all have little bits of all three and that can vary across the
Default Intelligence Centers Under Stress
00:09:54
Speaker
person. But the most important thing to note is that even the most well-rounded person will have a default and that default, whether head or heart or gut, will come out most strongly in times of pressure and stress. So that's really interesting. Working as a human resources professional, I do tend to see a lot of people when they are in a stressed situation. yeah
00:10:15
Speaker
Maybe i should perhaps be asking them what they had for lunch. You might want to send them to our website. We've made our assessment that we've created over the years. It's like a 22 to 25 question assessment that'll kick out your top results. And that's available on our website. We will put a link in the description. It's actually more helpful and accurate in real world terms to just take a look at how people are making decisions and what they are signaling that they value in both the the stances they take, but also even more importantly, the the questions they ask and and not least the ways that their signals show up in their sort of body language.
00:10:56
Speaker
For better and worse, much of corporate world has taught us to present things in head ways. Do it linearly, build the case, do it sequentially. Here's the problem. Here's the objective. Here's the methodology. Here are the results.
00:11:10
Speaker
Not too bad for a head audience. But if you start seeing your decision maker in particular in the room start checking their phone, they're getting a little antsy, that's probably a signal that you are giving them a story that doesn't resonate with them and it's not helping them get what they need. And they might be a gut. If you see them leaning in and trying to connect with you, but not really able to do so and and looking for the tension, looking for the problem to solve, you might be talking to a heart. Once you understand how these things show up, how these things show up in people's behaviors and their body language in the questions they ask, then it can actually be really easy to see where they're coming from. And it can be easy to see what people across the team are representing differently. And Michael, you can imagine if you aren't aware of these defaults and these differences, then you might be reading those signals in very different ways and ultimately disconnecting in disruptive ways versus productive ways. Yeah, because sometimes little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. right I'm assuming as well that it's probably not a good idea to assume that just because people are for example, in a technical role or an accountant, that they are necessarily head focused. I love that you said that, Michael. Well, now I'm worried. That that is... sort of the the immediate sort of stereotype, right? People will say, and and and look, I have to admit, we've been collecting this data for you know nearly a decade now. There are some patterns.
00:12:35
Speaker
To make some hypotheses, because not everyone you come across will be someone that you know you have their assessment results and you have heard from them that they agree with those results and you know what their center is, you're going to have to make some guesses, make some hypotheses, and then you know see how that data bears out in your experience of those people.
00:12:53
Speaker
Yes, there are patterns, but no, it is not helpful to stereotype. We work quite a bit with the data and analytics functions within organizations in no small part, because a lot of the storytelling training and and organizational influence training we do, those kinds of audiences need that help.
00:13:10
Speaker
They're good at analysis, not quite as good at influence, traditionally speaking. So you would be right to guess that in that kind of a room, With a 30-person team of data and analytic professionals, you will have a pretty high ratio of heads.
00:13:26
Speaker
And so, yep, there's a pattern you can see. if you're If we're talking to a sales team, yes, you can guess that they will probably over-index on gut in that room because that kind of a role tends to attract that kind of a person, a person who reads people well, a person who is interested in movement, momentum, keeping things going.
00:13:46
Speaker
if you are talking to an R and D function within an organization, you're talking to a bunch of scientists, the stereotype might be, ah, here again, lots of heads, right? you would sometimes be correct but you would also be correct if you guessed maybe we will over index in heart in this room because a lot of scientists and i can say this as a former scientist my university degree was actually in chemistry before he got into the marketing world scientists spend a lot of time on one specific thing and you have to be really passionate about that thing you have to believe in that thing very strongly and so you'll find oftentimes that that a science-oriented team or even organization, because organizations too have centers, will be heart-centered. I can tell you, because we've done the assessment with them, at least to some functions, Johnson & Johnson, which is a scientifically-based organization. Yeah, big company. They're a heart organization. You can see that when you work with them. They are all about values. beliefs, connection.
00:14:52
Speaker
P&G here in the States, Procter & Gamble, also a very science-rooted organization. They are the almost archetypal head organization. They want the data, they want the logic, they want the rational structures.
00:15:04
Speaker
When you mention J&J, Johnson & Johnson, I can picture their advertisements where it says J&J, a family company. Correct. I can then also recount having worked with people who have worked at Procter & Gamble. And when you say, oh, it's all about the data, oh, it is so much. Absolutely. And if the data says do it, then they can do it. But you could have a real struggle to get them to see, yeah the data says one thing, but there is also this other case, this more emotional case.
00:15:36
Speaker
Let's have a try. That's exactly right. Organizations can have a tough time both valuing to your point, Michael, but also even just integrating different modes of decision-making into, you know, what tends to be there over index.
00:15:51
Speaker
That's not to say if you see people asking for a lot of data, you must be in a head organization. Nowadays, data is kind of the the top thing in most organizational priorities but how organizations do or even struggle to make decisions from that data will be a bit of a cue for what their actual center is whether head heart or gut and michael i think that speaks to something that important that i want to say because this is a human model fundamentally it does work at all scales so every individual will have a default Every team will have a bit of a lean depending on either, you know, the the functional area of that team to some degree, the the strong maybe influence of leaders that have a particular center, organizations have centers, and even if there there are some interesting regional or even sort of cultural patterns. We were doing a training around Head, Heart, Gut for a North American subsidiary of a German-held company. They came in because they were really struggling to work well and make decisions well and give their German counterparts and leadership what they needed to drive strategic alignment. You know, they said, we need help influencing. We need help impacting, help us understand audience centric storytelling, et cetera. As part of that, we did this head, to heart, gut analysis.
00:17:14
Speaker
30 of them maybe in the room and something like 21 of them tested or assessed heart. Mm-hmm. So very driven by conviction, beliefs. They're looking for what is good and beneficial. They're looking for the moral of the story and the tension and all of those things. And I said, does anyone in the room want to guess what Germany tends to default to just broadly as a culture?
00:17:38
Speaker
And of course, everyone in the room immediately said, do you do you want to guess, Michael, what they said? The stereotype would be that it would be very head. Very head. Exactly right. And again, that is a bit of a stereotype. You have to be cautious with that. But I can tell you there was a German woman in the room who readily nutted and said, yeah. And we we had a good laugh over that. You can see it in very German companies. There is something culturally that tends to value signal or lens through head.
00:18:06
Speaker
That's different than the U.S., which tends to, as a culture, idolize gut thinking and gut decision making. many South American cultures, Brazil, Argentina, you will see that culturally heart tends to be more of the center. and I say it because it is a human system that you can actually get a decent amount of hypothetical data from just looking at the context and looking at the surround when you're working with a team, when you're working with a new organization, and and then drilling that down to understanding the individual.
Impact of Upbringing on Intelligence Centers
00:18:38
Speaker
What impact does nature and nurture have? When you say These are things that can be applied or there are trends within national nations or within cultures. How much of this head, heart, gut is learnt and how much is applied through nature?
00:18:56
Speaker
I have never seen a person change over time. Even more importantly, in the nurture versus nature kind of a question, I have seen many times a person who will assume they are, I'm going to give you a particular example, head. I've had seen this a number of times.
00:19:13
Speaker
A person will come in for coaching or they're on a team we're working with at Blue Dog. They will say, I'm a head. I resonate with what's head values, head lensing, head mapping. Even oftentimes we'll do the assessment and assess as head, but they're coming for coaching because they feel unsure and insecure in their decision-making. Working with a person like that over time, what I've found again and again is that as we as we uncover what's behind and what's motivating these modes of thinking and these behaviors, oftentimes they're
00:19:44
Speaker
you will find that the person is actually a heart or a gut who had very, very strong head caretakers who taught them essentially the only thing that can be trusted is the data and the logic. Don't trust your feelings. Don't trust your instincts. And over time, a person who is signaling taught that over and over again, will adopt that mode of thinking. What I find fascinating and consistent across my experiences, even though they adopt that way of being in the world,
00:20:13
Speaker
it doesn't change their fundamental hard wiring. There's something in us, and I'm not saying it is you know you're born with it, but there's something is deeply formative where you are a head or a heart or a gut and you get locked into that wiring. And after a certain point, it doesn't change and can't even be unwired out of you under the influence of folks who think you know very different ways. You will also see that happen in professional context. A person who might be a heart in a very head-centric profession, will have to learn how to operate head, even if left to themselves in their own devices, that's not how they would ideally make decisions. What does that mean then for an employer?
00:20:55
Speaker
How do you build a team? How do you think about a team? How do you think about team health and comprehensiveness and and all of those things? I think you do start at an individual level because each person needs to know what they are.
00:21:08
Speaker
to understand what their their default strengths, blind spots, and outages will be. And that's where you start. you want if i'm I'm ahead. And even though I've learned to be very fluid and fluent across all three centers, and Many times working with a team, you wouldn't necessarily be able to guess. If you were working on my team at Blue Dog, knowing how I day-to-day operate, you would have no question if I'm a head. And indeed, although I've learned great fluency across all three, when I do the assessment to this day, my percentage of head ends up somewhere around the mid-70s. It's 70%. I'm that much head.
00:21:44
Speaker
I need to know that because that will that will not only tell me a lot about what I will value, it will tell me a lot about what I will overlook. Whether you are an individual, and then this extends to a team as well, you need to be strengthening where you are. Be the best head or heart or gut you can possibly be.
00:22:01
Speaker
stretch where you can. You want to be building up acumen in other spaces and then supplement where you can. For me, I could look at a heart. I could look at my sort of heart mentor, Jake. He's a colleague of mine. He actually he actually brought in Head Heart Gut as a Model 2 Blue Dog as an organizational typing tool 10 years ago.
00:22:19
Speaker
I can look at him and say, ah, that was a very heart thing to say. I'm going to say things like that when I talk to a heart audience. i could i could I could fake it till I make it, as it were. That's a great expression to use because that's actually although it's sort of something slightly negative about you faking it until you make it in some context within this context it's like you're not really faking it you're just using a secondary characteristic yeah to actually meet enable you to be more successful in a particular environment you're still being yourself there's nothing fake about you but you happen to consciously
00:22:56
Speaker
work on not being your prime aspect and and bringing in other aspects of your personality. That's exactly right, Michael. and you You have to practice it. You have to disrupt yourself. And here, this is maybe a bit of a hot take or a controversial stance, but um yeah having worked in with behavioral scientists and in behavioral science-rooted kinds of contexts, I'm convinced ah that behaviors influence beliefs, what we what we believe, yes much more than beliefs influence behaviors, ultimately. and you know we we could We could argue about that over a pu over a pint in a pub at some point. But what I've seen is that if you behave in a direction that you want to believe, you will get there better, clearer, and faster than if you believe in a direction you want to behave.
00:23:45
Speaker
And so that, I think, is what's underneath the notion of fake it till make it behave. as if you were the thing you want to be, and you will learn to be that thing over time. That was certainly true for me in in embracing and learning how to access heart.
00:23:59
Speaker
Gut, I was infamous for saying back when I was a head and an unhealthy one, an immature head, I've got data and facts, and those have implications. I don't have time or space for opinions. They don't matter.
00:24:13
Speaker
I mean, yes, you're chuckling and also probably, you know, yikesing thinking about my colleagues at the time. um But I didn't have a grid for instinct and intuition. And so I would call our now CEO, Shannon, who's the best gut I've ever met. And I would say, give me a gut check here.
00:24:30
Speaker
And over time, I learned to access my own intuition. But for a long time, I had to supplement that. and And while that works for me as a person, I want to say, as I'm sure you are are imagining and applying in your own head right now, that's exactly how you think about teams as well.
00:24:45
Speaker
What is the makeup of your team? Where can
Enhancing Team Dynamics Through Intelligence Centers
00:24:48
Speaker
you stretch? Where can you lean on maybe a couple of particular you know team members who have something that you are not over-indexing on, but where will you need to supplement? Quick example of that. We worked with the leadership team of a big global QSR, quick service restaurant organization.
00:25:05
Speaker
and She hired us because her and her VPs were had great strategies, great vision, great mission. They had great energy, and yet they didn't seem to be able to get things done.
00:25:17
Speaker
They had all the stuff on paper, but it wasn't showing up in actions. and They said, help us take a couple days, let workshop, help us get this stuff to ground and make it show up in actions. And of course, the first thing as you can imagine now we did was we assessed them head, heart, gut.
00:25:33
Speaker
And now, Michael, that you've got some orientation of this model, it won't surprise you to hear 65% of that team was heart. But they're from the hospitality industry. Yeah. They had one head and two guts. Yeah. And so we said, your problem is, and and here's the thing about hearts. Hearts are wonderful in creating energy and conviction and getting people in a team on board. They're great at imagining possibilities. They're going to create great mission statements.
00:26:00
Speaker
They tend to get tripped up by talking and dreaming more than acting, having too many possibilities and not zeroing in on clarity of action. And so we said, your problem is you're a bunch of hearts.
00:26:10
Speaker
without the anchoring of head and not enough actioning of gut. And so we said, we need to lean into these two team members to translate your conviction and energy into action. And you need to actually go out of your team, maybe get some of your direct reports who are stronger in head to help you build the structure, to help you get the strategic cadencing, et cetera, et cetera.
00:26:33
Speaker
And so much like an individual, stretch where you can and then supplement where you can. That sounds great. It was really fascinating. Very interesting. Really do appreciate your time today, Eric.
00:26:44
Speaker
It's been, yeah, I've learned a lot and it's it's fascinating. Thank you very
Conclusion and Call to Action
00:26:49
Speaker
much. Yeah, it's been my pleasure. Can I maybe leave you with one signal to keep an eye out for? Okay. And then one thing to keep in mind when you're managing people. The thing to keep an eye out for, and I often tell this kind of in the frame of a joke,
00:27:02
Speaker
A head, a heart, and a gut walk into a bar and they're trying to make a decision on their business and their head says, this is right. And the heart says, no, this is right. And the gut says, no, this is right. The problem is they mean three completely different things by the word right. A head means it's true, factual, logical, supportable. A heart means it's good, beneficial, helpful, desirable. A gut means it's valuable.
00:27:24
Speaker
It'll move the needle. It's productive. It's necessary. That's something to know when you're arguing about the word right. Last but certainly not least, if you're managing a head, you need to know that at the very bottom, they're going to want to feel that their perspective is valid.
00:27:40
Speaker
If you're managing a heart, they're going to need to feel that their person is valued. And if you're managing a gut, they're going to need to feel that their path is supported. And yes, we are all more nuanced human beings than that. but we do have those as our cores when we are heads versus hearts versus guts. It's fascinating. Thanks for the time. Thank you very much.
00:28:01
Speaker
He's been interesting. I am Michael Millward, Managing Director of Abbasida, and I have been having a conversation with the independent mind, Eric Staples, who is the Director of Growth Strategy and Organizational Upskilling at Blue Dog.
00:28:18
Speaker
You can find out more about both of us by using the links in the description. I'm sure you will have enjoyed listening to this episode of The Independent Minds as much as Eric and I have enjoyed making it.
00:28:29
Speaker
So please give it a like and download it so you can listen anytime, anywhere. To make sure you don't miss out on future episodes, please subscribe. You'll probably also want to share the link with your family, friends and work colleagues as well.
00:28:42
Speaker
Remember, the aim of all the podcasts produced by Abbasida is not to tell you what to think, but we do hope to have made you think. Until the next episode of The Independent Minds, Thank you for listening and goodbye.