Dr Rob Archer

From ‘computer says no’, to ‘no, computer’

Posted on January 18, 2024 by Dr Rob Archer

There is a famous character in Little Britain called Carole Beer, a computer operator who famously responds to reasonable customer requests with the phrase:

“Computer says no”

This captured something funny and true about our relationship with computers…a tendency to blindly believe whatever they say, and to allow this to override our own intuition (and in Carole’s case, humanity).

I was reminded of this when I watched Mr Bates vs The Post Office, a brilliant series made by one of my clients, ITV.

The Post Office scandal is one of the biggest ever scandals in the UK, where hundreds of sub-postmasters were incorrectly convicted of theft and false accounting, based on the output of a new computer system.

When sub-postmasters recorded financial shortfalls in the new system, people believed the system rather than the humans.

The blank, unquestioning faith in computers destroyed lives and led to despair, bankruptcy and suicide.

Only the scepticism and courage of a handful of people stood in the way.

One, Alan Bates, refused to accept that the computer was correct and instead trusted his instincts that something was amiss with the computers.

He was right.

Learning scepticism of thoughts

In ACT we are taught to treat our own thoughts and emotions with a degree of scepticism.

We learn to see our thoughts not as ‘the truth’ but rather as hypotheses to be evaluated by whether they are helpful or not.

If we were to act as though these thoughts were true, what would that lead?

Could other perspectives or explanations be possible?

It’s like the famous Emo Phillips line:

Learning this scepticism of our thoughts can be liberating, as we learn that we don’t have to do everything our minds tell us to do.

Learning scepticism of technology

It occurs to me that we need to learn this scepticism when it comes to using technology.

We should be teaching people that outputs of technology are products of humanity, and so are flawed, limited, biased and frequently, plain wrong.

In this era of AI, algorithms, quantified selves and deep fakes, it is even more urgent to treat all outputs of technology with a degree of scepticism.

The alternative is a world where we place blind faith in technology, and where we no longer trust our own instincts.

The very definition of inhumanity. I for one say ‘no’ to that.

A Father’s Day post from New York

Posted on June 18, 2023 by Dr Rob Archer

It is Father’s Day and I am traveling – this week in New York.

It’s days like this I worry that I am failing the Cat’s in the Cradle test of Fatherhood.

If you’ve never heard the song here it is:

This song really meant nothing to me until I became a Dad, and then it meant everything:

My son turned 10, just the other day

He said, “thanks for the ball, Dad, come on let’s play!

Can you teach me to throw?”

I said, “not today, I gotta a lot to do” He said, “that’s OK”

And he walked away but his smile never dimmed,

It said, “I’m gonna be like him, yeah,

you know I’m gonna be like him.”

And the cat’s in the cradle

And the silver spoon,

Little boy blue and the man in the moon

“When you coming home Dad?”

“I don’t when, but we’ll get together then, son,

You know we’ll have a good time then.”

Maybe you can imagine how the songs ends.

It is a hard listen, today.

I don’t think I am failing this test, but it is a reminder of the price of failure.

Be present. Put the tech away.

Keep trying and don’t put it off, because the time is now.

All we ever have, is now.

The 3-Space Model

Posted on April 4, 2023April 12, 2024 by Dr Rob Archer

*UPDATE*

This post by Dan Carter is very similar to the 3-space model described below:

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7184014249415917570

The 3-Space model is a really flexible way of navigating transitions.

It is as relevant to elite athletes as it is to those in business.

Here’s how it works:

Imgine you have 30 or so seconds between work calls or meetings.

It is easy in that context to take the stress or emotion from one call into another. In turn this can impact behaviour in the next call, with the cycle potentially repeating.

This is a tricky challenge – 30 seconds is not long, after all!

And yet there are techniques that can help with fast emotion regulation and help us take more more effective action.

One of these is the 3-Space model.

Instead of doing nothing in the 30 seconds, divide the time into 3, roughly equal parts:

The First Space – Processing your emotions

In the first 10 seconds, try to tune into your body – what are you feeling? What thoughts are you experiencing? What emotions are you feeling? Where do these show up in your body?

The Second Space – Pausing to get present

In the next 10 seconds, see if you can intentionally pause to bring yourself into the present moment. You can do this by taking a couple of deep breaths, looking at the sky or touching a cold surface.

The Third Space – Picking your response

In the final 10 seconds your job is to intentionally pick the most effective behaviour in the next passage of time. For example:

Business: What kind of impression do I want to make in the next meeting? What are my objectives?

Home life: What kind of Dad do I want to be when I turn the key and open the door?

Sports: What can I do to put pressure back on my opponent?

I wouldn’t say the effect of using the 3-space model is dramatic, but I do find its value tends to compound over time.

I regularly use it with my children, especially when tired, and it helps ‘lift and shift’ me away from reactive mode and towards being more connected to my values pretty reliably.

Why Mental Health is About Going Back to Basics

Posted on May 17, 2022 by Dr Rob Archer

When you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck. Paul Virilio

Ever since humans started rising up the food chain, our progress as a species has made our lives both easier and harder.

Sure, we have electric tin openers. But how many giraffes forget to buy batteries for their child’s toy cherry picker on Christmas Day?

Take the invention of farming roughly 12,000 years ago, suddenly we were able to support much larger families, and a huge explosion in population followed.

But farming was also a trap.

Compared to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle it was harder work with longer hours. But with more mouths to feed there was no going back…

Language is another example. Perhaps the great human invention, it allows cooperation at scale and turned us from frankly quite puny apes into the planet’s most deadly predators.

Yet at the same time language is a double-edged sword.

Unlike say, wombats, language allows us to ruminate on the past, to worry about the future and to compare ourselves unfavourably to others.

Language allows me to write this post in the conscious certainty that one day I will have to leave everything and everyone I love in this world.

Wombats don’t think like that, or if they do they’re being very stoic about it.

Finally, let’s take modern inventions like smartphones, videoconferencing and social media.

These are all astonishing achievements that bring many benefits. But on balance, would you say these inventions have made us happier necessarily?

When you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck.

The point is that our progress as a species has not always been good for us.

And this is why improving mental health is so often about going back to basics…

Five mental health basics

Most of us know this stuff, but the problem with knowing something is that this is not where the battle is won.

Like it or not, humans evolved with a basic set of needs which we need to make happen. And unless we do them, we will not be happy, healthy, or perform at our best.

Here’s the 5 most important:

1. Social relationships. The theme of this year’s Mental Health Awareness month is loneliness. And quite right – our ancestors simply did not survive without the support of a group.We’re wired for connection, and that’s the real, face-to-face, full-fat kind, not the online, semi-skimmed kind.

2. Daylight. Our internal body clocks require daylight in order to recalibrate each day. Without this daily recalibration from light, we start to slip out of sync with our own biological rhythms and we become less happy and healthy (this is a great 3 min video on the subject).

3. Movement – our ancestors only rarely got stuck at their desks for 10 hours a day. In fact, it is estimated they walked around 15,000 steps a day (according to Fitbit’s early data). We evolved to solve problems on the move, not sitting at a desk. (I like this clip about the perfect anti-learning environment).

4. Work in pulses – our hunter-gatherer ancestors rarely engaged in frenzied, all-out continuous berry hunting. Humans work best in pulses; activity followed by rest. A bit like, err, everything else in nature.

5. Set boundaries. Our ancestors weren’t being messaged at 11pm about this amazing berry tree their old school friend just found in Italy. Unless we can find a way to place some boundaries around our working hours or commitments, none of us is going to be happy or healthy.

I know you know this stuff.

But knowing is not where the battle is won.

So now I’m off to take that walk, and I hope to see you there.

Do you need a high-performance routine? (Plus: FREE quiz…and hedgehogs!)

Posted on February 22, 2022 by Dr Rob Archer

So, for today’s serious analysis of the modern workplace, I want you to imagine you’re a hedgehog.

There you are, snuffling about in the forest, doing all of your normal hedgehoggy things.

Yes, you’re covered in fleas, but you look adorable!

Then one day you reach a strange bit of the forest which feels a lot harder underfoot, and then there are these two strange bright lights coming at you…

Now, we all know what you should do, which is probably run for it.

But we also know what you (as a hedgehog) are likely to do, which is roll up into a ball.

Now, this doesn’t make you a bad hedgehog.

You’re an excellent hedgehog, you just weren’t evolved for the particular environment you’re now in.

This is what is known as an ‘evolutionary mismatch’.

Now of course we humans aren’t like hedgehogs. We are way more advanced! We’ve even developed flea powder!

But in some ways we are a lot like hedgehogs, in that we didn’t evolve for the environment we are in either….

Why it is so hard to be human

For 99.9% of our evolutionary existence, humans would gather in small groups, forage and hunt for food, we were active in the day and slept when dark, our lives shaped by our environment.

Our ancestors moved a lot (over 15,000 steps per day according to Fitbit’s early records), and ate a wide variety of food.

In his book Origins; How the Earth Made Us, Lewis Dartnell shows how evolution and our environment are not separate events – our biology was shaped by nature.

Every cell in our bodies evolved in sequence with a daily rhythm, (primarily driven by exposure to light).

Yet fast forward to today and everything has changed.

Far from being tethered to nature, we now work in a way which is independent from these daily rhythms.

Where once we were connected to the earth and to each other, today we feel more connected but also more isolated.

For many of us, we hardly see daylight, we are largely sedentary (most of us now walking closer to 5,000 steps per day), and we work more or less constantly.

No surprise that work feels a daily grind…

Biologically and psychologically we evolved to work in a daily rhythm, and disrupting this rhythm leads to a kind of dysregulation, affecting everything from sleep to mental health.

This is another evolutionary mismatch.

Covid as the great accelerator

And Covid has accelerated these trends.

I first met Annette, a senior manager at one of the major airlines, in Spring of 2020.

She told me how when the Covid crisis took hold she and her team had moved into ‘emergency mode’, working round the clock to try and save the business, but

‘now it’s 16 months later and it feels like we’re still in the same pattern’.

From speaking to 1000s of people in many different industries last year, I know many can relate.

Many of us have been drawn into routines which we didn’t consciously design, and which have become unsustainable.

The issue is not whether we can carry on – most of us are good at soldiering on – but whether this is the best we can aim for. If you look at the statistics on mental health since Covid, I would argue not.

But what can we do about this, and where should we start?

Understanding high-performance routines

The first step is to build awareness that we are working in routines for which our brains and bodies were not evolved.

We are working out of sync with the rhythms that shaped our entire biology.

Arguably we don’t even notice the cost we’re paying, because it has become the water we swim in.

Yet by operating in a way which is divorced from our biology we create huge challenges to health and mental health.

There is hope, though.

Unlike hedgehogs, we can do more than just roll up into a ball.

In the next article I will explain what a high-performance routine looks like.

But in the meantime you can build awareness of your existing routine by trying this quiz, which will give you feedback as to whether you might benefit from strengthening your routine.

It is freely available to anyone, including hedgehogs (though admittedly you might need a mouse).

The Great 2022 Reset: You don’t need new habits, you need a (high-performance) routine

Posted on January 19, 2022 by Dr Rob Archer

It’s January so psychologists like me are legally obliged to write about habits, resolutions and the like.

If that’s what you’re after I heartily recommend the work of Katy Milkman, BJ Fogg and James Clear.

These people have undermined the idea that habits are about repetition (“21 days to build a new habit!”) and introduced the more accurate idea that it is how we feel during any given behaviour that creates a habit.

Yet this conversation also misses some key variables.

The first is that how we feel is often not within our control. We are usually better off trying to control the context around a behaviour instead.

The second is that it is sometimes not the habit itself that is key, but the timing and sequencing of a behaviour that matters most.

And this is why I believe what people most need in 2022 is a reset coordinated not by habits, but by high-performance routines.

What is a high-performance routine?

Well, let’s start with the opposite.

At some point in the last 20 months many of us have fallen into routines that we didn’t really choose or design.

For whatever reason, what started off as a sprint became a marathon and we became locked in routines where we worked harder and longer, became more sedentary, and days all blurred into one. To assess your own routine, how many of these bullets resonate?

Everything feels like a priority
You hunker down for hours in front of your screen, taking few breaks
Some days you hardly move from your desk (a good indicator is less than 5,000 steps per day)
You feel constantly distracted, pulled between different priorities
You reach midday and realise you’ve not been outside
Work often bleeds through into the evenings, weekends and holidays
You find it hard to switch off and / or sleep
You often feel tired in the morning
You feel guilty that some areas of your life are being neglected
You worry about the impact of all of the above, but are anxious that if you work less you will feel even more overwhelmed

This is what I call the ‘flat line’ way of working where we work in a continuous, often dysregulated way, without any real structure or boundaries. In this way we ignore our own body’s need for recovery and instead ‘push on through’.

The ‘flat line’ can work for a while, but over the longer term it becomes an insult to high-performance and dangerous to mental health (primarily because it’s a very unnatural way to work).

Worse still, in this context potentially helpful new habits can seem like an extra burden.

For example, imagine telling someone who is overburdened that they need to start doing meditation. Even though meditation might help, in the short term it is likely to feel like another burden; one more thing to do (and possibly fail at).

Meditation – just one more thing to fail at

High-performance routines are different for 3 reasons.

1. Routines create their own rhythm, with one part of the routine enabling the next. Habits are easier to stick to when part of a routine.

2. Individual behaviours become much more powerful when part of a routine. What was an isolated behaviour becomes a meaningful pattern, linked to our biological rhythms as well as our long term values and goals.

3. Routines create a sense of control; of everything having a time and a place. And this creates the positive feelings for change to be sustained.

In the next few weeks, I will be publishing a series of posts on high-performance routines as well as giving away my new e-book on the subject.

In the meantime, I would encourage you to consider what an ideal daily routine would look like for you.

You could start by downloading the template below and seeing if you can identify what your ideal daily routine would look like if you had complete control over each day.

I did this for myself and with many clients last year, and the results were always revealing.

daily-hpr-exercise Download

The future of work: Why Psychological Flexibility is a Key Leadership Skill of the Future

Posted on January 7, 2022February 10, 2022 by Dr Rob Archer

A few years ago in the UK, a Panorama investigation uncovered systematic abuse of elderly care home residents who were being routinely pushed about, belittled and humiliated by their so-called carers.

Worse, when whistleblowers drew attention to the abuse it was they themselves who were disciplined by senior management. Empathy for the victims seemed in short supply as it took a TV investigation for action to be taken.

This is just one example in a long line of depressing stories about toxic leadership. From MPs to journalists, and leaders in organisations from Big Tech to oil, the modern era seems one where empathy, care and values in leadership can be in short supply.

Values and leadership

Theorists like Bruce Avolio have argued that we need a more authentic form of leadership, which connects leaders to what really matters to them. This acts as a kind of compass for leaders, which is especially useful in times of uncertainty (read; now).

Connecting leaders more powerfully with their values is also important because it has been shown to generate positive psychological outcomes in followers.

And yet…

There is one slight problem with these ‘authentic’ forms of leadership: they are bloody difficult to do.

Leadership values easily get derailed by circumstance and expedience as well as by existing organisational cultures. It takes a special kind of courage to execute values in practice.

Yet most modern leadership theories (and training) deal with values as though all that remains after identifying them is to go off and do them.

Good luck with that.

Understanding our values is only half the battle. Values have a flipside – an admission price.

Put simply, pursuing our values makes life psychologically harder, not easier. We tend to hurt where we care.

It is much easier to avoid this psychological discomfort – something that psychologists call experiential avoidance. However in the turning away from our discomfort, we often turn away from our values.

This is why experiential avoidance is perhaps the biggest driver of substandard leadership behaviour (as well as in clinical contexts, poorer mental health).

After all it’s far easier to avoid that awkward but important conversation than to have it.

how can we help our leaders live their values in practice?

Psychological flexibility is a concept which started in the clinical context (over 8 50 randomised control trials show its effectiveness in improving mental health) but is now gaining traction in organisations.

Many of my organisational clients are introducing this training, not least because psychological flexibility is so practical, and especially effective with difficult situations involving ambiguity or uncertainty – what Todd Kashdan ‘calls the messiness of human life’.

Psychological flexibility is important in leadership for three reasons:

It helps people clarify and understand their values in practice, not just in theory.
It helps people stay more aware of the present moment, which means that they are more likely to notice opportunities to be empathetic and engaged with other people.
It gives leaders the skills to move towards their values and deal with the psychological cost of doing so. By building willingness to have difficult thoughts and emotions, it reduces the natural human tendency to avoid them.

Too many leadership training programmes focus on values and forget to train people in the skills that help them live their values.

Yet unless we do this, leaders will continue to run from the pain that empathy brings them.

Humanising the workplace; Two practical tools to help teams working remotely

Posted on February 23, 2021June 30, 2021 by Dr Rob Archer

Since March last year I’ve run well over 300 webinars with tens of thousands of people from all around the world, and everywhere the themes were similar.

After the initial burst of excitement of working from home, people talk about how relentless work is, and how much they miss some of the more informal, human sides of working in teams.

For many the past year has brought a kind of empathy gap, where work has become more transactional and less human, with many of the informal 2-minute conversations replaced by more formal hour-long Zoom calls.

There is therefore a need for teams to adapt and to think of new ways of protecting the ‘human’ side of office life.

Building on this idea, here are two tools that you can download and use with your teams; The Life Compass and The Key to Me.

Below you can find a brief explanation of each, as well as free templates to use. I hope you find them useful!

Tool 1: The Life Compass

This tool is to help people to understand what really matters to them (even in adversity); what kind of actions move them towards their values, and how stress can sometimes ‘hook’ them away from that direction. It is designed to help guide people through tough times, just like a compass.

How to use the Life Compass

Step 1: Have each person in your team complete their own Life Compass for themselves. You can download the template here.

Instructions for completion are here.

You can see a compass that I completed – and which I sometimes use in workshops – below.

Step 2: Then, the group can complete a shared compass, to help them navigate through the project together.

You can download the Team Compass template here. We’ve also created a template in Mural here.

As with the individual compass, work round each quadrant to identify what matters, how the team gets hooked away from what matters and what course correcting might look like.

Tool 2: The key to me

This tool is useful for helping to build understanding and empathy across distributed teams. It’s also quite a fun exercise to do which can bring people together really well and remind everyone that we’re all just human beings doing our best.

The idea of The Key to Me is to create greater understanding of what gets the best out of each individual, as well as what kind of constraints and limitations homeworking brings.

It is an especially great tool for any team which is newly created or has new members (so long as they feel sufficiently psychologically safe to do so).

Here is a template in Mural for using The Key to Me.

And here is my own example created in Mural:

I really hope you enjoy using these tools – both of them have helped me. Let me know in the comments anything you would add or any questions you have.

New E-book: Thriving in Uncertainty

Posted on November 26, 2020May 3, 2021 by Dr Rob Archer

I am happy to release version 2 of our e-book, Thriving in Uncertainty.

thriving-in-uncertainty_may-21 Download

In this short guide, we cover the two key issues related to uncertainty:

How to make effective decisions even when outcomes are hard to predict
How to deal with the negative emotions (like stress and anxiety) that come with uncertainty

As with all our e-books we have packed it with links to free tools and resources, ideas for further reading and TED talks that illustrate key points.

We have also included a range of templates and interactive PDFs that can be used either by individuals or groups.

This is version 1 – we would love your feedback about how we can improve it.

Enjoy!

The Marginal Gains Handbook – Practical ideas to survive and thrive in the age of Coronavirus

Posted on May 7, 2020 by Dr Rob Archer

We are delighted to release VERSION 2 of this free, practical guide of evidence-based ways to survive and thrive in the age of Coronavirus.

DOWNLOAD HERE

This version includes improved ideas for thriving in the age of Coronavirus as well as a new section on parenting in lockdown.

This is from a CEO who’s been using it with his organisation:

Your Covid Marginal Gains booklet has been a great source to help me during this once in a life time roller coaster. It deals with so many layers that we are all going through and gave me confidence in what I was telling my team, give me solace in what I was feeling, and hope for what despair we all go through.

Continue reading “The Marginal Gains Handbook – Practical ideas to survive and thrive in the age of Coronavirus” →