Retail Ireland Conference
Dr. Maureen Gaffney
May 2013
The Problem Statement
Truth #1: The pressure for
continuous & faster change
is putting huge pressure our
capacity to adapt to that
change
Truth #2: Developing our
capacity to adapt & change e
is our biggest challenge &
our greatest opportunity to
survive, recover & flourish in
a sustainable way
Why so much pressure to change ?
 Speed:
‘The world used to be a place where the big ate the small. Now
the fast eat the slow.’ Klaus Schwab
 Relentless competitiveness Pressure to continuously replace
products & services with more efficient ones
 Focus on services : increasingly defined as ‘a solution to a
problem’ or ‘something that works’
 Fear of being left behind : Anxiety that job & workplace may
be changed at any moment by economic & technological
forces that are anything but stable
‘Microsoft is always only two years away from failure’ Bill Gates
‘Only the paranoid survive’ Andy Gove Intel
The complacency gap
• A recent survey of customers of nearly 400 US
companies revealed that only 8% of them described
their experience as ‘superior’
• Yet, 80% of the companies surveyed believe that the
experience they have been providing is superior.
• This disparity should alarm any organisation that is
competitive & serious about building sustainable
success
We KNOW how to change.... J. Kotter
1.
2.
3.
4.
4.
5.
6.
7.
Ability to create a sense of urgency
Get a good team – with skills, motivation &
connections to make the change happen
Create an enterprise vision – that people can vividly
see, hear, feel, want
Communicate the vision
Remove obstacles out of people’s way so they can make
change happen
Change fast – create small wins
Keep on changing
Make change stick by creating new organisational culture
Then why is change so often hit-andmiss or unsuccessful?
 Because change has both an internal &
external aspect
 Over focus on structural change & neglect of
internal change – how people are thinking &
feeling
 Whether they feel they are flourishing - At
Their Best
 ‘At work do you have the opportunity to do what you do
best every day?’
 When employees answer ‘strongly agree’ to this
questions they are
 50% more likely to work in a business with lower turnover
 38% more likely to work in more productive unit
 44% more likely to work in business with higher customer
satisfaction
At your best
 Being at your Best not just about IQ but EQ
 Longitudinal studies – IQ contributes only 20%
to life success
High EI accounts for 2/3 of difference between
‘star’ & ‘average’ performers & 4/5 of
difference between ‘star’ & ‘average’ senior
managers/leaders
At Your Best
CONNECTIVITY
AUTONOMY
USING YOUR VALUED
COMPETENCIES
High work
satisfaction
VITAL
ENGAGEMENT
High
Positivity
High
Productivity
The Problem ?
Only 20% of people & 20% of business
teams flourishing
20% are ‘languishing’ – functioning
well below par, blocked, frustrated,
‘running on empty’
What Blocks Us from Flourishing ?
Losing a very precise ratio of
positivity to negativity
The Little Meter in Your Brain
Continually registering negative &
positive emotional reactions to
internal & external ‘events’
 Each emotion triggers cascade of
changes in thinking, in body & in
behaviour
Critical Positive-Negative Ratios
Ratio of 3:1 – critical
threshold & minimum
platform for positive
functioning
 Below 3:1 – the
‘languishing ratio’
 Ratio 5:1 – the
‘Flourishing ratio’
 Ratio of 12:1 - dynamics
of flourishing break up

 For happy, sustainable
personal relationships
 For individual wellbeing &
optimum functioning
 For work & organisational
success
The Basic Emotions
Liking/Love
Joy
Gratitude
Contentment
Anger
Fear
Sadness
Shame
Interest
Hope
Pride
Humour
Inspiration
Awe
Guilt
Envy
Jealousy
Contempt*
Disgust*
Emotion
Behaviour
Thought
Pattern
The Power of Negative Emotions
Negative designed to be powerful,
‘sticky’ & contagious
 Negativity ‘contaminating’
 Loss more powerful impact than ‘equivalent’ gain
 Negative first impressions ‘stickier’
 Need 9 ‘bits’ of positive information to reverse
negative first impression
 Less than 4 new ‘bits’ of negative information to
reverse positive first impression
 Negative mood stronger & longer lasting effects than
positive mood
 Intense negative interactions powerful predictor of
long-term outcome in relationships
 Trust easier to destroy than create
Two Principles of Flourishing
Consciously &
Actively Build the
Positive in yourself,
in others & in
organisations you
care about
Consciously &
Actively Reduce
the Negative in
yourself, in others
& in organisations
you care about
Building the positive
Ten Strategies to Build the Positive
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
Build your capacity for happiness
Set yourself goals
Control your attention
Always know your positive purpose
Take charge of your mood
Master the art of vital engagement
Build meaning in your life - feeling that you matter & what you
do matters
8. Build your resilience
9. Stop sabotaging yourself : How you can’t be driven crazy
without your full cooperation
10. Embrace the future: Why optimism really counts
Strategy 1
Build your capacity for happiness
. 1 Life Success & Happiness – Which comes
First?
The predictive power of a smile
Happiness & Health: Exercise, Body Mass, Smoking
important factors- but positive feelings more important
Persistent Negative
Feelings
Cut 10 yrs Off Your Life
Persistent Negative
Feelings
Cut 10 yrs Off Your Life
So are happy people insufferably selfpreoccupied?
Positivity is Contagious (so is
negativity....)
 One person's positivity directly causes another
person to feel positive
 The more direct & face to face the interaction
stronger the influence
 Effect spreads throughout social network - even to
those you don’t know.
 Every positive colleague increases your happiness by
9% & each unhappy colleague decreases it by 7%.
 So if you can add three positive people to your
network your positivity increases by nearly a third.
2. Why having ‘Life Projects’ counts
Happiness Set Point
Life
circs
10%
Genetic
50%
Life projects
40%
Strategy 5
Take charge of your mood
How mood changes everything
 Feelings provoke mood
 Mood lasts two hours
 Mood affects virtually
everything you think, remember,
feel & do
 Mood is contagious -particularly
mood of somebody you depend
on
 So you can’t leave your mood at
the door of your life
The ‘Mood’ of a Group
 Emotional contagion happens in groups & spreads like virus
 The more emotionally interconnected a group, the longer
have worked together, the stronger the moods expressed by
individuals – the more contagion
 Mood at work counts – to individuals but also to productivity
 Negative mood affects in performance of entire group
In cardiac unit where nurses’
general mood depressed, death
rate among patients four times
higher than on comparable
units.
Strategy 8
Build your resilience
Flourish - not in spite of adversity but
because of it: Stress –Related Growth
Level of
functioning
Flourishing
recovery
Survival
TIME
Stage 1: Coping with immediate
distress: Are we there yet?
 Why me? ‘Why us?
Why now? ‘What
if....?’ ‘Now
what...?
 Affecting focus,
concentration &
productivity
Stage 2. Understanding the
meaning of what happened
Stage 3: Building a new
narrative
 About the kind of person/organisation that you
think you are
Worthy of love & respect? Or not?
 About what you expect of other people
Can you trust others? Or not?
 About the future
Full of opportunity? Or threat?
Story is your lens on the world
‘Contamination’ Narrative
 Set-back or crisis seen as
‘a life that was once good has now gone bad’ forever spoiled, ruined, never to be again
 Sense of future robbed
 Energy trapped in despondency, &
helplessness or continually going after goals
no longer attainable
‘Redemption’ Narratives
 Admitting the scale of the crisis & setback &
accepting new reality
 Unwelcome yes, but intrinsic to growth that
followed
 Crisis as positive turning point - not as end but
beginning of something new
 Refocus big picture – reconnect to deepest
values – who you are & what is really
important to you
Strategy 10
Cultivate optimism
 Remarkably little evidence that optimists
EVER worse off than pessimists
 Optimism & human power to adapt wired
same way in the brain
 Be ready to respond to both threat AND
opportunity by activating positive &
negative expectations
Learning to ask transformative
questions
1. How are we different in positive way – not in
spite of but because of what happened?
2. Is there anything about what happened that
allows us to do something that otherwise we
could not have done? Or would not have
done?
The answers are the drivers of post-stress
growth
The Incredible Frailty of
Predictions....
 1984 Economist experiment
 The classic experiment – 284 experts
making 27,000 long & short term
predictions
 ‘Foxes’ & ‘Hedgehogs’

‘In this world the optimists have it, not because they
are always right, but because they are positive. Even
when wrong they are positive, and that is the way of
achievement, correction, improvement and success.
Educated eyes-open optimism pays; pessimism can
only offer the empty consolation of being right.
The one lesson that emerges is the need to keep
trying. No miracles. No perfection. No millennium. No
apocalypse. We must cultivate a sceptical faith, avoid
dogma, listen and watch well, try to clarify and define
ends, the better to choose means’.