Thompson Harrison
News and Press
On The Psychology of Successful Groups
The Great Coaches: Leadership & Life
Paul Barnett & Jim Woolfrey
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Paul Barnett and Jim Woolfrey invited Samantha Roceky to discuss the psychology of successful groups.
Some of the highlights from the interview are Sam’s thoughts that:
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Its through team membership and in particular the teams leader that people experience the culture of the organisations they belong to.
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How the focus of leaders should be to create other leaders so that they can create a ripple effect throughout the organisation.
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The research that says 60% to 70% of people are stressed because of the behaviour of their superiors. And the implications of this for you as a leader.
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And the importance of disrupting your teams by bringing in ideas and stimulus from outside, and making sure that the membership is diverse.
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Listen to the podcast HERE.
Paul Barnett and Jim Woolfrey invited Dr Gavin Weeks to discuss the topic of Energy on their podcast
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Listen to the podcast HERE.
How to talk to your friends, according to social science
The exact number of pals for a productive conversation + why it matters.
BY NIKKI OSMAN PUBLISHED: 21 JUNE 2023
When Sally Rooney published Conversations with friends in 2017, it wasn’t intended as an educational text. Six years and one pandemic later, all signs point to a non-fiction equivalent flying off the shelves.
Research into our post-pandemic social skills suggests we’re a little rusty. A Japanese study published in May 2022 found that Covid reduced opportunities for small talk, in a way that impacted our ability to socialise.
Providing yet more proof that our social cogs need a little lubrication, a systematic review of the impact of the pandemic on social anxiety, published in January, found that it’s increased among the general population in the wake of Covid, with women being particularly vulnerable.
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Read the article HERE
Do you have a medium-sized sports shop near you, stocking a range of equipment from running shoes to cricket bats and every type of ball under the sun that has been keeping local people fit in mind and body for as long as anyone can remember? Well, if the sporting megabrand Asics has anything to do with it, you won’t have for much longer.
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There have been two retail cornerstones to my sporting life: Euro Sports on Finchley Road, run by the Patel family since 1976, where I got my first cricket bat (SP, size 4), tennis racket (Dunlop Maxply Junior) and every other piece of kit I ever used until I moved to Kentish Town in 1994, where (especially since my sport-mad son was born) hardly a week has gone by that I haven’t been into Ace Sports for a ping-pong bat or a tube of tennis balls or just a chat with owner Nick Mavrides, ever-smiling guardian of NW5’s physical and mental health.
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But he’s not smiling any more. On May 4 he received notice, out of the blue, that Asics was terminating his shoe contract, “as part of the ongoing evolution of our strategy”. Adidas and Nike having previously done the same, this represents a huge blow to his business and may finally close him down. Asics sent the same letter to Euro Sports. Without the turnover from an affordable running shoe, these two great shops will not survive to sell the specialist sporting kit their communities depend on.
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“In the end, it’s just greed,” Nick says. “At the point a shoe enters the country it costs Asics around £20. I will pay them £78 plus VAT for it and sell it for £150, but if they sell direct they get the whole £150, so they don’t want to pay us any more. Which means the end of local sports shops.”
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When I contacted Asics, they told me “a diverse and varied retailer base of small to big partners is an integral part of our strategy and key to our future”. But that is blatantly not true, as they have just cancelled the two best sports shops in central/northwest London.
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Then, sounding more like a jilted lover than a business, they said, “With this particular retailer, its focus and operations indicated that Asics was not viewed as a key partner”.
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“Not true,” says Nick. “They know nothing about my business and have never sent a rep here. Asics is the only running shoe I carry, from baby size up to a men’s 14. And I pay them £25,000 a year for stock, which is massive. Euro Sports spend £50,000. This is a cartel between Nike, Adidas and Asics which aims to wipe independent sports shops off the map.”
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And this at a time when our increasingly unhealthy nation needs community involvement in sport more than ever. Manchester City can conquer the world, England may win back the Ashes, but if Asics cannot be brought to reason, British sport will die.
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‘For the perfect dinner party, the best number of guests is a multiple of four,” says the psychologist Professor Robin Dunbar in a new book, The Social Brain. “We can only keep in mind five people’s mental states at once, including our own . . . so any attempt at a conversation within a larger group is doomed to become a ‘lecture’ . . . therefore, inviting four people, or eight or 12, to a dinner party may be the best strategy for ensuring everyone has a good time.”
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With respect to the eminent professor, may I be permitted to suggest that the best number of people for a dinner party is, in fact, none.
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Recipe for success
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According to The New Macho study (couldn’t help thinking of a book-lined room with a desk in the middle, a rack of dumbbells in the corner, cigar stubs everywhere and a semi-automatic assault weapon over the fireplace), a report commissioned for Men’s Health Week, 51 per cent of men believe that “the media negatively affect how successful they feel”. But I don’t know about that; it all depends on how much I’ve written and what they paid me for it . . .
SCIENCE
Why conversations are better with four people
Science Correspondent
Monday June 12 2023, 12.01am, The Times
Three might be a crowd but four appears to be the magic number when it comes to conversation. And, according to an academic who has spent decades studying how we socialise, William Shakespeare instinctively understood that.
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Professor Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist at the University of Oxford, is known for “Dunbar’s number”, which alludes to his theory that most of us are able to sustain about 150 social connections.
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But his research has also explored how people act in smaller groups. At Cheltenham Science Festival he explained that when it comes to having an enjoyable chat, the upper limit is a gang of four. When social groups have five or more members, the chances of them laughing together plummets.
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He said: “You very rarely get more than four people in a conversation. In the normal run of things, when a fifth person joins a group, it’ll become two conversations within about 20 seconds.” Alternatively, a “lecture” situation develops in which one person holds court and the others act as an audience.
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In larger groups, “you have to decide whether the person who is speaking is really so important you’d rather be standing there saying nothing”, he said. If the speaker is not very interesting, the audience tends to splinter into groups of four or fewer. Dunbar believes that the underlying reason is that we can only track what a certain number of people are likely to be thinking at one time.
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Scientists call this the “theory of mind”, which involves being able to see the world from another person’s perspective. Also known as “mentalising”, it is crucial for conversation because people often use imprecise language, which makes context important. “The language we use is full of metaphors and unfinished sentences. The listener has to be able to figure out what it is the speaker is trying to say,” said Dunbar.
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Additionally, the speaker must track whether those they are talking to are following their meaning. Dunbar believes that the limits of our ability to predict the thoughts of others in this way explains why groups that work in challenging situations — such as SAS patrols and surgical teams — tend to do best when there are four members.
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In The Social Brain, co-authored by Dunbar, he argues that Shakespeare must have intuitively known about this phenomenon as it is rare for his plays to have more than four significant characters speaking in one scene.
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He wrote: “[Shakespeare] instinctively understood the mentalising capacities of his audience. He was anxious to ensure his audience wasn’t cognitively overloaded by the number of minds in the action on stage. [It is] a masterclass in the study of human psychology.”
Why bad managers depress output — as well as their staff
The Financial Times | 10th May 2023
Autor: Isabel Berwick interviewing Tracey Camilleri
CHRO Summit 2023
18th May 2023
Be Ready for Tomorrow
Join Tracey Camilleri in Debating the Big Issues
What does it take to be a good company and, in an era of virtue-signalling, what marks one out?
What would make tomorrow’s leaders better than today’s?
How much can companies improve wellbeing without reducing workload?
What does it take to change culture and is it worth it?
Is woke broke? What’s next for diversity, equity and inclusion?
Who’s happy at work and what’s their secret?
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From trust to triumph: Role of social connection in group success
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Author: Natalia Fokina
Get new insights on how to create great, high-performing teams with the new book “The Social Brain: The Psychology of Successful Groups,” published a month ago! Drawing on extensive research and real-world examples, the authors offer explanations on what size groups work and how to shape them according to the nature of the task at hand....
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Today’s Challenge to Build “Relational Wealth” with Tracey Camilleri
By Vivaldi, March 31, 2023
Hybrid work models, rapidly evolving technology, and generational shifts are changing the nature of our jobs and workplaces. According to Gallup, “two out of three professional service workers, including roles such as engineers, administrative assistants, consultants, and computer programmers, prefer to be hybrid.” However, these models have their drawbacks — over half of younger workers, ages 18-to-34 cite mental health issues as impairing their ability to work effectively in remote environments, according to McKinsey. The availability of flexible work also factors into whether people stay in their jobs.
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The Social Brain Book Launch Webinar
The Saïd Business School, University of Oxford
Watch this virtual book launch, and hear from 'The Social Brain’ authors Tracey Camilleri, Robin Dunbar and Samantha Rockey as they are interviewed by Saïd Business School, University of Oxford Professor Sue Dopson.
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How to Escape the Hell of Bad Meetings
Bloomburg UK
There’s a Goldilocks number for every group, one of many insights of evolutionary psychology that can help managers to build successful teams.
Brains, hormones and time - the invisible causes of better workplace culture
Are there forces at work that might impact the way work feels? Could we use those forces to make work better?This discussion with Robin Dunbar and Tracey Camilleri took me to places I hadn't expected to go. That hormones, our brains and time would play a part in the relationships we forge at work isn't something that you would expect to find in a company's culture document, but as you'll hear today they forge a vital component of better team work.Hormones are triggered by emotional interactions with other humans. Uniquely they only tend to work face-to-face. Hormones can help us build affinity with others in a powerful way that is often overlooked.Brain-size impacts the connections we have with those people. At the core of human experience is our closest one (or two) relationships. There’s a small circle of 4 or 5 people who sit at the heart of our lives, and up to 15 who make up the majority of our time.And that time is critical for the strength of those connections. We spent 40% of our time with our 5 closest relationships, and 60% with the top 15. By spending time we can become close friends with people in our lives.The Social Brain by Tracey Camilleri, Samantha Rockey and Robin Dunbar is out now. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
RSA x THE SOCIAL BRAIN
Humans may be social creatures by nature, but we struggle to work together. Join three experts from Oxford and learn how to make group-work more productive and satisfying.
We all know how easy it is for a group dynamic to turn sour. Trust can prove elusive. Resentments build quickly. Standing out becomes more important than working towards a common goal. Even the greatest bands and the most dynamic start-ups of all time have been plagued by group division.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. In this groundbreaking talk, world-leading experts in evolutionary psychology and strategic leadership come together to offer a primer on how to get the best out of our teams.
With years of expertise, they will show how an understanding of our ‘social brain’ can help us build productive, successful relationships. Together, they will explain how group dynamics work and what size group is most suited to the task at hand. They will offer practical hints on how to diffuse tensions and encourage cohesion. Furthermore, they will demonstrate the vital importance of balancing a sense of unity with the need to encourage different outlooks and strengths.
Join us for what will be both a fascinating analysis of how our brains function in group environments and a brilliantly practical guide to creating collaborative, high-performing teams.
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The Social Brain Book Launch
23rd February 2023
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We were thrilled to launch our book The Social Brain: The Psychology of Successful Groups in the glorious setting of the Lumley Library in the Royal College of Surgeons last Thursday. The evening was made for us by the company of so many clients, friends, contributors, collaborators and family – a truly ‘social brain’ gathering.
how to ACADEMY
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https://howtoacademy.com/videos/the-social-brain-the-psychology-behind-successful-groups/
The Social Brain – The Psychology Behind Successful Groups
Humans may be social creatures by nature, but we struggle to work together. Join three experts from Oxford and learn how to make group-work more productive and satisfying.
We all know how easy it is for a group dynamic to turn sour. Trust can prove elusive. Resentments build quickly. Standing out becomes more important than working towards a common goal. Even the greatest bands and the most dynamic start-ups of all time have been plagued by group division.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. In this groundbreaking talk, world-leading experts in evolutionary psychology and strategic leadership come together to offer a primer on how to get the best out of our teams.
With years of expertise, they will show how an understanding of our ‘social brain’ can help us build productive, successful relationships. Together, they will explain how group dynamics work and what size group is most suited to the task at hand. They will offer practical hints on how to diffuse tensions and encourage cohesion. Furthermore, they will demonstrate the vital importance of balancing a sense of unity with the need to encourage different outlooks and strengths.
Join us for what will be both a fascinating analysis of how our brains function in group environments and a brilliantly practical guide to creating collaborative, high-performing teams.