In the last issue of Practical Counsel (issue #20) I interviewed the renowned international conductor Sir Mark Elder, and explored some of the parallels between leading an orchestra and leading a legal department.
Sir Mark provided me with a number of powerful insights on how the conductor learns his or her craft, which provided me (and, I believe, PC readers) with an entirely fresh perspective on how a senior in-house lawyer might think about developing his or her leadership skills.
If I was concerned that some of PC’s readers might find my conversation with Sir Mark a diversion too far, I needn’t have worried. The feedback was that this was a novel and fascinating approach to the topic under discussion, and that the conductor/leadership metaphor is a powerful one.
I’ve decided to conclude the topic of Meta Learning with two final takes on the topic (at least as far as this series of issues is concerned).
This week I’ve been in conversation with Dominique Ashby, a neuroscientist by background, who consults to businesses (including legal), primarily around change. My conversation with Dominique was fascinating – and reminded me how much we can learn from the neuroscience, not only about how we learn as individuals, but also about how we can most effectively teach and coach others.
Next week a contribution from Professor Nigel Spencer, a former Global Head of Learning & Development at Reed Smith and now the Director of the Hub for Professional Practice at Queen Mary University of London, and Professor in Education Innovation and Professional Practice at QMU’s School of Law. Nigel is also an Associate Fellow at the Saïd Business School at Oxford University. He will provide the perspective of a Learning & Development specialist, who is not only hugely experienced in the practical aspects of L & D, but who also brings an academic rigour to his understanding of what works best. With insights drawn from his experience as a practitioner and his scientific understanding as an academic, Nigel will share what he believes most effectively ‘moves the dial’ in terms of learning and developing leadership, management and relational skills.
Enjoy reading, and please comment and contribute to the debate by posting direct on Practical Counsel. Also, please write in with your unique people issues to me (practicalcounsel@substack.com) - I unequivocally undertake never to reveal your identity and will change key details of your situation so as to preserve your confidentiality and anonymity (unless you don’t want this). I also undertake to write to you personally with my own thoughts and comments on your situation and am always happy to follow up with a call on Zoom or similar.
My Conversation with Dominique Ashby
Dominique Ashby is a Neuroscience Expert, who studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge University, specialising in Neuroscience. She subsequently trained and qualified as a financial restructuring lawyer, working on cross-border group restructurings. Dominique has deep experience advising on and facilitating significant organisational change in a variety of organisations including professional service firms. She is the Founder and Principal of neuro@work, advising on change and increasing operational agility.
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DA: Dominique Ashby
JM: Jonathan Middleburgh (Founder / Editor, Practical Counsel)
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JM: Dominique, thanks so much for contributing to Practical Counsel again. I find the insights that you bring from the field of Neuroscience to be so powerful. For me, they really round out some of the understanding I have developed from my study of applied psychology.
DA: Thanks for that, Jonathan, and I’m delighted to contribute. I’ve shared with you previously, but want to say again, how much I enjoy reading Practical Counsel.
JM: Thank you. As you know, we’ve been running a series of issues on Meta Learning; exploring, crudely put, what offers senior in-house lawyers the biggest ‘bang for their buck’ in terms of learning and developing their leadership, management and relational skills. I know you’ve been following this series. What insights can you share from the field of Neuroscience that might be of interest to our readers?
DA: I’ve been reading these issues of Practical Counsel with great interest. And as I’ve read them I’ve thought of a number of learnings from Neuroscience that are relevant. I’m going to focus here on two insights from the scientific research.
The first insight is an intriguing one. It links in a way to something Sir Mark Elder talked about in the last issue of Practical Counsel – he mentioned how he uses his body as one of the ways he leads and influences an orchestra in its playing.
This use of the body in leading finds an analogue in the use of the body in learning.
The emerging neuroscientific research confirms that people learn better if they receive certain sensory-motor inputs while learning. This requires some explanation.
The famous French philosopher and scientist, René Descartes, asserted that there is a strict separation between body and mind. That this isn’t the case, certainly when it comes to learning, should come as no surprise to us. Our earliest forms of learning include interacting with our environment through physical touch and gestures, used to better comprehend the properties of the world around us, and specific objects within it.
My advice to clients to include walking meetings in their diary is precisely because our brain functions at its best when we include plenty of movement in our working day. Try this if you haven’t already and you will notice your mental energy and creativity soar!
Neuroscience research is helping us better understand the potential of integrating sensory-motor learning, and other techniques we instinctively use to learn when young, into a variety of learning approaches that can be used throughout our lives.
So:
· Learning using an element of gesticulation enhances what is being learnt and also enhances problem solving. Research has shown that learning a new language (real or fictitious) has greatest success when simultaneously learning physical gestures that link to the meaning of that word. The greatest recipe for success is when we read and listen to a new word or phrase, see a teacher demonstrate the linked gesture, and then reproduce the word and gesture ourselves. This is because, when we learn a language with or via gestures, not only are the usual areas of the brain associated with language activated, but also areas associated with procedural memory, including the motor cortex, cerebellum and the basal ganglia. This multi-network activation helps codify the learning more strongly in the brain, making the learning stay with us longer and making it easier to recall.
· Working as a senior in-house lawyer inevitably involves a lot of complex problem solving. Using gestures or movement as an aid to problem solving will help, and you may not even require conscious understanding of the meaning of the gesture itself to see a positive effect. A study that asked volunteers to solve a logic problem whose solution involved swinging ropes, found that those volunteers who were asked to swing their arms during the test (without being told why) were more likely to solve the logic problem than the control volunteers. The takeaway from this is to add in an element of movement any time you’re facing a challenging problem or need your brain to take a fresh perspective.
· Learning through trial and error is also a very powerful aid to learning, with studies showing that instant and personalised feedback helps us learn quickest, especially when we’re learning in a “safe environment”. The reason why this form of learning is so powerful is that our brains are, at their core, survival prediction machines that continually and subconsciously scan our environment and run risk models on the data in order to plot the best course of action for survival. This applies even when we’re in a safe environment, such as working from home. Situations that provide our brains with immediate individualised feedback on any errors we make within the context of a safe environment (i.e. one where errors will not lead to negative repercussions and where we will not be negatively judged by others for them) are a gift for our prediction machine brains, allowing us to recalibrate and make positive progress with minimal downtime. A study looking at the effect of playing online video games that involved exploring new worlds and gaining competencies showed that individuals who played the games as part of general learning developed their executive thinking skills in a way that was transferable to other areas of their lives. This was an effect that endured, even six months later.
· Trial and error learning is often avoided in the legal profession for obvious reasons. However, the profession could benefit from leveraging the trial and error approach to learning, especially by receiving immediate individualised feedback. This style of learning is powerful not just for technical legal learning, but also for the development of leadership skills and creative problem solving.
· There is one final practical tip from neuroscience that helps learning and collaboration, and generally helps us to be at our cognitive best. This is to begin any session involving learning, co-creation or periods of high focus, with two minutes dedicated to allowing people to bring to mind, in as much detail as possible, the last time they laughed. Anyone who has attended my brain boost workshops will have experienced the effects of this practice. What happens when we bring to mind the last time we laughed, or indeed any positive memory, is that our brain becomes flooded with the same positive neurochemicals as when we first lived that moment of laughter. This positive neurochemical state happens to be the ideal one to learn new things, to be creative and to focus. It’s one of many practical brain boosts we can gift ourselves with during the working day so that we perform at our best, and one that is particularly helpful to those working in the legal profession. The legal profession proactively trains our brains to be more cynical and risk averse, forcing them to exist in a more negative, “fixed mindset”, which actually inhibits learning and creativity.
JM: That’s so interesting, Dominique. I can’t necessarily see most of the in-house lawyers I know introducing laughter or physical comedy into their regular team meetings – but there are some really helpful takeaways here for in-house leaders who want to provide an environment that is more conducive to learning.
You mentioned that you had another insight that you wanted to share.
DA: Indeed. My second insight is around tailoring learning, in the sense of breaking it down, or unpacking it for the individual learner. When we tailor learning to individual needs we increase the capacity to learn almost anything. Studies show that this approach even helps individuals to score more highly on IQ tests.
Again, let me explain and give some context in doing so.
A team at Cambridge University wanted to explore whether we can improve our IQ, something that is classically seen as a fixed attribute. The team took one of the classic IQ tests, called Raven’s Progressive Matrices, and ran two forms of it – a standard version, and a version that broke down each element of the test so it could be focused on independently from the others, in effect guiding people’s attention as the test progressed.
What the team’s research showed is that the standard version of the test was most successfully completed by those with high scores on other types of intelligence tests – no big surprise there.
However, people of all intelligence levels succeeded at the same attainment level as those with high IQs in the version of the test where the test was presented broken down into the individual shapes.
We already know that breaking down big tasks into smaller ones makes the big task more achievable for our brains. What the Cambridge study did was to take this one step further, by helping the individual to identify what specific element in a task or problem to focus their attention on. The approach thereby helped the individual to direct their cognitive resources to the right thing, at the right time, thereby increasing the effectiveness of those resources in solving the problem.
This opens the door to adapting learning and teaching models to take into account attentional strategy, working with learners to create a plan for how best to direct their attention during complex learning tasks, breaking down what they should pay attention to, and in what order, for them to best succeed.
When you view learning and cognitive ability in this way, you can see that it is possible to hone learning as much as you hone physical prowess in sporting activities – making the role of the “coach” or learning professional as important in the type of learning experienced in the legal profession, as it is in the sporting world.
I’ve definitely found this to be the case when coaching clients in how to structure complex change programmes with their teams. Change in particular can feel overwhelming, like a huge IQ test - with so many overlapping elements to process and figure out in order to reach the right result.
Working with clients to break down the individual elements of a successful change project and when to focus in on them is always a key moment in the change process - and one that can then be replicated for future change projects they are looking to achieve.
JM: Dominique, you’ve given PC readers a lot to think about here, some of it highly practical, some of it a bit more abstract. Are there one or two additional practical tips you can give to help our readers with their own learning, or with the learning of their team members?
DA: One thing would be to think about how you can create a safer space for yourself and your teams to learn within. There are many ways we can increase the safety of learning in the real world to establish a culture of continual, creative, learning. If you want to start somewhere, then I suggest you look at objective setting and how you reward/recognize your people. Focus some of your team’s objectives around reporting on the key learnings from having achieved (or tried!) a task, rather than the completion of the task itself. Proactively champion and congratulate not only the moments when people complete a task, but also when they learn something important from them – whether the learning is about how to collaborate more effectively, use of new technology or about the development of leadership, management or other so-called ‘soft’ skills. As your team starts to recalibrate and to view “test and learn” as a rewarding and rewarded way of working rather than imperfection, your team members will naturally unlock more of their creativity and collaborative potential.
JM: As always, Dominique, I’ve found your insights absolutely fascinating – not just stimulating from an intellectual point of view, but having real practical application for learning.
Thank you so much, and I hope you’ll be willing to contribute to Practical Counsel again.
DA: It’s been an absolute pleasure, Jonathan.
Key Takeaways
1. This issue of Practical Counsel has focused on learnings from Neuroscience that provide insight into the topic of Meta Learning, learning to learn.
2. Dominique Ashby, a Neuroscientific expert, shares some insights from recent neuroscientific research.
3. The first key insight is around the effectiveness of using the body – so called sensory-motor inputs – in learning.
4. Using movement and / or specific gestures when learning can increase the uptake and durability of learning by activating the parts of the brain relevant to learning and lodging that learning in the brain’s memory bank.
5. Learning through trial and error – coupled with individualised feedback - is also a powerful way to learn, and can be used to great effect in the learning of leadership skills, and other associated skills.
6. Starting a learning session by encouraging participants to call to mind a positive memory stimulates positive neurochemicals that help learning and creativity.
7. The second key insight is the importance of breaking down learning into bite-sized elements, and unpacking it for the individual learner. Research shows that helping the learner to focus on individual elements of the learning, in the order that works most effectively for them, can be very powerful.
8. Dominique suggests one practical way to establish a culture of continual, creative, learning – by focusing some of the team’s key objectives around reporting on key learnings from a task, and championing and congratulating not only the moments when people complete a task, but also when they learn something important from them.
And Now …….
Contribute to the debate and write in with your comments and observations. Also write to Jonathan with any other people issues you face as an in-house lawyer.
Jonathan can be reached by email at practicalcounsel@substack.com
A note for you picky lawyers; and a plea for tolerance
I am a British lawyer by background and went to both school and University in the UK. So my English is British English. I have taken a conscious decision to write this newsletter in British English, but to try to avoid phrases that aren’t common outside the UK. Sometimes, though, I’ll use a phrase that isn’t commonly used outside the UK, without realising that it is a Britishism. I also endeavour to use the vernacular spellings of my contributors (e.g. to use US spellings for a US contributor), but won’t always get this right.
My plea is for you to tolerate the British spellings and grammar and the occasional Britishism. And to focus on the substance of the newsletter rather than the occasional (to you) annoying turn of phrase, bit of grammar or unorthodox spelling, or the occasional inconsistency in spelling as between, for example, UK and US ‘standard’ spellings.
Thank you and best wishes,
Jonathan Middleburgh