SPEAKERS

Nippin Anand

Nippin Anand  00:01

Welcome to another episode of embracing differences with me. Nippin Anand. Anand a podcast aimed at understanding and promoting transdisciplinary ways of living and thinking, meaning, assimilating different viewpoints, different subjects, different disciplines, but focused on a very simple question, how do we human beings, learn, unlearn, relearn and make decisions, and how can we tackle risks in an uncertain world?

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Imagine a situation during an operation, you find out that one of your employees has bypassed a critical alarm during the refueling of a tank. What is the first thing that comes to your mind?

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Hello, my name is nippin Anand. Mistakes happen, accidents happen. Things go wrong. We encounter surprises, and sometimes we observe strange behaviors, even in the most familiar situations, but then we have to make sense of it. We have to explain it to ourselves and to others, and sometimes we even have to write reports. Whatever model we use, whatever method we follow. Everything depends on how we understand human beings, the human mind and the process of decision making. In this episode, we will try to make sense of human mind and how we make decisions. We will ask the question, are we learning from accidents and everyday work? The episode is part of a book that I’ve recently published. It’s called, are we learning from accidents? How we think about the human mind? Here are some typical reactions and questions that come to mind if someone was to bypass a critical alarm, why did you bypass the alarm? Can you explain why you went against the approved procedure? How can we prevent this from happening again? How can we improve the process? How can we reinstate accountability? And this happens typically during an investigation. Why are you being defensive? I’m only doing my job. Are we learning from accidents? We cannot answer this question until we challenge our most basic assumptions about what learning even means, because our questions do not come from nowhere. They come from our bedrock assumptions and the limits of our imagination about learning. So where are we with our assumptions? Perhaps a good place to begin would be to start with the human mind.

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The mind is not the brain. Much of risk and safety is dominated by a central but hidden assumption human mind is located in the brain. So much power to this myth that we don’t even consider talking about it. There are many founding fathers of modern sciences, including Francis Bacon, Kepler, Galileo and Newton who took this view, and this dates back to even the ancient Greek philosophies of Plato and Pythagoras. One of the most influential philosophers in this field is Rene Descartes. Descartes was of the view that human beings have a dual form, material and immaterial. While the soul is a material, the body is made up of matter. Descartes was still influenced by religion, and more specifically, Christianity, and therefore he advocated that intelligence was supernatural. It came straight from the heaven into our head, but the body was purely matter, and the purpose of the body was to serve the mind, just like a slave would obey the commands of his master. The brain is located inside the mind, quite literally, at the top, and the rest of the body falls below the brain.

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Think, for instance, about the symbolic meaning of a necktie. It is a custom made up for the tacit assurance that the body is kept in check, isolated from the head by a knot a loosened tie after five in the evening seems to weaken that assurance thinking and sophisticated reasoning becomes the highest purpose of life. I think, therefore I am. What about feelings, intuitions, hunches, well, in the world of Descartes, material sciences and much of safety sciences, all that takes a back seat. In the last 150 years or so, material theories have questioned the immaterial nature of mind and consistently argued that even the brain is made up of matter and that there is nothing intractable, nothing supernatural and nothing so special about the human mind it is to be treated in the same way it is to be treated in the same mechanistic sense as the body. Think of cognitive psychology, a dominant field in human psychology. According to cognitive psychology, the brain works like a computer and mental activity.

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Is similar to information processing all subjective experiences, whether it is enjoying music, turning a valve or pressing an alarm, are computational processes inside the brain when we use the language of reducing, removing or eliminating biases. That is the language of cognitive psychology. The brain is a computer and a source of all error. This brain centered view makes another assumption. The brain is not only a computer, but it is also a camera. The image, what I see as you is captured, recorded and retained in my brain as a memory together the computer and the camera metaphor make a convincing case for the entire decision making process to be turned into and replaced with artificial intelligence. Thinking of the brain as a computer or a camera encased in our skull has far reaching implications for how we think about decision making human mind and how human beings learn, bypassing an alarm implies that the processing of information in the brain went wrong. The procedure now strictly demands that we should not bypass the information, but the output of decision making process did not adequately process all the inputs to the brain. Processing error, this input and output metaphor plays a decisive role in how we learn from accidents. When things go wrong, train, retrain and constrain people, just like we apply a fix to machinery, and we call it learning. Is the mind really located in the brain, and is decision making a function of collecting and processing information, let us find out

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the embodied mind. Human mind is not located in the brain. Our whole body is a mind. I have written about this extensively in my book, but there are a growing number of studies to support the embodied nature of mind. I would recommend starting with philosophy in the flesh, by George Lakoff, the conscious mind is only the tip of the iceberg. Our ability to retain information in our conscious mind is far limited. As we grow older, our life experiences become largely unconscious to us. We call them habits, heuristics, gestures, rituals, metaphors and more generally, biases and preferences we cannot consciously remember how to ride a bike, the sequences of action it takes to get on a bike, and everything in between the start and the end of our journey. In fact, you could be chatting with a friend or talking on the phone as your unconscious mind takes over, peddling, biking and enjoying what may seem like a high risk activity to an alien every self organizing life is equipped with biases and preferences which allow us to make automatic decisions without being consciously aware. Nearly 98% of all our decisions from the time we wake up to when we go to bed, are made without our conscious awareness. Our unconscious biases are embodied in us. It is in our being. It is who we are. The nervous systems are only about 500 million years old. Life on this planet began more than 4.5 billion years ago, from unicellular bacteria all the way to evolve primits. The basis of mind is automaticity. Humans are no exception to this trajectory of how the embodied mind has evolved. In social psychology of risk, we refer to the embodied mind as one brain and three minds, meaning we think from head, heart and gut, and we rarely involve cognition thinking in our daily lives. Biases are not errors located in the brain, and the unconscious mode of being is not the same as the pre programming of a machinery. Machineries can be programmed to perform in a certain way, but life is organic. This is a eucalyptus tree in Australia. Even when the tree is charged in a forest fire, life will try to sprout out of it, the unconscious being can repair and heal on its own, because there is the will and the creative intelligence to live and flourish. By contrast, this is a burnt switchboard on a supply ship that caught fire due to a surge of high voltage. The burnt switchboard cannot heal on its own. Lifeless machinery is not designed to move beyond the binary logic unless it is preprogrammed to act in a certain manner. One only needs to observe a bee flying effortlessly, like even the most sophisticated drones cannot function. Unlike the drone, the bee is not equipped with a disembodied chip located in the head. The Bee’s entire body is an intelligent mind. The bee does not have a mind. The bee is the mind. That’s what we mean by embodied mind. When someone bypasses an alarm or forgets to close a valve, our job is not to locate and fix.

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Errors in their brain, but to ask questions in ways that they will realize their biases, habits and ways of doing things that have become unknown to themselves, and take ownership of their actions. So far, it sounds simple, but as we will find out, it changes the entire approach to investigation, from mechanical fixing to relational learning, the extended mind, the embodied mind, extends beyond the body. In his book The secular age, the great philosopher Charles Taylor would say, we have a porous mind, a bit like a sponge, because the mind is porous, it can soak in, absorb and withhold so much of what we perceive around us. We often say young children are just like sponges. They can soak in so much. You can also think of the embodied mind as a receptor and a transmitter of signals, just like a magnetic field. Our five senses, including the skin, acts just like a social field around us. There have been a series of experiments conducted with airport staff, private detectives, security services and ordinary people, both in person and by using CCTV cameras to show that people can actually feel when you’re staring at them from their back. Dogs will know their owners are coming home at unexpected times, pets can predict that their owners are about to have an epileptic Frick. Horses can find their way back to the stable over completely unfamiliar terrain. Birds can migrate and find their way back home from the wilds. Many people experience telepathy, a strong sense about who is going to call them on the phone. What these experiments reveal is that the mind is not encased in the brain, the mind is embodied, and the mind extends like a field far beyond the physical boundaries of the body. These experiments are consistent with the ancient wisdom, but also studies in consciousness and latest neurosciences affect because unlike machinery, our minds are alive, unconscious, embodied and extended. Everything and everyone affects us, and we have an affect on our social surroundings. Affect is an all encompassing term to describe our feelings, first coined by the father of experimental psychology back in 1890s

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but affect is no ordinary feelings. Affect prepares us to decide whether we should approach or a wider situation or a person without involving thinking. We have no explanation for what affects us to what degree and why. I have no idea, but every time I look at the tall steeples in churches, I feel at all. I feel depressed because where I live. It gets dark too soon. During the winters, I’m terribly bored by a train of PowerPoint presentations, and I’m thrilled when we visit our favorite eating place. Of course, there are expressive qualities of the objects, the cathedral, winter nights, PowerPoint slides and the food, but also our own feelings at work that will attract or repel us. We are attracted to certain people, and some things seem uncanny or not right because of affect. You and I can look out of the window, but the degree to which we are drawn to the outside world depends on, quite literally, how we are affected. I will never forget an afternoon in Perth when we were doing an exercise in risk perception. Everyone was looking out the same window to see what each one will perceive. One participant, Sabrina, pointed out to a small building in the background of a landscape of flyovers, bridges and tall buildings, and said, This is where my mother was treated for a serious heart operation. As she spoke, she was overwhelmed, and her voice became heavy. Not only a building from distance had an effect on sabria, but I too was gripped just by looking into her eyes. If the mind was encased in the brain, none of this would happen. We would just go about our lives, meeting and greeting people. Hi. How are you and reacting? Not too bad, as it often happens when people lose connection and become indifferent to each other’s stories and sufferings. Affect makes us alive, caring, loving, annoying and irritating without involving our senses or reasoning. Affect explains our relational and social being. Embodiment is not cognition. There is a serious misconception that embodiment refers to individual cognition or behavior. It comes from people who have difficulty imagining beyond the brain centric and mechanistic view of human beings embodied mind is neither individualist nor cognitive. Embodiment is best understood when we think of ourselves as whole, relational and social beings. Inter effectivity, a personal story without knowing and without interacting. We affect each other and affect explains our relationship with our social environment. Let me share a story with you in 2020

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One I interviewed a young Seafarer who had fallen deep inside a tank in an interview that lasted for just over an hour, John told me everything about how and why the accident happened and what meaning he had made of this story. You can read all about John’s sufferings and how he processed the meaning of this accident by visiting the link in this podcast. But here’s a brief summary of the accident after he fell into the tank. It took four hours to evacuate John out of the tank and another seven days to get his broken bones treated. Why? Because that’s how the tanks on the ships are designed, and because the accident happened in China at a time when this was a national holiday with multiple fractures, John was kept on painkillers for a week until his treatment began. Such is the burden of guilt and shame that nearly five years after the accident, when I interviewed him, John still felt that it was his fault that he did not carry out a risk assessment. Three days after our first interview, I followed up with John to ask how he felt about the podcast. Here is what he had to say. So from the very moment, that very last moment that we talked nippin, I really pondered a lot. I thought a lot out from the conversation that we had,

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honestly the conversation was very healthy for me. That’s very healthy, and I’ve learned in that hour of interaction how great of a listener you are. You assured me that there won’t be any

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awkwardness around given the weight of my story, he also made sure that you listen to every bit of it, so I’d be able to you, so you’d be able to give insights and

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ideas to what we were talking about. So what struck me most in our conversation was when you disagreed on my idea about how I could have saved myself from getting that accident.

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I told you that it was, it should have been. It was supposed to be to have a better and a proper risk assessment I might have not fallen down that seven meter deep anti healing tank.

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Well, all this time I was thinking, and I was always bringing that ideology with me, that if I had just followed the book step by step, I could have avoided that peril and be saved,

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and as a provoking thought, you presented a different view, and what I learned from you is that if I had just been given the assurance that I am listened to by my superiors And a meaningful conversation has just been built and maintained between my chief mate and I.

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Well, I could have saved myself from the accident. Well, to be honest, that’s a powerful challenge for me. Nippin

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It changed the way I view it, and all this time, I was always submitting myself to compliance, not minding the other side of the story. And in that point of view,

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that following of risk assessment, that’s compliance, that’s bureaucracy, that’s a step by step, you know, following of the book. Well, I did that, but in the end, why I still got the accident? Because I locked something, we missed something out from it. And what was lacking on my on that story of accident was that

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my superiors and I, we were not successful in

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creating, making and maintaining a meaningful conversation, a a meaningful connection between myself and my superiors,

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that voice that I had, that should have been heard by my chief mate.

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You, you learned my story right from the very first moment I came on board the very first step

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I made on board that very first vessel I sailed on, there was already a there was already a loophole on the story between the relationships, between my relationship with My chief mate,

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and that should have been I,

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I should have been heard.

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We should have made

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a

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a I should have made a good relationship with Chief mate, and that should have saved me.

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That should have saved my foot from not breaking. I.

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Yeah,

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and that’s it, nippin Anand, that’s, I guess, my realization out from the conversation that we get. How do you explain that someone 5000 miles away on a zoom call will connect with us and share their experiences and their feelings without hesitation, and as you can hear in this follow up call, how could someone realize that the problem is not with not following the process, but in fostering a relationship with his shipmates? The problem is not brain centric. It is embodied and relational. But such a realization does not come from telling and selling ideas. It comes by asking open questions and listening with intention and attention. It comes through affect. It is a mystery to investigators, safety managers and materialists in general, to observe such a powerful moment of learning and realization merely by listening to the person I have seen seasoned investigators reacting to such stories as surreal, even esoteric, and many would pass a judgment without asking a single question, but it is understandable why such a denial when we see another life as a brain centric mechanical engine and all that we want is to extract data from another human being, it almost feels like a cow giving away milk without resisting. We are still discussing matter and measurements, and we treat people as if they are objects for manipulation, and often we do it unconsciously. We believe that people make choices and they withhold a lot of information when things go wrong. Why should they give away all their secrets to you? It is best we ask them about those secrets when things are going right. From this viewpoint, people sharing openly about their experiences when things go wrong is bizarre. It cannot be true, but when we realize that the other person is affected by our intentions, even 5000 miles away, John Surya, story starts to make sense. Intention is a good way to think about the extended mind and how we affect each other by our mere presence. When your intention is to treat another person as a hazard to be controlled, it is understandable that this person will hesitate to share their stories with us, but when the intention is to acknowledge another person’s presence, to listen and understand their point of view, the extended mind, like a field, can transmit those intentions to another person, even before we start the conversation, because we are live and embodied. The social field between us allows us to resonate with each other when we share our intentions. Martin Buber calls this a relationship in the i thou, the hyphen symbolizes the umbilical, the connection with the other Rupert Sheldrake and Thomas Fuchs have written in depth and detail about the effect of embodied mind. We can read morphic resonance by Sheldrake and inter effectivity by Fuchs, but there are many other world class academics and researchers who have written extensively about it.

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Isn’t it interesting that without being aware how profoundly we are affecting the others, even before we utter a word, others are affected by our mere presence. So what does this mean to us? If you want to learn how people make decisions as much as possible, be yourself when you engage with the others, when our intentions do not align with our actions. People can feel it when we are full of negative thoughts, disgust, judgment and skepticism. Others can feel it even if we pretend that everything is normal. This is a very important point in investigations, because we make up our minds way too early about what we think went wrong, even before we engage with those involved with all this in mind, let us reflect upon our questions. When someone bypasses a critical alarm, as we discussed at the outset, why did you bypass the alarm? Do you realize that you have breached a procedure? How can we reinstate accountability? How can we prevent this from happening again? How can we improve the process? Why are you being defensive? Why did you bypass the alarm? What are we assuming here, that decision making is brain centric, and the decision was made in conscious awareness. The style of questioning assumes that the person would know what they did and they can reason why they did what they did. Typical response in such a situation is that we will get a response that matches closely with the documented process to align with our own reasoning and escape further questioning. You can only explain something that you know how helpful is seeking reasoning and explanation when the decision was made in an unconscious mode. Please explain why you have breached the procedures. The assumption is that people know what they do, and knowing comes before action. If you cannot explain why you made that decision, there is a serious problem. But can you explain how you drove the car from home to the office this morning? Can.

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You explain why you brush your teeth in the way you do? Can you explain why you fold your arms in the way you do? Can you explain why you hold a certain political view or a preference for a cuisine? Biases and preferences cannot be explained at a conscious level. That’s why they are biases. Interestingly, these breaches mostly happen with most experienced people. Extended exposure to a risk or routine involvement in an activity leads to the formation of habits and heuristics, preferred way of doing things that are not always consistent with documented procedures, but also prolonged exposure to a high risk activity, such as involving critical alarms, reduces the tolerance of the risk over a period of time, which is also a subset of embodiment. How can we reinstate accountability? The issue of accountability and responsibility preoccupies many managers when things go wrong. Discipline, drawing the line, sanctions, reprimanding, psychological safety, to speak up. See it sort it dominates our minds. I have spoken about this in another video, but ask yourself this question, how can someone be held responsible for a decision made in unconscious more I get it. So should I let the person lose? What message are we sending to the fleet, both accountability and responsibility have a place in every organization. We are responsible people. But first, help people to realize what is not known to them. Help them become conscious of their unconscious habits, so they know what they have done, and next time they can take ownership of their decisions. Secondly, if you don’t come to know what has really happened, how would rewriting the job description, holding people to account or serving a disciplinary warning change anything? What will you really change, especially when there are limited means to verify if what you change has really worked? A story comes to mind.

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A young Australian driver was interviewed for toppling a car after two hours of interrogation and a few days of deep diving, it was concluded that the tire pressure was low on one of the tires, a safety alert was sent out to the entire fleet, and we are all safe. When we interviewed this person, the first thing he said was that he was exhausted on the morning of the accident. Upon asking he admitted sharing a room with three girls in a motel on the night before and having sex with them all night. Fatigue and exhaustion were the cause of this accident, not low pressure on tires. Yes, how can someone be so irresponsible to have sex all night and not rest enough before their shift? But I would ask the same question to the investigators, how can someone be so irresponsible to establish a cause that has no relationship with the effect and make the entire fleet suffer to end our anxiety? My point really is that one should not approach such problems with the mindset of accountability in the first instance, without attempting to understand the fallible humans. How can we prevent this from happening again? You are speaking to someone who is unaware and unconscious of what they have done. This should be an outcome of a discussion, and it is best if such a realization comes naturally from the person involved. It should not be the first question on our mind. But unfortunately, this question is often what preoccupies most managers and leaders. Apologize, admit you are guilty, say that you have made a mistake, reassure me that this will not happen again, and we will let you go. We do that to our children. Forget employees. Why are you being defensive? Why can’t you just explain what happened? I’m only doing my job. Keep in mind that you’re obtaining information about a split second decision made in unconscious mode by a human being. You now have access to a lot of information, and you also have a point of reference to identify the gaps, both from your experience and documented processes. You also have the time and supposedly, a team to investigate the decision you are creating a coherent narrative through reasoning and evidence. Sense making and decision making do not work in this manner, people have difficulties explaining what happened and why a situation unfolded in the way it did. What is unconscious and unaware does not readily come to surface when we seek explanations. There are times when people will look confused and struggle to make sense, because there is no sense in those decisions. Only chaos, disjointed views, incoherent reasoning and vague memories. You are using a rational process seeking the why, what and how to understand a non rational decision. How does that make any sense? It takes time for people to process what they have experienced uncon.

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Consciously. That is why we must learn to never interrupt the flow, respect silences, confusions, contradictions, conflicting messages, disturbing gestures and lost faces. This is all part of sense making what is also important is that we conduct interviews at the earliest possible, not allowing too much time for people to make connections and causal reasoning.

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This may sound counterintuitive, but we really need those confusions and contradictions and mixed messages. These are golden nuggets in investigations where we should shift our attention for learning it helps us to understand the true nature of decision making. Unfortunately, our investigation strategies almost always end up in a place where we manipulate the other person to admit how decisions should be made. It’s a quest for control. It’s not an opportunity for discovery and learning. Don’t seek explanation. Listen to the rich description, even if it makes little sense,

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the power of affect. There are at least two important reasons I speak about affect in this podcast, how affect works when we interact with people involved in accidents, and how affect works when we write accident reports to create opportunities for learning. Let’s begin with the first one. Hey, Gordon, you know the situation, we’ve had an overflow of fuel, and it could have easily been an explosion, because you bypassed a critical alarm. How would you explain that if Gordon is stuck in the survival mode, his entire energy will be focused on fighting the unseen enemy. He will say a few words to get a feel for your reaction before he says more. That’s the invisible effect at play, threat, survival, guilt and shame, mainly to end the conversation, sometimes also by admitting mistakes and giving up as an escape mechanism. Many people involved in accidents will tell you that the experience of being investigated leaves them traumatic. And interestingly, it is more traumatic than the accident itself. This has also been my own experience, and it took me 10 years and a very understanding and loving wife to recover from this trauma. Most people will stay in denial and anger, not because they did something that turned out to be a mess, but because of how they were treated as part of the investigation process. Many never come out of the trauma and distress of the investigation, the idea that social and biological beings can be treated through chemical pills or by enrolling in mental health programs where people are taught to bounce back is rooted in the same assumption that human beings are mechanistic and the mind is a mechanical lobe encased in the skull. Looking back at John Soria, the young Seafarer who fell inside the tank, we started the interview by asking John about his personal life. Like many youngsters chasing their dreams, John wanted to be a lawyer, but during his days at high school, he found out that his father, who was also a seafarer, was having an affair outside of his marriage. As the eldest of four siblings, John said he felt that he was cornered when his father decided to leave the family to start a new relationship in a country where social security and welfare is a foreign concept, John had to sacrifice his dreams and find ways to survive and feed his family. Seafaring was his only option, and although he never liked the profession, he was forced to take up a job at sea when you listen with the intention and attention someone feeling cornered or exhausted like the young Australian driver, confused or excited, are strong words, and they mean so much more than tire pressure. Permit to Work barriers and checklists. When we focus our attention on the emotional and relational language, we stand a much better chance to connect with other people. That’s how we investigate accidents using the IQ method, listening to the story by paying close attention to the language and with the intention to learn with another person. And when we cultivate a culture of engaging with people and listening to their stories with attention and intention, many will become our strongest advocates if they felt acknowledged and supported as part of the process, we don’t need a silo between learning and development and a mental health department. Learning Development and healing can be reconciled when we understand the invisible power of affect in investigating accidents.

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Beyond investigating accidents and impromptu interactions, affect plays another important role to rethink our approach to investigating and learning, brain centered and mechanistic approaches tend to attribute disproportionate power to the investigators and third party consultants brought into the organization to create change, watching people from distance, exercising power with checklists and regular.

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Organizations, seeking evidence, demanding rational explanations, and using surveys and questionnaires to measure behavior are byproducts of material philosophies. I’m not against measurements and objective assessments. They deserve a place in every organization, because that is what regulators, inspectors and the society in general requires from businesses as a minimum, but to expect that objective, unbiased assessment from distance, watching people talking about work or tapping into their head to find ideas about how to improve efficiency has little to do with learning. We unwittingly use words such as learning improvement and change, without pondering about what that even means to us and to others. If the narrative of an accident does not affect people and if it does not draw them emotionally, there is little hope for learning and change. Affect and emotions do not evoke from Objective assessments measuring the trends or writing more fleet alerts and procedures. Affect comes through participation and even marination, if we want to change people’s outlook and their ways of thinking, we must get used to marinating with people listening to their confusing and conflicting narratives and creating rich stories and thick descriptions of every surprise, incident and accident.

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There is a powerful paradox in storytelling, because no two situations are alike and no two accidents are the same. It makes every story deeply personal and specific to the context. But on the other hand, when we produce a rich and descriptive story, it allows people to see themselves in the story.

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It is easy to argue against data and evidence, but it is hard not to relate with another person’s fallibility and sufferings. What has a sinking ship to do with someone who has spent a lifetime in the biotech industry after hearing the story of the captain of Costa Concordia, I would say everything this came from a participant in Houston, and it had left me pondering for quite some time. People from all walks of life have felt connected with Francisco scattino story, the captain of the Costa Concordia. It has touched and changed so many lives. When a story moves people with such intensity, it must have the universal qualities to resonate with the human spirit.

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As the famous quote goes, the surest way to arouse and hold attention of the reader is by being specific, definite and concrete. The greatest writers, Homer, Dante and Shakespeare are effective because they deal in particular and report the details that matter. Their words call up pictures if all that I get after reading a report is a telltale of stupidity, a wrongdoing that demands an apology, a sin that leads to scapegoating or a root cause that ends with a corrective action. There is no affect and no learning. It’s a brain centered exercise and a quest for certainty and control, if, on the other hand, the investigation evokes vivid and detailed images of the struggles of everyday life and an accurate and honest framing of human fallibility, honest and accurate. From our own point of view, we stand a much better chance to connect with people and to bring them along. Our imagination takes us to places that we have never visited. In reality, a good story touches people, not because they have experienced something similar, but because they can imagine themselves in that story. I would sum up this discussion with some questions for you. Is your investigation focused on the whole person or their brain?

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Is your investigation focused on people and relationships or hazards and controls.

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Is your investigation style participatory or objective?

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Is your investigation engaging or instructive?

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But before I go, I have some questions for investigators, leaders and even scientists. Do you believe that the brain is the source of all error? Do you believe that you can objectively extract data from people to learn about their behavior?

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Do you believe that human beings are conscious of their decisions?

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Do you see your body as an engine to transport the brain?

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Do you believe that only those things that can be measured, reasoned and validated through evidence should count. Have you ever experienced connection with someone or something without reason or evidence? Is your belief in brain centered decision making determined by unconscious biases, or is it because you have read and understood the science of decision making across disciplines? In the next episode, we will discuss the contrast between learning and training using the mandala artwork. If you are interested to read more about culture and learning, I have recently published a book. Are we learning from accidents? The book is available on Amazon, Kindle, Kobo and Apple books. Every now and then, we organize workshops around the world.

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World where we introduce the participants to the power of subjectivity, experiential learning, unconscious decision making, embodied learning, relational thinking, conversation mapping, mandala drawing and a wide range of practical and intuitive methods and tools in social psychology of risk, we now have a workshop on culture scheduled in Copenhagen. We also have a series of workshops on learning from accidents in Calgary, Canada, London and Brazil. We also have an online workshop scheduled in December later this year. You can check out all our workshops by visiting our events page, novellus.solutions/events. Hi. I hope you’re enjoying watching these videos, and they are making you think little bit. And if they are, please subscribe to our YouTube channel with Team novellus. My name is nippin Anand, former ship Captain, a master mariner, and I work at the intersection between anthropology, social psychology and the neurosciences of how human beings learn, unlearn, relearn and make decisions, particularly in groups, which we call collective sense making. I work with organizations around the world, particularly in high risk areas, to help them diagnose, understand and improve their culture. If you want to know more about our work, please visit our website, novellas, dot solutions. Thank you for watching. You.