General Counsel are lawyers “plus.” Knowing the law is only part of the job. The rest is in understanding the all too human dynamics that make a company go tick-tock. Here are five ideas from cognitive research that will help do just that.
No. 1: Always be contextualizing. Evolutionary biology teaches us that our survival resulted from imagining the worst and acting upon it. The stick could be a snake, so run; the brown patch of grass could be a lion, so skedaddle; the eclipsed moon portends disaster, so hide. No longer true, yet our neural wiring still hums to this tune. In their insightful new book, “Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well,” authors Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen counsel that the antidote for hardwired fear is to “contextualize” the rush to dooms day by “roping” out what an event is not about. “Yes, this venture capital firm decided not to invest, but it does not mean you will never get funding, it just means this firm won’t.” An event is not a person’s life; it is only a moment in a life. It is just one data point in a lifetime of millions of data points. It is a setback, not an identity.
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