Business Insight Zone

Tara Hunt has a great post about how our emotions and our rationality often put us at odds with one another (with ourselves, too) in important contexts. She rightly focuses on political questions, but also touches on the business world, and especially Internet businesses. Give it a read.

What is “limbic hijacking”? The way that the emotional aspect of issues (e.g. sex-education methods) hijack our rational faculties. Tara offers these seven remedies:

1. Bring emotional intelligence and social intelligence back into our kids’ education
2. Take the media to task for articles that perpetuate the negative stories about the internet; in fact, take the media to task for hyperbolizing scary, bad, freaky things in general
3. When you see someone behaving in a way that bullies, performs criminal acts and/or takes advantages of others online, DO SOMETHING.
4. When you witness limbic hi-jack, name it. [...]
5. Spend more time with people who don’t share your view of the world [...]
6. Try to empathize with someone who is experiencing a limbic hi-jack and see the argument from their side. [...]
7. Generally get in touch with your emotional intelligence. The uber logical approach doesn’t encompass the complexity of human issues no matter what the stats say.

Good answers, and they apply as well to the workplace as to the political arena. Just think about all the ways that limbic hijacking goes on all around us at work:

• Ms. Worrywart Manager says No to anything new because she is irrationally concerned that the new thing will create chaos, ruin the company, crash like Project X did a while back, or whatever. People like this are walking “veto points,” and they almost can’t help themselves from spreading limbic hijack among the masses.
• Mr. Disorganized goes into a panic because his disorganization has derailed a key task. His panic infects others.
• Ms. Department Head uses fear, rather than a rational explanation of cause/effect or action/consequence, to discipline her now-hijacked employees.
• Mr. Frustrated vents all the bad news about every mistake the company has ever made — not because it’s a bad company, but because Mr. F. is going through a nasty divorce, or got passed over for a promotion, or was the clumsy kid on the playground who got picked last for kickball, or whatever. He spreads his hate and frustration to those around him, including plenty of people who have no beef with the company.

What’s your best (worst) example of limbic hijacking?