The healthy human brain is no dummy. By the time it reaches adulthood, it knows a lot about what works and what doesn’t work. Where it gets in trouble is when things that it thought worked no longer do so, at least not well enough.

When that brain was much younger and in the body of a child, change was much easier. The child brain is quite malleable. When it wants or needs to do something different, doing that different something usually isn’t nearly as difficult as doing something different is for adults.

At one point in his widely admired book, Brain and Culture, Yale psychiatrist Bruce Wexler explains it this way:

“During the first part of life, the brain and mind are highly plastic, require sensory input to grow and develop, and shape themselves to the major recurring features of their environments. During these years, individuals have little ability to act on or alter the environment, but are easily altered by it. By early adulthood, the mind and brain have elaborately developed structures and a diminished ability to change those structures. The individual is now able to act on and alter the environment, and much of that activity is devoted to making the environment conform to the established structures.”

A brain that “backs” its way into maturity
A lot of what happens as the brain ages and matures on the long, arduous journey from birth to adulthood has been a career-focus of the husband-wife research team of Drs. Stephen Rushton and Anne Juola-Rushton at the University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee. A couple of weeks ago, the Rushtons were sharing their views with parents in Mumbai, India.

My interest was immediately captured by Stephen’s comment (as quoted by an Indian reporter) that “The child’s brain develops from the back to the front.” The two Drs. Rushton took their child-rearing audience on a tour of just how the child brain develops beginning with the spinal cord and cerebellum and moving more or less sequentially over the years to the occipital lobes, parietal lobes, temporal lobes, motor cortex and finally to the frontal/pre-frontal lobes. This doesn’t mean that there are empty spaces where those later-developing organs are, but I understand exactly what the Rushtons are describing: an advancing “biopsychosocial” locus and focus—a forward-moving frontline—to a person’s cerebral capabilities.

While I’ve not had the opportunity to talk with the Rushtons about all this but hope to—we have family in Sarasota and are there often—what I’ve heard thus far sounds highly supportive and endorsing of many of Brain Technologies/Brain Me Up’s applications and explanations. This is particular true of those based on the late Dr. Clare W. Graves’ “biopsychosocial” model of human development. That is to say, our Dolphin strategy models and materials.

My colleague, Dr. Paul Kordis, and I wrote our first “dolphin”-based work more than 20 years ago. Other works on the Graves model followed. Thus far, however, none seems to have caught the attention of a globe-spanning audience with quite the magnetism and usefulness of our book, Strategy of the Dolphin™: Scoring a Win in a Chaotic World. This work appears to speak directly to the desire of its admirers for a better way to understand the marvelous, mysterious dance between brain and culture and for better ways to use that knowledge in their own self-development, organizing and relationships.

From ‘best ever’ lists to the House of Lords
The assignments with which Strategy of the Dolphin have been tasked and the list of its admirers continue to grow.

Just the other day, we learned that our dolphin strategy provided the Inspirational Forum for Organizational Health with the theme for its 31st annual conference at The Hague, Netherlands—in the late 1990s. We’d never have known had not a report on a speech delivered in England’s House of Lords by the organization’s president about a year after Princess Di’s tragic death been recently revisited by a blogger.

While we know of no parents who have named their newborns after the dolphin (or us) because of the book, more than a few organizations have put “dolphin” in their name or dolphins in their logo in the book’s honor. (Alas, our company lawyer has had to remind more than a few enthusiasts that “Strategy of a Dolphin” is one of our trademarks.) In one language and then another, the book is frequently reviewed; here’s a recent French language review—of the French language version of the book, natch—written by a Belgian blogger. Self-development writers can’t seem to stay away from the book and its compelling metaphor for very long, as this recent U.K. article confirms.

And business students who gave oral book reports on SOD years ago sometimes discover that their professors never forgot how moved they were by their students’ enthusiam for the book’s content.

Earlier this year, we learned that SOD is on the short list of “best business books ever” that management professor David C. Wyld maintains. Dr. Wyld has opined that “the authors’ insights are brilliant and so very relevant to the challenges most individuals and organizations faced through the nineties and still grapple with today: going for the elegant outcome; leveraging the wave; breaking set; being on purpose; seeing through the brain’s ‘time window’; releasing to a higher order; pushing the envelope; shifting in time. It’s deep and intelligent, but not intellectual. It’s a thoughtful blueprint and practical road map of useful insight.”

Thanks, Professor!

What keeps this book timely and relevant?
I was already mulling over Professor Wexler’s book and the Rushtons’ model of how children’s brains develop, along with some other ideas about how the brain deals with the need to change. Then came Wyld’s comment that the insights in SOD are still “so very relevant to the challenges most individuals and organizations face….” Why is that, I pondered? Eventually, I penned these thoughts:

To get the adult brain to change, you must work with the way that brain is already wired. It has a lot of beliefs, protocols, habits and practices already in place. It has a strong sense of how it thinks the world ought to be. The best way to make any head way changing all this requires helping people feel like they can use all that knowledge they already have but use it in exciting and productive new ways to do things differently.

The power of the Dolphin strategy is that it doesn’t require people to give up who they are. It simply asks them to take what they know and bring it into a wider, more productive context. Once they do that, then they often discover is that what they’ve added to the mix has not really been merely additive but also transformative. As the old saw puts it, the whole is suddenly more than the sum of the parts.

There’s a right time to think like a Carp (“self-sacrificially”). And a right time to think like a Shark (“controllingly”). And certainly, more and more times when it pays to think like a Dolphin (”situationally and pro-actively combinatorially”). You may need to think like all three in a short space of time. In today’s world, your audience or marketplace can change several times an hour. So at the moment, what people need more than anything else is a new comfort level for being more mentally and emotionally agile, versatile, competent.

This is what we teach with the Dolphin strategy. First, we offer a new way to think about the main ways that people believe, act and respond. There are only a handful of major filtering and belief-formulating scripts that people everywhere follow in daily life. Our goal with the Dolphin strategy is to help individuals recognize those overarching scripts and the behaviors they trigger faster than ever before. When they spot these scripts in others and themselves, they have valuable clues as to how to respond appropriately. And we may be introducing them to a new script—the script of the Dolphin thinker. In today’s marketplace, the Dolphin thinker—particularly, the Dolphin thinking executive and the Dolphin thinking entrepreneur—is going to win or achieve favorable outcomes more often than anyone else, for three reasons:

1) He or she sees change coming quicker than others (because he or she has more perspectives, and a wider perspective, with which to watch for change).

2) He or she understands better than most which change will matter and which may not (because the Dolphin worldview offers a better sense of what lies behind and beyond change and how other worldviews or belief holders are likely to respond to it).

3) He or she thrives on making new things happen, old things better and the world a more competently functioning place (because the appearance of new technologies, new viewpoints and new configurations of people working together doesn’t spook Dolphins but, to the contrary, excites their innovative spirit and outlook).

Not everyone is equipped to think like a Dolphin. But all Dolphins are equipped to help those around them think better, with less fear and inner resistance because the world is changing and needs to change even more.

________

For more information about the Dolphin strategy book and the other Brain Technologies self-growth materials, go here. And you can arrange to take our online Yo!Dolphin! Worldview Survey™ here.

While getting him awake is not often a problem, his grandparents say, getting his feet on the floor usually is. He loves to lay in bed, eyes wide open, eyes very active in fact. Looking first in one direction, then another, though almost never at you. Ask him what he’s doing, and you are inviting a minor Vesuvius of emotion, they report. “You are interrupting my story!” they say he’ll protest. It is clear that their grandson does not like his story-making interrupted. And I’ve come to realize that few of us do.

I’m going to assume that most of the emotion is being generated by his right hemisphere, which is irritated that its understanding of what the left side of his brain is currently up to has been disrupted. That’s because for a lot of things, until the left side of our brain supplies an explanation, the right side is left pretty much without one. This, at least, is what neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga suggested years ago, and continues to suggest, with his theory of the interpreter.

Residing in the left hemisphere—or so “split brain” expert Gazzaniga concluded, as he explained (among many other places) in The Mind’s Past (page 174)—“The interpreter constantly establishes a running narrative of our actions, emotions, thoughts, and dreams. It is the glue that keeps our story unified and creates our sense of being a coherent, rational agent. It brings to our bag of individual instincts the illusion that we are something other than what we are. It builds our theories about our own life, and these narratives of our past behavior seep into our awareness.”

Ever since reading Dr. Gazzaniga’s theory of the interpreter, I’ve tended to tell anyone curious about what I do professionally that I’m a deadly serious student of the stories people tell themselves and others to explain who they are. You can notice this persistent thread running through nearly all of our models, books and assessment tools here at Brain Me Up. And few things interest me more than the “core” story people tell about themselves.

I’ve concluded that there aren’t very many core stories. And that understanding what your core story is and admitting to its realities, and constantly assessing when and where it makes sense to submit to guidance from your core story, are crucial to being an effective human. (Of course, not every core story equips its user to know or even to care whether they are an effective human as well as some core stories do.)

Any scholar or researcher who professes to be a “developmental” person, following how one person over time and how all persons over the generational expanses of time, assemble and enable and sometimes limit their personal qualities and skills, is hard at work seeking to understand the stories people tell themselves and others in an effort to explain who they are.

Years ago, I was introduced to the pioneering, self-described “biopsychosocial” theory of self-explanatory storytelling of the late Clare W. Graves, the American psychologist. I’ve yet to discover a better model. So I’ve spent much of my career seeking to make his model—which is sometimes called “the theory of everything” and can quickly overload anyone who comes to it just wanting to know a little bit about a few things—more accessible to ordinary souls.

I love all my model-children equally, but first among equals is the schematic that Dr. Paul Kordis and I put together a couple of decades ago and still continue to expand. That would be the water creatures model that was the focus of our book, Strategy of the Dolphin.

The users of the Carp story explain themselves to themselves as perennial victims. They see the world as being against them, and much of the time, they can be forgiven for thinking so. Life is hard. There aren’t a lot of opportunities to bootstrap one’s way upward economically, socially and culturally. There are more Carp storytellers on earth than any other kind. The Carp story reeks with vulnerability. Where it is heavily in use, there is often much resentment and anger and suffering. Can IEDs, suicide bombers, child and spousal abuse, public protests that turn bloody and political Tea Parties that turn shrill and accusatory be far behind?

Next comes the Shark storyteller. The user of the Shark story usually feels entitled. And often for good reason. They hold most of the cards and many of the marbles. The easiest way to learn how to tell the Shark story is to be the daughter or son of someone who told it well. In the 21st Century, the most formidable redoubt of the Shark storyteller is the major corporation and governments and other agglomerates (like universities) that act like one. It is important to the Shark story user to appear confident, in the know, on top of things, and really a pretty good Jane or Joe. Funny thing, though, how often Shark waters turn bloody, good Jane, good Joe or not.

Someone who isn’t forced by dire life circumstances to use the Carp story and who has the sensibilities to understand what a dead-end the Shark story tends to be often gravitates toward a much more fructiferous story. In fact, it sometimes seems to me like the brain has suddenly discovered itself when it arrives at the ability to tell this next story. That’s because, welcome improvement that it is, the new story and its user soon seem to be surrounded by wretched excess. Not by money, necessarily, although users of this story often do well enough. But a wretched excess of ideas, possibilities, symbols, connections and desires. Originally, Dr. Kordis and I called this the Pseudo-Enlightened Carp story. But we eventually came to realize that this was probably too harsh and an unnecessary diversion.

Because in being censorious of the premature assumption by persons suddenly able to tell this story that they have arrived at enlightenment, we were probably steering people away from a realization that they are very close now—psychologically, operationally—to a radically new, fecund, competent kind of story that people on the planet increasingly needed to hear and to which they need to self-adapt.

And so we changed the name of this new story to First Dolphin. It is only a beginning, important as it turns out to be. Truth be known and acknowledged, the First Dolphin story is the story being told of themselves by many of the people who are now feverishly connecting through Facebook and Twitter, who are raising the alarums about global ecological injury, who are scanning the heavens for signs of other intelligent “beings” in the universe, who are protesting against the treatment of the Carp storytellers and the abuses of the Shark storytellers and propagating the desire for a fairer, safer, more peaceful world.

Users of the First Dolphin story are nowhere near being able to live up to all their precepts or deliver on all their promises. But their story is a great improvement. And a critical spawning grounds. Already, at Brain Me Up, we are tracking two additional stories that have grown from the First Dolphin’s: the stories of the Prime Dolphin and of the Deep See Change Dolphin. It is one of these stories that, if the audacious theories of The Singulatarians come to pass, is most likely going to be the leading candidate for implantation in the “mind” of the artificial intelligence that they are predicting is destined to exceed our own.

But enough for now. If you’d like to know which of these stories you currently use to explain to yourself and others who you are—well, that’s the intended function of our newest Brain Me Up assessment. It’s called the Yo!Dolphin!™ Worldview Survey. Go here to know more. Be assured, our purpose is helping you understand and put to good use your life-story-making, not interrupt it, whether you are lying in bed musing about it or have your feet on the floor.

For example, I don’t trust automobile dealers. Not a single one of the lot, anywhere on Earth—not a whit. There is nothing in my experience or observation that indicates they deserve to be trusted. The car lots and auto showrooms of the world are marinated in greed, untruths and shady gamesmanship.

For similar reasons, I do not trust big-time politicians. Not a single one, anywhere on Earth. Now, there are some whom I admire more than others. But I don’t fully trust any of them, and you shouldn’t either. Because sooner or later, every prominent politician’s integrity goes on the auction block. And nearly all will claim righteousness or feign piety or swear ignorance or innocence when they sell out, and very few ever get indicted or penalized.

Admire Their Courage, But Be Cautious of Their Power
I do not trust cops. Not a single one, anywhere on Earth. I often admire their courage. And I find their job so fascinating that one of my favorite TV shows is Fox’s “Cops,” on Saturday night. But when you are in the clutches of a policeperson, for a brief but parlous time, you are at their total mercy. For that instant, they can be judge, jury and executioner. You can die, or be beaten, or be framed for a crime on the mere whim of the person behind the badge, and many victims around the world are, every day.

I do not trust ministers, priests, imams or rabbis. Probably most clergy people I’ve met are “good people,” and I’ve liked some of the ones I’ve known best a great deal. They often act sacrificially in admirable ways. They can provide wise, helpful counsel for many at difficult moments. But none I’ve ever met would I trust fully with my deepest questions about what it all means. Those who profess to respect my questioning show suspicions of being in camouflage; those who oppose it can be downright scary.

And now I must confess to a growing distrust of what I’ve come to call the New TrustMe Gurus of the business marketplace. There has been an explosion of them. They are promoting and peddling everything from nasal sprays to social networks and networking to books that tout things like the Joseph D. Pistone technique for winning friends and influencing people.

You may remember Pistone. He was the FBI agent who spent six years infiltrating the Bonanno crime family. In their new best-selling book, Trust Agents, digital marketing consultants Chris Brogan and Julien Smith admire how Pistone, using the alias of Donnie Brasco, won the Mafia’s trust by simply hanging around bars until the goons came to accept him as part of the scene. The point Trust Agents’ authors wish to make: you need to build up trust with your target markets before you make your move, not as you are making it.

Go Straight to the Heart of the Matter: the Pituitary Gland
Now, I’m willing to concede that many of the techniques in Trust Agents have value and are ethically light years ahead of the methods being advocated by some of the promoters of oxytocin, the “love hormone.”

Researchers from Zurich to Atlanta to Houston to Los Angeles are captivated these days by what happens when they squirt a few atomized drops of oxytocin into people’s (and rodents’) noses.

Oxytocin (not to be confused with oxycontin, a morphine-like drug associated with the death of DJ AM) is the short polypeptide hormone released by the pituitary gland. Within a few minutes of inhaling the drug in sufficient quantity, trust becomes a five-letter word for everything from let’s make a date (or set one for nuptials) to where did you want me to sign to let’s spray the whole Middle East with this stuff. The New-Age-in-a-spray-bottle effect seems to last for two to four hours.

Liquid Trust® was reputedly the first oxytocin spray on the market. (There is now also a Liquid Trust Enhanced.) Sellers of LT have this advice for their business customers: “Use Liquid Trust in creative ways around your workplace. Before important presentations or meetings, spray some Liquid Trust around your desk or conference room [sic] see the magic happen. You could even spray some on memos or reports that you have to hand to your manager! Although they cannot smell it, Liquid Trust is there and working to increase trust in you.” [Go here for more tips, like spraying LT on thank you cards to your clients.]

The Trust Equation Is Still the Same: Stand and Deliver
However, it is neither the outpouring of glib “Chicken Soup for the Marketer” books nor the wretched excesses of the new Mary Kays of the oxytocin receptor industry that has triggered my disgruntlement for the new TrustMe movement in business. I’m simply disappointed that trust has been monetized and commodified and its pursuit irrationally “scaled” to the point where it is sure to be devalued when the trust bubble implodes.

The newly evangelical TrustMe movement in business simply isn’t producing. I know this because people who keep making me promises as part of the new TrustMe clique simply aren’t delivering, not any more than before. Tantalizing hints of imminent breakthrough developments tipple off the lips and fingertips as easily as ever—never to be heard of again, just as before. Expressions and pledges of networking solidarity arrive en masse, only to wither like last week’s flower bouquet. It’s the same old, same old, not the New Millennium.

What I think has happened is this: the TrustMe/social networking edifice is built on sands underlain by the same old human deep-water rip tides and whirlpools, and nobody has been doing any real core-sampling. While the neurocortex poses, the limbic circle and the reptilian brain continue to dispose.

Trust is still what our deepest instincts have always said it is: a very small circle. Earning trust still requires what it has always required: showing over time that you can deliver consistently on honest promises. You can have a thousand people in your LinkedIn network and three thousand Twitter followers and Facebook friends out the kazoo, and nothing fundamental about the trust equation changes. Commit + follow-through, again and again = trust.

The Danger is Seeing Trust as a Numbers Game
Meanwhile, the demands of all that networking have made it nearly impossible for more and more of us to carry out the basics that can, over time, lead to the kind of trust that the new TrustMe business and social networking movement has been hoping to benefit from.

The experts call this “strategic trust.” This develops slowly, usually requiring years. It is very fragile, and can disappear in a finger’s snap. It happens, if it happens, because people stay around. They keep their promises. They radiate dependability and integrity in their actions. They reveal more and more of themselves and eventually, over time, become a “sum that is greater than the parts” in the experience and expectations of people for whom they count and on whom they count.

Few things are more fragile and require more tending than strategic trust. I’m not seeing very much of that emerging from the new TrustMe movement, and I don’t expect that it will. And that’s going to be very disappointing to a lot of folks.

They bought into the idea that trust-building can be a numbers game. And that being trusted is something that can be demonstrated and benefited from by showing up more and more often along the long tail of the Internet. By the time they figure out the truth, the authors of things like Trust Agents and the inventors of Liquid Trust will be long gone. And with them will go the only money anyone will make out of all this talk about how important it is to send word at the speed of light to an ever-growing myriad of message addicts (or message ignorers) of just how trustworthy you are.

Trust Values Are Eroding, Across the Board and the Seas
While Nero is fiddling, Rome shows signs of burning down. In its summer report on the top 10 trends for 2010, McKinsey, the big consulting company, says trust in business is declining. McKinsey points out that falling trust levels increase transaction costs, lower brand values and bring greater difficulties attracting customers and retaining talent.

Dr. Eric Uslander, the trust-studying scholar at the University of Maryland-College Park, says generalized levels of trust have been declining in the United States for more than 30 years. The decline is substantial. While not the same as “strategic trust,” generalized trust is a barometer of sorts for the overall economic health of a society and its business environment. In poorer countries, both strategic and generalized levels of trust are abominable, and getting no better. This is, of course, one of the chief reasons that they are poor.

So trust is as important as ever. Too important, I think, to be left to the TrustMe Movement. This is my advice: don’t put a lot of trust, time or money in following the TrustMe hype. The last thing you need to do is let the TrustMe folks cause you to devote so much time to trying to network with people you hope you can trust and who will end up trusting you that you have no time to prove yourself trustworthy. Call that a fatal attraction to trying to do trust on the cheap.