Ninety-three percent of us believe that we are above average drivers. Of course that is not statistically possible but it is the wonderful thing about being human, persistently experiencing a world in which we are above average.

Another great thing about being human is that we get to create our own reality. Rather than experiencing an objective reality, our brain takes in loads of data and molds it into a reality that aligns with our mindset, our beliefs our past experiences, and our expectations.

This makes the world a much easier place to navigate, but it does also have some downsides. One downside is that very often it makes us worse at communicating with other people.

Research on New Year’s Resolutions shows that more than 50% of people set aside their resolutions by the end of the first month.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time looking at the research on how we can best attain our goals, or in the current case, our New Year’s Resolutions. Here is a quick summary of what some of the research tells us.

What is it about airplane crashes that so completely draw our attention and why are so many people so uncomfortable with flying? Blame it on our need for control and on some predictable cognitive biases.

The recent and still unsolved murders at the University of Idaho are horrifying and as much as I’m generally loath to use current, and tragic, examples, the investigation and public discussion highlight well cognitive biases that can slide unnoticed into our thinking and skew how we view a situation. Perhaps in this instance, where we are not the primary investigators, it doesn’t so much matter. But in the case of the investigators, it does, and in situations you face every day in your business and life it can matter a great deal when cognitive biases negatively impact your decision processes.

We are faced every day with information of uncertain quality, and we must make decisions with only partial and often ambiguous information. That’s not a problem, it’s just a fact of life. The problem comes when we decide to use this information and we fail to appropriately incorporate any uncertainty judgment into our thinking.

How could such iconic brands and anchors of our culture simply cease to be? I am fascinated by the decline of these brands…Radio Shack, Blockbuster, Blackberry, Pan American, Borders, Tower Records (true loss there), and Kodak, to name a few. It is true some of these exist still as online ghosts of their former selves, but for the most part they are gone.

Part of that is capitalism. The old make way for the new, whether they want to or not. But could the old not become the new? With the right insight and right information all of these brands could have adapted, innovated, and survived.

I was reading this morning about self-healing composites, materials that can repair themselves while still in operation. Picture an airplane wing healing its own cracks while you search for your seat. Pretty cool. I’ve also recently learned that porcupines are self-healing. They get a bit over adventurous, creeping too far out on weak tree branches, and thus often fall from trees. The result is they jab themselves with their own quills. Fortunately, the quills are coated in a natural antibiotic, so they heal quickly from their self-inflicted wounds.

Wouldn’t it be fantastic if we and our organizations could be similarly self-healing, especially so when our wounds are self-inflicted. And as far as corporations go, research seems to show that most wounds are self-inflicted. I believe, with the right mindset, our organizations can be self-healing, and in the process we can avoid inflicting further damage.

Last week I had the opportunity to teach a two-day Cognitive Interview course in DC and then to spend the next three days working with the same fantastic group on Credibility Assessment, this time with the addition of Aldert Vrij and Sharon Leal, two of the absolute top researchers on deception and amazing people.

The research into deception detection is a fascinating field and has been progressing at an exponential pace over the past decade. Professor Vrij has very much been at the forefront of this wave with approximately 600 papers and 25,000 citations and Professor Leal is not far behind. The pace of the research is awesome, yet also leads to some challenges. I want briefly to mention some of these challenges, and I’ll then jump to discussing some real-time deception detection methods that do seem to work.

Imagine, on a whim, you have proffered $44 billion to buy a social media platform, have a large fortune of your own at risk in the deal, and now are wondering if this was such a good idea. And you are sitting across the table from the social media executives, negotiating the deal, and trying to make sense of whether what they are telling you is true or a lie. How many bots really are on their network? Are they not making eye contact? Are they fidgeting? Do they appear nervous? Are they stumbling over their speech a bit? Are they looking up and to the right?

Guess what? Not one of those things are relevant to whether they are lying or telling the truth. Of course they are fidgeting, stumbling, and looking away…

If we apologize genuinely and effectively, identifying and rectifying the affront, we can actually strengthen our team bonds and strengthen our standing within the team. If we fail to apologize — or do so half-heartedly or in a way that does not relieve the burden of offense — it is highly improbable we will receive any forgiveness. Instead, we damage our team, receive the negative outcomes Fehr et al describe, and thus damage our standing within the group.

Through most of human history, humans have had to be very good at identifying and protecting against things that wanted to hurt us…things like saber-toothed tigers or perhaps the Mongol Horde. While similar environmental threats still exist, albeit on a different evolutionary scale, we generally no longer face such threats to our existence on a daily basis. But that doesn’t mean our brains have stopped scanning the environment for potential harm; on the contrary, our brains are hardwired for self-protection. However, the environmental threats we’ve evolved to identify and avoid have now been replaced by actual or perceived threats to our identity and thus our place in society.

As a leader in an organization, your intention, I assume, is to create a culture that promotes innovation and adaptation and makes employees feel like valued and important members of your team; but what if how you are communicating is creating a mental model of a workplace that is not aligned with these goals?

My niece and sister visited us in New Hampshire last week and when my niece got out of the car, I saw she was holding a book I recognized. She’s always holding a book and has read a rather impressive number and range of works and the book she had with her was “Deep Survival,” by Laurence Gonzales. If you do anything that might possibly put you in danger, even something as seemingly undangerous as hiking, this is the book you should read. It’s brilliant and I was quite excited to see her reading it as she becomes an accomplished mountaineer and climber, but my point here is neither survival nor my niece. It’s how this science-based book relates directly to organizational culture and communication. Gonzales’s book draws on an array of neuroscience to understand who survives life-and-death situations and it applies equally well to challenges we face daily within our organizations.

I receive about six different news updates in my email every day, and each seems to be trying to outdo the others with catchy and sometimes amusing (or misleading) headlines. Yesterday, the headline for one of them was, “90 percent of life is confidence”— a quote from an anime series I’ve not yet watched. That does sound good, and wouldn’t life be easy if that were true? In my courses I talk frequently about the importance of confidence; yet the headline made me think about all the ways confidence, and overconfidence, can lead us to suboptimal outcomes and how perhaps we can avoid this by refocusing where we place our confidence.

Earlier this week, my peas and Japanese cucumbers had reached the stage where they needed trellising so I pulled out the fancy trellis a gardener’s catalogue had convinced me was going to be the most amazing thing. To my dismay, but hardly to my surprise, it would take me a full year to untangle the bright green plastic mess and it seemed not sturdy enough to support anything had I succeeded in untangling and stringing it up. I’m not annoyed at the catalogue; I’m annoyed at myself for failing to think like a gardener and instead thinking like someone who collects gardening tools and gadgets. I’d fallen prey to the “toolbox approach”, the thing I’ve most adamantly pushed back on the past ten or more years in the realms of investigating and interviewing.