The word blockchain can create a whole range of emotions ranging from excitement to fear. In this podcast we had the pleasure to have Mark Simpson, Head of Consultancy at Armour Risk, take us through the Psychology of Blockchain.

 

What is blockchain?

Mark prefer to lift it to describe what Distributed Ledger Technology is (of which blockchain is a type of DLT)

Simply - Digital and decentralised books of record

A bit more complex - DLT is a database held and updated independently by each participant (or node) in a network – the distributed bit.

Updates to the ledger are independently constructed and recorded by each node.

The nodes then vote on these updates (different methods) to ensure that the majority agrees with the conclusion reached. This voting and agreement on one copy of the ledger is called consensus, and is conducted automatically by a consensus algorithm.

Once consensus has been reached, the distributed ledger updates itself and the latest, agreed-upon version of the ledger is saved on each node separately.  The immutable bit.

The DLT attributes are

* Distributed

* Transparent & change evident

* Consensus driven

* Immutable record

* Tamper proof

* Cryptographically secure

In three words - Digitally Lifting Trust

Fear and DLT as a catalyst for change

In many ways DLT is like other forms of technology in that it is a catalyst for change, but as it challenges from more than a tech point of view it brings other challenges.

DLT challenges paradigms; values, identity and this can be tough.

According to Mark our view of the world and decision making is in fact distributed and doesn’t just occur in our head.  As a coach one of the methods Mark has trained in was multiple intelligences (or mbraining for short).

Mbraining developed by Grant Soosalu & Marvin Oka used findings in Neuroscience that show we have three functioning brains in our head, heart and gut respectively. Using these findings as the basis for further behavioural modelling research, they unpacked some of the unconscious processes we use with our head, heart and gut.

It is a body of knowledge that has really helped from a change perspective and is being used in a framework Mark has developed called Resilient Changing.

Mark wrote an article on the topic of change a couple of years ago:  https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/meeting-challenges-change-part-1-mark-simpson/

In summary we have

The head brain – highest expression - creativity

* Cognitive Perception- cognition, perception, pattern recognition, etc.

* Thinking – reasoning, abstraction, analysis, synthesis, meta-cognition etc.

* Making Meaning – semantic processing, language, narrative, metaphor, etc.s

The heart brain – highest expression is compassion

* Emoting– emotional processing (e.g. anger, grief, hatred, joy, happiness etc.)

* Values – processing what’s important to you and your priorities (and its relationship to the emotional strength of your aspirations, dreams, desires, etc.)

* Relational affect – your felt connection with others (e.g. feelings of love, hate, indifference, compassion, uncaring, like, dislike, etc.)

The gut brain – highest expression - Courage

* Core Identity – a deep and visceral sense of core self, and determining at the deepest levels what is ‘self’ versus ‘not-self’