Monday, November 03, 2008

Can Business Leaders and Neuroscientists Collaborate?

If you put today's best business leaders and neuroscientists in a room together, what would the conversations sound like? What would they be able to offer each other? Here are the potential rewards and the challenges in such a partnership.

What Neuroscience Can Offer Business Right Now

Outside of the medical, bioscience, and brain fitness industries, neuroscience has much to offer business in general across all industries, especially in employee development and the work environment:
  • An insight into what works and what doesn't in learning (memory formation). Research into learning capabilities and limitations can be used to design stronger formal training programs, manage knowledge transfer technology, and help supervisors coach subordinates more effectively.
  • Tremendous research into transforming task performance, time management, and multi-tasking. We have come a long way since the discovery of the assembly line; we can help increase productivity by a significant percentage.
  • A review of employee policies and procedures to see what hinders or promotes employee performance.
  • A much stronger and less abstract view of emotion and how it impacts job behavior, team relationships, engagement, decision-making, and job performance.
  • Volumes of information on focus, concentration, flow, and peak performance.
  • A beefing up of wellness programs by including information on how to optimize employee brain potential.
  • Much more on high performance using discoveries in motor imagery, plasticity, evolutionary biology, and cellular biology.

A participant quote from the recently ended NeuroLeadership conference in New York: "Bringing in hard science maximizes the potential for self-awareness and 'insight' into oneself."

One thing that I am seeing a lot of in my classes is the high impact of a simple awareness of how the brain works. It's surprising that awareness alone is so powerful, but in this case, it seems to be doing the trick. Telling a person a little bit about the brain gives them the "aha's" into what drives their behavior and how they can modify it. The results are hard to believe -- a person can have a transformational change in as little as three hours of classroom time. It works because:

  • The material and environment are non-threatening, compared to other training where the participant feels like he is in class because he is "broken" and ends up being defensive the whole time instead of being open-minded. Brain science material allows participants to think, "It's not personal; it's not about me; the whole human race grapples with these issues."
  • The participant feels more in control after learning the material.
  • The participant sees immediate benefit to using this information.
  • The participant feels like s/he has a clear path to mastering the changes s/he wants to make in his/her behavior.
  • The participant feels happier. (This should not be underestimated.)

Challenges in Neuroscience

The challenges I see on the neuroscience side of neuroscience and business collaborating include:
  • Bulk of research is on ill brains instead of well brains (this is changing).
  • One scientist is typically involved in only his/her own research. Many of the best solutions in business come from combining the work of multiple scientists. More collaboration and integration are needed.
  • Valid study design is critical for accurate findings. Much research is flawed. Great design and accurate interpretation requires special training and much discipline. Conversely, too limited of an interpretation can hamstring great possibility.
  • Most neuroscientists do not know how to apply their work to business. A new middleman will need to be created that can walk in both worlds. A select few individuals (like me) will get degrees in both fields so that they can cross-communicate.
  • Scientists have a hard time finding random subjects in a cost-effective manner and often use students. Also, male rats have been used for most of the brain research to-date, limiting findings to one gender.

In spite of these issues, neuroscience has much to offer business, especially in employee development.

Challenges in Business


There are many challenges on the business side of a neurobusiness collaboration.
  • Neuroscience is not even on the radar screen for most CEOs. They think it's for medical devices, physical or software products, or bioscience. They don't think "competitive advantage" and "neuroscience" in the same sentence.
  • From what I have seen, even the business thought leaders are asking the wrong questions. They don't know how to approach teh scientists to maximize stakeholder value.
  • Executives who look only in the Organizational Development field will miss many possibilities. There is much more potential in other fields.
  • Executives that need to justify return on investment before they see breakthroughs could miss out on a huge competitive advantage. There's just not enough evidence yet. Or the evidence is protected by confidentiality agreements.
  • Executives who believe that neuroscience is limited to the press releases they hear on CNN will require a mindset change. Correspondingly, hiring consultants who grab onto the hottest new thing and know little about the brain could be peddling inaccurate and potentially damaging data.
  • Executives must be willing to face some very big ethical issues when they come up.

Common Challenges:

  • Finding a common language. A potential solution is to look for someone who walks in both worlds.
  • Being willing to be wrong - on both sides.

Success Stories


In future issues, I will be sharing examples of neurobusiness success stories: how smart and brave business leaders have brought neuroscience into their businesses and transformed their workplaces.

Conclusion

Business leaders and neuroscientists have a great deal to offer each other, despite the huge hurdles they must overcome to begin to collaborate effectively.

You're Exaggerating

One of our brain's most important functions is to maximize our survival, and the fear system is a major component of that. The whole reason we feel fear is because a threat to our safety has been detected. So fear is really our own alarm system. The problem comes in when we let fear, a system designed in cave man days, hold us back in our 21st century life.

Many people feel that when they feel fear, they need to stop doing whatever it is they are doing. The emotion is so strong that we feel like avoiding situations where we feel fear. This is not the best use of our fear system.

Our fear system is designed to sound the alarm when we feel danger. But most of the time, when it goes off these days, we are not in danger of dying. Your car alarm goes off many times, but your car is not in danger of being stolen. You home security system often generates false alarms.


When our own fear alarm system goes off, we need to do a better job of evaluating the threat and then deciding the best course of action to take.

To make things worse, the intensity of our negative feelings compared to our positive feelings is not the same. In other words, our positive and negative emotions are not symmetrical.

Which feels more intense to you: winning $100 or losing $100?

Most people say that losing $100 feels much worse than winning $100 feels good. In fact, they are right. Negative emotions, including fear, are felt more intensely than positive emotions. Our fear system wants to make sure it has our attention so that we will run from the bear in time to stay alive. So that's likely why our negative emotions developed more intensely over time than our positive emotions.

This may explain a lot to some people. When you fight with a friend, lover, or family member, it feels bad, intense. The reason our fear system is triggered during a fight is that we have this need to stay part of a tribe. Being part of a group, back in cave man days, allowed us a much higher probability of survival than being a loner. Hence, the drive to get along, not make waves, be a follower, and fit into the group is quite strong.

What can we do to feel better? First, we need to see a yield sign in place of a stop sign when we feel fear. Evaluate the source of your fear, then move forward with your best course of action.

Second, increase the number of positive interactions in your life compared to the number of negative interactions. (Listen to soothing music instead of the TV, watch a comedy instead of a horror show, be nice instead of grouchy!)

Speaking in front of a group is a great example of feeling a fear that does nothing but get in our way today. Why in the world does this fear outrank death in every top fears list I have seen?

The cause of this fear is a self-consciousness about how we think we will be perceived in front of a group of people. Our systems are likely designed to help us keep our mouths shut in front of the whole tribe so that we will not say something that could get us kicked out. The chances of survival were much higher if we could remain a good, conforming member of our group or tribe.

Our fear of public speaking remains, but there is no real usefulness to this fear in the 21st century, and it has likely derailed a huge number of career promotions in people who just couldn't muster the courage to develop these skills. If you're ready to conquer public speaking or another skill that is fearful to you, turn that stop sign that you see when your fear rises into a yield sign and proceed with caution to build your skill.

Take a Brain Quiz

How well do you know stuff about your own brain? Take our quiz. Choose an answer to each question: fact (true) or fiction (false).

A. Punishment and reward is the best way for us to learn. Fact or fiction?

B. Men are happier than women. Fact or fiction?

C. We only use 10% of our brains. Fact or fiction?

Ready for the answers? Scroll down.

A. Punishment and reward is the best way for us to learn.

Fiction: Although this research from the 1930s is still widely quoted, it has been overturned. Social modeling is actually the most natural and effective way to learn and was formulated (or discovered) by Albert Bandura in the 1950s. If you have children, you have already figured this out the first time you wondered where they got that horrible behavior from and realized it was you.

Social modeling brings importance to congruence and credibility in the workplace: walking your talk. Your employees will more naturally (and unconsciously) model your behavior than your words, when they are at odds with each other.

B. Men are happier than women.

Fiction. It's the same; men and women are equally happy. This is true despite the list of reasons that men are happier than women that is floating around the Internet right now (Your last name stays put; Phone conversations are over in 30 seconds flat; Men can play with toys all their lives; Men get extra credit for the slightest act of thoughtfulness, etc.). However, women experience higher intensities of emotions, both positive and negative, than men. This explains why women are more predisposed to depression than men.

C. We only use 10% of our brains.

Fiction. We'd be close to dead if this were true. We use all of our brains. Each part has a specific function or memory store that contributes to all the things we do as humans: talking, walking, breathing, sleeping, thinking, smelling, seeing, etc. This myth might have gotten started in reference to the part of our brain that we have access to at any one time; that is, our consciousness. It's clear that our consciousness compared to our subconscious is a much smaller subset of our whole apparatus, akin to an iceberg where the underwater part is our subconscious and the part floating above the surface is our conscious.

How did you do? We'll post another quiz soon, so you'll get a chance to improve your score.