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.