Organisational Change and the Neuroscience of Leadership

The implementation of strategy ultimately requires a change the behaviour of employees. New research conducted over the last two decades has produced a more accurate view of human behaviour change resulting from an integration of psychology (the study of the human mind and human behavior) and neuroscience (the study of the anatomy and physiology of the brain). An article titled “The Neuroscience of Leadership“, from Strategy+Business provides an interesting discussion on organisational change, some of the interesting points raised in the article are:

Change Is Pain: Organizational change is unexpectedly difficult because it provokes sensations of physiological discomfort

Trying to change any hardwired habit requires a lot of effort, in the form of attention. This often leads to a feeling that many people find uncomfortable. So they do what they can to avoid change.

Behaviorism doesn’t work: Change efforts based on incentive and threat (the carrot and the stick) rarely succeed in the long run.

…..Present the right incentives, and the desired change will naturally occur…… Yet there is plenty of evidence from both clinical research and workplace observation that change efforts based on typical incentives and threats (the carrot and the stick) rarely succeed in the long run.

Humanism is overrated: In practice, the conventional empathic approach of connection and persuasion doesn’t sufficiently engage people.

But the human brain can behave like a 2-year-old: Tell it what to do and it automatically pushes back. Partly this phenomenon is a function of homeostasis (the natural movement of any organism toward equilibrium and away from change), but it also reflects the fact that brains are pattern-making organs with an innate desire to create novel connections. When people solve a problem themselves, the brain releases a rush of neurotransmitters like adrenaline. This phenomenon provides a scientific basis for some of the practices of leadership coaching. Rather than lecturing and providing solutions, effective coaches ask pertinent questions and support their clients in working out solutions on their own…. People can detect the difference between authentic inquiry and an effort to persuade them.

Focus is power: The act of paying attention creates chemical and physical changes in the brain.

Concentrating attention on your mental experience, whether a thought, an insight, a picture in your mind’s eye, or a fear, maintains the brain state arising in association with that experience. Over time, paying enough attention to any specific brain connection keeps the relevant circuitry open and dynamically alive. These circuits can then eventually become not just chemical links but stable, physical changes in the brain’s structure….. Attention continually reshapes the patterns of the brain. Among the implications: People who practice a specialty every day literally think differently, through different sets of connections, than do people who don’t practice the specialty. In business, professionals in different functions – finance, operations, legal, research and development, marketing, design, and human resources – have physiological differences that prevent them from seeing the world the same way.

Expectation shapes reality: People’s preconceptions have a significant impact on what they perceive.

Cognitive scientists are finding that people’s mental maps, their theories, expectations, and attitudes, play a more central role in human perception than was previously understood. This can be well demonstrated by the placebo effect. Tell people they have been administered a pain-reducing agent and they experience a marked and systematic reduction in pain, despite the fact that they have received a completely inert substance, a sugar pill….. The mental expectation of pain relief causes the person to repeatedly focus his or her attention on the experience of pain relief, so that the brain’s pain-relief circuits are activated, causing a decrease in the sensation of pain. People experience what they expect to experience…. How, then, would you go about facilitating change? The impact of mental maps suggests that one way to start is by cultivating moments of insight. Large-scale behavior change requires a large-scale change in mental maps. This in turn requires some kind of event or experience that allows people to provoke themselves, in effect, to change their attitudes and expectations more quickly and dramatically than they normally would…. [research] findings suggest that at a moment of insight, a complex set of new connections is being created. These connections have the potential to enhance our mental resources and overcome the brain’s resistance to change. But to achieve this result, given the brain’s limited working memory, we need to make a deliberate effort to hardwire an insight by paying it repeated attention…. That is why employees need to “own” any kind of change initiative for it to be successful. The help-desk clerk who sees customers as children won’t change the way he or she listens without a moment of insight in which his or her mental maps shift to seeing customers as experts. Leaders wanting to change the way people think or behave should learn to recognize, encourage, and deepen their team’s insights.

Attention density shapes identity: Repeated, purposeful, and focused attention can lead to long-lasting personal evolution.

For insights to be useful, they need to be generated from within, not given to individuals as conclusions. This is true for several reasons. First, people will experience the adrenaline-like rush of insight only if they go through the process of making connections themselves. The moment of insight is well known to be a positive and energizing experience. This rush of energy may be central to facilitating change: It helps fight against the internal (and external) forces trying to keep change from occurring, including the fear response of the amygdala….. Second, neural networks are influenced moment to moment by genes, experiences, and varying patterns of attention. Although all people have some broad functions in common, in truth everyone has a unique brain architecture. Human brains are so complex and individual that there is little point in trying to work out how another person ought to reorganize his or her thinking. It is far more effective and efficient to help others come to their own insights….. The term attention density is increasingly used to define the amount of attention paid to a particular mental experience over a specific time. The greater the concentration on a specific idea or mental experience, the higher the attention density….. With enough attention density, individual thoughts and acts of the mind can become an intrinsic part of an individual’s identity: who one is, how one perceives the world, and how one’s brain works…. The key is getting people to pay sufficient attention to new ideas…. Perhaps any behavior change brought about by leaders, managers, therapists, trainers, or coaches is primarily a function of their ability to induce others to focus their attention on specific ideas, closely enough, often enough, and for a long enough time.

Mindful Change in Practice

Start by leaving problem behaviors in the past; focus on identifying and creating new behaviors. Over time, these may shape the dominant pathways in the brain. This is achieved through a solution-focused questioning approach that facilitates self-insight, rather than through advice-giving.

In a world with so many distractions, and with new mental maps potentially being created every second in the brain, one of the biggest challenges is being able to focus enough attention on any one idea. Leaders can make a big difference by gently reminding others about their useful insights, and thus eliciting attention that otherwise would not be paid. Behaviorists may recognize this type of reminder as “positive feedback,” or a deliberate effort to reinforce behavior that already works, which, when conducted skillfully, is one aspect of behaviorism that has beneficial cognitive effect. In a brain that is also constantly pruning connections while making new ones, positive feedback may play a key functional role as “a signal to do more of something.”

At the organizational level, Mike wants to change the way thousands of people think. A common approach would be to identify the current attitudes across the group through some sort of cultural survey. The hope would be that identifying the source of the problem would help solve it. Based on what we now know about the brain, a better alternative would be for Mike to paint a broad picture of being more entrepreneurial, without specifically identifying the changes that individuals will need to make. Mike’s goal should be for his people to picture the new behaviors in their own minds, and in the process develop energizing new mental maps that have the potential to become hardwired circuitry. Mike would then get his team to focus their attention on their own insights, by facilitating discussions and activities that involve being entrepreneurial. After that, Mike’s job would be to regularly provide “gentle reminders” so that the entrepreneurial maps become the dominant pathways along which information, ideas, and energy flow. He also needs to catch the team when they get sidetracked and gently bring them back. The power truly is in the focus, and in the attention that is paid.

Perhaps you are thinking, “This all sounds too easy. Is the answer to all the challenges of change just to focus people on solutions instead of problems, let them come to their own answers, and keep them focused on their insights?” Apparently, that’s what the brain wants.

Technorati Tags: Strategy, Leadership, Change, Psychology, Management, neuroscience, Organisational Change

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Tagged as: Change, Strategy