BRAIN GAIN: Leaders are bombarded with information. The brain is too. Five senses are pouring in millions of bits of information every day - and even staying on guard when we are asleep. Strange noise in the night? Wake up! Cold toes? Snuggle up. Anxious about early-morning flight? Wake up and get up! It’s too early. I’ll keep you half-awake, just in case. I need my sleep. You also need to get up. Who’s in charge round here? Good question. Not you. Well, maybe you, maybe me.
Among the many remarkable accomplishments in its evolutionary development, the brain has pulled off two very clever tricks. The first is to get highly differentiated systems working together completely non-consciously. The second is to find economical ways of processing huge amounts of information to extract maximum output value.
'Differentiated systems' is just another way of saying 'different departments'. What the brain manages to do is organise the outputs from each region, in milliseconds, and present them to the outside world as if it were a single system operating in there. Observe, for instance, the consistency and completeness of personality with which another person functions. It's called being integrated. We instantly recognise when there is something slightly off-key, or poorly integrated, about another person.
What a joy it would be if organisational departments, in what these days are dignified as complex systems, operated easily across boundaries. Personality - the brain's own individual culture system - acts as the central integrator to make separate parts present as a whole. That's the job of ‘culture’ inside organizations and why it is of such great importance.
Not only is culture a huge brand differentiator, it has the capacity to organise why and hopw people act both inside and outside the organisation;and so it is a critical part of the leader's capability to understand and manage the culture very well indeed. Like personality it gets the neurochemistry of the organisation flowing and , well done, flowing in the direction that the organisation wants.
How does it do that, though?
An update from the British Neuroscience Association (22.1.11) reports that a team of scientists at the University of Rochester, Washington University in St. Louis, and Baylor College of Medicine has unraveled how the brain manages to process the millions of complex, rapidly changing, and often conflicting sensory signals to make sense of our world. Single cells in the brain establish which signals to give what weights to as being more or less important. That’s what experience does for us. It’s called ‘knowing’. When million of cells assign the same weights simultaneously – a simple operation performed by many neurons – the result is effective decision taking.
A good leader gets others around him or her to know, ‘intuitively’, how s/he would assign weights to critical issues. In this way the mind of the leader usefully invades the minds of subordinates. The brain cells of subordinates do what the leader wants. That’s culture. It’s not just saying ‘yes’. It’s knowing what ‘yes’ would look like.
Effective transmission of culture occurs through memes – the social equivalent of genes. Biochemist Dr Martin Farncombe has just written The Success Virus, a practical guide to using memes in corporate decision-making. It’s so important there will be a thorough review of it in April.
Think of brain cells as being voters: or customers. How could the culture of a political party, or of the organization, so engage the voters or the customers that they really attached to the party or the product or the service? Steve Jobs seems to have got as close as anyone to working that out pragmatically. Neuroscience is beginning to tell us how. That has real possibilities for a leader being smarter.
Dr Paul Brown is Visiting Professor in Organisational Neuroscience, London South Bank University and in Individual and Organisational Psychology, The Nottingham Law School. He is qualified as a clinical and organizational psychologist and as an APECS executive coach. Brain Gain will be a monthly column.
