Mind your mind: an exploration in neuroscience and leadership

One of the topics I set my teeth in this year is the promising field of neuroscience and how it relates to leadership and leadership development. I'm a learning and development professional after all, so not knowing about the latest discoveries on the workings of our grey box is like a car repairer not knowing about engines to me...

Some months ago, my colleague Monica and me did a presentation 'Mind your mind: an introduction to neuroscience and leadership' on the Associate Learning days of our company (Center for Creative Leadership). We repeated most of that session duirng the grand office opening of our new EMEA campus earlier this month. Below is the non-confidential part of that presentation. It basically gives our introduction and understanding distilled from the books we read on the topic. (If you do nothing else, take the short quiz on p19.)

Neuroscience and leadership : an introduction from Bert De Coutere

Here is the short narrative:

• Neuroscience is making dramatic progress in the understanding of the human brain. It is happening now. The race is on to translate those insights into leadership development best practices.
• The breakthrough comes from 'seeing live into the brain' via fMRI or other technologies. I demoed a relaxation session with a cheap 99$ toy NeuroSky Mindwave to underline that basic versions of this technology is already in our toys and clothes. For example, the slide below shows research of dr Nardi who tries to link brain activity to the ever popular Jung and MBTI personality types.

• But remember two things about neuroscience: compared to others it is still a baby science, and as a consequence a lot of 'snake oil' is out there. Maybe in 10 years time we get back together and say of this very session "what were we thinking..."
• What we have 'seen' so far contradicts the mental model of the Descartian view: mind and body are not independent (they are linked both ways), we are far from rational beings (emotions and our habits take over even when we think we're thinking - again, do the quiz on p19), our brains aren't 'done' when we are adults as neuroplasticity ensures we keep wiring and rewiring, and there is also a social dimension to our brains (eg via mirror neurons)
• We then went quickly over the evolution of our brain and the reptilian, mammalic and primate parts of our brains via the 'hand model' of Dan Siegel.
• Our brains are wired to process fear and negative information faster than positive information. Here we jump to the field of positive psychology. We can mindfully intervene in our hard-wired negativity. 
• Actually, we can 'interrupt' all our emotions and habits if we want to, but that requires attention (neo frontal cortex) over time and therefore a lot of energy. (see also David Rock's excellent book Your Brain at Work.)
• Because of the big energy consumption and the relative small size of what we can hold in our active thinking brain, we try to automate as much behaviour as possible. In the book "Thinking fast and slow" from Daniel Kahneman that is called system 1 and system 2. (again, page 19, really!)
• We then went for the main model of the book 'The Power of Habit' on our habit "system 1" brain.
• The rest of the presentation is about CCL's exploration and topics to bring all the above to live, but that I can't cover here. 

Oh, and this presentation featured on the Slideshare home page! I'm so proud of me ... :-)