A great deal of the work of a leader involves change – in their own and others’ performance, behaviours, skills and attitudes. Our brain is changing all the time; every new stimulus or thought creates some new connections; familiar stimuli and thinking reinforce existing connections and every mental and physical action is the result of activating new or existing networks of connections between neurons.
However, in order for someone to change their physical or mental behaviours sustainably (to create new habits), their brain needs to create new and robust connections between neurons. We also know that the adult brain remains elastic (i.e., changeable) throughout life and that its connections can be changed by learning and practice.
Habitual Behaviours
As adults, most of what we do on daily basis, how we react to familiar stimuli and effect regular goal, is habitual and automatic. Experience shapes and patterns of behaviour through which we normally achieve our daily goals, walking downstairs, eating breakfast, typing on our computers. If it works reasonably efficiently we do not need to consciously plan how to walk. In contrast, a toddler has to work out how to get down from a chair and get into mother’s lap.
Such habitual behaviour is the result of many years of learning and practice. It is the result of neural networks being reinforced through repeated use to the point where their activation is the easiest option for achieving certain goals in certain contexts. A useful analogy is like the deepest of several connected channels running down a hill. Water will find its way there by itself. Goals do not have to be conscious in order to trigger habitual behaviours. A student who has the long-standing habit of coming to his/her study room after classroom activities would start working in the study room automatically.
New behaviours take time and conscious effort to learn. Learning can be described as the forging of new connections. Once forged and successfully repeated over a significant period of time, their connections become the deepest channel, the default path for signals in the brain. It is now believed that the neural pattern may physically be created in the brain.
Think about your own deeply engrained habit. Not just those like eating and travelling but some of the small things you do every day or every week. For example, how do you normally react to an interception – with a smile or a frown? How do you start your management team meeting? Do you go straight to the point you make or you encourage others to give a range of inputs? It can take months or years to create habitual mental and physical behaviours. Changing these involves the creation of new pathways, which with use over time become the easier, default routes for neural signals to travel. The old connections, if not used, are gradually puned.
A Case
Manna, a very bright and able colleague, who managed the IT system providing customer information and support for a large services organization, was known as difficult because she had the habit of starting most responses with the word no. This had served her well in the past, when she was the junior receiving orders and requests from everywhere, as it gave her time think and plan, but as the leader some 200 sales, clerical and IT staff it was a significant disadvantage. A mentor helped her see the need for change and she worked hard at becoming more approachable.
Changing The Brain
A number of factors are needed to change brain so that it enables new patterns of mental or physical behaviours. The first is focused attention. Although adult brains continue to be elastic, and we have some 86 billion neurons capable of roughly one million billion connections, we do not have infinite capacity. Our brain is a competitive environment in which different paths compete for resources. These resources can be chemical, such as the oxygen and glucose that are required for energy, and hormones which trigger particular effects, and physical, such as the limited capacity of our working memory which can hold only some five to nine items at one time, and the speed at which a signal can pass across a number of neural connections.
Some people might say the brain is inherently lazy. In other words, the brain chooses the most energy efficient path. We know that the higher order brain functions, anything complex involving working memory and prefrontal cortex (PFC), such as conscious processing of inputs, conscious decision making, complex concepts, planning strategizing, self-reflection, regulating our emotions and channelizing energy from them, are very energy intensive.
Attention appears to be this mechanism by which these limited resources are focused on a particular stimulus, physical activity or mental task. Attention allows for new neural connections to be forged and progressively strengthened. The old unused ones are gradually pruned. The pruning of neural connections happens throughout life, but there are two periods when it is most intensive and causes massive changes around the age of two and adolescence. It is the reason teenagers need so much sleep and fuel, and underlies changes in their personalities and moods.
It appears that focused attention is needed for significant changes in the brain. But for leaders, focusing is not enough. The leaders must have the capacity to shift attention when necessary.
The new connections are sustained and embedded through the second factor, deliberate practice or repetition. Forming a new network or pathway of multiple connections (or mental map), is not enough, as a new connection is fragile. For it to remain usable, it needs to be used again and again until it is well established. “Use it or lose it” is indeed a critical principle. Re-using a set of connection, such as those created as result of learning a new skill like driving a car not only improves that skill but gradually changes the location of that map in the brain, so that it needs less conscious attention and hence fewer resources and efforts to accomplish. This explains the difference between a skilled driver and a novice one. It has been observed that cab drivers’ mid posterior hippocampus starts reducing its size in retirement after a relatively short period.
Underlying focused attention and practice is the need for the motivation, will power or self-control to change. Without this, focusing attention and practicing will not be sustained enough to deliver the long-term robustness of new connections that are acquired for long change.
Finally, the environment has to be conducive to focusing attention. In situations of danger and uncertainty the brain’s resources are driven by the overwhelming need for survival. The need focuses attention on the source of danger and on trying to predict where the next threat will appear, on escape or full frontal battle rather than an innovative or creative solution. The most important part of our environment is other people and our relationship with them.
Further Explication of Factors
Focused attention. Focused attention is driven both “bottom-up” and “top-down” systems (i.e., by external stimuli that we do not control, or by our goals and will). Our attention is focused involuntarily on “bottom-up” stimuli that are most relevant to us, either through genetically programmed behaviour, social significance, and so on. For example, when we perceive an immediate threat, such as a car that is veering towards us at speed, our attention is focused.
Attention is voluntarily focused, “top-down” in service to our conscious goals. For example, when we want to do something that is of interest (like hitting a tennis ball), top-down attention is focused. Top-down attention can also be focused by non-conscious goals.
The presence of focused attention determines a significant change in brain structure (Merzenich& associates). Although receiving and processing a stimulus creates changes in adults, these are less lasting than those created by deliberate attention. It is also possible that focused attention is necessary for the capture of explicit memory (semantic and episodic).
The ability to focus attention can be improved through practice. There is non considerable evidence that mindfulness meditation is one of practicing that does just that.
Repetition and practice. The effect of practice can be explained at neuronal level by the “Hebbian principle of cells that fire together wire together”. Repeated firing of neurons at the same time strengthens their connections and increases the speed and efficiency of the linked networks. Linked firing is also thought to be involved in the creation of memories. The corollary is that neurons that fire together only once, or only a couple of times, have fragile links to each other, unless the experience is highly emotionally charged.
Repetition and practice works not just for the motor cortex, but for sensory and cognitive activity. Practice needs to be sustained over a significant period of time. Depending on the activity, various experiments have derived required period. Klinberg describes an experiment in which it took five weeks of cognitive training to change patterns of activity in the frontal and parietal lobes. An experiment in 1995, by Pascual Leone, with some participants practicing on keyboards and a control group just thinking about the same movements, demonstrated that both groups changed the relevant motor cortex area. Mental, as well as physical, practice change the structure of the brain.
This has the most prefound significance for leaders who are grappling with significant organizational changes. It cannot happen overnight. Changing self and other needs time.
Motivation, will power and self-control. It is important to recognize that motivation, will power, and self-control are closely interconnected. These factors need to be harnessed to achieve significant, sustainable behaviour and attitude change towards a consciously set goal.
Human are motivated. They are motivated to act in terms of responses towards external and internal stimuli. This can be both conscious and non-conscious.
Whether or not humans have free will is still hotly debated. In 1999 Benjamin Libet established that some 100-200 milliseconds before a conscious decision to move a finger, for example, a readiness potential was measurable in that part of the brain that controls that finger movement. Libet concluded that our non-conscious mind had made the decision before our conscious mind was aware of it – hence no free will. But he maintained that our conscious mind had about 150 milliseconds to choose between allowing and countermanding that decision. These findings are still controversial. The meaning of the readiness potential has been disputed. They may however explain why exercising will and making decisions are such hard work.
That human will or will power (determination to pursue a chosen goal or action) exists has been demonstrated by experiments. Roy Baumeister is a leading researcher. A key manifestation of will power is self-control or self-management, the ability to resist impulsive desires. Exercising self-control appears to correlate with increased activity in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (RVLPFC). According to Baumeister, will power like a muscle, can be trained through repeated practice.
In order to change behaviour to achieve a goal, exercising will or self-control to keep attention focused on the goal and on the changes needed would seem a key part of the top-down process. Will is also essential to persistence in practicing until the change is successfully embedded and routinized. Once routinized, the bottom-up system plays its role.
Motivation and will can thus be seen as parts of the brain’s mechanism for bottom-up and top-down focusing of attention on what is most important and relevant and enabling self-control towards the achievement of goals.
Environment. A leader has the seminal role of creating environments which make it easier for people to achieve organizational goals. These are indeed leaders who recognize that it is easier to work with the grain of the brain than against it. Having recognized the paramount importance of focused attention to enable change, of emotions for motivation and the need for practice over significant periods of time, they are more likely to create environments in which individuals and teams can change themselves and each other. Such environments will have reduced distractions, they will have many opportunities for the corporate goals to be clearly articulated and repeated, and the goals will be few and coherent, not conflicting.
Having explicit goals appears to create motivation. There is some evidence that writing them down not only helps clarify them but also increases the chances that we will achieve them.
Actions and Reflections
- Use the power of goals to trigger focused attention
- Anything that supports practice is useful (getting self-help groups to do role plays)
- Engage in mindful meditation, even for a few minutes a day before important calls or meeting
- Set an example of how to avoid unnecessary distractions and offer training how to avoid them (time-management). Discourage multi-tasking.
- Provide a varied and appropriate mix of incentives, which, with feedback are closely linked with desired outcomes
- Finally, where appropriate, allow people to have sufficient time to develop expertise. Frequent changes can get in the way of performance when in-depth domain knowledge is needed.
No Comments
Leave a comment Cancel