A series of introductory articles by Michael Soth
How the brain-bodymind revolution will affect your business
Since the 1970's a slow and quiet revolution has been steadily gaining pace in our scientific view of how the human mind works. Our key speaker for the conference, Peter Russell (“The Global Brain”, “The Brain Book”), proposed a holographic view of the brain already about 25 years ago.
This was followed in the 1990’s by the ‘Decade of the Brain’ during which neuroscience threw off the shackles of 20th century paradigms and re-invented itself, rising like a phoenix from the ashes of a discipline which had been considered at a dead end just a few years earlier.
The revolution in modern neuroscience is now well-established and propelled into public awareness through best-selling books like Antonio Damasio’s “Descartes’ Error” and “Looking for Spinoza”, Oliver Sacks’ “Awakenings” and “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” or Steven Rose’s “The 21st-century Brain”.
However, it is a revolution that is only recently beginning to actually affect the field of psychological practice, and it has only minimally filtered through into business.
Out-dated psychological and human resource technologies
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Most human resource departments, business psychologists, consultants and coaches, and therefore most business leaders and executives, rely on out-dated and anachronistic psychological principles, harking back partly to the mid-20th and in many ways even further back to the late 19th century.
We would not expect a 21st century business to perform well with index cards or manual stock-taking. So how can we expect it to excel based on human resource technologies and psychological paradigms which are 60 to 100 years old? Would you do deliveries in a 1912 Ford?
In what other area of business would we dream to operate with technologies which are that antiquated ?
Let’s be clear that these outdated psychological principles do not operate in isolated, circumscribed, peripheral parts of an organisation. They are central to its creative and productive functioning. Antiquated assumptions about human psychology underpin, shape and restrict all attempted culture change, management fads and other efforts at improvement. Our assumptions as to how human minds work (and especially how they do - or don't - work together) pervade every aspect of social and business organisation.
The competitive advantages of 21st century psychology
As is the case with all other forms of innovation, business leaders who grasp and apply the principles of the brain-bodymind revolution will undoubtedly gain competitive advantage. Moreover, these principles by their very nature will enhance both sustainability and productivity.
Advances in mechanical and electronic technology are decades ahead of psychology, increasingly offering diminishing returns on technical innovation, and it is in the under-developed recesses of the human bodymind that the margins for improvement are now greatest.
The multi-dimensional nature of consciousness
Yehudi Menuhin once said: “Human potential is like fish eggs, 90 percent is wasted.”
This figure has been confirmed in terms of our use of the brain: most humans are accessing only a small fraction of the brain’s capacity. The ordinary waking state which our culture takes to be the sum total of ‘consciousness’, is only a small slither of a much wider spectrum of consciousness. Only a tiny percentage of the multitude of intelligent processes occurring every second within us reaches conscious awareness.
This statement takes us towards one of the most simple, yet far-reaching implications of the brain-bodymind revolution: consciousness is multi-dimensional – there are multiple intelligences, and all of them are valid, relevant and necessary in processing, mapping and understanding reality.
It’s only in accessing and drawing on all of the modes of consciousness that we are sufficiently in touch with reality in order to shape and create new realities.
Different kinds of consciousness
The most basic distinction – which most people will have come across – is the differentiation between left- and right-brain hemispheres. Each is associated with a distinctly different mode of consciousness (see the video at http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/229 for a simple, but inspiring introduction), leading to the notion that an integration between the two sides is required to make full use of the brain’s capacities.
Another perspective on different modes of consciousness is based on the well-known, if simplistic, distinction of the brain’s sub-systems (Paul MacLean’s 1970’s ‘triune brain’-hypothesis) which apart from the human cortex (the seat of logical, rational thought-processes and our self-reflective capacities) includes the reptilian and mammalian brain.
An important aspect of these models is that the main differences between the various parts of the brain are not in terms of the content of consciousness which they process, but in how they process it, using different modes of consciousness altogether. The parts of the brain are not specialised primarily in order to attend to different targets or objects of awareness, but mainly to generate different ways of perceiving, assimilating and processing.
Since the 1970’s, our understanding of the brain’s complexity has grown exponentially, and so has our recognition that our rational waking universe is only the most superficial and accessible layer of a much richer internal multi-verse.
This recognition sends shivers down the spine of traditional psychologists, counsellors, coaches and consultants: we now know that rational thought is only a small fraction of that small slither of consciousness that is accessed via language and mental reflection, but that’s typically all they can or are trained to work with. It is, therefore, not at all surprising that traditional psychological methods have been limited and haphazard in their effectiveness.
Advertising psychology already works with non-rational consciousness
| A simple, yet instructive exercise in this regard is to get your advertising psychologists together with your human resource department and to start thinking about applying marketing psychology to staff management. Your staff are – after all – the same people that are customers to other companies. Based on what the advertising people have to say about what motivates humans and how they tick, your management strategies throughout your organisational chart will have to cover that much wider range of different modes of consciousness also in your employees. |
In a field that has otherwise staked its bets on cognition, mental reflection, insight and verbalisation, marketing psychologists are something of an exception. Advertising people had to become wise to the fact that rationality is hugely overestimated in its significance and influence. They do not think of consumers as rational decision makers – far from it. They know about the impact of irrational, emotional and unconscious forces in the psyche, and take them into account. Without having a comprehensive picture nor fully understanding the whole spectrum of consciousness, advertising people are at least working within a wider range of consciousness.
But for some reason the psychology through which we understand our customers is – generally speaking - not being applied to our staff. In terms of managing their human resources, most businesses treat their staff as if they only had a neo-cortex, as if they functioned on a rational basis.
But that neo-cortex - which is wrongly assumed to be the one working part that earns the wage – comes packaged within a person.
That person – whether they are our customer or our staff member - has multiple intelligences, a complex arrangement of psychological factors constituted by different modes of consciousness. It is in our interest for these diverse consciousnesses to work together in synergy – within any one person and between people in our organisation.
The business organisation as an evolving network of consciousness
To think of our business as a learning organisation with a precious and evolving knowledge base (Peter M. Senge “The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization”) is only the first step. The next threshold in 21st century management is to consider the business itself as a complex, evolving brain – a power-house of multi-dimensional consciousness.
In the next instalment of this series, in order to work towards some principles for managing such an entity – the business as a collective multi-conscious organism - I will focus on the difference between the ‘content’ and the ‘process’ of consciousness. This will give us some insight into change processes and also – and more importantly – a deeper understanding of resistance to change. With most management approaches focussed on achieving their positive vision, the understanding of the unconscious forces and dynamics resisting change are usually inadequately understood. This is one area where a depth-psychological perspective can save endless time, money and effort.