NeuroLeadership Institute

Thursday, March 31, 2011

NL Summit 2010 Insight - The Neural Challenges of the Senior Leader - Sleep, Stress & Performance

Jessica Payne is the Director of the Sleep, Stress & Memory Lab at the University of Notre Dame. Jessica co-presented a breakout session on Day 2 of the NeuroLeadership Summit 2010 with Christina Lafferty, Professor Behavioral Science & Director of Research & Writing at the National Defense University, USA.

The session, ‘The neural challenges of the senior leader – sleep, stress & performance’ looked into what neuroscience research is revealing about the optimal brain state for learning, performance, leadership and behavior change.

The session explored three factors the brain needs to order to function at its optimum:

1. Moderate stress
2. Good nourishing sleep
3. Positive affect

As all these areas intersect and are neurobiologically linked, targeting any one of these areas for improvement has the benefit of affecting the others.

Stress

Research reveals that the brain operates at it’s optimum under moderate stress. Too low you lose alertness and too high you fall into anxiety and disorganization. High levels of stress can impair the brain, and have tangible effects on the physical body and brain and on mental and emotional health. This impairment is selective and unfortunately targets the areas that we need most in order to process information efficiently, learn and perform cognitively at our optimum.

There is evidence to suggest that by practicing activities such as relaxation, mindfulness meditation, exercise and deep breathing we can reduce cortisol levels (stress hormones) in the brain and improve regulatory control over the stress response system in general.

Sleep

Sleep is critical for optimal neural performance. The sleeping brain is smart and very active. During sleep the brain extracts what is essential and important and makes calculations of what to retain and what to let go of, what to remember and what to forget and helps us regulate our emotions.

Sleep allows us to harness a huge amount of unconscious or implicit knowledge that can’t be accessed when the brain is ‘online’. Effectively, during sleep, the brain is allowed to ‘run-a-muck’, searching for connections that don’t make sense and defying the rules of time and space. Sorting through, mapping out, reconnecting and recombining information that we know, yet don’t have conscious access to when we are ‘online’. Jessica hypothesizes that the purpose of this process is to allow you to find connections that you wouldn’t be able to find otherwise.

Emerging evidence suggests that sleep not only consolidates your memories and helps you to learn and remember things but also helps you reorganize that information in a way that gives rise to creative cognition and insights and allows you to make inferential jumps that you can’t make during wakefulness.

Positive Affect

Postive affect is extremely powerful to the brain, lab results indicate that minor affect manipulations, eg a smile, can have a huge impact. The impact on cognition include: facilitating memory for neutral and positive information (instead of negative), increasing verbal fluency, positively impact the strategies we use in decision making and improving creativity and problem solving.

In conclusion Jessica suggests that anything we can do to lead with a scientifically informed understanding of the brain, taking into account the brains limits and harnessing its strengths, is sure to improve performance, dramatically enhance leadership and make for a more productive workplace and happier employees.

Click here to access the webinar recording for a full debrief of the 2010 Summit sessions
For more on Jessica's work visit http://psychology.nd.edu/people/JessicaPayne.shtml
To order the 2010 Summit recordings and accompanying slides click here

Labels: Jessica Payne, Neural challenges of the senior leader, neuroleadership summit, summit

Thursday, March 17, 2011

NLSummit 2010 Insight - Optimizing Learning Initiatives

Lila Davachi, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Psychology Cognition & Perception, Center for Neuroscience & Center for Brain Imaging at NYU. Tobias Kiefer, Ph.D. is Head of Global Learning & Development, Booz & Company, Munich, Germany. Lila and Tobias presented the second session on day two of the 2010 Summit on ‘Optimizing Learning Initiatives & Creating WOW’.

During this session we dove into the neuroscience research findings on learning and memory. Memory was defined by Lila as the conscious access to the past. Understanding how we encode, generate and retrieve memories can help to shape the strategies we implement to enhance learning & training in organizations.

Over the course of a year coming up to the 2010 Summit, Lila worked with Tobias as well as David Rock on identifying a way of summarizing what we know about memory from neuroscience research. The result is the AGES model, a tool to assist in defining and remembering how to apply the learnings. There is a paper in the 2010 NeuroLeadership Journal on this model in detail.

AGES stands for:

A = Attention
G = Generation
E = Emotion
S = Spacing

One factor critical to the successful formation of memory is focused attention, research reveals that memory suffers with distraction. It may be that we are doing our memories a disservice by living & engaging in a media heavy world.

Once information is in the brain system, generation is important, as the way we attend to information changes the probability of later remembering it. Generation is most effective when we make the information personally relevant and attach it to existing associations in our brain. Encouraging people to transform the information in an individual way can have a huge boost on memory.

Emotion is the physical aspect you might feel in relation to an event. Because emotion ‘grabs our attention’ it influences the attention component of memory and enhances your memory for the experience. As a result memories are more likely to stick, they are more likely to consolidate and become durable memories that you can remember later on.

The last component of the AGES model is spacing. Lila described ‘spacing’ as simple, and a free gift. Unlike other components of AGES that require effort, thought, and implementation, spacing allows us to strengthen memory traces as we rest. Rest periods between learning work for us to help solidify the learnings and can actually contribute to making the memory last.

So what does AGES mean to the corporate world? The application of AGES has the potential to revolutionize how we drive change and teach people. It has implications not only on training design and delivery but also the cost structure of training for organizations. Designing brain-friendly training programs that take into account what we know about our learning and memory brain systems could greatly enhance their effectiveness individually and systemically.

Join a FREE webinar for a full 2010 Summit debrief, 24 March, 7.30pm USET
(RSVP to support@neuroleadership.org)

For more on Lila's work visit http://www.psych.nyu.edu/davachi/

To order the 2010 Summit recordings and accompanying slides click here

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Summit 2011: Speaker & Topic Announcement

Join us at the 2011 Summit from 8 to 10 November in San Francisco, USA. The theme in 2011 is 'Adaptive Organizations'. This year we will be taking a more organizational perspective, and involving more senior executives in the discussion, while we think about how to create more resilient, dynamic, adaptive organizations through understanding the brain.

The 2010 NeuroLeadership Summit was our best yet. Our goal is to make 2011 even better, and we think we're on track to do so. Take a look at the program that is confirmed so far...

Dr Philip Zimbardo – one of the most famous psychologists alive today. The researcher behind the famous Stanford Prisoner Experiment. Dr Zimbardo will present on 'The Leader as Hero’.
Click here to see what Jonah Lehrer said about Dr Zimbardo’s work in the Wall Street Journal recently.

Bob Johansen, from the Institute for the Future, one of the world's leading futurist think tanks, will be joined by Dr Robert Burton, neurologist & author of 'On Being Certain' to present on 'Why it is hard to think about the future, and how to do it better'.

Dr Carol Dweck, author of the bestseller ‘Mindsets’ will present on the question of 'What beliefs organizations should hold in order to be more adaptive'.

Dr James Gross, founding father of emotion regulation research, will talk about 'How organizations can better harness emotions to be more adaptive'.

Dr Daniel Siegel, bestselling author and one of the leading researchers around the neuroscience of mindfulness, will talk about 'Creating adaptive, resilient organizations'.

Dr Matthew Lieberman will talk about 'The importance of the social brain for leaders', focused on the inherent challenges in the brain of being a leader.

Dr Lera Boroditsky will talk about 'The power of language' and how language can be used to create change.

Some of the breakout topics will include:

Designing a global talent management framework based on the brain
Real time bio feedback in leadership programs
What we have learned from the five Summits so far
The Neuroscience of goals
Differential leadership across ages, gender and stages
The senior executive brain

There are a number of programmatic changes based on your feedback, including:

Gala dinner on the first night
Leaving night two free for self organized groups/downtown
More space for the surprisingly popular lunchtime meet the scientist sessions
Accommodation on site

The things that work really well, such as interaction in the sessions, we have kept.

There are many more sessions in discussion, look out for announcements on further developments coming soon...

More Information

Friday, March 4, 2011

NLSummit 2010 Insight - The Mechanics of Motivation

Dean Mobbs PhD is a Senior Investigator Scientist at the MRC-Cognitive and Brain Sciences Unit at Cambridge University UK. Dean and Walter McFarland, an Organizational Learning Consultant and Independent Researcher, presented a session titled 'The Mechanics of Motivation' at the beginning of Day 2 at the 2010 NeuroLeadership Summit.

Walter began the session by exploring where we are in organizational life around human motivation. He summarized the current theories of motivation that are currently used to inform and develop work systems to enhance motivation. Walter highlighted, that in spite of everything we think we know about the drivers of motivation, there remains a lot we don’t. The presenters propose that neuroscience may provide the valuable keys to understanding how people are motivated.

Dean began his presentation by defining motivation as ‘the basic need to minimize physical pain and maximize pleasure’. He then presented the findings on some of his research on the fair and reward processes of the brain. This research is revealing interesting findings on the activation and response of particular brain systems to drivers of motivation such as incentive, fear, punishment and social environment.

These responses to are helpful to evaluate the effectiveness and potential dangers of the motivators we employ. Some examples of the learnings so far are:

Incentives in some circumstances can be detrimental
Fear can change our perceptions
Short term threat may facilitate motivation but long term may decrease performance

Although there are many levels to motivate people, what is becoming evident through this research is the importance of the social environment. Strategies that appeal to the social-brain, such as affiliation and feedback, are potentially the most powerful motivators in the workplace. Social motivators activate the dopamine and reward system in the brain and we experience this activity when we:

see those in our ‘in-group’ win
help others and give advice
work in a team
hear people say nice things about us

To date the design and development of motivational systems within organizations has been theoretically based with no consideration of the neuroscience. This new understanding of the brain, offers an exciting opportunity to interject a meaningful perspective on the mechanics of motivation and may provide a useful framework to evaluate motivational strategies and their potential impact on the organization and the people in it.

Join our FREE webinar for a full debrief on the 2010 Summit - 24 March, 7.30pm (USET)
(Register your attendance at support@neuroleadership.org)

For more on Dean's work visit http://sites.google.com/site/dmobbs/home
For more Summit Insights visit http://blog.neuroleadership.org
To order the 2010 Summit recordings and accompanying slides click here

Labels: dean mobbs, motivation, neuroleadership, neuroleadership summit, summit

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