Have you ever been through an organisational change process, leadership development programme or training that doesn’t quite provide the promised transformation?
It’s not really surprising, given that organisations normally fail to address the fundamental part of us which learns new skills, makes decisions and processes change: our brains.
It’s like restoring a battered old-timer car. You lovingly recreate the plush and stylish interior, spend evenings scouring the internet for original fixtures and fittings and engage the most skilled craft body repair shop. But if you don’t touch the engine, you’re never going enjoy the full driving experience.
And being able to purposefully leverage our engine of change – the brain – will be key for both individuals and organisations to adapt and thrive in a rapidly and profoundly changing world. In short, to innovate.
To illustrate why things often don’t really change even after people have developed the technical skills or understanding, take a look at the famous Müller-Lyer optical illusion.
While the middle line looks longer, as you can see below, they are all actually the same length.
But the really remarkable thing here is not the optical illusion itself.
Rather, the illusion still works even when you know for an objective fact that they are the same length. Look again!
In other words, just because you objectively know something, it doesn’t mean you can simply override the perceived sensory data (or, more accurately, the perceptions or predictions that the raw sensory data stimulates). Your brain just doesn’t work like this.
Why?
Because the higher cortical areas which consciously know that the lines are the same length are not involved in the part of the visual system which produces the visual impressions that create the perception. It’s like crying in the movies: you know that it is made up, but this does not stop the raw sensory data coming in through your eyes and ears triggering a reaction. For that time the movie becomes real; the lines appear as different lengths. But it goes way beyond optical illusions or stories. This process (known in the cognitive sciences as Unconscious Inference) is basic to the way we work and is fundamental to how we make sense of the world. It is happening all the time, even though we are almost never aware of it.
Similarly, just because someone has learnt the skills in a training course or planning process (the equivalent of knowing the lines are the same length), this does not automatically override the underlying perception that the lines are different lengths. You can get all the time management tools, tips, tricks and strategies you want, but these won’t make you much more productive if the underlying issue is actually something else entirely. Or you might well rationally accept the need for organisational change, but still unconsciously resist it.
One solution is to keep providing people with skills and tools until they finally understand that the lines really are the same length or objectively accept that the super new time management tools are the answer. But just relying on this strategy alone fundamentally fails to understand how our evolutionary brains work, as there are different systems going on here.
Adopting the factually accurate and rationally correct approach (the lines are the same length) has enabled humans to split atoms, prove Fermat’s Last Theorem and solve Sodoku puzzles. And these are certainly not things to be sniffed at, as this approach to understanding the world has enabled humans to become the dominant life form on earth. But this is far from the complete story as to how we work.
It is the less factually accurate system (you perceive different lengths) which has enabled all of your ancestors (human and others) to survive and reproduce for 3.8 billion years and without which you would not be here today. And this system is no less internally logical or rational than the other system, it just has a different goal – survival.
The current human brain, with its unparalleled advanced cognitive capabilities, is a very, very recent evolutionary development. If you compressed the history of the earth into 24 hours, the first single-celled life (from which all life is descended) appeared about 18 hours ago, the first hominoid brain about 2.5 minutes ago and the current human brain just 3 seconds before midnight; we’d probably require the accuracy of an atomic clock to measure how long our post-scientific revolution ‘logical’ brains have been around!
The point is that our advanced cognition has not simply “replaced” the deep biological processes built up over unimaginably vast periods of time. Rather, it has been grafted on top – it is a tiny (albeit phenomenally consequential) cherry on a deep and rich evolutionary baked cake.
And the central driving force of life throughout these billions of years which underpins our brain’s architecture has been the drive to survive and reproduce. This means a focus on taking in and processing limited (is it directly relevant to survival?), relational (what does it mean in the context of other information?), pragmatic (is it ‘good-enough’?) and actionable (is it quick enough and presented in an easily understood format?) information.
The goal and logic of pursuing factual accuracy (the lines are the same length) for its own sake was simply not the driving force in evolution, where utility and usefulness were the only games in town. If, based on trial and error over hundreds of millions of years, our brains have determined that the interpretive mechanisms which draw on artistic license (the lines are different lengths) are more useful than accurate mathematical measurements, then who are you to argue? As the chemist Leslie Orgel who investigated the origins of life put it: “evolution is cleverer than you”!
So it’s not just about recognising, managing and overcoming our biases, limitations and assumptions (as important as that can be) so that we all truly perceive the lines as being the same length. Or trying to complement the focus on rational thought and decision making with, say, a course on emotional intelligence, as beneficial as this might be.
Rather, it is about spending time understanding how the engine of the brain actually works – the fundamental drivers of how and why we perceive things the way we do. Because armed with this knowledge as to how it is, rather than how we would like it to be, we can leverage this to begin to change and shape how we think and act. And crucially, because we are dealing at the level of underlying principles about the brain, the knowledge becomes transferable across domains; after all, we use the same brain whether we are delivering a key note speech, researching cell structure or avoiding doing the washing up.
And yes, none of this changes the fact that the lines are the same length. But just remember that figuring that out is the easy bit; all that’s needed is a pencil and ruler. The hard bit is understanding the other stuff: why and how our brains make sense of the world in the way they do and how we can work with and ‘hack into’ this, rather than simply deny or minimise its existence by sweeping it under the carpet.
And let’s not forget, the profound changes being driven by Artificial Intelligence, for example, are not simply about measuring distances, but how generative self-learning systems can become intelligent. And much of this work has been driven forward by researching, theorising, mapping and modelling our extraordinary evolutionary adaptive brain. Yes – that thing which apparently even gets the lengths of lines wrong.
So next time people don’t respond entirely as expected to the new organisational change process or don’t implement the skills from the training course, consider that there might be something much deeper going on. And if we continue to ignore such a fundamental way we work as humans, it is hardly surprising that many people end up feeling stressed, disengaged and unmotivated.
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