A Craving for Certainty
A recent article in Strategy + Business by David Rock entitled “Managing with the Brain in Mind” was a fascinating look at how neuroscience research is revealing the social nature of the high-performance workplace. In particular, the essay focused on how brain impulses respond to certain social situations. As M Squared Consulting is focused on helping clients maximize the benefits of the high-end flexible workforce, it was enlightening to explore how business conditions and management styles can be adjusted to improve employee performance.
The entire article explores numerous aspects of this interesting topic. The short excerpt below examines the response of the brain in familiar and unfamiliar circumstances, and offers some suggestions on how to break down complex projects so that an individual can feel more comfortable and confident:
“When an individual encounters a familiar situation, his or her brain conserves its own energy by shifting into a kind of automatic pilot: it relies on long-established neural connections in the basal ganglia and motor cortex that have, in effect, hardwired this situation and the individual’s response to it. This makes it easy to do what the person has done in the past, and it frees that person to do two things at once; for example, to talk while driving. But the minute the brain registers ambiguity or confusion — if, for example, the car ahead of the driver slams on its brakes — the brain flashes an error signal. With the threat response aroused and working memory diminished, the driver must stop talking and shift full attention to the road.
Uncertainty registers (in a part of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex) as an error, gap, or tension: something that must be corrected before one can feel comfortable again. That is why people crave certainty. Not knowing what will happen next can be profoundly debilitating because it requires extra neural energy. This diminishes memory, undermines performance, and disengages people from the present.
Of course, uncertainty is not necessarily debilitating. Mild uncertainty attracts interest and attention: New and challenging situations create a mild threat response, increasing levels of adrenalin and dopamine just enough to spark curiosity and energize people to solve problems. Moreover, different people respond to uncertainty in the world around them in different ways, depending in part on their existing patterns of thought. For example, when that car ahead stops suddenly, the driver who thinks, “What should I do?” is likely to be ineffective, whereas the driver who frames the incident as manageable — “I need to swerve left now because there’s a car on the right” — is well equipped to respond. All of life is uncertain; it is the perception of too much uncertainty that undercuts focus and performance. When perceived uncertainty gets out of hand, people panic and make bad decisions.
Leaders and managers must thus work to create a perception of certainty to build confident and dedicated teams. Sharing business plans, rationales for change, and accurate maps of an organization’s structure promotes this perception. Giving specifics about organizational restructuring helps people feel more confident about a plan, and articulating how decisions are made increases trust. Transparent practices are the foundation on which the perception of certainty rests.
Breaking complex projects down into small steps can also help create the feeling of certainty. Although it’s highly unlikely everything will go as planned, people function better because the project now seems less ambiguous. Like the driver on the road who has enough information to calculate his or her response, an employee focused on a single, manageable aspect of a task is unlikely to be overwhelmed by threat responses.”
For the complete article, please visit www.strategy-business.com.
