With Strategy in Mind: Part III

2. Paradigm: Individual business leaders can’t see their own biases; the best strategy is to manage around them.

In his popular book, The Medici Effect, Frans Johansson describes the breakthrough insights that come in business and science through the intersection of ideas, concepts and cultures. It is now a ‘best practice” of business innovation to bring together different, even contrating domains of knowledge. Perhaps some of the entrenched perspectives of how we develop leadership competencies could be advanced by similar efforts. Today we are witnessing the cross pollination of two domains that by all appearances would seem totally unrelated; on closer examination, they offer a fascinating glimpse into the possibility that individual leaders could do much more to develop their own strategic capacity.

(Antique Medical Magnifying Glass  http://cdn1.ioffer.com/img/item/140/545/401/aAuQ.jpg )

Anton van Leeuwenhoek, a Dutch cloth merchant in the 1660s, was the first to observe bacteria. He was inventing higher resolution magnifying lenses to better see the weave of the cloth. His chance observation of a glass of pond water changed the paradigm of medical practice forever after. In 1974, Raymond Damadian, a medical doctor and research scientist, was granted a patent for the MRI. For the first time, we can now actually observe the amygdala in action; scientists can observe heightened neurological activity in different parts of the brain connected with emotions of love and hate, likes and dislikes -- attachment and aversion. The history of scientific discovery is marked by knowledge acquired as a result of new tools of perception. It is hardly a stretch to think we are at such a tipping point in the mind.

MRIs and other technologies may now give us the external scientific proof we need to objectively and rationally verify that our minds are not as rational and objective as we wish to think:

1. The neo-cortex did not replace the amygdala, it grew around it: emotional bias operates as a parallel process alongside our more conceptual, thinking minds.

2. The amygdala reacts instinctively for survival, which means the emotional/judgmental response typically happens first. When we get to the thinking part, aversion and attachment are likely already present.

3. For survival sake, the amygdala developed a more acute sensitivity to pain (fear) than pleasure. It kept us alive, but in business strategic terms, we may be more emotionally inclined to avoid potentially painful risks than invest in opportunistic rewards.

4. It turns out that even within the more evolved neo-cortex there is evidence to confirm that some of us are, neurologically speaking, “biased”, or inclined to be more optimistic than others. Scientists now directly observe different levels of activity in two distinct areas of the neo-cortex, one associated with pessimism, the other optimism. Not just the glass now, but the neo-cortex too is half full.

Recent advances in magnetic resonance research have opened up new opportunities to track connection fibers between different brain areas using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI).  http://www.sep.ethz.ch/projekte/life_sci