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Step 3: Search for Patterns
As most people know, the brain is composed of two hemispheres that have interconnected but very different functions. Neuroscience technology and research have provided us with a more complete picture of the left and right hemispheres' specialized roles. The left hemisphere is the primary source of neural information that a person uses to carry out routine tasks. The right deals with novelty, including experience and data that are less linear and less structured linguistically or mathematically. The right hemisphere is the more "poetic" part of the brain; it operates in metaphorical, image-based, imaginative ways. In this section of the article, we'll focus on what you as a leader can do to improve the functions of the left hemisphere, which often gets taken for granted as essentially determined by genetic inheritance.
Ironically, many cognitive fitness exercises directed at businesspeople focus on stimulating the right hemisphere - the creative, playful side. In part this is because of the classic stereotype of businesspeople as dull men in gray suits who need to loosen up. It's also true that in recent years creativity has come to be seen as the panacea for corporate ills. Although it's important to stimulate creative, divergent thinking, you'll derive just as much benefit, and perhaps more, from stimulating the analytic neural networks that are often viewed as left-hemispheric. These networks comprise the standard operating procedures that you use throughout a given day - a vast cognitive repository or library that is automatically activated to handle familiar tasks and challenges.
Why is the left hemisphere so important? Recent neuroimaging investigations have identified one of the engines that serve left-hemisphere performance: constellations of neurons that neuroscientists such as Elkhonon Goldberg call attractors, which mediate critical executive functions in the brain. While attractors are not exclusively located in the left hemisphere, they are especially supportive of the role played by that hemisphere. They are organized to orchestrate thought and action with great efficiency and effectiveness. Together they form the basis of what the Nobel laureate Herbert Simon referred to as pattern recognition, which he considered to be the most powerful cognitive tool we have at our disposal. Pattern recognition is the brain's ability to scan the environment; discern order and create meaning from huge amounts of data; and thereby quickly assess a situation so that appropriate action can be taken right away and with a high degree of accuracy. It is a complex chain reaction that uses the highest-level capacities for abstraction and reflection that are based on the deepest repositories of stored experience. The power of pattern recognition, a critical competence of the executive brain, can be seen in the capacity to simplify without being simplistic. For executives trying to make sense of a rapidly changing business environment, superiority in pattern recognition is perhaps the greatest competitive advantage that can be developed.
For executives trying to make sense of a rapidly changing business environment, superiority in pattern recognition is perhaps the greatest competitive advantage that can be developed.
There's a lot that you can do to develop your left-hemispheric capabilities. First and foremost, challenge your existing mind-set, enlarge it, and make it more complex. Listen to different viewpoints, read new kinds of articles and books, and visit places with a focused set of learning objectives. All these experiences - particularly those related to your own organization or job - will expand your vocabulary, your conceptual storehouse, and your general perspective. Such immersions will call into question your own mind-set and improve your abilities in pattern recognition.
Hitachi Data Systems provides a good example of the kind of foray we're talking about. Working with BrightHouse, a consulting company based in Atlanta, Hitachi executives were invited to an ideation-strategy session with a distinguished classics professor to help them think about how to reposition their business. As a result of what they learned, some of the executives have been working on reorganizing the company along the lines of the Greek agora, with a view to creating an open marketplace for the exchange of ideas and knowledge. We're not saying that the classics professor told Hitachi what to do; rather, Hitachi's leaders combined what the classicist had to say about ancient Athens with what they knew about their company to create a new and potentially better way to share information.
With activities such as these, it is of utmost importance that you do them often. Make a consistent, ongoing commitment to immersing yourself in new systems and ways of thinking. It cannot be an occasional event, because the point is to expose yourself to a variety of cases and situations that cumulatively encode rich experience in your brain.
Just as you'll need to vary your own experiences to maximize your cognitive fitness, you'll also want to make sure that the experiences of your management team members are varied. Avoid filling the team with people who've all followed the same path upward. This advice may seem obvious, but we suggest taking a cold, hard look at how executives make it to the top in your organization. Isn't there a tendency for one route to dominate? This is natural, given that those who are looking for advancement tend to benchmark, and those at the top tend to warm to subordinates with experiences similar to their own. Evolutionary biology could give you any number of explanations for the survival value of these behaviors. But if you care about your company's cognitive fitness and, in particular, your management team's overall ability to discern patterns, then you need to be on guard against the inclination to pick only one kind of leader. Selection and succession programs that draw from the same limited population of executives promote an aggregation of cognitive templates based on shared experience and common pattern recognition. When a perspective becomes codified, people stop looking for new patterns and your company sacrifices some of its cognitive fitness - and competitiveness.