How to encourage creative thinking and insights in your people The integration of the neurosciences with psychology are

unearthing some interesting perspectives, one of the most surprising being how we think creatively and get insights. Increasingly, white collar folk are paid to think rather than to do, so success will depend on the companys ability to create optimal conditions for that to happen. Insight requires a quiet brain. What do most of us do when we are trying to think of a solution? Hold our heads and say to ourselves, Come on, think harder!. However, most people seem to get insights when away from work or the situation to be dealt with, perhaps on a Sunday walking the dog or in the bath. Companies like Google have recognized this and experimented by allowing engineers time away to work on completely different things. Due to the hard-wired, pre-conscious and highly efficient way our brains tend to operate, we find that most problems are not solved rationally. It seems we cant explain around 60% of problems we solve. Two things are going on in the brain. Firstly, as David Rock pointed out in his book Quiet Leadership, insight seems to come from having weak associations - you have to quieten down the narrative circuitry in the brain to allow insight to come. Secondly, anxiety appears inversely related to ability to generate insight, i.e. the more anxious you are, the less likely you are to get insight and vice versa. The limbic brain (which I introduced in an introductory note a fortnight ago) tends to activate rapidly in response to threat. Think of needing to come up with a solution really quickly before the boss blows his lid But in doing so, it drains the prefrontal cortex of metabolic energy, the area of the brain engaged in rational thought, computation and decision-making. What does this suggest you do now versus what might you do differently? A leaders job is to help his/her people to improve their thinking. Not to do their thinking for them, but to create conditions for people to think better for themselves - conditions that have trust at their core, so people feel safe to experiment without fear of ridicule or political fallout. It also serves to help create better team dynamics by helping leaders create good thinking environments at work, saving considerable time in unproductive meetings. If we can stop second guessing what we think peoples brains need, as seen through our own eyes, and help them become masters at thinking for themselves, things will get better. Defining solutions not problems is pivotal to this and helps people have their own insights. A problem focus embeds old mental templates further. A solution focus builds resilience rather than repairing damage. Generating higher attentional capacity in our people encourages neural growth. Our hardwiring is driven by automatic perception, but our conscious thought only changes according to how we choose to focus or reframe our thinking. A practical thing leaders could do would be to replace the why didnt you? with what do you need to do to? Consider the transformational effect of each individual having one good insight each per week at your firm. Think of the rich seam of ideas that would ensue, genuinely stitching

people and teams together in common purpose, driving huge productivity improvements. The standard response (training) is largely ineffective - giving advice, solving problems for them, trying to work out how people think and then correcting it. Save your money. It rarely works. Self-generated insights, on the other hand, emit a rush of dopamine (a brain chemical associated with reward) and encourage the individual to focus attention on turning those insights into something more concrete. Therefore, it creates a virtuous circle of positive change that creates results that encourages further positive change and so on. It would seem that brain science is telling us something management probably suspect anyway, but are fearful of: that people dont want to be managed, they want to be unleashed.

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