Climate Emergency and the Biology of Leadership

The Neuroscience Of Climate-Change Apathy

Our rising generations, our future leaders, have grasped something that seems to elude many of their elders: we are in a race for our lives, and we are losing. The window of opportunity is closing; we no longer have the luxury of time, and climate delay is almost as dangerous as climate denial.

We have to act now to save our planet and our future from the climate emergency. Three decades passed between the first report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the international community’s pledge for action through the Paris climate accords. It took another two years to decide on how to keep each other accountable. The current generation of leaders has failed to respond properly to the dramatic challenge of climate change.

This is deeply felt by the rising generations. No wonder they are angry, frustrated, helpless. Scientists, activists and change leaders have honed their message into what they thought were clear and undeniable data and facts. But the messages do not seem to get through. It doesnt seem rational. In fact, it isn’t.

Changing the way that companies and communities operate is, at root, changing the way employees and citizens behave and think. That means tinkering with the human brain. Neuroscience is showing us that this amazing device is neither entirely rational nor irrational, emotional nor calculating, full of foresight nor “in the moment” — instead, the brain is an amalgam of all those sometimes contradictory traits.

That makes leadership look a lot more complicated than it used to be in earlier eras and still applied a lot today, when leaders just simply follow some behavioural templates and golden rules - more to deliver into the expected leadership behaviours than to overcome our challenges and seize the opportunities ahead.

But true leadership deeply matters. Rising generations know things need to be different, and they are stepping up as leaders today because they can already see the state of the world they stand to inherit and feel called to grab the wheel them selves and steer humanity's course. And for those future leaders, science’s more accurate picture of the brain is well worth to understand. To the extent that leaders become “brain savvy,” they become more effective: once you know more about what’s going on in there, you’re closer to getting the outcomes you want from your leadership moves. And that is why we are giving the brain a seat in our lecture halls and teach the biology of leadership - for a future of brain savvy leadership - and why we are giving the brain a seat on the table when support companies in change management.

In emergency situations like now, where we urgently need to influence, motivate and persuade others, who's operating system is a gigantic cerebral cortex which is a 200,000-year-old beta design, sitting on top of legacy systems that evolution produced millions, and even hundreds of millions, of years ago, with basic mechanism like the “fight-or-flight” response, for example, being so old that we share it with salmon and fruit flies.

The rational mind, far from being the master of this facility, is only one of its many components. And the rational mind’s work — logical rules, which we can explain to others, applied to objective facts — is just one of many brain processes. Other sections work differently: they use different kinds of input, and handle that input according to different rules.

Before we can manage climate-change risk, we need to understand and manage the brains that evolution gave us. A main part of the challenges brain savvy leadership needs to master is decision illusion and WYSIATI.

Decision Illusions

As we have experiences and perceptions of which we are unaware, we also have experiences and perceptions that aren’t what we think they are. Decision illusions - brain processes that mask the real causes of our thoughts and actions.

Decision illusions arise in part because so much of the brain’s activities occur outside of consciousness. The mind has defences against unwelcome or unsettling information. If it can’t hide unpleasant news, it actively fights it. All change leaders, game changers and transformation managers will have their experiences, how actively minds can fight the unpleasant news.

A region of the frontal cortex - called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), it’s located above the eyes, behind the forehead - appears to be essential to this active censorship. Confronted with new realities - not supported by our believes, past action and current experiences - there is not only activity in the “error detecting” regions of the cortex. There is as well activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal region, which is busy erasing the anomaly from the awareness. The brain isn't just registering “that looks wrong.” Its also registering “forget it, that can’t be.”

Cognitive dissonance, the mental discomfort created by holding more than one conflicting belief at once, is driven by many factors. Dissonance could be created by people having a personal stake - whether it’s stock, enjoyment to a drive fast gas-powered cars, meat consumption, past decisions being performed.

No one wants to believe their daily activities - choice of food, choice of transportation, use of air condition, choice of manufacturing process and product design - are responsible for a global disaster that has already turned millions of people into climate refugees and killed scores of others. They are.

People change their minds about the issue rather than changing their habits because it’s an easier way to cope. This cognitive tension runs alongside another barrier known as discounting, wherein people undervalue climate change because its hazards don’t feel immediate or nearby. Spatial discounting helps explain why people maintain the status quo - or become more polarised - even if their news feeds are swamped by viral stories of giant icebergs breaking off Antarctica, or polar bears swimming until they drown.

What You See Is All There Is

When it comes to perceiving and responding to complicated risks, it is increasingly clear that the human brain can operate to the detriment of what we would normally consider rational outcomes. One explanation of this is that human society, and the nature of the problems we are trying to address, has evolved more quickly than the physical capacity of our brains to understand and respond to developing risks. As Daniel Kahneman put it in his 2011 book "Thinking, Fast and Slow", humans suffer from the ‘what you see is all there is’ (WYSIATI) phenomenon.

WYSIATI suggests that human decision-making is based primarily on Known Knowns, namely phenomena we have already observed, and rarely considers Known Unknowns. Most importantly for a problem like climate change, human decision-making appears almost oblivious to the possibility of Unknown Unknowns, including the risk of climate change “tipping points” that worry many scientists.

Several of the ways in which our thinking can yield counter-intuitive results in an area like climate change are briefly profiled below:

• The availability heuristic is a way of describing how humans make judgments. We assume we’re rational creatures, using all available information to make decisions. In fact, we make judgments based on what we best remember, which tends to be very recent experiences. The availability heuristic has major implications for how we think about aspects of climate risk that no one has yet witnessed.
• The optimism bias a term used to describe the human tendency to expect things to turn out better than data-supported forecasting may suggest. Regardless of the data presented, we tend to believe that the future will be much better than the past. The bias holds true across ethnic and socioeconomic groups. Taken collectively, people can grow pessimistic about world economies or the future of their country, but individually, they will tend to believe their lives will get better. This bias also interferes with evidence-based risk perception for a problem like climate change.
• The ‘neglect of probability’ bias is another bias that kicks in under conditions of uncertainty, based on the difficulty our brains have in working with probabilities. In a field like climate change, as data intensive as it is, and given the range of uncertainties that can best be characterised as probabilities, the ‘neglect of probability bias’ suggests that much more focus is needed on communicating climate risk in a way that avoids the potential for this bias to interfere.
• Patternicity is another cognitive bias with huge implications for climate risk perception. The search for patterns in everything around us has clear evolutionary benefits (by telling us which plants and animals to avoid for example), but it is exactly that kind of pattern-seeking that has helped political discourse get bogged down in debates over whether climate change is or isn’t already happening, and exactly how much climate change may have already occurred, rather than focusing on the much clearer risks posed by future climate change.

Guideposts for Leadership

This short reflection just scratches the surface of the cognitive processes to be managed to lead change at scale and pace. While much remains to be understood about the brain, some fundamental principles can guide day-to-day leadership decisions. To reach people and influence them, both their top-down thinking and their bottom-up intuitions needs to be engaged.

Big challenges don’t always need big solutions. It’s natural to feel that big problems need big responses, and that the right answer is going to be far from the wrong one. That’s one of the brain’s inbuilt biases. Everything you experience has multiple meanings, because the same object is treated differently in different parts of the brain. Instead of big, dramatic, difficult changes at the level of rational persuasion, you can make slight adjustments to details that matter at other levels of meaning. These are easier and quicker. Often, they’re all it takes.

Awareness of the biology helps control the biology. It’s not easy to square our self-image as clear-thinking, disciplined people with the evidence of all of our biases. But self-awareness pays off.

Make the story coherent on many levels. The more we understand the biological basis of behaviour the clearer it is that all brain functions depend on one another. The best way to engage the multileveled brain is to tell a story that works at many levels. The more parts of the multilevel brain leaders can speak to, the more effective their message. You can’t get more brain savvy than that.