Don’t be Driven by your Dopamine

I facilitate team offsites. Most of them focus, at least in part, on strategic thinking and team development, topics that leaders and teams often struggle to focus on day-to-day in organizational life.

Recently, a client told me, “This offsite has been so beneficial. We don’t usually have time for regular strategic discussions or to develop our sense of team!”

I surprised myself by responding, “You don’t choose to make the time. The question is: Why not?”

This stopped us both in our tracks for a moment. We batted around ideas to try to answer that, most of which had to do with pressing business needs and how organizational life – and hybrid work – conspires against team development time.

Upon reflection, however, I think there’s a deeper mechanism at play: the accomplishment of seemingly urgent tasks, and the attendant chemical brain rewards they bring, have created an addiction in organizational life. Our brains crave the chemicals that accomplishment releases and so we instinctively and unconsciously prioritize activities that provide them. I’m thinking that our organizational focus on the urgent – a seemingly understandable response to organizational priorities/needs – is in fact a personal neurochemical desire, like wanting a candy bar or an exercise workout.

Let’s be clear: I’m no brain scientist. However, bear with me a moment; consider dopamine. The Cleveland Clinic says:

Dopamine is part of your reward system. This system is designed, from an evolutionary standpoint, to reward you when you’re doing the things you need to do to survive… Our brains are hard-wired to seek out behaviors that release dopamine… When you’re doing something pleasurable, your brain releases a large amount of dopamine. You feel good and you seek more of that feeling.

The Clinic article goes on to say: “This is why junk food and sugar are so addictive. They trigger the release of a large amount of dopamine into your brain, which gives you the feeling that you’re on top of the world and you want to repeat that experience.”

I’m inclined to think that task accomplishment is the junk food of organizational life. Checking off a task, or reviewing a project dashboard, or completing a status update provides, if not an actual dopamine release in the brain, a rush of satisfaction that we strive to replicate. To extend this metaphor, I’d suggest that the uncertainty of strategic thinking, or the slow process of building team processes and trust, is that healthy food you know you ought to eat but does not offer the same short-term satisfaction. Ergo, we don’t choose to make the time for it.

To take this a step further – again, bear with me, I’m feeling my way through this thinking – maybe there is the relationship between dopamine and addiction to consider. The Cleveland Clinic description goes on to say:

Scientists now think that dopamine’s role isn’t to directly cause euphoria, but serves as a reinforcement for remembering and repeating pleasurable experiences. So, when drugs cause surges in dopamine, it’s teaching your brain to remember the experience.

Thus, in the case of addiction, drugs play the role of junk food but cause a more severe neurochemical reaction and play a stronger reinforcing role. In addition, “over time, with repeated drug exposure, a certain area of your brain becomes less sensitive, and you don’t get the same feeling of pleasure from anything else but the drug.”

Let’s reconsider several of these Cleveland Clinic statements with a few words altered:

• So, when task accomplishment causes surges in dopamine, it’s teaching your brain to remember the experience.
• Over time, with repeated task accomplishment, a certain area of your brain becomes less sensitive, and you don’t get the same feeling of pleasure from anything else but the task accomplishment.

Maybe I’m out on a limb here, but perhaps this explains why much of organizational life emphasizes the urgent over the important. If this is true and we need to eat our organizational health food and avoid the addiction of the urgent, and if the reason we aren’t doing so is that individually we are driven by the dopamine of accomplishment, then to break this cycle we must restructure organizational life in ways similar to the individual rewiring and community restructuring needed when addressing addition.

The good news, in my opinion, is that it is not hard to do. A few simple practices – individually and in teams – can break down most the barriers that keep us from thinking methodically and strategically and prevent us from day-to-day team development. But those practices are the subject for another post. The first step is to admit we have an organizational dopamine problem. More steps to come…