Hacking Business through Neuroscience

To think that what we call “Business”  happens without our personal influence is to think that no strategy and no good decisions have much to do with our own capacities and expertise, which means that    simply doing things "by the book" will guarantee success, no matter who you are. The reality is that when planning a new budget, hiring new people or creating an innovation plan, we actually  rely on functions and processes of our Brain and therefore Neuroscience and Business should not be separated after all.

Working in the field, you may already be  familiar with the concepts of  Behavioral Economics, Neuromarketing and different theories that explain market behavior, but we should take a deeper look at the individual Cognitive Processes and their effect on our daily decisions.

So what exactly is our personal influence on the decisions we make in Business?

From the moment we wake up until the moment we go to sleep, we owe every action to our Brain making the correct decisions and functioning efficiently. We have this “ONE” tool that we use for our personal life, for our social life and for our work life (and any other aspect of life we would like to separate), but the reality is that although the “TOOL” is the same, “HOW” we use it in different environments is not.

Think about a sleepless night, when you feel like your head Is battling with your need for a good rest, but you are clearly losing. After not sleeping enough, the day turns into an uphill race and the usual smooth decisions turn into rusty engines in an attempt  to avoid destruction. We are used to thinking it's a part of life, but how much attention do we pay to the importance of our Brain performance?

We always talk about Brain Performance in Business

During a meeting, if you have the capacity to follow the flow of information, to be able to catch the important parts and create a coherent picture, that’s thanks to your “Working Memory” doing its magic. Paying attention to relevant information in  a sea of data and facts, ignoring the noise and coming up with an effective idea, that’s “Inhibition” helping you. Adapting to a new situation in the market using what is available, depending on the trends, locations and competition: that is “Set Shifting” allowing you to change the rules. And what about the topic everyone talks about: Innovation. Without “Creativity”, no innovation can happen and this can be understood by looking into the activity of neural pathways. During the creative process, we have to have the capacity for “divergent” and “convergent” thinking, two things that can be related to activity in specific areas of the prefrontal cortex. All these capacities relate and are reduced to Cognitive Functions and there are activities that can benefit these capacities with no apparent connection between them at first sight.

So where are these functions located?

Think about the top of your head and your eyes, behind your front head. There you have it, the Prefrontal Cortex (without further details). All your performance depends on the optimal functioning of this area, and there are different levels that are not related with pathological issues, that we can identify and work with. If we can be more aware of the different processes and their optimal performance, we will have better tools to identify the areas that need more work and focus on them. After all, there is always room for improvement.

So why more Neuroscience in Business?

In our day to day work, we may instinctively engage in automatic activities that are supposed to make things work better, but they end up being not much more than repetitive and with little real effect in the long run. Instead, we could shift our focus to actually understanding the underlying processes of our activities, and through that, create a real and impactful change.

Neuroscience can predict, explain and improve performance. Anyone in the business world will benefit from learning more about the Cognitive Processes involved. Furthermore, knowing and having present additional factors that can influence performance, could save a lot of time and money when trying to find the cause, root and source of any friction in a corporation.

In upcoming articles we will focus on analyzing business cases and look into the aspects that are related with an optimal brain performance, in order to generate innovative and out of the box solutions to complex situations that arise in the business environment.