Benefiting at work from Brain Based Insights

A few months ago I worked with leaders at Waterford Institute of Technology, and our brain based project went especially well ... maily because of the amazing minds on WIT's campus. 

Then, when the check for my work failed to come ... because of the glitches that come to all firms and all humans, I met Kate Kennedy who solved the problem for all of us. Kate also taught me more about plasticity of the human brain,  by the way she persisted in positive tone, made endless phone calls to see what could be done, and proposed a plan to supervisors that created exceptions to bureaucratic restraints and a new payment to replace the lost funds.

Thanks Kate – you rock! Hopefully WIT will recognize your problem solving ability as we did here in New York… because to solve a problem well is to show the highest level of intelligence!
Along the way I also spotted brain based research – which shows why so many people meet with doom when difficulties strike. It comes from the fact that the human brain is shaped by the world around you and by the interactions you choose.

Take for example problem solving of pretty much anything where you are unfamiliar with either the skills required or the facts involved.

Here are surefire ways to turn difficulties into mental monsters of doom…

1. Run down the “other side” … in the same way academics diss practitioners at times, and visa versa… and you’ll wipe out the very people who can help you. That’s because successful problem solvers tend to run from negativity – and with good reason – the human brain rewires and shapes itself by the world around us.
2. Ratchet up poor tone so that stress takes over and working solutions grow more and more distant. That’s because stress comes with cortisol which arrests key parts of the brain, so answers grow less while anger increases.
3. Expect others to do the impossible for you and keep demanding more from those around you– especially after your own working memory fills up with frustration, and leaves no room for the hard work that brings you new skills or facts. That’s because when we fail to draw from intrapersonal intelligence through what Dr. Robyn McMaster calls the inner voice … to solve problems with the brain in mind.  Failure to draw from interpersonal intelligence follows so we can no longer collaborate well with others to find an answer.
4. Rant more about what doesn’t work … and blame people around you … so that you rewire your basal ganglia more for complaints and self-justification … than for working solutions that build communities as people collaborate to create solutions. That’s because the basal ganglia builds habits from the concrete things we do in a day, and rewires the brain to do these more easily the following day.
5. Impress people around you with how you already know that! Don’t bother to apply what you hear in lectures, and simply keep doing the things in the same way – because you know all that stuff already, right?  That’s because through this practice -- your brain has already begun to atrophy.
6. Block your brain from innovative possibilities, and refuse to try suggestions that others offer, and you actually shrink your brain physically. That’s because both stress and refusing to do things differently shrink the human brain.

Yikes – did I just say we shrink our brains,  simply by a negative response to difficulties? How can research be so stark simply because we choose to act like featherbrains a time or two?

Seems unfair …. 

How do your solutions, stack up against an innovative problem solver like Kate Kennedy's at WIT?  What's your experience?