Changing Minds is the culmination of a year of talking, thinking and doing since we began the neuroscience hybrid leadership pilot in July 2022. We grounded Changing Minds in this ancient wisdom: “We cannot see the world as it is, we can only see the world as we are”. From this we framed; that the purpose of our brain is to maintain the gap between as the world is and as we are, close enough for our survival.

We think this is one way to transform the virtual meeting! We begin with this Einstein wisdom: “a problem can’t be solved by the same thinking that created it”. Since 2020, virtual meetings have been generally thought of as adding video technology to the familiar remote conference call (see diagram on the side).

In five years of applying neuroscience ideas with clients, one significant lesson stands out: there's a greater need to undo existing thinking than to learn new thinking. Leaders aren’t stuck because they lack knowledge; they're stuck because they struggle to undo existing thinking patterns, called mental models, that have worked for them in the past.

Our project began mid last year when one of my favourite clients asked us: “How do we do leadership team building in Hybrid Working?” We’ve researched and worked with clients for the past 8 months drawing on the latest advanced work in Cognitive (thinking) and Social (interpersonal) Neuroscience.

There’s a pub story about three baseball umpires talking about how they make their calls for a “ball" or a "strike”.

Three Cultures of Management - A 1996 classic by the great Edgar Schein – "The typical explanations revolve around vague concepts of "resistance to change," or "human nature," or failures of "leadership."" This is a free PDF download.

Lisa Feldman Barrett says we're not interpreting our feelings well enough and it's making our lives harder.

The two concepts of Horizontal and Vertical learning have become broadly known. Look them up and you’ll find dozens of variationsHorizontal is the accumulation of “declarative” knowledge, facts, concepts, capabilities etc. – all the things we can sort of ‘label’ and ‘picture’ in memory.

I’m excited to be travelling to the UK tomorrow for my first post Covid leadership workshops with my favourite global client. I’m delivering a new pilot approach to team building, forming cultures and accelerating vertical learning in the Hybrid workplaces.

"It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work,..."

A person has a view on something “One”, and you offer them another view “One”. If this person is an inflexible Thinker, they will tend to change the new view (assimilate it) so it looks like their one and the result then is “One”. But if the person is a curious Thinker, they will likely try and accommodate the new view and we’d presume they then have “Two” views – but we’d be wrong.

The neuroscience of grief and grieving is a relatively new field, but one that offers practical discoveries for people of all backgrounds. What has been learned from a variety of approaches, including both brain imaging and, surprisingly even from animal studies. We learn why it is so hard for our brains to accept the loss of a loved one and this work offers hope for helping those who struggle with prolonged or complicated grief.