Changing Minds With Neuroscience: What’s It About?
In five years of applying neuroscience ideas with clients, a significant learning stands out: there's often greater value in undo unhelpful thinking than adding new ideas. Leaders aren’t stuck because they lack knowledge; they're stuck because they struggle to undo existing thinking patterns and mental models, that have worked for them in the past.
We find ourselves in a unique era of human history, where we’re using brains, that evolved for small villages with a small number of possible serious events. The uncertainty from a complex world without village boundaries places demands to learn how to use our brains better.
Neuroscience is providing new insights into how brains make mental models, how they’re organised, why they’re hard to change and therefore how to change them where we can. Our own personal worlds are built out of our own mental models and so how well we use them and put them together means how well we live in the world.
The role of leaders can be defined as supporting people in organising and changing their own mental models to meet the place where they find themselves. Leadership may be seen as an art and craft of mental models.
There would be no surprise; mental models are made of stories.
David Eagleman’s book: "The Brain: A Story of You" contains 76 sections, each with stories about mental models. I recommend Audible, easy listening.