MBA223: The Human Work Machine

David Mantica discusses the brain science behind some of the challenges knowledge workers face and helps you shift your mindset to enable you to thrive in a complex and chaotic environment.

Show Notes

As knowledge workers, we rely on our brains and relationships to get things done. That’s where some of the challenges lie. The hard skills of business analysis, project management, and product ownership are relatively easy to learn. But the soft skills . . . that’s the real challenge.

It’s amazing how little education knowledge workers get about how our brain impacts our ability to be successful. Our brains operate for two things; survival and efficiency. That efficiency word is very scary when it comes to complex cognition.

The survival aspect can be even more difficult because it ties back into the physical survival mechanisms of our body, because we really haven’t evolved yet to understand that we are an apex predator. A lot of the initial reactions that our brain drives in our system is protecting us from a physical perspective when fear occurs. So the manifestation of fear around losing your job becomes a physical manifestation similar to being chased by a saber tooth tiger. You lose a lot of the power of cognition in that.

The first step is not so much getting into the details of communication skills and emotional intelligence. It’s getting a better understanding of the fundamental workings of our brain and how you have to combat that to be healthy and to be able to thrive in constant change.

Cognitive Distortions One thing we do a very poor job of is feeding our brain to operate with high level of cognition over an extended period of time. Since our brain wants to be efficient, it will process and gather information and look at the information using its stereotypical heuristic patterns it’s used to. This is why you see yourself having a tendency to try to solve the same problem using the same tools and getting frustrated. You’re not realizing that you have to force yourself to think deeply about a problem to get your brain processing at the cerebral cortex level and to get into something called deep literacy.

And then on top of all that, it’s our society’s goal to pound this with sound bytes of information so that we’re always operating on that system. That’s important for us because the first technique you need to be thinking about is when analyzing a complex future state situation, taking a step back and doing some deep thinking and try to push away the emotional stimulus that’s around you to get your cognition going; it’s critically important because it doesn’t naturally occur.

We’re bombarded with data all the time and our brains want to operate efficiently, so we ignore a lot of the data that we see in our daily lives. That can lead to snap judgments and unconscious biases, leading us to thinking down the wrong path.

One such cognitive distortion is confirmation bias. It’s a tendency that we look for things that agree with what we’re thinking about and block the things that don’t agree with what we’re thinking about. It’s a preservation technique, it’s an efficiency technique, and it drives a lot of failure in the workplace. This can also lead to tensions in working relationships.

Another common cognitive distortion is loss regret. The concept of the loss regret is that I would rather do nothing and not have to lose then do something and have the potential to lose, even though when I do something there’s a chance I could win.

That fear of change is so scary for the brain because it wants efficiency and it wants survival. It’s going to force us to try to stay in the status quo. That’s why we all have that tendency to stay in our bubble and we don’t take certain risks.

These cognitive distortions and others affect how you interact with stakeholders and could be at the root of some of the challenges you face.

The Stress Response When faced with a stressful situation, our bodies release chemicals that often l