EMEA 5065: The neuroscience of leading high-performance teams

Desires

  • Finances and work
  • Relationships
  • Health
  • Recreation
  • Moral, ethical, and spiritual

Greed

  • Stimulates motivation centers in the brain (more one has, ++ rewards one seeks)
  • E.g. sharing accumulated wealth with others often leads to greater emotional satisfaction
  • Brain evolved to anticipate extreme scarcity, we need to actively retrain to anticipate abundance

Two forms of desire

  1. Unconscious drive to survive (bottom-up)
  2. Conscious wanting by optimistic fantasies about the future (top-down) “wishful seeing” <- what we want to tap into in teams. “Breadcrumb” model for long-term driving of goals.

Dopamine control circuit

  • Manage uncontrolled urges of dopamine desire
  • Guides “raw energy” towards profitable ends
  • Abstract concepts and forward-looking strategies
  • Imagination
  • Control of world

Desire circuit vs control circuit

  • Phantoms: things we wish to have

  • Phantoms: building blocks of imagination, creative thought

  • Motivation and persistence

    • Cost-benefit tradeoffs
    • Celebrating small wins

  • "I don't care anymore; I need to stop for good and call it a day" vs "I'm going to take a short break and regroup by focusing on why achieving this goal matters to me and keep going”

References

Dopaminergic circuitry responds not to reward or pleasure, but to reward prediction error

  • Keeping expectations low can maximize the delta between actual and expected rewards
  • Think about this w.r.t. goal setting, and how to discretize tasks
  • Anticipation, reward prediciton error, novelty, and curiosity drive motivation
  • Pain and fear diminish motivation, but drive growth and learning (push through to harder goals)

Barriers to motivation

  • Physical pain
  • Unpleasant emotional experiences
  • Ruminating on unpleasant thoughts

Time boxing is a technique to properly process negative experiences (small mourning) - even 90 seconds.

Distant goals and desires (future oriented)

"Time to hunt vs time to eat"

  • Switch transition from forward-oriented dopamine (wanting) to present-oriented (H&N) dopamine.

  • Pursue hard, long-term goals

  • Dopaminergic personality

    • Bored easily
    • Enjoys anticipation and planning more than doing
    • Easily distracted
    • Loves thrill of chase > prize

  • Dopamine fasting (trendy take on asceticism) has some validity but shouldn't be taken to extremes. Fasting, of any kind, can be addictive.

  • Ocytocin

    • Associated initially with sex & breastfeeding
    • Synthesized by the brain when needed, short half-life (~ 3 minutes)
    • Ocytocin in analogy to dopamine is not a "trust hormone", but rather anticipation of trustworthiness.

What is engagement?

Activates the prefrontal cortex, provides a sense of empowerment and motivation, activates areas of the brain involved in reflection and introspection, driving fulfillment and satisfaction.

  • Engagement must utilize the social interfaces wired into the brain
    • Reward systems
    • Trust systems
      • Sense of autonomy and control over one's work, decision-making
      • Sense of meaning and purpose; serving a larger mission

Social brain and compassion

  • Insula (sensorimotor processing, sense of self) and anterior cingulate cortex (threat-processing, pain or suffering)
    • Helps connect the goal-seeking desires of the prefrontal-cortex with the interroceptive centers (amygdala, limbic areas)
    • Drives our ability to feel compassion and guilt

SCARF model

  • Status
  • Certainty
  • Autonomy
  • Relatedness (ingroup/outgroup)
  • Fairness

General ideas

  • Be mindful of instance labels
  • Find and work with "chemistry creators"