The brain and business: what kind of partners are they? Candace Pert, professor of physiology and biophysics, has pointed to the mind/body connection in her discovery of the brain’s opiate receptor. Studying brain waves and their oscillating electrical voltage has also given us a rich understanding of neurotransmitters and the messages they send.
Steven Kotler has harnessed these breakthroughs to help us understand the state of flow—that exhilarating state leading to peak performance—in his book, The Art of Impossible. And yet, if flow were enough, our world would be more adept at solving its problems.
Following on the heels of the flow state, a developed awareness is necessary. Awareness includes a holistic view, opening leaders to a new way of accessing information to both build the bottom line and be the remedy the world needs today.
Flow and employee retention
Let’s start with flow. Kotler states, “Flow may be the biggest neurochemical cocktail of all,” and that “Psychologists refer to it as ‘the source code of intrinsic motivation.’” In the flow state, activity changes in the frontal cortex, softening the ego state and engendering a greater reliance on intrinsic motivation. Interestingly, employee retention is dramatically tied to intrinsic motivation, a sense of working for something greater than ourselves.
Older studies suggest that the extrinsic drive for satisfying basic needs caps out at about an earning rate of $75,000 annually (it’s now north of $250,000). After that, intrinsic motivation kicks in, necessary for employee satisfaction and engagement. To augment engagement and commitment, HR can demonstrate how the company is generously and genuinely committed to developing the employee’s life mission and fostering the employee’s participation in the ongoing development of the company’s mission.
Skills that set flow in motion
Autonomy heads the list, perhaps one of the reasons why Patagonia, the outdoor gear business, is often cited as a desirable place to work. They get it. Work at your own rhythm. Surf. Whether or not your company sends its people out to surf, autonomy allows for the freedom to explore aspects of an employee’s work without restrictions. Certain companies dedicate a percentage of employee work time to unfettered exploration. Google had something called 20% time, which, Kotler says, has generated “over 50% of Google’s largest revenue-generating products,” including, among others, Gmail and Google Maps.
Mastery is necessary for employees eager to become experts at all the subsets of skills to do their job well—to tame the wild beast of the impossible. “Mastery drives you toward expertise; it pushes you to hone the skills you need to achieve your passion and purpose. In other words, if autonomy is the desire to steer your own ship, mastery is the desire to steer it well,” according to Kotler.
Our third skill set, creativity, allows the pre-frontal brain, where we try to figure things out, to fade out of focus. In our overly rationalized world, this crucial step can be overlooked, since it requires curiosity, not expertise, uncertainty, not knowledge, and letting go of preconceived ideas, not clinging to the status quo.
Awareness is the next step
If you’re at a high level in the flow state, you will have a sense of mission and purpose. This is a real step forward. Why not stop there? Silicon Valley is pretty saturated with purpose, autonomy, and creativity. nonetheless, leaders are reaching for something more, even micro-dosing to unlock that hidden door. Training in developing awareness can meet that need for the next step. Developed awareness offers different choices and a larger context, where new directions open up.
The nature of flow in a business can be entirely secular, not tapping into the awe, beauty, and grace available in awake awareness. Awareness opens to the future that wants to be admitted into the present, a future in harmony with life. In an aware state, we have access to things that don’t have precedent in the past, readying us for the future that wants to happen. In business, this means new opportunities, an enhanced bottom line, and at the same time a means of bringing regeneration to the living systems in our world.
Flow state + awareness
If we move from the flow state into awareness, we can experience other possibilities, including harmonics, or harmonic modes, which Dr. Selen Atasoy, explains as “the orchestration of the brain’s functional organization.”
What does this mean for business? Once the brain has been trained in this kind of orchestration, a leader can see the whole landscape and the details of a problem or situation. To work with both dimensions, leaders have a tremendous advantage in directing their company and developing a range of vision, which means not missing opportunities, whether they are right in front of you or coming in from unknown territory.
Our brains are capable of so much more than we realize. Without developing the reach of the human brain, we could find ourselves in a red zone, abdicating to AI because we think we have to. The movie Her, featuring a love relationship between an AI assistant and an introverted, lonely man, suggests humans may become harder to tolerate and then be left behind.
Our future is calling us to look very differently at leadership. For leaders to work at a higher level means building out a set of practices—an awareness skill set. Buddhist practitioners invite us to be aware not only of our breath but also of our attitude when our mind wanders.
In business, we can become a witness to old habits of mind, aware of our biases and aware of the biases behind those. Leaders can train themselves to be aware of asynchronous information, for example, arising on the periphery of our minds. A developed awareness can sidestep a rational, linear progression of thought. It can lead to new insight and direction by including the future that wants to happen, where business becomes both more profitable and the remedy the world is searching for today.
