One of the first products we made in our personal branding investigation was The Brain!

There is a plethora of books on the market about decision-making, y’know Gladwell, Kahneman and Lehrer an’ all. It made sense to take some of the simple experiments pioneered by others and use them to ask people to pause for thought about how they showed up – as an individual and especially as a team member.

I wrote about the types of queries we can pull a long time ago here: How Does Your Brain Work? Neuro-scientific understanding is within our own grasp! This is frontier work, yet highly accessible.

I thought it about time to explain some of these experiments, so you can test yourself at home! There will be some more posts covering the seven brain experiments we cover.

For now, I will simply state, that whilst we think we are rational, observant and conscious thinkers and decision-makers, mostly we are not. This means that for a lot of the time, in much of our professional work, we are on auto-pilot, leveraging best practice whilst we are being paid for cogency and immediate engagement.

It is worth, as I say above, pausing for thought about this. And especially in teams, there are breakthrough opportunities to understand ourselves better, along the lines of:

“Oh! That’s why we always do X when we discuss Y! Who knew?!”

Here are topics to cover…

• Is your brainstorming / idea generation preference: harmony, balanced, or dissent?
• Is your default decision-making technique: automatic or conscious?
• Just how deep are your powers of observation?
• Are you right or left brained?
• What level of social intimacy do you have: high, ideal, low?
• How rational are you about money: dominant rational, sympathetic irrational, or just plain irrational?!
• Do you see the world from a position of power or from one of empathy?

←This Much We (Think We) Know.→