Can Neuroscience Help Us Redesign Our Organizations?
For a few years now, all those responsible for designing and carrying out organizational strategies have been aware that something has changed forever.
Using an analogy, in the middle of the last century organizations could be compared to a diamond, due to their resistance and stability over time. However, over the years, these became increasingly “liquid”, as Bauman postulated (Z. Bauman 2015) and, as the 21st century entered, they practically transformed into soft drinks. In today’s organizations, uncertainty is inevitable. However, Neurosciences can help us face this new reality
Companies, faced with an increasingly unstable environment
The current challenges to attract and retain talent, to stay up to date with innovation, to discover new niches in a globalized market or protect those already conquered in the face of increasingly undefined challenges have become continuous.
This new context has been called “VUCA” , a term of military origin and acronym for Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (Stiehm & Townsend 2002). Continuing with the analogy, we could say that the environment where organizations currently develop is more similar to a plasma or, in other words, a highly energetic and totally dissociated state of matter.
This being so, the main need that those responsible for organizations have today is find the optimal way to modify the structure to adapt it to this new scenario and that the organization can survive, or even grow.
And this is where neuroscience can find a new application, beyond helping us develop Artificial Intelligence. Following a transdisciplinary approach, we can say that Organizations are very similar to the nervous system of living beings
Organizations receive information from the environment (markets, competition, regulations, etc.), process it and decide if it is beneficial or threatening, and respond accordingly, either by doing what they already know how to do (production, operations, marketing, distribution or sales). ) or developing new strategies or products (R&D&I, new markets, exports, alliances, acquisitions). Interestingly, that is exactly what our brain has been successfully doing for millions of years.
This conceptual similarity, together with the significant advances that we have achieved in the field of neuroscience and in our understanding of the nervous system, can help us a lot in this difficult task that we have identified as a priority: restructure our organizations
To do so, we need to take advantage of all that knowledge that nature has refined throughout the evolution process, and transfer it to the field of organizations. Thus, we must identify the functional elements and strategies that make our mind a powerful adaptation tool and replicate them in our organizational designs at different levels and at different scales.
Some of the high-level neuroscientific models developed recently (Garcés & Finkel, 2019) can help us in this work, since they clearly define the different functional elements and the dynamics they give rise to when they interact, allowing us to identify the key factors that affect to its operation. These models can be easily replicated on a small scale, and gradually implemented throughout the organizational structure allowing us to take advantage of the knowledge that nature itself has already selected as effective.
