Summary : Your Brain At Work – David Rock

The problems that arise when people try and work together in project teams generally come in three forms:
Neuroscience has also generated some interesting ideas with regards to addressing the brain’s inbuilt social needs:

To try and increase your insight, use the ARIA model. ARIA stands for Awareness, Reflection, Insight and Action. Awareness means you think about the problem without trying to focus on it exclusively. Reflection involves examining your thinking processes for any flaws. Insights can then come in a flash when two previously unconnected ideas come together. It’s vital that you then get into action making

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The human brain has an overriding organization principle – it will do everything possible to minimize danger (an “away” response) and maximize reward (a “toward” response). Generally speaking, the away response tends to be faster, stronger and longer lasting than the toward response.

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“Mindfulness is a habit, it’s something the more one does, the more likely one is to be in that mode with less and less effort. It’s a skill that can be learned. It’s accessing something we already have. Mindfulness isn’t difficult. What’s difficult is to remember to be mindful.”

“The default network is active for most of your waking moments and doesn’t take much effort to operate. There’s nothing wrong with this network; the point here is you don’t want to limit yourself to experiencing the world only through this network.”

Cognitive scientists first recognized in the 1970s there was an executive function in the brain. They came up with the technical term of “mindfulness” to describe this. Others have used terms like “self-awareness”, “meta-awareness” or “knowing yourself.” A distinguishing biological characteristic of the human race is we all have the capacity to step aside from our first-hand experiences and observe what we are thinking about at any given moment.

Some other key neuroscience findings in this regard:
It’s astonishingly easy for the human brain to become fixated on the same set of solutions to a problem everyone else uses. This is termed the “impasse phenomena.”
One way to resolve an impasse is to let the brain idle a while. This both reduces activation of the wrong answers and allows some loose new connections to come to the surface as well.

. Work with your brain instead of against it
2. Learn how to drive your mind’s director
3. Learn how to stay cool under pressure
4. Learn how to see the world from the brain’s perspective
5. Stop focusing on other people’s problems and come up with solutions

Summary of Your Brain At Work (David Rock)
1. Work with your brain instead of against it
Today, more people than ever before are paid to think instead of performing routine physical tasks. That’s fine but the human brain has biological limits on how long it can make decisions and solve new problems. Paradoxically, the key to improving performance in this area is to understand those limits and work with them rather than against them.
The real secret to achieving and then sustaining high performance doesn’t lie in an investment in the latest computers, smart phones or buying the car of the future. To achieve more, master your brain and structure your work to align with the way the human brain likes to work. Advances in neuroscience have made this possible to achieve.
Probably the six key problems of the modern day workplace are:

Generally speaking, the away response tends to be faster, stronger and longer lasting than the toward response.