Harnessing great minds: Use neuroscience to improve performance

 

There’s no doubt that lawyers are clever people. To enter the profession in the first place, top academic results are required, and the very nature of being a lawyer means that their brains are continuously stretched and challenged by their work. Lawyers need to understand highly technical matters, solve complex problems and find innovative solutions. Their clients, in effect, pay them to think.

So it’s surprising that so little is known or understood in the profession about how the brain works. Lawyers may be applying their grey matter effectively to their day-to-day legal matters, but could they be maximising their brain power to achieve even greater success?

Research into how we can become more effective and productive by harnessing our brain power is increasingly being applied to the world of work. Experiments have shown that how well our brains function affect not just our ability to absorb information and make decisions but also our ability to communicate, engage and influence others. For lawyers, knowledge of the fundamental aspects of neuroscience couldn’t be more relevant.

Brain power basics

The most important part of the brain is the prefrontal cortex. It’s crucial to our thinking ability and our conscious decision making, but only takes up four per cent of our brain volume and can get easily overloaded.

When working optimally, the cortex provides us with a longer attention span, the ability to contemplate possibilities ?and the ability to plan and focus. When ?the cortex is overloaded, however, it ?makes us easily distracted, disorganised and forgetful.

The amygdala, on the other hand, is the area of the brain that is heavily involved in our emotions. It is the amygdala that triggers the auto-response that causes?us to move away from threats and ?towards rewards.

Threats that our brains respond to include challenges to status or autonomy (both important to lawyers), or a perceived loss of control. A sense of reward can be felt by the brain, on the other hand, by a perception of fairness or affinity ?with colleagues.

At its simplest, maximising our brain power means avoiding overloading our prefrontal cortex, being conscious of ?things that threaten our brains and developing strategies to use the energy in our brains efficiently.

Generating new ideas

Have you ever noticed how difficult it is to think up new ideas when you’re under pressure? That’s because, in times of significant stress, glucocorticoids (a type of steroid hormone) are released and break down the neurons in our hippocampus, the part of the brain involved in encoding memories and processing new concepts. Our auto-response is to crave familiarity or routine. It stops us from wanting to have new experiences – we just want to retreat into a secure place.

By working long hours with constant deadlines and multiple client demands, the ability of lawyers to think creatively is significantly impaired. In reality, many lawyers are simply too mentally exhausted to come up with new ideas. Under pressure, most will therefore revert to tried and tested ways of doing things.

To be more innovative, lawyers need to take time out between transactions, to rest properly and quite literally to create more thinking space to have the mental energy to explore new things.

Pitfalls of multi-tasking

Lawyers are consummate multi-taskers, juggling several matters and a range of client needs on a day-to-day basis. Neuroscience, however, teaches us ?that the brain can focus effectively on ?only one conscious task at a time. Switching between tasks uses a lot of ?the brain’s energy and is likely to lead to more mistakes.

Professor David Meyer, a mathematical psychologist at University of Michigan, undertook an experiment to measure the difference in speed and accuracy between people being told to switch between mathematical problems and identifying shapes, compared with people told to perform the same tasks one after another.¹ In some cases, multi-tasking added 50 per cent to the time required to complete the tasks, with a higher proportion of mistakes.

In a legal setting, where time is crucial, this could mean someone working a 12-hour day achieving exactly the same results as someone working eight hours. The implications for lawyer productivity may require a fundamental reassessment of work allocation procedures and ?working practices.

Decision making

Research shows that new concepts ?take up more space in the brain than those that are already well known. It’s also proven that memory starts to degrade when we hold more than one idea in our minds at once.

According to David Rock, author of Your Brain at Work, when trying to make a decision between different options, the optimal number of items we can compare is two. He also believes that the optimal number of different ideas to hold in our minds at one time is no more than three or four.

If he’s right, then lawyers need to simplify the options for clients and focus on a limited range of alternatives to make good decisions.

Prioritisation

Prioritising is a key activity for busy lawyers. It often involves sacrificing immediate gratification for delayed gratification, and this is what makes it difficult. Our tendency is to do the things we prefer doing first, rather than the things we should be doing.

Neuroscientists believe that being able to see and hold in your mind a picture of what you want to do makes it possible to then do it. So, practising visualisation is a great way of learning the discipline to prioritise and to reduce the energy the brain otherwise expends on it.

Dealing with distractions

Distractions at work are pervasive. Lawyers find themselves dealing with emails, marking up documents, attending meetings, coaching team members and making telephone calls – with each activity a potential distraction to the other.

Distractions also have a significant impact on the brain. They limit our ability to remain focused and are exhausting, leaving the brain with less energy. This in turn means we have less capacity to understand, decide, recall and memorise.

So, being distracted can result in forgetting ideas or losing valuable insights. More seriously, according to Rock’s research, being ‘always on’ can lead to a drop in an individual’s IQ by as much as losing a night’s sleep.

Staying focused requires discipline, not just to switch off the mobile phone from time to time, but also to be conscious of the effect of distractions on the brain and to veto them. Greater personal effectiveness can be achieved, for example, by dealing with complex problems early in the day, spending specific time away from the distraction of the inbox and consciously clearing the mind before embarking on difficult tasks.

Managing the pace

To achieve peak mental performance, an optimal amount of stress, rather than ?no stress at all, is required. This optimal level occurs when the brain has intermediate levels of norepinephrine and dopamine, the chemicals which relate to alertness and interest.

It is possible to increase dopamine levels by changing our perspective, using humour or thinking about something positive. It’s also possible to bring these down by activating the emotional areas of the brain rather than the prefrontal cortex.

Once we are in a stressful state, however, adrenaline and cortisol are released in preparation for a ‘fight or?flight’ response.

There is a distinct gender difference in how the brain deals with stress. When a male brain becomes agitated, it finds release through competition, debate or escape. It has also been conditioned to process information in a linear fashion. So, for men, focusing on goal-directed actions in response to a crisis helps them use up their excess adrenaline.

By contrast, women typically want to talk about things as, in doing so, the female brain releases oxytocin and serotonin. The serotonin has a calming effect and the oxytocin helps a woman to feel close to others and less alone.

Understanding how we respond to stress and how our colleagues are likely to respond gives us insights that enable us to act in a supportive way and counter a perceived sense of threat.

Giving feedback

Giving feedback to lawyers can be difficult. In many cases, it creates an intense threat response that doesn’t help to improve performance, but instead results in debate or denial. The problem-solving approach to feedback is often not the most effective approach and providing suggestions can result in a lot of wasted time.

The science of the brain teaches us that we need to avoid a threat response by challenging competence. Bringing people to their own insights is by far a better way of getting them back on track, helping them to do their own thinking and, in effect, encouraging them to give themselves feedback as a reward.

Lessons for leaders

Jan Hills, principal at consultancy Head Heart and Brain, has undertaken extensive research into how the brain works to understand the implications for leaders.

“If leaders operate in a way which reflects an understanding of how the brain works, they will achieve much better results. By understanding how the brain reacts, they get the best reaction from themselves and their team. They lead better,” she says.

Hills points to a number of characteristics of how ‘brain savvy’ ?leaders act:?

• They ask a lot of questions, not just about what people are doing, but how they are feeling. They want to know if their people feel threatened because they understand that when the brain is threatened, even at an unconscious level, it shuts down the executive function that plans, reasons, is innovative and sets goals. These leaders want to use their influence to replace feelings of threat with feelings of reward.?

• They make their day as ‘brain efficient’ as possible by making important and creative decisions early in the day, rather than spending the most productive time for the brain attending to emails and routine tasks.?

• They keep calm when others around them lose it. By understanding how the brain works, they recognise their emotional reactions and can step back from them. They understand why they are reacting strongly, stop their reaction and choose to act differently.?

• They help others to deal well with change because they know that change creates feelings of threat more than anything else. They show their teams why change is good for them personally, help them to set personal goals to achieve change and reward them for doing so.

 

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Optimising brain power: Top tips for lawyers

• Focus on one mental task at a time to maximise efficiency

• Eliminate distractions to enhance productivity

• Tackle complex problems when your brain is rested

• Simplify the options to make better decisions

• Take mental time out to enhance creativity

• Get enough sleep for peak brain performance

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Making a difference

Understanding how the brain works, ?even at the simplest level, can provide insights into how best to harness the power it gives us, how to lead and motivate others and how to be more personally effective.

As Rock points out, only ten per cent of us do our best thinking at work. Just imagine what a difference it would make if 90 per cent of us did so.

?Jill King is a consultant and the former global HR director at Linklaters ?(www.jkinsights.co.uk)

Endnote

1. See ‘Executive Control of Cognitive Processes in Task Switching’, ?David E Meyer et al, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, ?Vol. 27 No. 4, 2001