Brain plasticity is what allows your brain to change its “softwiring.” For a long time, scientists believed that after a certain critical period in childhood, most of our brain’s neurological connections were fixed and highly unlikely to change. But recent research has suggested that a wide variety of practices, from physical exercise to studying to meditation, can lead to physical and physiological changes in our brains that affect our abilities to think and form memories. In a study of Buddhist monks who had practiced more than ten thousand hours of meditation, researchers at the University of Wisconsin measured significantly higher levels of gamma waves in their brains; these waves are associated with perception and problem solving.
That doesn’t mean the brain is infinitely flexible. If you have a preference for a certain way of thinking, you might be able to train yourself to operate another way and find that easier to do over time, but you’re very unlikely to change your underlying preference. Likewise, you may be able to train yourself to be more creative, but if you’re not naturally creative, there’s likely a limit to what you can do. That is simply reality, so we all might as well accept it and learn how to deal with it. There are coping techniques that we can use, for example, the creative, disorganized person who is likely to lose track of time can develop the habit of using alarms; the person who isn’t good at some type of thinking can train himself to rely on the thinking of others who are better at it. The best way to change is through doing mental exercises. As with physical exercise, this can be painful unless you enlist the habit loop discussed earlier to connect the rewards to the actions, “rewiring” your brain to love learning and beneficial change.
Remember that accepting your weaknesses is contrary to the instincts of those parts of your brain that want to hold on to the illusion that you are perfect. Doing the things that will reduce your instinctual defensiveness takes practice, and requires operating in an environment that reinforces open-mindedness.
As you’ll see when we get into Work Principles, I’ve developed a number of tools and techniques that help overcome that resistance, individually and across organizations. Instead of expecting yourself or others to change, I’ve found that it’s often most effective to acknowledge one’s weaknesses and create explicit guardrails against them. This is typically a faster and higher-probability path to success.
Find out what you and others are like.
Because of the biases with which we are wired, our self-assessments (and our assessments of others) tend to be highly inaccurate. Psychometric assessments are much more reliable. They are important in helping explore how people think during the hiring process and throughout employment. Though psychometric assessments cannot fully replace speaking with people and looking at their backgrounds and histories, they are far more powerful than traditional interviewing and screening methods. If I had to choose between just the assessments or just traditional job interviews to get at what people are like, I would choose the assessments. Fortunately, we don’t have to make that choice.
The four main assessments we use are the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the Workplace Personality Inventory, the Team Dimensions Profile, and Stratified Systems Theory. But we are constantly experimenting (for example, with the Big Five) so our mix will certainly change. Whatever the mix, they all convey people’s preferences for thinking and action. They also provide us with new attributes and terminologies that clarify and amplify those we had identified on our own. I will describe a few of them below. These descriptions are based on my own experiences and learnings, which are in many ways different from the official descriptions used by the assessment companies.
Introversion vs. extroversion. Introverts focus on the inner world and get their energy from ideas, memories, and experiences while extroverts are externally focused and get their energy from being with people. Introversion and extroversion are also linked to differences in communication styles. If you have a friend who loves to “talk out” ideas (and even has trouble thinking through something if there isn’t someone around to work it through with), he or she is likely an extrovert. Introverts will usually find such conversations painful, preferring to think privately and share only after they’ve worked things out on their own. I’ve found that it is important to help each communicate in the way that they feel most comfortable. For example, introverts often prefer communicating in writing (such as email) rather than speaking in group settings and tend to be less open with their critical thoughts.