Better business with powerful lessons from your brain

07:00 in the morning. The alarm clock rings. You get up, get in the shower, quickly eat your breakfast, brush your teeth, flee into the car, and away you go. Simple routine tasks for you, but a complex operation for your brain. You just don't notice because your body and brain are in harmony. Your body just works because your brain receives and sends stimuli. Nonstop.

Your brain collects all those stimuli, and compartmentalizes it. Certain stimuli are prioritized, others are ignored. If our brain didn't do this, you would go crazy with all those signals, and end up being unproductive. Our brain manages our body, constantly reducing complexity to something simple. And for that we can be very grateful.

How that comes about? Not always by working hard, but mostly by working together. By the harmony that exists between what you do every day, and the way your brain interprets it. By cognitive processes that kick in at the right times and decide for you what takes priority, what is irrelevant distraction, and how best to react.

That has everything to do with how your thought process is put together. Your brain continuously forms certain patterns. Many stimuli fit into known patterns, so it can already predict what exactly is going on, what consequences it may have, and how you should react. Do certain stimuli deviate? Then this becomes more difficult. In that case, a new pattern must be set up, which you can re-enable now and later. In this way you avoid having to continually start a new thought process. You simply take advantage of what you already know. Unconsciously.

It happens every second. Millions of stimuli reach your brain, but only a few dozen of them are dealt with. Your brain knows what to do, like a logical if this then that principle. So only when something doesn't quite fit into the system does a thought process occur.

You don't notice the smallest deviations yourself. Your brain processes them automatically, based on a previous learning principle. It makes assumptions that most likely match reality. Larger deviations require a little more effort.

If no pattern exists that can serve as a basis for addressing that deviation, the real work begins: the creation of a new pattern based on the incoming stimuli. This happens with every new situation, so your brain is constantly learning.

Huge deviations that cannot be quickly patterned create discomfort. Pain, stress, restlessness. In many cases, your brain approaches this as a dangerous situation. Your brain takes a shortcut, avoids predictions and takes immediate action. Actually, this triggers a defense mechanism: fight, flight or freeze. Now what?

Fight-flight-freeze is a self-protective mechanism that helps you survive. It aligns your body and brain by mobilizing both to overcome a particular danger. This makes sense when you are facing a huge tiger, or seeing an all-consuming hurricane coming at you. It makes less sense when you are actually facing something that is not really a threat.

Misinterpreted or not: your body reacts. With nausea, a dry mouth, cold hands, trembling knees... Were we not to have such a mechanism, it causes anxiety disorders or stress in the long run. This is because the mechanism helps your body decide for you, without cognitively burdening you.

• Fight: Face the danger head-on and try to overcome it with a variety of actions and tactics.
• Flight: flee from the danger, by not going into it, but just focusing on other things.
• Freeze: recognize the danger, but fall silent, as if you might as well not have been there.

That whole thing works tremendously efficiently. You continuously and automatically use data from the past to make truthful predictions for the future, and you to determine next steps. Combine that with a mechanism that protects you from danger, and you get a rock-solid system that proves itself over and over again. So why don't we apply that system everywhere? In our business, for example?

Why don't companies operate on the principle of short-term predictions and reactions, rather than setting a long-term strategy that everyone must conform to? Is that really that intelligent?

A frozen business does not help you move forward. On the contrary. Being an elastic business really puts you one step ahead of the competition.

Often the latter way of working makes your business static. Frozen, and unprepared for what is to come. Complex systems remain complex, so difficult decisions can hardly be made on short notice. This is often the case in large or established companies. They lack a dynamism that young start-ups, for example, often do.

This does not mean that we do not believe in a long-term strategy, but rather that we believe even more strongly in the learning principle. Small actions and solutions, which take shape in several short phases. Phases in which we collect and analyze data. Sometimes we will fail, sometimes we will succeed. In any case, we are continuously learning and taking the lessons into new patterns.

Internal teams resolve small deviations in those patterns by slightly adjusting solutions or forecasts so that they do fit the pattern. Larger deviations with unknown impact are dealt with higher up in the company. Rapid dynamics are not enough to survive, so we need a mechanism that can prepare the right response.

Serious disruptions? Only then does a new mechanism kick in.

That includes, for example, important trends in the market, transformations in the industry, attacks from competitors... These anomalies are assessed by CEOs and managers in order to respond appropriately. Fight-flight-freeze, remember? This is how harmony is re-formed in a complex situation. Does nothing happen? Then chances are that your business will go tilted or tired. And as you read earlier, that doesn't bode well in the long run.

That probably sounds like a complicated way of working. After all, in such a business, you have to respond quickly and flexibly to all kinds of data, develop new patterns, maintain a constant dynamic...

Yet that's easier than you think. Like the relationship between your brain and your body, the relationships in your enterprise should exist in such a way that your organization can actually work almost autonomously. Only when there are major deviations do you need input from higher up. Such organizations are well-oiled, problem-solving machines. Ready for the future, with a strong vision of future disruptions.