How the Mind Works - How the Mind Works

This website describes the mind in terms of maximizing performance and sustaining business (organizational) success. This material supplements and extends the more basic information provided at www.CompleteLeadership.com

Jessie, a senior consultant at a high-level change-management firm, habitually missed deadlines even though he recognized this behavior was about to derail his career. Mick, the talented CEO of an automotive supply company, uncontrollably lost his temper and attacked and humiliated his employees when they made a mistake, although he knew his actions negatively affected his business results. Don, a creative, hard-driving manufacturing executive, compulsively micromanaged, even though he understood his controlling behavior stifled motivation and creativity. Margaret, the CFO of a venture-capital backed software company, had penetrating intuitive insights into flaws in business cases, but she could not explain how she reached some of her conclusions, and she repeatedly displayed anger toward others who did not see patterns that were obvious to her. Jerry, a quality manager in an engine manufacturing company, performed most of the activities of his job exceptionally well, but he lacked the ability to motivate people outside of his organization to deliver results to him on schedule. Although these leaders executed most of their activities superbly, they underperformed despite high IQs, abundant experience and knowledge, management/leadership training, and passion to succeed. What was going wrong? What were they missing? What is the common factor that most people will miss as they look over this list of deficiencies?

We have self-control. We can decide to write an email and send it. We can choose to read The Wall Street Journal and do so. Most people can enact their intentions to go to work five days a week. We can execute our success-related tasks, implement our plans, and achieve our goals – at least most of the time. However, sometimes we seem to lose control and act automatically. As the situations described above illustrate, huge benefits await those who can transform involuntary activities that interfere with attaining peak performance and sustaining success.

In order to understand and manage automatic human activities at a pragmatic level, we start by overcoming widespread confusion through drawing an explicit distinction between the mind and the brain. Our brain is the 1.4 Kg (3 pounds) of tangible, convoluted gray matter that resides in our heads. Our mind is the intangible controller of our realities including our thoughts, knowledge, implicit assumptions, values, emotions, intentions, habits, and behavior. The following diagram illustrates the mind/brain distinction.

Systematic investigations over several decades have identified the relationship between many specific brain structures and identifiable mental functions (not to mention the more mundane experiment of drinking a martini and noticing what it does to your mind); so, in spite of centuries of philosophical debate on this topic, we make the pragmatic assumption that the brain creates the mind. Therefore, if we make an intervention at the mental level, and get a desired outcome at the mental level, the brain is involved. We do not need to concern ourselves with the nature of the notoriously elusive mind/brain interface. However, as indicated in the above diagram, we note with interest that the mind/brain interface operates bidirectionally. A key to understanding and managing mental activities that affect our performance is to note that sometimes brain functions maintain control and drive mental activities but other times explicit mental activities seize control and drive brain functions, which in turn create new mental activities.

As humans evolved, the adaptive selection process favored higher levels of complex thoughts and behaviors that occurred due to beneficial mental functions without any apparent relationship to how they were implemented in the hidden intricacies of the brain. As a result, many of our higher-level mental functions emerged by co-opting neural networks from various parts of the brain’s structure with the result that most of our complex, involuntary performance-related mental activities are distributed in the brain and encoded in complicated ways. For example, we cannot identify in the brain our individual hopes or intentions or the specific topics that create our personal pleasure and discomfort. Where, and in what form, in the brain can we identify the details of our deepest contexts (assumptions and beliefs)? In the foreseeable future, do you expect to be able to probe into the brains of people to tell whether they are American or Canadian, Republican or Democrat? Are they micromanagers or delegators? On which activities can they execute effectively? Are they able to effect deep change? Even if we could locate the corresponding regions of the brain and interpret specific content, how would that help us in the day-to-day execution of our business success needs? How would we directly modify the brain’s structure to perform at a higher level for our individual, idiosyncratic deficiencies?

We seek reliable interventions for turning deficiencies into competence and proficiencies into excellence in order to create greater success. For workplace performance improvement, we want to create interventions at the mental level and achieve desired results at the mental level using a viable model of the mind without requiring that we understand the intricacies of the brain's involvement. With this “black box” approach to the brain, we can create order in our comprehensive mental model, which is inherently missing in robust brain models, to make performance improvements comprehensible and systematic.

The brief stories at the beginning of this webpage illustrate performance-limiting issues frequently encountered in the workplace. Jessie was very good at the consulting processes of his profession, but he had an uncontrollable blockage to action that was about to derail his career. Mick had all of the engineering, manufacturing and financial abilities to make his company an outstanding success, but an internal context caused him to blow up at people when they made mistakes, which kept his company from performing at a level that would sustain success. Don had worked his way up the management ranks by being the quickest and most knowledgeable manufacturing expert; unfortunately, he couldn't let go of being the best technical expert around, so he kept micromanaging, which progressively undermined his effectiveness as his responsibilities grew. Margaret could instantaneously detect problems in complex financial statements but she didn't realize other people did not have her level of insights, so she became annoyed with them and failed to maximize the benefit of her own special expertise. Jerry was a superb quality manager but he lacked the courage to engage and some interpersonal skills to motivate people who didn't report to him to deliver results on time – a deficiency that was blocking his promotion to the next level. Our challenge is to identify commonality in all of these issues that keep otherwise outstanding performers from executing at a peak level. The commonality we seek emanates from a second, previously-elusive, robot-like mode of human activities. Our mind is not uniform as most people assume, at least implicitly. We operate in two distinct modes, which has escaped most people’s attention; we have a bipartite mind.

Our “thinking-self" executes the voluntary knowledge-based part of our mental makeup, such as plans, goals, and strategies. Our "auto-self" acts like a “robot within” that drives the involuntary aspects of our mental makeup – many of which play a dominant role in leadership and the other so-called "soft” success factors, including:

○ Dysfunctional workplace behaviors; undesired acts of commission (as with Mick and
Don)

▪ Our hidden assumptions and beliefs about the way things “really are” – auto-contexts (as
with Mick)

▪ Those skills we display automatically – auto-skills (interpersonal ones that Jerry was missing)

▪ Patterns we see in complexity without knowing how we do it – auto-expertise (as with
Margaret)

Most of the time, our thinking-self and auto-self operate harmoniously in parallel. A graphic example occurs when we communicate with other people. Our thinking-self creates the story we want to tell, if we are the speaker, or understands the story somebody else is presenting, if we are the listener. Simultaneously, and normally outside of our awareness, our auto-self processes the nonverbal part of our communications including voice inflection, facial expressions, and gestures. It also works in the background to produce the grammar for the story our thinking-self wants to tell. If we are the receiver of a communication, our auto-self works in the background to process the other person's non-verbal communications, parse the incoming sentences, and interpret the grammar to send stories to the thinking-self for understanding. Sometimes we segue, seamlessly and imperceptibly, between one mode providing primary control and then the other such as when our thinking-self takes over control from the auto-self while driving in order to read a direction sign and make a needed turn. Problems occur when our auto-self seizes control from the thinking-self and blocks us from taking a needed action, causes us to exhibit an undesired behavior, or frames our thinking in a way that doesn't match the needs of our environment. The above cases illustrate different forms of this phenomenon.

In the business world, we need to understand how mental functions affect performance and therefore success. Any formulation that attempts to do that must be easily accessible by busy executives who do not have the time or interest to understand the details of the mind ─ much less delve into the enormous complexity of brain. In fact, performance-improvement specialists don't need to know anything about the brain. Executives and other leaders in organizations need only to understand the existence and nature of the bipartite mind and to realize that besides our thoughts and knowledge, an automatic mode exists that controls many success factors including behaviors, contexts, skills, and expertise. HR professionals and managers who want to become leader-coaches should at least understand and know how to improve auto-self activities as discussed at www.CompleteLeadership.com. The material at this website goes beyond providing insights into how to recognize auto-self-based performance needs and how to select the appropriate intervention techniques and services. It provides additional material for those who desire to provide transformational performance-improvement services more effectively.

Due to the extreme complexity of the mind/brain system, pragmatism dictates that we segment it so we can describe it with regard to goals we want to achieve. Our goal is improving performance towards sustainable success in a work environment. Brilliant minds have achieved significant scientific success at understanding the structure of the brain and its relation to human well-being. Fortunately, we can expect continuing incremental advances and periodic breakthroughs in learning more about the brain. Unfortunately, because of the enormous complexity of the human brain and the way many performance-related mental functions are distributed in it, the level of details accelerates as neuroscience research continues, rendering the relationship between distributed brain structures and performance-related mental functions increasingly inaccessible to business people.

Unless we look forward to "mental steroids" (or “Viagra for the brain" as Scientific American put in the October 2009 article, “Turbocharging the Brain”) to create an unfair advantage in leadership performance to succeed in business, as some athletes do with anabolic steroids to succeed in sports, we need not concern ourselves with direct brain interventions. Therefore, this website discusses how the mind works in the context of creating mental interventions to improve performance of automatic, seemingly uncontrollable, activities. Fortunately, this allows us to create a level of order that enables realistic, pragmatic interventions to maximize automatically-enacted performance as the best way to establish an "unfair" business advantage through fair means for those individuals and organizations that get ahead of the power curve in auto-self performance improvements. The following table identifies different goals and intervention techniques for dealing with mind/brain activities. This website focuses on improving performance in the workplace, as isolated on the highlighted path in this table.

In addition to the specific goal-oriented items in this table, other investigators including non-clinical psychologists, philosophers of the mind, artificial-intelligence investigators, and cognitive scientists strive to understand the mind in more general terms using systematic investigative techniques.

As a result of concentrating solely on the mind, the components of our theory are not such tangible brain objects as neurons, genes, neurotransmitters, the amygdala, or the prefrontal cortex. Instead, our theory focuses on intangible but practical mental entities including knowledge, awareness, hopes, fears, intentions, assumptions, skills, pleasure, discomfort, success, procrastination, and behavior.

Correspondingly, our improvement techniques are not such brain-related interventions as drug therapy, brain surgery, or gene therapy. Rather, they are mind-related interventions such as increasing self-awareness, constructing virtual rewards and penalties, training new skills, creating clear intentions, making unconditional commitments, experiencing many repetitions of enacting intentions, and distinguishing and mediating between success and comfort priorities – all of which are described at www.CompleteLeadership.com.

We have identified two potent distinctions that open the way to a new frontier of systematic performance improvement, as summarized in the illustration below.

The next step creates the conceptual breakthrough we need to move to a new level of creating performance excellence. We want to integrate the two distinctions into a unifying model as the foundation of more-powerful performance-improvement techniques. The following diagram illustrates how both components of the bipartite mind interact with the brain. We identify the brain's role, and avoid the inaccessible complexity by treating the brain as a "black box" so we can ignore how it accomplishes its role. Identifying the locus of control creates insight into the fundamental natures of the auto-self and the thinking-self. The auto-self works automatically, does not respond to our thinking-self’s desires or directions, and tenaciously resists changes because it is a slave of embedded brain structures. The locus of control reverses for the thinking-self. In this case, the brain accommodatingly performs mind-initiated actions – the thinking-self doesn’t experience the brain’s role at all. Our thinking-self seems to have unilateral control of our attention, thoughts, and intentions.

This model reveals that our brain directly controls a large part of our activities; but, instead of trying to understand how the brain does it so we can improve performance, we can take a mind-centric path of modifying the auto-self. When we identify the auto-self's properties, we can create reliable, systematic techniques to change the auto-self, which results in concomitant changes to the controlling part of the brain, but we avoid dealing with the brain's complexity in the process. We can also now better understand our complex “human nature” as an often-times harmonious, sometimes acrimonious, amalgam of our auto-self-driven “animal nature” and our thinking-self-driven “uniquely-human nature,” as indicated in the above diagram.

The following diagram adds a path from the auto-self to the brain and shows a path between the auto-self and the thinking-self.

When our auto-self exhibits involuntary activities that undermine our success-related performance, our thinking-self is the resource we have available to notice the dysfunction and take actions to alter it. Since the auto-self uncontrollably follows entrenched brain activities, we must eventually alter the brain for the auto-self to become different. We have added this path to the diagram above. Fortunately, once again, we don't need to understand the brain-change process. We only need to construct a detailed model of the auto-self and create techniques to modify the auto-self – the brain-changes occur imperceptibly. This model also provides new insights into why we encounter tenacious barriers when we attempt to transform our automatic activities.

When formal management practices emerged at the beginning of the 20th century, researchers and practitioners did not draw a distinction between management and what we now call leadership. We can call this the ignorance stage regarding our involuntary activities (behaviors, thought patterns, and leadership skills) because people were largely ignorant regarding the auto-self mode of performance. When researchers and managers started to notice a growing list of performance issues that the increasingly powerful management practices did not handle adequately, the concept of leadership eventually emerged as a distinctive way of getting things done along with a growing list of “soft” success factors. Because performance investigators and management practitioners did not understand the auto-self at this time, they began to create metaphors to identify or “point toward” the elusive concepts they noticed.

The metaphoric stage then emerged and was characterized by indirect metaphoric identification of previously unrecognized success factors and empirically-derived improvement processes that were honed through decades of practice and monitoring of results. Ensconced within a uniform-mind auto-context and with an inadequate theoretical foundation, the metaphoric stage has reached the point of diminishing returns for responding to the relentless demands for increasingly higher levels of performance. We now hover at the precipice of transitioning to a new, more powerful, stage of performance improvement.

A descriptive stage is now possible based on direct descriptions of the previously elusive success factors within the bipartite mind auto-context, which enables theoretically-derived processes based on understanding and modeling the properties of the auto-self.

The following table summarizes the characteristics of the emerging stage transition for performance-improvements. The transition to the descriptive stage will open powerful new opportunities for performance improvement to create transformable leaders and organizations leading to a sustainable competitive advantage for those who cross the chasm to this new Pinnacle of success.

The following table illustrates the difference between metaphoric identification and detailed descriptions that use new terminology with specific definitions.

Metaphoric Identifications (Uniform-mind auto-context)	Detailed Descriptions (Bipartite-mind auto-context)
“Soft” success factors	▪ Auto-self success factors ▪ Auto-self defined by its identified properties
The "box"	▪ Auto-contexts as a component of the auto-self ▪ Reconstruct auto-contexts using bipartite-mind theory
"Comfort zone"	▪ Comfort Imperative ▪ Comfort priorities versus success priorities ▪ The unfair fight ▪ Internal reality wars
"Gut" feel	▪ Auto-expertise takes the mystery out of this phenomenon
“People process” (Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Bossidy & Charan)	▪ The thinking-self controls strategy and operations processes and incremental improvements to them. ▪ The auto-self controls the people process and radical (auto-context) improvements to the strategy process.

Metaphors work at the beginning of discovering new concepts because they enable recognizing and communicating the objects of the discovery within an existing auto-context (paradigm). If the new concepts are important enough to require deep understanding in order to launch a theory for effective management, the second phase of development requires reconstructing the relevant auto-context (a paradigm shift). Therefore, the real challenge in adopting the bipartite-mind theory of performance excellence emanates not so much from the need to learn some new terminology but from the need to cross the chasm to a new auto-context from the implicit uniform-mind assumption to the explicit bipartite-mind assumption, which makes possible the creation of the bipartite-mind theory of performance excellence and the systematic performance-improvement techniques built upon it.

As illustrated in the following graphic, the new theoretical foundation will provide two crucial benefits over the current empirical foundation of performance improvement.

Theoretically-derived techniques provide the main new benefits. If the underlying theory effectively models known performance-improvement factors, techniques built upon it should reliably improve performance results. We must empirically validate all new techniques to make sure they work as projected and to select the most effective techniques. I have created many new techniques based on the bipartite-mind theory, and all of them worked immediately as predicted. An overview of some of these techniques can be found here. Many of the techniques are based on the underlying principle of counteracting feelings-based auto-self drives.

Putting a theoretical foundation under existing empirically-derived techniques creates the other type of benefit. The use of deadlines is an example of an empirically-derived technique for getting things done on time, which is a specific usage of the theoretically-derived “path of least discomfort.” The path of least discomfort is one form of the theoretically-derived counteracting principle. Deadlines help to validate the “path of least discomfort” and serve as a handy example that people can leverage to understand that theoretical principles now exists that may generalize and lead to extensions to other empirically-derived techniques they currently use.

For practical purposes, we can simplify our model for improving our automatic activities even further by eliminating any reference to the brain as illustrated in the following diagram.

Making improvements to our robot-like automatic activities now becomes using our thinking-self to transform our auto-self. This enables us tochange the underlying brain mechanisms that control our automatic activities without even considering the existence of the brain – thus avoiding the need to deal with the brain’s complexity and inaccessibility for most performance improvement purposes. We can achieve that task more effectively if we understand in considerable detail how the auto-self works at a fundamental level. The website CompleteLeadership.com outlined the properties of both the auto-self and thinking-self. The rest of this website provides more-detailed descriptions of the inner workings of our dual modes of thinking and acting starting here.