Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do by Daniel M. Cable

 Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do by Daniel M. Cable

Exploring, experimenting, learning: this is the way we’re designed to live. And work, too. The problem is that our organizations weren’t designed to take advantage of people’s seeking systems. 

When we feel an urge to try new things and learn as much as possible about our environments, our seeking circuits are firing. According to Martin Seligman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, zest leads people to live life with a sense of excitement, anticipation, and energy.9 When we feel zestful, we see life or work as an adventure. And we approach new situations and changes with enthusiasm and excitement instead of apprehension and anxiety.

Professor Kent Berridge at the University of Michigan, who spent more than twenty years figuring out how the brain experiences a pleasure, concluded that the mammalian brain has separate systems for what he calls wanting and liking.18 Wanting is Berridge’s terminology for the seeking system, whereas the liking system is the brain’s reward center. When we experience the pleasure of a reward, it is the opioid system, rather than the dopamine system, that is being stimulated. These systems lead to very different effects: dopamine has an animating effect; opiates induce a happy stupor

Fine-tuned measurements that are tied to rewards and punishments allow organizations to direct employees and exploit the knowledge and processes that already are known to work. Because fine-tuned control that exploits existing processes makes it hard for workers to explore and experiment with new alternatives. By definition, the outcomes of experimenting and playing are uncertain, distant, and often negative. Biologically, this inhibits our creativity and desire to play. We just don’t ever feel like there is enough time to explore if our behaviors and outcomes are all tightly mapped out in advance, with financial and career implications if we miss them

Fine-tuned measurements that are tied to rewards and punishments allow organizations to direct employees and exploit the knowledge and processes that already are known to work. Because fine-tuned control that exploits existing processes makes it hard for workers to explore and experiment with new alternatives. By definition, the outcomes of experimenting and playing are uncertain, distant, and often negative. Biologically, this inhibits our creativity and desire to play. We just don’t ever feel like there is enough time to explore if our behaviors and outcomes are all tightly mapped out in advance, with financial and career implications if we miss them

In an IBM poll of CEOs worldwide, creativity was identified as the single most important leadership trait for success. So, leaders, these days know they need innovation. But in reality, they punish the behaviors that could lead to experimentation and innovation. By definition, experiments are unpredictable and often do not work to plan (which is, of course, exactly how experiments lead to learning). This is why it is easy for managers to dislike creativity when we are afraid of not hitting monthly revenue or weekly delivery targets

As powerful as self-affirmation and self-expression are in improving our stories about ourselves and changing our behaviors, there’s a way to increase their effects. In a series of studies, Julia Lee, a professor at the University of Michigan, found that those who undergo relational best-self activation experience stronger immune responses, enhanced creative problem solving (over 200 percent improvement), and significantly less anxiety and negative physiological arousal.

Research shows that when people identify and use their unique strengths, they report feeling more alive or intensely alive. Second, if we feel like work is more like real life, complete with intrinsic motivation and positive emotions, we’re more apt to help our organizations adapt, innovate, and stay relevant.

Self-expression organizations activate employees’ seeking systems, resulting in enthusiasm and the intrinsic motivation to invest their best back into the companies

Employers should create best-self reports for employees and for new teams, and then encourage employees to re-craft their jobs so they can play to their strengths. Employers can legitimize self-expressive job titles from the top down, as employees customize their jobs and their job titles from the bottom up. Leaders can encourage teams to openly discuss the unique qualities of each team member, and include members’ perspectives into the group’s decision making. These are evidence-based ways that employees can engage meaningful parts of their self-concepts within the standards of their business environment.

According to affective neuroscientists Jason Wright and Jaak Panksepp, one way to activate people’s seeking systems is to create an experimental safe zone that includes play and supportive social bonding. to get people to change their mindsets and their behaviors, you need to diminish their negative emotions and let them experiment with something new in order to learn some new behaviors.

Experimental safe zones also created intrinsic motivations, which are much more powerful than extrinsic motivations because they unleash creativity. Instead of working hard for fear of losing their jobs (extrinsic), Luigi and his colleagues were fueled by their own enthusiasm and curiosity (intrinsic). This in turn transformed their attitudes about the change.3 Instead of being skeptical—as they were at the beginning—by the end, they were itching to explore and take the experiments farther.  Curiosity is a potent emotion. And when everyone on a team is curious, they are more likely to move away from their comfort zones and old habits and work together in new ways.

Compared with all the other animals, humans are the ones doing all the changes. When you look at our species’ behavior relative to the others, we’re the change animals. This seems to be the outcome when our seeking systems (which other mammals share) teams up with the prefrontal cortex (the new part of our brain that lets us simulate the future, which other mammals don’t share).9 Put these two parts of the brain together, and humans are biologically wired for innovation and change.

Due to the seeking system, the feeling of purpose increases our enthusiasm, intrinsic motivation, and resilience. On average, our ancestors who were good at resisting deception and detecting sincerity in others were probably less likely to get tricked, and more likely to survive and have resources for their children. So it’s pretty likely that we evolved into effective authenticity-detection machines: we are attracted to authenticity and repulsed by insincerity. 

When it comes to the stories we tell ourselves, the why of our behaviors is a more powerful story than the how. Both philosophy and empirical research suggest that the higher our level of interpretation or construal, the more we will stick with it when the going gets hard. When we personally understand and believe in the why of our actions, we have greater resilience and stamina when the going gets tough.

s Friedrich Nietzsche said, “He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how". When we personally understand and believe in the why of our actions, we have greater resilience and stamina when the going gets tough.  If your day starts getting busy with meetings and other demands: it’s painful to try and keep that forty-five minutes open for exercise and a shower. And so when the schedule gets tight, the exercise gets cut. But what happens if your story about exercise is “to make my day better with endorphins”? Endorphins are morphine-like chemicals produced by the body during exercise that trigger positive feelings.

The broader point is to think about how the same behaviors and activities take on very different meanings to us depending on the stories we tell ourselves about what we are doing. If we choose more meaningful stories about our work based on personal experience and interpretations of our impact, we can light up our seeking systems and change our motivation, perseverance, and resilience in the face of adversity.

The purpose experiences described above were successful for a number of reasons: They allowed employees to witness the impact of their jobs firsthand. They also encouraged employees to develop and try out new ideas, which made their work feel more meaningful. As a result, they were able to develop deeper and more personal narratives about why they do what they do.

This is the power of purpose: it activates the seeking system and makes life feel better, as we saw in the company stories recounted throughout this book

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