Our intention here is not to draw a comprehensive map of all the brain structures and processes in the 180 distinct brain regions identified by researchers. Instead, we offer this model of three sets of circuits as a metaphorical framework to explain brain functioning as it’s applicable to your meta-leadership practices.
We start with the survival circuits. When your brain perceives a threat, the survival circuits exert quick and instinctive control over your cognitive and physical functions. Adrenaline kicks in, your breathing accelerates, and your heartbeat quickens. Your being and body are in survival mode.
Resting in the center of your brain is the amygdala. This almond-shaped cluster of nuclei processes emotions and serves as your threat alert system. It remains relatively quiet until the instant it senses a threat—often before you are consciously aware of it. Then it immediately and automatically triggers two neural responses, one fast and one slow. The fast reaction instantly ignites your survival circuits, activating your instinctual and protective “triple-F” survival responses: freeze, flight, and fight. The slow response travels a neural pathway to the neocortex, where the available information can be more fully interpreted. The fast survival circuit signal is quicker and preempts other mental processes until immediate safety is assured.
The psychologist Daniel Goleman refers to this activation of the fast survival circuit as an “amygdala hijack.” Others refer to it as the “dinosaur brain” or the “grasshopper” in the brain. Our meta-leadership term is going to the basement.* This reference has roots in the thinking of Sigmund Freud, who described the deep subconscious as “the basement” of the mind. “Going to the basement” encapsulates the most primal instincts and behaviors. When Barry Dorn got that phone call at Fort Dix and heard about the explosions, he and the rest of his team went immediately to the basement.
The amygdala hijack is a deeply embedded stimulus-response mechanism that saved your ancestors—as well as other species—from threatening predators. The swiftest runners and the best fighters survived. Picture the triple-F impulses of a rabbit you encounter in the wild. When it senses you, a potential predator, it immediately freezes, a response that provides camouflage and lets the rabbit blend into its surroundings. The predator brain is primed to detect movement to identify prey. Thus, the freeze could be salvation for the prey. However, if you get too close, the rabbit doesn’t contemplate your intentions. It takes flight, bolting to escape because survival depends on speed. If all else fails and a predator snares the rabbit, it struggles to survive by fighting. When you go to the basement, the same innate, sequential freeze-flight-fight responses are activated in your brain.
A similar phenomenon happens to you when you’re threatened. There is an instant physiological response. For a moment, you freeze. Your brain is focused on survival. Your heartbeat is signaled to accelerate, and you unconsciously get ready for flight. Your breathing is rapid. Hormones surge through your body, preparing you to run. Sensing impending threat, you get ready to fight. It is difficult to break this reaction. It is instinctive. It is common to all animal species.
The Triple-F sequence—freeze, flight, fight—can be traversed in seconds, hours, or even days, depending on the situation, your training, and your experience. At Fort Dix, Barry Dorn initially froze at the news of the explosions. How would he treat them all? Might some die? Instantly, he was deep in the basement, and then he remembered: fleeing was not an option. He was a physician with a duty to treat the injured, his fellow service members. People were counting on him. He would have to overcome his internal fears and fight the external threat.
With the skills and confidence born of medical training and experience, Dorn assumed control of his brain. In disciplined fashion, he ignited his midbrain, what we call the workroom of learned and practiced protocols. His routine circuits triggered his neurological ascent back up from the basement by recalling oft-practiced sequential actions. Triage procedures for determining who to treat first, for example, transform overwhelming crisis into workable directions. When he said, “I can do this,” he remembered that he and the staff knew how to set priorities and treat these injuries. He reset his brain the way you might reboot your computer when it freezes. With focus and calm, he led others out of the basement, routine brain circuits firing. He had done this before. The hospital staff rapidly kicked into gear. “We can do this.”
With this brain reset, Barry switched on his executive circuits, which enabled him to tackle the complex problems of reorganizing personnel, reconfiguring facilities, and obtaining supplies. He ascended to what we call the laboratory of the brain: the neocortex and its executive functions. This highly advanced section of the brain is where complex data collection and analysis occur. To reach this advanced level of thinking, Barry needed first to calm his survival circuits by activating workroom problem-solving. Going from the basement to the laboratory is impossible without convincing the brain that it no longer has to focus on survival. His capacity to regain control of his brain propelled him quickly to strategic decisions and actions. He rallied the wide set of people and resources necessary to meet the situation at hand. It was meta-leadership at work. Lives were saved.
Getting Out of the Basement
Today you rarely encounter the ferocious jungle predators that once stalked your ancestors. Nevertheless, the instinctual mechanism that propels you into the basement is embedded in your mind. During an amygdala hijack, when other functions of the brain shut down, extraordinarily smart people can go to the basement, get stuck in the basement, and say or do the dumbest things, often to their later regret. The hijack could be triggered by an offensive email from a colleague, an argument, or a sudden and devastating cut in the departmental budget. Any perceived threat can ignite the reaction. When the threat is perceived to be big, the fall to the basement can be precipitous.
When survival circuits are in control, your world is simplified: all you perceive is danger and safety, good and bad, friend and foe. Your natural options are limited to primitive survival responses. If screeching brakes send you leaping from the street back onto the sidewalk, you appreciate your fast-system response. In less life-threatening circumstances—including your response to that offensive email—you are better served by disciplining your reaction.
You cannot assert control, however, until you get yourself up and out of the basement. As a meta-leader, you want to help others up and out of the basement as well. Leaders are counted on for their rational thinking and insight. You can’t do that when overtaken by the impulses of your survival circuits.
You descend to the basement regularly. If you are a parent, you’ve been sent there by an incessantly crying infant or a petulant teenager. You are cut off on the highway and you scream in rage, your survival circuits preempting a more measured response. Conflicts and frustrations at work can take a whole group of people to the basement. It is your threat response.
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with going to the basement. It is automatic and instinctual. You have little conscious say in the matter.
Never lead, negotiate, or make major life decisions when you are in the basement. The speech or decision you make when you are in the basement is the one you are most likely to regret. Remember, the problem is not in going to the basement. The problem is how deep you go, how long you are there, and what you do while in the basement.
The good news is that you can control the speed of your ascent out of the basement. You can consciously reset your neurocircuitry and restore disciplined thinking and behavior, thereby activating your routine and executive circuits.
Just as evolution built a high-speed neural pathway to your survival response, you can intentionally form and develop pathways to activate the slower systems that take you to your rational workroom and laboratory. Build disciplined, learned responses that enable you to quickly reassert higher-level thinking. Construct and embed patterns of thinking and acting—experiences—that stimulate your slow-system signal to catch up to and surmount
your Triple-F reaction.
This neuro-reset is deliberate and in your control. To reestablish the discipline of your brain’s routine and executive circuits, first acknowledge that an amygdala hijack has occurred. At times, you recognize it on your own. “I am in the basement!” shouts your inner voice. At other times, someone else—a colleague, spouse, or friend—alerts you: “You are in the basement!” You might resist (“I am not in the basement!”). You do so at your own peril. Your agitated tone and tense expression reveal that you are, in fact, in the basement.
Perceiving and admitting that your thinking has been hijacked is your first and most important step toward reestablishing your resilience. When you remember that you have only partial conscious control over your brain, you’re taking a critical step toward getting smarter about your brain.
Getting to the Reset
To start the neuro-reset in your brain, reach for something familiar that prompts self-confidence or composure through demonstrated competence. This could be a practiced task or protocol. This intentional pivot activates your routine circuits and calms your survival circuits with the message, “I can do it.” Just as the survival circuits take you to the basement, engage your routine circuits to take you to your brain’s workroom. Here you perform learned and well-rehearsed actions almost automatically. The pathway to your workroom is your trigger script—your brain reset process.
Your trigger script breaks your basement’s grip on you. It could be as simple as counting to ten or taking three deep breaths. It is what you learn to reach for automatically. For example, drivers are taught to steer into a skid to regain control of the automobile. It is the same with your brain.
As you learn to recognize the descent to the basement—the mental skid—so too can you learn to initiate your trigger script to reassert control. When a patient suffers a cardiac arrest in a hospital, an alarm is sounded: “Code Blue!” Someone is dying! That phrase serves as the trigger script for staff to follow preestablished protocols to treat the patient. The medical supply cart is positioned, staff members situate themselves around the patient, and everyone knows exactly what to do. The trigger script and the tools in your metaphorical workroom allow you to reactivate your routine fast brain, deactivate the panicked Triple-F response, and begin your ascent up and out of the basement. You begin to see and perceive more, and things start making sense again. There is the familiarity and comfort of the routine. Your brain is in a different state.
As a meta-leader, you are a role model. Your trained brain functioning encourages the same in your followers. In his discussion of emotional intelligence, Daniel Goleman describes mirror neurons, which imperceptibly communicate emotions and responses from one person’s brain to another’s. One brain can take another out of the basement, just as the process can work in reverse. For example, one petulant person complaining bitterly at a family reunion can put the whole roomful of people in the deepest part of the basement. They’ve implicitly received the signal: He’s in the basement sensing danger my brain doesn’t perceive, so just in case, I should go to the basement too.
Basement behavior is contagious. When you are leading, people mimic your actions and reactions. If you are panicked and agitated, followers duplicate that behavior, further complicating their return to productive thought and behavior.
By contrast, when you begin guiding the action with calm and confidence, you prompt a similar response from others. Engage people on the common ground of shared protocols or practiced routines to redirect their actions. If they are your followers, your encouragement points them toward joining in disciplined, constructive action. As you lead more and more people out of the basement, you generate a self-reinforcing feedback loop of rewarding momentum and progress that reassures and invigorates your followers. And pragmatically, guiding others out of the basement bolsters your own ascent. This is what Barry did at Fort Dix.
Once your routine circuits and those of your followers are fired up, you are best able to engage the slower frontal cortex executive circuits required for complex thinking and problem-solving. You are in the laboratory of your brain, learning and processing new information. With your analytic executive circuits engaged, you perceive gaps between what is and what could be. You have a clearer grasp of problems and solutions. You detect and create fresh options and alternatives while you navigate complexity, smartly adapting and innovating.
To build the mental muscle of your meta-leadership brain, spend some time learning about yourself. Carefully observe your own actions and reactions, tracing the circuitry of your fast brain and slow brain. What takes you down to the basement? What do you typically do while there? How can you better activate your trigger script and get yourself and others up to the workroom? How can you better calm yourself and others in order to activate the executive circuits and return to the laboratory of complex learning, thinking, and problem-solving? For instance, you may realize that you are more controlled at work—your job is on the line—and more emotionally uninhibited in the comfort of home.
Perspective is also gained by studying others, both those close to you and people at a distance. For example, if you review photographs of the immediate aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings, you see first responders demonstrating routine rehearsed reactions. Law enforcement officials draw their weapons and scan the crowd for more threats. Emergency medical personnel grab their kits and head toward the wounded. Firefighters race to their trucks to get on scene. Each of these individuals has trained to respond proactively to an emergency. By exercising well-rehearsed steps, they quickly get out of the basement, reestablish control over themselves, and act appropriately given the circumstances at hand.
What helps you reset your brain? Being mindful of what is happening in your brain may feel awkward at first. Soon you will find your awareness of the basement to be second nature. Intentional, methodic brain reset is a meta-leadership skill you can practice and master. The more you do it, the quicker you achieve the thinking needed in the midst of crisis, change, or complexity.
How might this brain circuitry work in a crisis less dramatic than the multiple casualty event at Fort Dix? Imagine that you are heading to the office on Monday morning. You are relaxed after a lovely social weekend. The only task looming is a presentation to the senior management team on a proposed reorganization, and that is not scheduled until later in the week. There is plenty of time to prepare.
You are settled into your seat on the bustling commuter train when your phone rings. It is your assistant. “Have you seen the email?” she asks insistently. You are perplexed. Trying to keep work off your mind until you get to the office, you intentionally hadn’t looked at your emails. “Thursday’s presentation has been moved to today,” she continues. “Eleven o’clock this morning. What are we going to do? We’ll never be ready!”
A moment ago there were four days to prepare. Now there are about three hours. You go straight to the basement. “Did you make a mistake with the date?” you demand. “Don’t blame this on me,” she shoots back. Thoughts run through your mind: Is this sabotage by the CFO, who has his own ideas about reorganization? Was it a mistake not to cancel those weekend plans and work on the presentation instead? What will be the consequences if the presentation falls flat? All of senior management will be there.
First, pause. Recognize that you are in the basement. Stop blaming yourself or your assistant. Time is valuable, too valuable to spend pointing fingers. Go for your trigger script. Take three deep breaths. Feel yourself relax. Apologize to your assistant and ask her to have the team ready in the conference room when you arrive in twenty minutes. Remind yourself that you have successfully presented to this group before (“I can do this”). Remember what made those presentations well received. You’ll follow the same patterns and routines, just this time much faster. You have a competent group of staff who know how to work fast (“we can do this”). Emerging from your basement, you go straight to your mental workroom—and get to work with confidence.
<
br /> Use the remaining time on the train to organize a plan and jot down thoughts you’ve worked on since you reviewed the last draft of the presentation. When you get to the office, stop before walking into the conference room. Take a moment to ensure that you are out of the basement. When you enter, thank your team and then calmly give direction to help them ascend from the basement. Step by intentional step, turn the preliminary work into a polished presentation. One person can incorporate your notes and finish the slides. Another can proofread the final documents. While your staff members are working, rehearse your presentation, making sure to have a compelling opening and a memorable close. You are now at your highest level of thinking and preparing, with your executive circuits completely lit up. Your brain is under control, and so too is the situation.
Understanding Heuristics and Memory
Your brain’s circuitry and information-processing system—the basement for survival, the workroom for routine activities, and the laboratory for executive thinking—shape your leadership behaviors. You become more intentional and disciplined as your awareness of these cognitive processes increases. Your grasp of cognitive limitations is a strength that helps you better understand and influence the decisions and actions of followers.
As we discussed earlier, the brain is subject to cognitive biases that shape your perceptions of what is happening. These biases direct your thinking along preestablished cognitive pathways. They prioritize efficiency at the expense of precision and accuracy. In evolutionary terms, fast and good enough was a better survival strategy than slow and perfect.
You're It Page 12