Combine your inner wisdon, gut instinct and mental intelligence for effective decision making by Victor Marino.

We make up to 10,000 decisions every day – some of them momentus many of them trivial. Around 200 are about tea and coffee – caffeinated or decaf, grande or regular. It does not matter (too much) if you get your coffee wrong but when it comes to your work, team, finances and health, the implications can be bigger. For most decisions our own mental processing and intuition will guide us quite successully. But bigger decisions require a more complex set of insights.

Drowning in the deluge

Every moment of every day we are deluged by information. In 2008 we were consuming three times as much information as we were in 1960. In 2012, more than 204 million emails were sent every minute of every day. In 2020 we’ll be producing 44 times more data than we do today. The constant drip, ping, ring that surrounds us creates a compromised environment of ‘continuous disruption’. This is having a profund effect on our ability to concentrate, think, plan and decide. Our stone-age-designed bodies can’t cope. Confronted with endless data – our hearts beat faster, our breathing becomes shallow, our bodies shift into crisis mode. Making decisions becomes difficult as we can’t access our inner wisdom unincumbered from all the noise.

Wise decisions

Recent neuroscience has uncovered that we have complex and functional neural networks – or ‘brains’ – in our heart and gut as well as our head. And that these are just as critical to effective decision making as our minds. We all recognise the situation where someone is selling us a plausible line about the latest best-in-class product – but our gut is telling us something is wrong. To make effective decisions it is key to access and utilise the power of all our intelligence centres.Grant Soosalu and Marvin Oka, in their seminal book mBraining ‘Using your multiple brains to do cool stuff’, show that effective leaders use the three centres – head, heart and gut – naturally but not always consciously. When the 3 ‘brains’ are aligned and coherent leaders operate at their most effective. When they are misaligned, decisions and judgement can become impaired. These three centres each have their own specialist functions: Head brain – for executive decisions, including analytical thought and strategy Heart brain – for passion, relationships and values; Gut brain – for courage, motivation and action.

Evidence of the different centres is littered throughout our vernacular: ‘Listen to your gut instinct’, ‘follow your heart’, ‘deep in my heart I know’, ‘my gut is telling me something is wrong’. But in the complex and volatile business environment, leaders can overlook the intuitive and innate intelligence of their other brains. Often at work there is a dissonance between the desires of the heart and logic of the head and the sense of self that comes from our gut. In the West, we don’t much like to embrace the heart in the office but working with the heart’s wisdom is where mBraining begins. In an organisational context, using the gut to do a heart-based job is often evidenced in the CEO who has a voracious appetite for growth. They typically have high-risk drives combined with a strong bias for action through mergers and acquisitions (along with the big office and fast cars). The heart governs relationships, values and engagement, while the head takes the heart’s desires to build a vision and a strategy to get there. The gut then brings the whole plan to fruition through action. Leaders who overlook the sensitivities of the heart do so at a cost – as it leaves the head with no underpinning ethos to build a visionary plan. The gut is can then run amok with either chaotic or self-focused action. This scenario led to some of the spectacular failures as we saw in the financial crisis of 2008: leaders were driven by profit (gut) and the system (head) above purpose (heart) or any indeed real connection to their customers or staff (also heart). This disconnected way of working almost brought the Western economy to its knees. 

Difficult decisions

So where does that leave you when it comes the art of making the right call on a complex decision or a course of action? The experts don’t necessarily help. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman, noble prize-winner and author of the bestselling book Thinking Fast and Slow, believes many senior managers unconsciously think fast which is prompted by gut instinct and this can often lead to hasty and sometimes disastrous decisions. On the other hand, Malcolm Gladwell, the author of Blink, Outliers and Tipping Point strongly advocates trusting your intuition and gut instinct. So, who is right? The answer is both of them. However, it is the skill of application where the real power of effective decision-making is to be found. This is where mBraining comes in. When you know the problem and the solution then thinking fast is the most productive and efficient approach to the task in hand. When the problem is complex and ambiguous you need to take the problem on a reflective tour of your multiple brains to clarify if your intelligence networks are aligned. mBraining enables you to combine intuition with analysis and fast with slow thinking providing a much stronger base for safer, clear and wise decisions.

Multiple brain insight

Using methodologies from cognitive linguistics and behavioural modelling, mBraining is a comprehensive system for communicating with and integrating the intelligence of all three brains. It starts with balanced breathing to access the intelligences – tuning into each of them and enabling each to ‘talk to’ the other. This gets them aligned and facilitates the brains to function at their ‘highest expression’ (head: creativity, heart: compassion, gut; courage). When this is achieved, the person’s innate intuitive wisdom emerges and the quality of their decisions and actions becomes adaptively and generatively different. What’s crucially important is that the highest expressions are only activated when you are in an optimal state of neurological balance, or what is defined as ‘autonomic coherence’. This is when you’re neither too stressed nor too relaxed, but are in a ‘flow state’.

When not in engaged or aligned, one brain can ‘take over’ the functions of another. Melissa, a HR manager in her mid-30s, came for mBraining coaching because of issues to do with compulsive overeating. She opened up with ‘Something’s wrong with me, I can’t seem to help myself’. Mellissa did use her heart for connection and empathy, but she used her gut to determine what she wanted in life – which is a heart-based function. This led to over indulgence and a challenge with control. Using the mBraining techniques she was able to access more of what she wanted in her life rather than short circuit her desires for life through food. We are all clever enough dealing with the complex challenges of modern life and its seemingly endless demands. Business doesn’t need more ‘cleverness’ what it needs more of is wisdom. Wisdom comes from a more holistic approach to human and organisational life enabling us to make more effective decisions and take the best course of action. Balancing our heads, hearts and guts is the route map for us to be more creative, more compassionate and more courageous – at work, at home and in life. The mBraining process can help make you wiser and more effective. Though when it comes to your coffee choice it’s a safe bet to rely on your gut instinct.