Episode 30: Kristen Hansen, Neuroscience, Leadership and Performance.

Love it.

So this is a while ago since you wrote this book.

Has the science changed a lot since then?

The science is rapidly changing.

So I first published it in 2017.

So that was really early days in terms of people talking about neuroscience.

When I first started talking about it, it was, you know, in 2010 or so.

And I started an interest group that ended up being hosted by Google.

Once a quarter we started talking about the neuroscience of leadership and And that was very early.

But even by 2017, it was still new.

Like, what do you mean talking about neuroscience and leadership? So we did do a few revisions.

So the version that we have currently is 2023.

However, even since then, there's also been obviously a lot.

So neuroscience is exploding at a rate of knots that like anything, this sort of science, we're really understanding more and more daily about how our brains work.

you know, the brain doesn't change that much.

So everything in that is still obviously really current and works well and we still train really all of the content in our book.

Yeah, it's really an ascendancy, isn't it? People having a lot more of a deeper dive into neuroscience and neurophysiology and it's a fascinating area of which I know very little.

Why do you think that is? Why is this the sudden link between neuroscience and leadership and a deep dive into that?

Yeah, it's a good question.

Look, the first time that neuroscience and leadership that I'm aware of combined for a conversation was in around 2006.

And David Rock of the Neuroleadership Institute did spearhead that conversation in a lot of ways between neuroscience and leadership.

And it then exploded because it helped us understand the all the things we didn't understand, why we said the wrong thing at the wrong time, why we couldn't speak when we wanted to speak, what performance in our teams was working and why and when it wasn't working.

It really explained a lot of the stuff that we needed to understand.

So modern neuroscience also exploded from a technology point of view because previously we had We had MRIs, which were more a static study of the brain.

The functional magnetic resonance imaging scan started seeing where blood flow was going and what was happening at different times when you did different activities.