Do you ever feel as if you are on a different wave length from your prospect, client, colleague, staff, or audience? Do people look at you with frustration when you share your plan for solving a problem?
In the 1990s communication theory was reborn in the form of a neuroscientific concept called whole-brain thinking. Since then thousands of Fortune 500 and other companies have used this approach to increase skills in communication, problem solving, collaboration, and increased productivity and satisfaction.
The whole-brain concept states that the hemispheres in the brain process information in different ways. The left hemisphere processes verbal, logical, quantitative, and analytical thought, while the right addresses visual, spatial, creative, and holistic thought. Each of us has a brain dominance wherein we lean toward or prefer one style of thought processing.
One reason the whole-brain approach is having a positive impact on corporate America is that operational reality and stereotyped perceptions often clash violently. Business formula and entrepreneurial thinking tend not to mix. The result of Apple Computer, for example, was not the result of a staid business formula.
How we think affects our perception of the best ways to communicate and collaborate. How we communicate causes people to move toward us or away from us.
For example, if you talk to a right-brained person about details, numbers, facts, and sequences, they will tend to tune you out, experience actual physiological stress, and want to shout, “What is the point you are trying to make?!” On the other hand, if you talk to a left-brained person about pictures, metaphors, analogies, the “big picture” first, they will feel like hopping up and down in frustration, shouting, “But how are you going to get there?!”
The business implications of the [whole-brain] approach are varied and numerous,” says Mansfield (Manny) Elkind, formerly senior manager of experimental projects at Polaroid Corporation. Elkind, the CEO and President of MindTech, Inc., believes the individual’s thinking preference should be a priority consideration because people have different styles.
“Each thinker approaches problems differently and describes the problem, process, and solution differently. As a result, collaboration and communication can be difficult if the differences are not acknowledged and addressed.”
Elkind using the HBDI Profile fosters thinking flexibility, strategic thinking, shifting perspective, and integrating core values with individuals, teams, and executives. The HDBI is a brain-dominance profile created by Ned Herrmann, of Herrmann International, which looks at thinking categories of facts, form, feelings, and future. It took this profile with Elkind years ago and the result were precisely how I prefer to think.
What thinking preferences tell us is that in business and personal life we must recognize and appreciate that there are many ways to approach, describe, and process concepts and tasks. Knowing that differences exist, each person can then make an effort to get the information across to the other in a form that is more easily grasped. But ultimately the goal is the joint action of the two styles working together to produce a synergy to increase overall effectiveness.
Executives with this training and teams composed of left- and right-brained people have a greater potential for producing greater and richer perspectives and decision options. According to Elkind MindTech, whole-brain thinkers “perceive thinking differences as opportunities, not problems, with applications to their whole life system.”
