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I have talked a lot in the past about the Neurobabble Fallacy. I know this makes many people uncomfortable. I have friends and family in the Neuro-something business. There is neuro-marketing, neuro-leadership and neuro-lots-of-things. Some of that stuff is legitimate. For example, understanding how cognitive systems react to signals and applying this to advertising. If you want to call that neuro-marketing, so be it. But beyond those prosaic aims, there is a whole industry of neuro-anything that aggressively attempts to legitimize itself by bringing in pop-neurosciences to dinner every day.

Neuro-leadership is one of those suspects. It tries to link brain functionality to leadership. Of course brain functionality can be linked to anything that has a brain. Since we are not quite sure what that thing called ’leadership’ is about, the linkage is a tricky one.

Are there correlations between the firing of those neurons, the waking up of those circuits and feeling rewarded by a business achievement? You bet. Do those circuits also fire when gambling and wining? Most likely. And after a good date on Saturday night?? Yep. Does it mean that gambling can be understood by studying business achievement? Why not? The other way around? Dating? Why not. So… are we then talking ‘rewarding systems’ in the brain? You bet. OK!

Wait a minute! Are we perhaps talking correlation? That makes a lot of sense. However, just to remind everybody, there is a strong correlation between the number of people who drowned by falling into a pool and the number of films in which Nicolas Cage appeared. Which does not link swimming pool safety with film making. For other correlation data such as the strong connection between the divorce rate in Maine, and the per capita consumption of margarine, visit this.

I am making enemies by the minute. I know. I am oversimplifying. Yes. Maybe. Apologies, neuro-friends. I am certainly disgusted by the amount of neuro-bullshit that leadership/management and other disciplines built upon shaky foundations are willing to swallow to legitimise themselves.

Do I have any qualifications to have an opinion on these bridges too far? In my previous professional life I was a clinical psychiatrist with special interest in psychopharmacology. I used to teach that stuff in the University. I then did a few years in R&D in pharmaceuticals. I then left those territories to run our Organizational Architecture company, The Chalfont Project. I have some ideas about brains, and some about leadership and organizations. I insist, let both sides have a good cup of tea together, but when the cup of tea is done, go back to work to your separate offices.

The transferability of models between disciplines is not a sin. But I remind everybody of Alan Sokal’s ‘Intellectual Impostors’. Here is an old summary of mine:

The “Sokal Syndrome”: Intellectual nudity, Intellectual Impostures, Mind Grafitters and Airport Books Business School Graduates

And if you have time The hard sell of a big theme supported by dubious, incoherent but dramatically presented evidence

I will neuro-stop my ranting now

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  1. Paul Brasington

    I wonder if the attraction of neurobabble is rooted in what Iain McGilchrist would argue is a characteristic left brain urge to impose control through over-simplification (I’m paraphrasing a complex argument here) – here suddenly is the prospect of cutting through all that messy human stuff, reducing it to something more mechanical and so predictable, by routinely confusing correlation with causation.
    It matters a lot because it seems this stuff has gained some traction, despite its evident banality and conceptual naivety. Here’s something from a publication put out under the aegis of the Engage and Prosper organisation, a typical passage which seeks to show the value of neuroscience in internal communication.
    “When you create supportive and collaborative environments, the brains of employees can process information more quickly and more easily, leading to effective change. But if the brains of employees perceive the workplace or their role within it as a threat, then comfort, motivation and satisfaction are all likely to decrease.”
    All you have to do is remove the phrase “the brains of” from each sentence and you’re just left with a statement of the bleedin’ obvious. But it’s worse than banal, because it tries to turn the complexity of real people into something we’d understand as less than fully human, a mere organ which we can understand through chemistry and a glorified location map, rather than harder work of human observation and interaction. In its roundabout way it’s trying to reintroduce FW Taylor’s notion of the business as a machine, rather than a complex living and constantly evolving organism. I know that’s ironic when you might have thought thinking about brains would emphasise the organic as well as the complex, but the way neuroscience is being used seems essentially reductive rather than enlightening.
    I’m a writer, not a behavioural scientist, but I’ve been working in this area long enough, and have enough basic philosophical rigour to know when some really sloppy thinking is being pushed as insight. If you haven’t come across him by the way (and I appreciate you may well have done) McGilchrist is well worth reading. I know his left/right hemisphere model has been attacked as an over-simplification, but that’s to miss his point that he’s talking more or less metaphorically by that point, attempting to describe a cultural disposition rather than a physical fact. It’s a disposition which tells us quite a lot about management ideas and their common distortions.

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