Body
In this area our studio makes perhaps its most dramatic distinction. Here's how:
When leadership come under scrutiny, the root causes of massive aberrations are normally contextual. Take the relatively large economic crisis (autumn of 2008) as an example: bankers, brokers, traders, economists and academics facilitated the production of extremely complex financial instruments (and derivatives); very high risk products were able to find the backing of government securities and A grade paper by means of a scientifically tested software (CDO Software), designed to evaluate the quality of financial products. None of these people, in the context of the implementation of these products, meant to invoke a catastrophe... yet they did. This crisis (along with many others) offers an elegant insight about leadership: that it is highly contextual. In theory, these economic/financial products were ok. Scientists designed and "tested" them. Everyone was trading them, and there was no intention to wreak havoc on the global financial system. But in practice, within another context, like the chaos of the marketplace, that is exactly what happened.
A common examination and response to this situation looks something like this:
Step 1) Use human psychology to tool and design a product that makes money, a product made for a complex, modern marketplace and which uses human ingenuity and behavior to provide a valuable service.
Step 2) Watch that product fail.
Step 3) Re-tool the psychology of the product to make another one that works better...
Where does this progression err gravely?
Our answer is in Step 3. Steps 1 and 2 are natural in the process of learning. At this stage in history, however, we cannot afford as leaders, or as a society, to keep repeating Step 3.
Psychology and brain chemistry remain the same throughout invention and implementation. This is not a problem of psychological adaptation as most leadership experts would argue. It is a problem of context.
Our work seeks to provide the tools needed to make radical decisions in new contexts. This requires going below the common intellectual tools of psychology and self-help. It requires a journey into the context of behavior, which, we will argue throughout our training, is not seated in the mind, but in the body and nervous system. If we are to truly respond to these crises and modify our behavior, it will be through our physiology, on the cellular level.
Next: Mind
