Can neuroscience help us redesign our organizations?

Companies and organizations can learn from neuroscience to adapt to change.

For some years now, all those responsible for designing and implementing organizational strategies have been aware that something has changed forever.

To use an analogy, in the middle of the last century, organizations could be likened to a diamond, because of their resistance and stability over time. However, over the years, they became increasingly "liquid", as postulated by Bauman (Z. Bauman 2015) and, well into the 21st century, they have practically become gaseous. In today's organizations, uncertainty is inevitable. However, neuroscience can help us deal with this new reality..

Companies, faced with an increasingly unstable environment

The current challenges to attract and retain talent, to keep up with innovation, to discover new niches in a globalized market or to protect those already conquered in the face of increasingly undefined challenges have become continuous.

This new context has been called "VUCA".a term of military origin and an acronym for Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (Stiehm & Townsend 2002). Continuing with the analogy, we could say that the environment in which organizations are currently developing is more like a plasma or, in other words, a highly energetic and totally dissociated state of matter.

This being the case, the main need of today's organizational managers is to find the optimal way to modify the structure of the organization's structure. to find the optimal way of modifying the structure to adapt it to this new scenario so that the organization can and enable the organization to survive, or even grow.

And this is where neuroscience can find a new application, beyond helping us to develop Artificial Intelligence. Following a transdisciplinary approach, we can say that organizations are very similar to the nervous system of living beings..

Neuroscientific models applied to organizations

Organizations receive information from the environment (markets, competition, regulations, etc.), process it and decide whether it is beneficial or threatening, and respond accordingly, either by doing what they already know how to do (production, operations, marketing, distribution or sales) or by developing new strategies or products (R&D, new markets, exports, alliances, acquisitions). Interestingly, this is exactly what our brains have been doing successfully for millions of years.

This conceptual resemblance, together with the significant advances we have made in the field of neuroscience and in our understanding of the nervous system, can help us greatly in the difficult task we have identified as a priority: restructuring our organizations..

To do so, we need to take advantage of all that knowledge that nature has purified throughout the process of evolution, and transfer it to the field of organizations. Thus, we must identify the functional elements and strategies that make our minds a powerful adaptive tool and replicate them in our organizational designs. and replicate them in our organizational designs at different levels and scales.

Some of the recently developed high-level neuroscientific models (Garcés & Finkel, 2019), can help us in this work, given that they clearly define the different functional elements and the dynamics to which they give rise when they interact, allowing us to identify the key factors that affect their functioning. These models can be easily replicated on a small scale, and gradually implemented throughout the organizational structure. implemented throughout the organizational structure, allowing us to take advantage of the knowledge that nature itself has already selected as effective.

Bibliographical references:

• Bauman, Z. (2015). Modernidad líquida. Fondo de cultura económica. http://bookfi.net/dl/1382252/9882bd.
• Garcés, M., & Finkel, L. (2019). Emotional Theory of Rationality. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 13. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnint.2019.00011.
• Stiehm, Judith H. and Townsend, Nicholas W. (2002). The U.S. Army War College: Military Education in a Democracy. Temple University Press. p. 6.