To reduce mental fatigue, reduce anxiety, and support healthy brain function of any individual, a clear intellectual thought is imperative. Efficiency and alertness combined with a sharp risk response mitigation is supported by this sailboat cerebral agility.
A very interesting concept that was written by Bart de Langhe, Stefano Puntoni, and Richard Larrick in the Harvard Business Review article “Linear Thinking in a Nonlinear World”2 comes to mind here. Their powerful sentence is given below:
“This is true for generalists and specialists alike, because even experts who are aware of nonlinearity in their fields can fail to take it into account and default instead to relying on their gut.”
This concept anchors deep into the T-shaped analogy given in Chapter 2 (Education Agility). While it is good to be an expert and a generalist, when there is a crisis, an environment that was not forecasted or foreseen on the horizon, anticipated codes or responses envisioned may not be deployable. Relying on one’s cerebrum and its multitude of capabilities saves the day, the organization, and ultimately every stakeholder. It is synonymous to the waterfall vs agile mindsets in a way. This is why we decided to include Cerebral Agility in our model.
There are times when you are stuck because there is a situation where you are at a loss as to how to answer or act or come up with solutions. In this moment, you have to give yourself time to think but you don’t have much time and what comes out of your mouth has to be Persuasive, Powerful, Credible, and Informative.
An organization thrives when there is a steady stream of think tanks looking for new ways to make the organization more efficient, responsive, and creative, to say the least. Obscure situations need quick responses—Emergency Room doctors need to think fast—cerebral agility is at its height here. Lives are at stake here. It is the same when there is a sudden explosion, hostage situations, fire, etc.
This kind of environment needs to be created in an organization to facilitate this agility. Highly innovative companies like Facebook, Ikea, Apple, and many more give their employees and temporary teams the freedom to make these decisions and develop and create new and innovative ideas. All organizations no matter whether they are a startup or been around for ages, in such scenarios, need to cultivate this environment as well.
Cerebral Agility fetches new viewpoints, shows ease in difficult and obscure situations, coming up with timely guidance. Here is the mantra that combines the ingredients to maturity—know more, read more, be curious—therein lies your adaptive achievement! When you want to have good ideas you need to have many ideas. Having options and ideas is a luxury. Keeping it in a repository radar screen, monitoring, generating more ideas to use, and gauging the ideas as and when it is needed. When we manage projects, we need to build interdisciplinary project teams that are able to generate new ideas and options on how to deliver consensus-driven projects.
Taking insights from “Julian Birkinshaw”3 we can further define and explore this agility as the “action-oriented organizations.” If one takes an organizational chart of any company, the structure shows various departments at the functional, departmental, and C-levels being responsible for different areas of the company. In the same manner, the cerebrum has different duties taken care of by varied sections. If there is perfect 360-degree integration, meaning all of the moving parts are coordinated and the boat is rowed in perfect rhythm by all the individuals, the success level of an organization is bound to be high. If one of the sections is amiss, therein comes the cerebral agility to make things right, as is the case for any organization where an outside consultant is called in or an in-house remedy is sought and implemented.
The capability of being agile in the moment makes the personal agility attributes expand itself to organizational agility. As is with individuals who are trendsetters, increasing the globalization of business with their out-of-the-box thinking. The dynamic complexity of how the brain and the mind work is quite simply genius, to put it mildly. So to cruise all the way from personal agility to organizational agility, the thoughts need to be at premortem, postmortem and the actual exercise of adoption, adaption levels within an individual and the organization in itself. It would be highly prudent to be revisiting these thought processes when taking the strides for each implementation. This will then lead to the adaption, adoption, adaption cycle to be sharpened.
Learning as you go with curiosity and being productive as an edifying endeavor with ideas formed out of brainstorming leads to imaginative creativity. Being brave during an urgency situation and having the boldness to be adaptive and clear at a circumstance thrown at a moment’s notice is what cerebral agility is all about. Performance for “on-the-spot projects” evidently needs this agility to be a triumph. To emerge as a success solution provider, cerebral agility thus needs a project’s and the organization’s stakeholders to have creativity and imagination at its helm. Whether it is a project, program, or portfolio management, when emergency conditions and states arise, team thinking skills, efforts to hasten clarity in such extreme circumstances, and inventive work are mandatory. Both dexterity and proficiency are to be honed as well. Some examples for achieving these are by:
- brain exercises,
- role-plays,
- drills,
- scenario modeling.
No one can be fully prepared for these extenuating situations. Here bravery and logic should prevail amidst the boldness to be adaptive to save the day miraculously.
Just as in the Information technology world the Agile Manifesto says “Working Software Over Comprehensive Documentation,” cerebral agility is of utmost importance when it comes to saving the unknown. All the documentations, processes, tools, methodologies, and so on and so forth in the world cannot bring back the life of a project. This is on the grounds that the minds and brains of the teams and individuals are not working in sync and thinking out of the box with the unusual and out of the norm situation at hand. Moreover, as the explanation of this agile manifesto goes, programmers would rather code than document. People and teams that are truly dedicated to the success of the projects and the organization’s performance want to find extraordinary ways to put the emergency situation back on the right track. They would rather try not to use the documented methods and sources. That will be a waste of time, energy, resources, etc.
“Over the years we have learned that if we asked people to rely on logic and common sense instead of on formal policies, most of the time we would get better results, and at lower cost. If you are careful to hire people who will put the company’s interests first, who understand and support the desire for a high-performance workplace, 97% of your employees will do the right thing. Most companies spend endless time and money writing and enforcing HR policies to deal with problems the other 3% might cause. Instead, we tried really hard to not hire those people, and we let them go if it turned out we’d made a hiring mistake. Adult like behavior means talking openly about issues with your boss, your colleagues, and your subordinates. It means recognizing that even in companies with reams of HR policies, those policies are frequently skirted as managers and their reports work out what makes sense on a case-by-case basis” says the company Netflix.4 This clearly draws full light into our cerebral agility beam because Netflix has statistics that show the reason why they are so insistent on high performance. They say, “In procedural work, the best are 2x better than average. In creative/inventive work, the best are 10x better than the average, so there is huge premium on creating effective teams of the best.”
To have the cerebral agility honed, some of the remedies that can be employed are:
- Take a deep breath and think before you act or speak.
- Exercise the entire cerebrum with brain games regularly to be agile at all times.
- Gear for nonlinear conditions even if linear circumstances are the norm in one’s space.
- Don’t let deviations that cannot be avoided no matter how uncomfortable to outsmart us just as the paleomammalian cortex is inseparable from the prefrontal cortex.
Industry Applications by International Practitioners and Academia for Cerebral Agility
One outcome that we want students to achieve is “critical thinking.” Learning to think critically is such an important skill. We use it every day to problem solve, critically analyze data, and how we can create meaningful communication in our organization to get our message across. This is the type of skill that business emphasize for hiring high performance employees.
Professor Linh Luong, Program Director of Master of Science in Project Management, University of SEATTLE
Having constant focus on organizational goals keep the creativity alive and allows the brain to think in a non-linear way by identifying, understanding and commiserating with the customer to come up with quick, clear, precise and to the point solution especially in a ‘out of the box’ situation. Design Thinking approach requires cerebral agility to build human-centric solutions. Cerebral agility helps in achieving higher degree of innovation through idea generation and critical thinking. It ties in with the “Time-to-market” - Expresses the organization’s ability to quickly deliver new capabilities, services, or products. The goal of looking at ‘Time-to-Market’ is to minimize the amount of time it takes for the organization to deliver value.
Gaurav Dhooper (PAL-I®, PMI-ACP®, SAFe4®, CSM®, LSS-GB)
Program Manager, RPA & Agile Practitioner at Genpact
INDIA
This agility helps us to develop the best we have inside ourselves. In our sector, we can embrace Cerebral Agility as a process that helps us to be more curious, develop the best in us, generate and provide new ideas and alternatives in our organization. These processes when adapted quickly and agilely to the changes and trends of our market can bring the organizational agility to its peak.
Rafael De La Rosa, Project-Portfolio Management Consultant,
PT. SMART tbk
INDONESIA / SPAIN
Data (analytics) is highly cerebral. Data is factual, and binary. It tells a concrete story. Putting data to good use requires a critical analysis of current data needs, and data gaps. Absent this insight, organizations will struggle to build and communicate meaningful stories about the impact of their data analysis.
Patrick N Connally, Director, Teradata, Philadelphia,
USA
Being cerebrally agile means being able to gauge the circumstance, modify behaviour and deliver the right information at the spur of the moment. For me, part of this comes naturally and partly I have trained myself. As the head of an agency it is important for me to make quick situational decisions about whether it is possible to accomplish the project at a given time, will it be profitable, what competencies will I need to complete it successfully, and where to find the right people at the affordable cost?
An example in my company would be to be Agile 360 (Agile360 degree feedback allows each individual to understand how agile an employee, coworker or staff member is viewed by others.). There was an instance where we needed subcontractors asap. What I did was to have the whole company brainstorm and bring to the table all the contractors we had used in the past and whoever had any connections with contractors. This emerged to be a great solution as we did solve the problem. It is just spontaneous thinking with the right resources.
Joanna Staniszewska CEO, You’ll Ltd.,
POLAND
You achieve results when your brain and your mind work in an agile manner. This takes effort. We need to constantly train our minds by being curious, finding out more, reading more and learning to generate new ideas. That is where cerebral agility comes in.
Makheni Zonneveld, Future Readiness Coach,
NETHERLANDS
It’s all about the right strategic projects, being undertaken at the right moment in time and for the right reasons whilst also accepting that those self same right projects, still have the capacity (through no fault of their own necessarily), to deliver the wrong results.
Paul Hodgkins, Executive Director, Paul Hodgkins Project Consultancy,