For a few 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 its resistance and stability over time. However, as the years went by, they became increasingly “liquid”, as Bauman postulated (Z. Bauman 2015) and, at the beginning of the 21st century, they practically became gaseous. In today’s organizations, uncertainty is inevitable. However, neurosciences can help us to face this new reality .

Companies, in the face of 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 from 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 where at the moment the organizations are developed is more similar to a plasma or, said in another way, a state of the highly energetic and totally dissociated matter.

This being the case, the main need that those responsible for organizations have today is to find the optimal way to modify the structure to adapt it to this new scenario and that the organization can 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&I, new markets, export, alliances, acquisitions). Interestingly, that is exactly what our brains have been doing successfully for millions of years.

This conceptual similarity, together with the significant advances we have achieved in the field of neuroscience and in our understanding of the nervous system, can help us a lot in that 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 refined throughout the process of evolution, and transfer it to the level of organizations. Thus, we must identify the functional elements and strategies that make our mind a powerful adaptation tool and replicate them in our organizational designs at different levels and scales.

Some of the high-level neuroscientific models developed recently (Garcés & Finkel, 2019), can help us in this task, since they clearly define the different functional elements and the dynamics they give rise to 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 , allowing us to take advantage of the knowledge that nature itself has already selected as effective.

Bibliographic references:

  • Bauman, Z. (2015). Modernidad líquida. Fondo de cultura económica. http://bookfi.net/dl/1382252/9882bd.
  • Garcés, M., y Finkel, L. (2019). Teoría emocional de la racionalidad. Fronteras de la Neurociencia Integrativa, 13. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnint.2019.00011.
  • Stiehm, Judith H. y Townsend, Nicholas W. (2002). La Escuela de Guerra del Ejército de los Estados Unidos: La educación militar en una democracia. Temple University Press, pág. 6.