(Editor’s Note: as part of our Author Speaks Series, you can enjoy below a stim­u­lat­ing excerpt from the new book The Brain Advan­tage: Become a More Effec­tive Busi­ness Leader Using the Lat­est Brain Research).

Brain-imaging tech­niques allow researchers to wit­ness the brain’s activ­ity reflected in a rain­bow of col­ors on a com­puter screen. When brain cells are highly active ”work­ing harder” the result shows up as brighter col­ors on the com­puter screen. Bril­liant reds and yel­lows indi­cate brain areas that are most active. In con­trast, the blues and greens on a scan show a qui­eter, less active brain.

What would we expect to find if we exam­ined the brain scans of peo­ple with high ver­sus aver­age IQ scores? We might pic­ture the active brain of an Ein­stein as a hotbed of smol­der­ing col­ors ”but we’d be wrong. Neu­rol­o­gist Richard Restak sum­ma­rized a UCLA study that com­pared indi­vid­u­als with high IQs to those with aver­age IQs. Restak wrote, The researchers started off with the seem­ingly rea­son­able idea that ‘smarter brains work harder, gen­er­ate more energy, and con­sume more glu­cose. Like light bulbs, the brains of bright peo­ple were expected to illu­mi­nate more intensely than those of dimwits with a reduced wattage.  What they dis­cov­ered instead was exactly the oppo­site. Higher IQ peo­ple had cooler, more sub­dued brain scans “while their less intel­lec­tu­ally gifted coun­ter­parts lit up like minia­ture Christ­mas trees..

Why would smarter brains work less hard? One strong bet is that when we are inex­pe­ri­enced ”when we still have a lot to learn”we have to make a con­scious effort to think about what we’re doing. But later, after we’ve become more adept, much of what ini­tially took effort becomes automatic.

The good news is that func­tion­ing on autopi­lot allows us to expend less brain energy on the rou­tine aspects of the work. Our exper­tise allows us to direct our energy else­where. For exam­ple, novices use dif­fer­ent parts of their brains than experts do. This hap­pens in areas as dif­fer­ent as play­ing chess and swing­ing a golf club.These stud­ies show that less-experienced peo­ple think more about car­ry­ing out the mechan­ics of the task and encod­ing information.Experts, on the other hand, func­tion on auto­matic pilot in these areas. In fact, experts some­times fal­ter “flub­bing a bas­ket­ball free throw or a golf put” when their focus shifts back to the mechanics.

So func­tion­ing on autopi­lot can be a great advan­tage. But it can also work against us. As men­tioned in chap­ter 1, inter­na­tional rock climber Lynn Hill was prepar­ing to climb a wall in Buoux, France in 1989. She threaded her rope through her har­ness but then, instead of tying the knot, she stopped to put on her shoes. While tying her shoes, she talked to another woman. The thought occurred to me that there was some­thing I needed to do before climb­ing, she later recalled.29 But Hill dis­missed the thought and climbed the wall. When she leaned back to rap­pel to the ground, she fell seventy-two feet. For­tu­nately, tree branches broke her fall and Hill survived.

Lawrence Gon­za­les, who tells this story in his book Every­day Sur­vival, points out that more train­ing would not have helped Lynn Hill. “In fact,” as Gon­za­les writes, “expe­ri­ence con­tributed to her acci­dent.” She could tie her rope to her har­ness on autopi­lot but the sim­i­lar­ity between tying shoes and tying the rope “tricked” her brain into think­ing she had done what she needed to do.

So there are two sides to our abil­ity to func­tion on autopi­lot. Doing so can lead to major mis­takes, as Lynn Hill’s story illus­trates. On the other hand, there are dis­tinct ben­e­fits as well. When we are try­ing to become more expert, in many cases our goal is to get good enough so that we can be on autopilot!

Inter­est­ing, but so what?

How can I use this infor­ma­tion as a busi­ness leader?

Among their many chal­lenges, lead­ers have two key respon­si­bil­i­ties: devel­op­ing their peo­ple and increas­ing effi­ciency. Increas­ing effi­ciency often involves stan­dard­iz­ing, automat­ing or sim­pli­fy­ing processes. How­ever, car­ry­ing out rou­tines more auto­mat­i­cally also has one major draw­back. It increases the risk that, like Lynn Hill fail­ing to knot her rope, peo­ple will at times imple­ment these pro­ce­dures mindlessly.

In an ideal world, for efficiency’s sake, employ­ees would con­duct much of their work on autopi­lot. Then they would shift off autopi­lot when the sit­u­a­tion required more con­scious thought. The key ques­tion for busi­ness lead­ers is how to ensure that peo­ple stick to autopi­lot when it’s work­ing well, yet make the shift to more con­scious delib­er­a­tion when it’s needed.

What if

1. What if busi­ness lead­ers use auto­mated sys­tems to remind them to peri­od­i­cally go off autopilot?

Pro­fes­sion­als often step back from recently-completed projects and debrief. They assess how things went and con­sider what they might do dif­fer­ently next time. Why not extend this prac­tice to well-established rou­tines? Team mem­bers could, for exam­ple, look at the plans they are cre­at­ing for car­ry­ing out a project. Then they could take some time to dis­cuss ques­tions like Is this the most effi­cient pos­si­ble way to do this? and Is there some­one else whose per­spec­tive we should get on this before we start?

Sim­i­larly, indi­vid­u­als can take a few min­utes before they jump into their own work to ask Is there a bet­ter way to do this? Would it be bet­ter to have some­one else do this? One busi­ness leader exper­i­mented with send­ing her­self ques­tions like these as instant mes­sages that appeared through­out the day. When one of these prompts appeared, it didn’t usu­ally change her behav­ior imme­di­ately because it didn’t apply directly to what she was doing. But over time, she inter­nal­ized the ques­tions and they started pop­ping into her head at times when they did apply.

In many orga­ni­za­tions, qual­ity or con­tin­u­ous improve­ment reviews are intended to serve a sim­i­lar pur­pose. But all too often, the reviews them­selves become scripts that are exe­cuted with lit­tle thought or con­sid­er­a­tion. Lead­ers should shift their mind­set from think­ing of qual­ity or other reviews as admin­is­tra­tive tasks and instead approach them as oppor­tu­ni­ties to turn off autopilot.

“ Madeleine Van Hecke, Ph.D., is one of the authors of The Brain Advan­tage: Become a More Effec­tive Busi­ness Leader Using the Lat­est Brain Research, with Lisa P. Calla­han, Brad Kol­lar and Ken A. Paller, Ph.D. Ms. Van Hecke is a licensed clin­i­cal psy­chol­o­gist, speaker, con­sul­tant, and author.

Related Arti­cles:

• To Think or To Blink
• Why Smart Brains Make Stu­pid Decisions

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