Industrial manufacturing leaders need to ask WHY...

Leaders of industrial manufacturing companies are up against it now. In the next few months, they will begin to make the hiring decisions they have been holding off on, and they will be challenged to align anew the people in their organizations around a shared mission and purpose.

You can bet that only a few of these companies will make the transition easily.

Industrial manufacturers that need to break new ground with an expanded management group and new hires on board will find that the first barrier is not out in the marketplace; it will be internal, in the form of dissonant beliefs regarding the right way forward. The problem will be to lead organizational alignment, and in this endeavor top management is challenged to understand a basic tenet of neuroscience itself.

Neuroscience, the scientific study of the nervous system, has discovered how regions of the human brain become activated as we go about editing our daily realities. In his book How We Decide, author Jonah Lehrer reported how even scientists must learn to overcome their preconceived beliefs before they can succeed in their missions. The research proved that beliefs are preserved in a region of the brain called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. The first step to solving a problem (in our case the need for internal alignment on purpose and value definition), we must recognize that the biological design of the human brain causes it to disregard divergent, contrary information as though it were never encountered. Here is a quote from the book:

“The lesson is that not all data is created equal in our mind’s eye: When it comes to interpreting our experiments, we see what we want to see and disregard the rest. Belief, in other words, is a kind of blindness.”

Despite the brain’s tendency to screen out new facts, thus preserving established beliefs, scientists nevertheless persist in making breakthrough discoveries. They are able to do this because they keep asking a simple question: Why? By examining failures, resisting conformity, and often by seeking a collaborative, outside-in level of objectivity, they do not allow false beliefs to deter them in their missions to become breakthrough winners in the scientific marketplace.

If you want to align organizational behavior, you need to introduce external realities – namely, the voice of customer, the ultimate authority, the only one who can tell you WHY. Which leads to the question: Who in your organization, if not the CEO, is asking why customers behave the way they do? Could it be because their beliefs, too, have yet to be changed in favor of your brand?

jb
www.centrifuge-now.com

For more on this subject, please see my firm's whitepaper series: "Overcoming Entropy" at this URL: http://gourl.gr/ibg