The Financial Times published an interesting post today on how management consultants are looking at brain chemicals to help analyse leadership and workplace trust.
Deloitte is looking into brain chemistry – and how they can apply what they learnt in neuroscience to management. Some of the quotes from management consultants sound like they need a bit more time in the oven: “Neuroscience would be saying you need more neural pathways to make people think differently.”
I think Thinking Fast and Slow should be read by every management consultant and leader. I wonder what these guys will have to add on top of this. Paul Zak, the neuroscientist that the FT quotes, talks about trust as an “economic lubricant”. Isn’t that Marketing 101? In fact, I doodled about it here. Ok, they mention a few chemicals that most management consulting folk and their clients probably haven’t heard of before like oxytocin. In management consulting, a new name usually means a new sales pitch, so I can see why they are excited. Another management consultant references the idea that we are more irrational when we are in fight or flight mode. I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised that in some boardroom some CEO of a gargantuan business is signing off on a contract with a management consultancy that just presented this – but really, it does sound like plain common sense.
There is one very interesting idea in the article: predictive hiring.
Instead of relying upon CVs and interviews, they ask applicants to play 15 or 20 computer games designed with the aid of neuroscience — revealing a cognitive and emotional profile. The result is matched against the gaming profile of high-performers in the role to be filled. Combined with techniques such as machine-learning and trawling social media profiles, this approach opens the way to hiring based on capability. “Companies won’t worry where they went to school or what their grades are”…
I think that games that seeing how a person takes decisions is a great way to understand their personality. It is the basis of psychological tests. However, if, instead of trying to go into the reasons why a person is like this and what they can do about it, we could simply use this information for what it is, I think it would really help to match people with certain jobs. It’s like a decision making genome that you can then marry with a job description – of course only after you accumulate enough data.
A millennial's musings 
Interesting concept. Years ago, professional employment agencies used testing protocols to establish profiles for individuals seeking employment. This testing was used to help determine their strengths and weaknesses and to guide their job searches to find work compatible with their personality profile.
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Testing protocols are useless. Companies don’t know how to spot talent and people don’t know what they want. You put these two types at a cocktail party and turn the music on expecting them to just magically dance but all you get is cold feet and a waxed dance floor still in pristine condition.
This is a much larger issue of matching and now they’ve inflated the other markets, rehashing old concepts, rebranding them as new, and desperately trying to figure out the obvious. Again, they don’t know what they are doing!
NLP was done back a while ago… What are the Big 3 doing? Please don’t tell me Bain or BCG has stooped to this level…
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