To Tom and Sophie, who have grown into such beautiful, strong, well-rounded individuals. I'm so proud of everything you do and the people you have become. I love you to bits. This book is for you.
And finally thank you to you, the reader, for taking the time to stop and read this book, and discover what you can use to create your own high-performance brain.
PREFACE
We talk a lot as business leaders about the need for adaptability and innovative practices. This makes perfect sense, because we are living in a time of unparalleled change. Information, technology, the way we produce things – it's all on the fast track. We need to be able to match the pace of innovation.
What I find interesting is that nobody ever really discusses how we are going to achieve this. Yes, we can educate ourselves. Yes, we can do research and keep up with digital technology as it changes. But what about our ability to increase our mental flexibility, agility and adaptability?
This is about more than survival; it's about evolution.
In the age of information and innovation, the currency of knowledge is necessarily being replaced by our ability to think – and to think as well as we possibly can. We can initiate this change through greater brain awareness. For this we need to understand what is required to create and operate a thriving brain.
Future Brain reveals how you can use the latest discoveries from the brain science for your brain's advantage. It also sets out to answer some of the questions around how to build a brain for the future.
What will the future brain look like? Read on. You'll be surprised at what you find.
INTRODUCTION
The current work environment is not a happy place in the main. Increasing levels of stress and anxiety, perceptions of time poverty and change fatigue, the effects of chronic medical conditions and depression on workflow – business is not booming. In Future Brain we examine these very big areas of concern and discuss how strategies based on neuroscientific research can be used to reduce their impact by offering practical solutions for individuals and organisations.
Our brain has received a bad rap for far too long. If you think of it in social media terms, our brain is a community page with about 300 likes. Why? Largely because, until fairly recently, we have been remarkably ignorant of the workings of our own minds.
Now, however, we have access to brilliant studies from neurologists, neuroscientists, psychiatrists and other researchers who are delving into why our brain works the way it does, and why we need to keep it as fit as we possibly can.
It is this research that has led to the development of the 12 Keys of Future Brain, which break down the academispeak to provide understandable, easy-to-implement ways for all of us to become better thinkers.
The standard working week is now almost as extinct as the dinosaurs. The distinction between work and home time is becoming ever more blurred. Perceptions of how we do our work, where we do it and even why we do it are shifting.
Flexibility of work hours may mean our working in several jobs or a change in the location of where we are expected to or allowed to do our work. Increasing globalisation means we are constantly interacting with overseas marketplaces, which has led to the concept of being ‘open all hours’. Our brains are, as a result, exhausted.
With greater technological capabilities than ever before, and with medical research at its peak, will we find a magic pill or potion to enable us to develop brain superpowers? Will there be a cerebral update chip that our health/brain practitioner can install when we attend our regular brain check-ups?
Or is there another solution, such as choosing to manage and use our brain better? Could it really be as simple as that?
If we dismiss the basics, we miss the point.
When I worked in general practice, my clients came to see me because they were sick. After all, that was my job: to make a diagnosis and provide a treatment to allow the patient to recover. But much of the time their sickness was a consequence of poor health and lifestyle choices. Not from ignorance, but just from trying to keep up with everything in their daily lives.
I also noticed that one environment that contributes heavily to the burden of disease, injury and mental distress is the one we call work. The modern workplace is very often a source of visible and non-visible harm, a toxic and unwieldy monster. The challenge before us is to address the stark reality that this is not only doing us physical harm but is costing us dearly in many aspects of our lives.
Depression is now the second leading cause of workplace disability globally. Type 2 diabetes is the fastest growing chronic condition in Australia. According to Sick at Work, a research paper published by Medibank in 2011, the total cost of presenteeism was reported as $34.1 billion for 2009–10, equivalent to a loss of 2.7 per cent of GDP. Presenteeism is the loss of productivity that occurs when an employee turns up for work but works at a lower capacity than normal because of illness, stress or other distractions. Presenteeism costs the Australian economy more than absenteeism, which itself currently runs at around $24 billion, with a direct cost of $536 per employee per day.
While the research clearly indicates the problem is huge, the implication is also that this problem is not going to go away any time soon, and indeed is likely to increase.
It is also possible that these figures underestimate the reality. Every one of us is impacted by different life events, concerns and worries at any given time. We might be super-productive, highly organised and excellent at our job, but we all have those times when we will be ‘off’ due to minor health ailments, family worries or extra-stressful circumstances at work.
Absenteeism is fairly easily defined in terms of specific time off for reasons of ill-health or injury. Presenteeism, though, is a far harder animal to corral.
From an individual perspective, when we speak of keeping fit and healthy, we are really talking about taking care of our minds and bodies so we can do what we want, when we want and as we want. The relatively recent concept of brain health signifies far more than simply a new term for mental health and wellbeing.
Brain health is about creating a fit and healthy brain that is then optimised to operate at its best, and a big part of that happens in our work life.
In the workplace, organisational health is about ensuring the complete health, safety and wellbeing of all who work there. The focus of OHS has traditionally been on preventing physical injury; what is needed now is the integration of brain and mind health into this model.
Bill Withers, founder of acQuire Technology Solutions, speaking at a conference I attended a couple of years ago, gave a nice analogy on the need to view a business (of any size) as a living organism. Just as a human being comprises trillions of living cells, a business is also the sum of its parts. Every staff member has a specific role to play. Each person contributes to the function and integrity of their workplace. Like a cancer or infection, malfunction in any part of the business, down to the level of the individual, can contribute to the demise or extinction of the business.
An extreme example of an organisation brought down by an individual is Barings Bank, which until it closed its doors had been the oldest investment bank in Britain, having operated for over 200 years. The activities of a single employee, a senior derivatives trader named Nick Leeson, led to the bank's collapse in 1995 with a loss of $1.4 billion. Leeson had been seen as the golden child, brilliant at creating money for the bank, which turned a blind eye to his super-speculative and unauthorised dealings.
Building organisational health need not be hard. It requires putting in place the checks and boundaries, ensuring everyone shares the