In the past year I’ve been doing a lot of reading about NeuroLeadership. It’s a very interesting field of 
management study that combines how the brain works or neuroscience with the practices of leading change in people or organizations. The material is fascinating and I find that it supports, through research and science, many of the recommendations and counsel we offer clients about sustaining change.
We often reference the research paper “Executive coaching as a transfer of training tool” (Olivero, Bane, & Kopelman, 1997) that reveals a 22.4% return on investment (ROI) on management or leadership training. However, if the subjects undergo weekly one-on-one coaching sessions based on the training content that ROI percentage jumps to 88.0%. So although we knew that individual coaching after the workshops had a huge positive effect on the participant and that reinforcing the message in different mediums facilitated corporate culture change, NeuroLeadership is explaining why and how. The ‘why’ is the way our brains work, how we generate insight, how we turn new ideas into new habits and why change is so hard to achieve in one person or an organization. The “how” is attention and focus on those key learning objectives that creates new patterns in the brain, in effect moving the new idea from short term to long term memory through repetition.
So ‘rinse and repeat’ is not only a 50’s clever marketing ploy created to get consumers to use more shampoo, its also the key to change. This could be why two thirds of change initiatives fail, a clear message must be sent repeatedly. Anyone who plays an instrument or is in a professional that practices performance understands the value of focused attention. From research being published it is becoming clear that focusing on a task or concept also creates physical and chemical changes in the brain. If change is pain then focus is power.
Connecting the dots back to Business Improvisation becomes easy…
Practice.
