There’s a costly misconception hindering innovation. Marketing models hold that strategic reasoning must always precede and inform emotional execution. Before we decide to try an idea, we must first prove its worth by conscious knowledge untainted by feeling. But neuroscience suggests this is not only wrong, it’s backwards. If “knowledge is power” we must understand cognition or the “process of knowing.” Cognitive science tells us that discoveries and decisions are made largely unconsciously. And feelings not reasoning come first. Emotions precede and inform rational understanding. It’s time to flip the script and listen first to our bodies and then our minds. As French mathematician and inventor Blaise Pascal presciently observed, “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.”
THE BODY LEADS THE MIND
Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio explained this peculiarity through a revolutionary experiment known as the Iowa Gambling Task, designed to understand real-world decisions. Subjects could freely choose from four decks of playing cards in an
attempt to win the most money and determine the most profitable decks. There were two bad decks full of high risk cards, and two profitable decks that yielded conservative but consistent pay-outs and rarely punished players. Subjects were asked to report when they could explain why they favored one deck over another. It required about 50 cards before a participant began to change their behavior and favor a certain deck, and about 80 cards before they became aware of why they did it. Rationality is a relatively slow process. But in addition to asking them to explain their decisions, they also measured their emotional responses by gauging how the electrical properties of skin responded to anxiety and stress. The experimenters found that the body got “nervous” after drawing only about 10 cards from the losing decks. Even though the subjects were not consciously aware, their bodies developed an accurate sense of fear and anxiety in response to a bad deck well in advance of the rational mind. The subjects’ feelings were faster and more accurate, having figured it out way before the conscious mind was tipped off. Damasio formulated the landmark somatic marker hypothesis. This model of decision making shows how our decisions often depend upon access to what he calls somatic markers, feelings that are tagged and stored in the body and our unconscious minds. As Damasio states, “It is emotion that allows you to mark things as good, bad, or indifferent literally in the flesh.” This task is a challenge and metaphor to improve innovation. We can’t prove the profitability of an intuition or idea because it’s simply not open to conscious explanation. And if we wait for rational proof, we won’t get there in time or at all. See on www.fastcocreate.com Accelerators & Incubators, accelerateur, incubateur, entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, Executive Business Accelerator, Gilles Bouchard, Harvard Business School, Harvard Business Angels, innovation, Louis Catala, reconversion, startups, Audra Shallal, expertise, entrepreneur investisseur, développement, international, entreprise de croissance, accompagnement cadres et dirigeants, cadres, dirigeants, grands groupes, outplacement, startupper