OWP liVe REPORT

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Roi’s session on “Integrative Thinking” offered four key insights to help address the pitfalls of individual brain dominance and homogenous teams and to embrace the benefits of “whole brain” diversity.

1. Know your own personality

3. Work on your weaknesses

Most of us leverage certain parts of the brain for thinking while ignoring others, depending on our personal cognitive profile. This could mean, for example, we are comfortable analyzing a problem or organizing a multi- team project but find it difficult to come up with new ideas. Roi explained that taking the time to reflect and define our dominant thinking style was the first step towards understanding how to create balance and integration for ourselves and our organizations.

Teaching your brain to use its lesser-used parts can, with time and practice, enable you to open up “dormant” personality traits. This doesn’t mean transforming into a “whole brain” leader overnight but understanding what would be most beneficial to try to change, Roi said. “There are things that you are good at, there are things you need to be good enough at and there are things you may never be good at,” he said. “It’s a question of deciding which one is important to develop and to apply your practice and discipline to in order to grow that new aspect of your thinking skillset.”

2. Be aware of your bias

4. Actively compensate for what is missing

While we cannot completely change who we are, understanding our dominant traits provides important information for leaders and teams. It allows us to see what unconscious biases we might have and why there might be gaps or problems in our performance. “For example, we tend to hire people in our image, people that think like we do. It’s simply more comfortable,” Roi said. “Unless we are aware of our biases, we tend to hire people with similar profiles and miss out on the benefits of bringing in fresh and diverse ways of thinking.”

The final step is to use this information to address any imbalances. If you are highly creative and conceptual, for example, this could mean hiring the appropriate talent that can support the day-to-day organization of your operations. It also means taking a look at the composition of your top management team and taking action to add what is missing or reduce what is dominant. “The research on top teams has demonstrated this kind of thinking diversity in the team leads to higher performance and agility,” Roi said.