Business As A Brain

Plasticity—the quality of being easily shaped and moulded—is vital to organisations of today in order to transform into ‘organisations of tomorrow’.

- Dr Tara Swart

In an age of ambiguity and discomfort, the ripple effect of geopolitical and psycho-social events is unprecedented. Amid the US-China trade war, Brexit, and #MeToo movement, the need for organisations of all kinds to pivot is clear.

But behind a change in product, output, service, culture, or principle is a massive amount of physical and psychological work. To pull this off, corporations need organisational plasticity, which I refer to as their ability to adapt and keep in line with the ever-changing milieu that we operate in.

Organisational plasticity started as a metaphor rooted in neuroscience and data science. Neuroplasticity is our brain’s ability to change itself, while in data science neurons are the individual elements of an artificial neural network, which can extract patterns within data. When it comes to organisations, the neuron equates to each person that makes up the workforce.

To aid this process, I created, with the input of Dirk Rossey and Kevin Wong at Arowana International, the model of a business as a brain. I also launched this concept at my Applied Neuroscience Program at MIT Sloan in 2018 and started collecting data from pilot tests on global corporations.

To build the model, we ran polls of staff at companies seeking feedback on the strategy, environment, and ability to adapt to change in their organisation. Response rates were low, so instead, we created our own Facetime-style app to interview respondents. The data was fed into machine learning platforms from Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, and Google, which also provided a sense of their emotional state.