BrainWare Safari

Consider the fighter pilot who can see and aim at a target a hundredth of a second faster than the enemy.  Consider the safety record of the semi-driver whose ability to sustain attention over long periods and whose peripheral vision are superior to other drivers in the fleet.  Consider the professional basketball or football player whose mental picture of where the ball and the other players are on the court or field enables him/her to calculate where to position himself or herself more effectively than the opponent.  Each of these examples demonstrates the importance of cognitive skills that are automatically processed without conscious thought.  In some cases, military, professional sports teams and undoubtedly, public safety employees are already receiving training in the cognitive skills most applicable to their job performance.  But most organizations are only beginning to scratch the surface of the kinds of improvements they could realize.

Now consider some other cognitive skills – say, sequencing – a skill required for accurate processing in a manufacturing environment, or in efficiently working through a series of interrelated steps in an office procedure.  Or visualization – a skill needed in construction, in a concrete way, and in strategic planning, in a less tangible way.  The same principles apply here.  These are skills that can be developed and enhanced in virtually any individual.  Organizations don’t often think of developing them, assuming that employees come to them with as much or as little of these skills as they will ever have. That is a costly assumption, both for the organization and the individual.

Because the brain can change and is constantly developing new pathways, each of us can further strengthen our strengths and mitigate our weaknesses.  With appropriate exercise, we can build and reinforce the neural connections in our brains that will allow us to function more efficiently and effectively.  We can get better at “changing our minds” (quite literally) in the face of new information, at combining information to discover something new or see it in a new way, or at seeing things from another’s point of view so that it becomes clearer how to communicate with them.  The potential payoff for organizations that support this kind of development in their employees is incalculable.