Helena Boschi

The Neuroscience of Change

Many ‘change leaders’ or change management programmes fail to take into account how the human brain is set up to operate. All too often change messaging is constructed around the business rationale, which makes logical sense to those at senior level but rarely has the desired effect among the people who are expected to make any changed process or structure successful.

This session offers a fascinating and valuable look at why change efforts typically don’t work and explains why the human brain is not inclined to ‘embrace’ change. Specifically the session covers how human beings typically respond to uncertainty, why change creates imbalance and stress in our systems and the emotions that drive us to act. The session also provides simple and practical strategies to enable new ways of working at all levels, from creating the right conditions for change to reducing uncertainty and providing a sense of control for those who are both driving and implementing change initiatives.

The Biased Brain

The human brain is designed to make fast judgements and mental short cuts about information it receives so that it can keep us alive. However these short cuts can also lead to cognitive distortions and biased thinking. Understanding how and why our biases work is an important first step in improving our decision-making and building inclusive relationships.

This fast-paced session provides an informative and engaging view of how biases work in the brain and how we can mitigate against possible cognitive errors. The session brings together the disciplines of neuroscience and behavioural economics (including nudge theory) to provide practical and relevant examples of the biases we use every day, often without ealizing it! The session also offers valuable insights into how to frame language and pricing in order to get the outcomes you want.

Feeling Fear and Fostering Psychological Safety

Psychological safety is a phrase that is now being widely used with organisations to enable conscious and considered approaches to building a culture where people feel able to speak out and be heard. First brought to attention in the late 1990s, psychological safety is now recognised as an important element of healthy and collaborative work environments and a strong predictor of team performance. But it is hard at the best of times to establish and foster psychological safety, and this becomes even more of a challenge at a time of significant change and uncertainty.

To ensure we build and maintain a psychologically safe environment where we can all thrive and perform at our best, we need to develop new ways of working and learning together – sharing failures as well as successes and showing our own vulnerability to build trust and reduce anxiety in others.

This session explores the role of fear in our lives and why human beings are designed to register fear as a primary emotion in uncertain times. The session discusses behaviours that emerge when we don’t feel safe, the human need for conformity and social inclusion and how psychological safety can mitigate the greatest human fear of all: social rejection.