Beyond the Lizard Brain: Nurturing Adaptive Teams
A Neuroscience-Informed Field Guide for Self-Organization (Part 1 of n)
Welcome to the initial post in a series of who knows how many… more than three, fewer than a dozen?!
I’m embarking on this adventure for a couple of reasons:
First, I noticed that an older post of mine, "Triune Brain: Myth or Fact," consistently receives more traffic than I ever expected. Why so much interest? Is it the simple sticky metaphor of the “lizard brain”? Is debunking hot? Not sure. Wanna find out.
Second, I want folks to avoid hand-to-hand combat when taking on zombie ideas that refuse to die.
Finally, I enjoy “connecting the dots” to see what picture emerges. In this case, I’ll be drawing upon ecosystem leadership ideas, systems thinking, and neuroscience research.
Understanding neuroscience is not merely academic; it provides the underlying 'why' for practical strategies that enable self-organizing teams to work with their brains, not against them, for sustained high performance.
Field Guide Core Principles
Nurturing Emergence, Not Controlling Outcomes
In a prior series of articles, I explored moving away from the tired, old view of organizations as rigid machines to be optimized and towards a perspective of them as living, adaptive ecosystems that need to be nurtured. (Humans != Resources, aka Meat Widgets!)
This fundamental change calls for a perspective – on leadership, teamwork, collaboration, etc. – that focuses on cultivating the right conditions for intent, initiative, and collective intelligence to emerge, rather than attempting to control every outcome through rigid frameworks, top-down mandates, or perverse incentives.
Self-organizing teams are at the forefront of this evolution, this humanization of work, gaining increasing autonomy, agency, and psychological safety. This guide aims to support these teams to use their newfound freedom to thrive (not just survive).
Four Quadrants of Team Dynamics
To navigate, I'll use an adaptation of Ken Wilber’s Four Quadrants to view the multiple dimensions of team experience and challenge, via distinct yet interconnected frames of reference:
Personal (I): This quadrant focuses on the individual's inner world, including mindset, emotions, behaviors, and skills. It's about recognizing personal neural patterns, cognitive biases, and developing self-awareness and emotional regulation to build adaptive responses.
Relational (We): This encompasses the interpersonal dynamics of a team: shared values, collective culture, and how individuals interact. It highlights the importance of mutual support and psychological safety for effective collaboration.
Practices (It): This quadrant addresses the tangible aspects of team functioning, such as workflows, tools, processes, decision-making patterns, and technologies. It's about optimizing how the team gets work done and uses its collective intelligence.
Environment (Its): This refers to the broader organizational systems and ecosystem conditions that influence the team. This includes external factors such as corporate culture, policies, other value streams, and how leadership functions within a non-centralized system
The Adaptive Brain Model: A Lens for Understanding
Another cornerstone of this guide will be the Adaptive Brain Model, which provides a neuroscience-informed perspective that fundamentally changes how we should approach team dynamics and collaboration.
For decades, the "triune brain" theory, which suggested our brains evolved in three distinct, independent layers (reptilian for instincts, limbic for emotions, and neocortex for reason), was widely popular. However, modern neuroscience has thoroughly debunked this model as outdated and inaccurate.
Instead, contemporary research reveals that the brain is not a collection of isolated modules but a highly interconnected, adaptive, and prediction-driven network.
Key insights include:
Constructed Emotion Theory: Emotions are not simply triggered automatic reactions; they are actively constructed by our brains based on continuous prediction, context, and learned patterns. This means teams can learn to construct different emotional responses to pressure by changing their predictive patterns through practice.
Neuroplasticity and Prediction: The brain is a "prediction machine," constantly updating its models based on new experiences and is remarkably plastic, capable of rewiring throughout our lives based on repeated practices and environmental conditions. Adaptive teams, like the human brain, can sense, predict, experiment, and adapt collaboratively. For example, when a team meeting starts with tension, our brains instantly predict conflict - but teams can learn to construct different responses by practicing new patterns together.
Interdependent Networks: Brain networks work together interdependently, optimizing the body's internal state, emotion, and cognition to adapt to continuously changing needs, rather than functioning as purely "emotional circuits" or "cognitive circuits". The brain's core function is adaptation to internal and external environments, constantly minimizing prediction errors to achieve this.
An Iterative Process: Five Adaptive Practices
To understand and influence team dynamics, this guide will incorporate an iterative process built around five adaptive practices:
Scan how individuals, teams, and systems sense internal and external conditions. This involves observing patterns in system behaviors.
Predict what mechanisms help anticipate and prepare for change. This includes contemplating and speculating why a system operates as it does.
Experiment with how safe-to-fail experiments enable learning and adaptation. This involves designing and conducting small nudges to amplify helpful patterns and dampen destructive ones.
Reflect on what practices support integration and learning. This means studying the results of experiments, listening, and observing how the system responds through changing behaviors, interactions, and outcomes.
Share how knowledge distribution strengthens the overall system. This involves adapting your methods based on system feedback and iterating.
Context Matters
Where your team currently resides on the health continuum will influence where and how you “dive in.” For example, you might need to build more psychological safety before introducing an advanced practice like “prediction error learning.”
In addition, cultural variations, remote/hybrid situations, and willingness to consider AI integration to amplify human judgment all matter.
Along the way, I will be offering ideas on how you might adjust field-guide practices based on different contexts. Take what serves, adapt what doesn't - all will be invitations to experiment, not prescriptions to follow.
Trail Overview
I expect this journey into continuous learning, adaptation, and collective intelligence will unfold along the following themes:
Finding Your Starting Point (Assessment + personal patterns)
Relationships (communication + conflict)
Practices (experiments + tools)
Systems (self-organization)
Resilience (pattern-breaking mastery)
Ready to embark?
The Trail Head
Your first step is to scan the current state. Take stock of your and your team's health with a focus on assessing psychological safety and trust, as these elements form the foundation for any meaningful progress on the path of self-organization and high performance.
Are you in survival mode: "We Know Something's Wrong"? Or perhaps you’ve achieved stability and are building a good rhythm of inspect and adapt. Or you might be one of those teams that have achieved high performance and are looking to scale insights. And if by chance you have achieved adaptive mastery and can sing "We're Groovin’ in Real-Time," congratulations! Let’s have a virtual coffee, and you can share how you got there.
For comprehensive guidance on various methods, patterns, and suggested tools to conduct your trail head scan, refer to: "Team Health: Moving Beyond Survival Mode.”
You don't need a perfect assessment, just some insights into your team's well-being, communication flows, and how it currently navigates challenges.
And with those insights, you’ll be ready to dive into “Part 2 of n”…