Pitfalls of Research

The world's understanding of leadership, at a detailed level, is anecdotal at best. Sometimes we can point to someone and say "now there's a good leader." But how do we know? And how did they get that way?

Cutting-edge research, such as the use of fMRI scans of brains, has great promise to unlock the mysteries of leadership. I believe that we need strong links to hard science of some kind to build a foundation upon which to move the field of leadership development forward. Things we can measure that go beyond one's whim on a multiple choice scale on any given day.

But of course it will take some time as the field sorts out the new research data and methods. In the mean time, what's happening is that research is quoted several times down the chain, and by the time it ends up in the newspaper, it can be very distorted.

My friend and colleague Eran Magen has been fantastic about pointing out to me my own faults of what I think is "proven" and "understood" from brain research. For example you may have heard of the "evils" of the amygdala, which is blamed for "hijacking" people's reasoning in times of crisis.

This was supposedly deduced by studies in which the subjects are being scanned, and then are put through a stressful situation, and asked to make choices. Sure enough, the amygdala lights up, and they make dumb choices. Cut and dried, right? Ah, but the problem is that the amygdala "lights up" (gets a lot of blood flow) in really different situations, too. Rather than being a panic button, it could simply be something that activates when the brain thinks something important is happening, be it dangerous or otherwise.

Here's the key point I want to leave you with--be cautious of any research that you hear quoted, especially from a distance, that makes a clear, simple, definitive conclusion about human behavior and leadership. We're still in the early days.