Those of us engaged in organizational research are humble creatures.  We live in a world of probabilities, where achieving significant correlations of .4 or .5 delight us – where if we explain 25% of the variance, we’ve achieved something and where we try to do better than random prediction.  We ask people their observations (”To what extent does this leader exhibit empathy?”), their attitudes (”Indicate the extent to which you agree that the company reacts quickly to market opportunities.”) and their intentions (”I would recommend this company as an employer.”)  And we hope to see some pattern in their responses that might help the company’s leaders make better decisions or help us more deeply understand the complexities of how people behave when they work together.

The quixotic nature of our task was recently brought home to me when I heard an interview with V.S. Ramachandran, a neurologist at UC San Diego and head of their Center for Brain and Cognition. ( http://cbc.ucsd.edu/ramabio.html)  

He pointed out that the average brain has 100 billion nerve cells, each with anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 contacts with other nerve cells.  Those contacts can be inhibitory or excitory and can result in the “possible number of brain states exceed[ing] the number of particles in the universe.”  And he and his neuroscientist colleagues are just beginning to map the brain’s functioning to better understand how the mind operates and to solve basic  brain disease problems.

I don’t think I am jumping the gun to wonder when this research will help those of us engaged in more quotidien pursuits of increasing group performance and building better organizations.  Already the market researchers are grabbing hold of the new tools of cognitive science to unearth customer desires.  Gerald Zaltman’s book “How Customers Think” (http://www.amazon.com/How-Customers-Think-Essential-Insights/dp/1578518261) tells about research at the “Mind of the Market Laboratory” at Harvard Business School.  And other fields of psychology are not far behind.  Shelley Taylor, the director of  UCLA’s Social Neuroscience Lab   (http://taylorlab.psych.ucla.edu/index.htm), is doing creative and useful research  using neuroimaging to understand how social relationships protect us against stress.

So is organizational neuroscience next?  Will we see employee brain imaging instead of employee surveys?  Will we need to turn in our focus group recording devices for MRI equipment?  Or will we continue to poke about with questionnaires and hope employees know what they want and what they think?  In either case, however rapidly we adopt and learn from neurological research, I will marvel at the complexity of bringing together hundreds and even thousands of these masses of gray jelly, giving them goals to accomplish and tasks to perform and organizing them in functions to produce services and products and concepts.  That we can predict anything about such a system is truly remarkable.