A Useful Concept

Last time we talked about the brain as a “prediction engine” (in the words of Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett), and how it helps us conserve energy and stay safe by using what’s happening now to predict what will happen next, and therefore moving us towards what we need to do in our current situation, or away from what we need to avoid

This time, we’ll combine that idea with the concept of psychosocial domains from other neuroscientists. And it’s a concept we also use when we assess psychological safety for our clients.

The psychosocial domain is a useful concept for thinking about how the brain works when we are in a social group with others - such as a team at work. It doesn’t represent actual parts of our brain or its physical structure, but it does reflect how our minds work.

A lot of the brain’s predictive work happens outside of our conscious awareness, so an understanding of what’s going on will help make us aware and enable us to take steps to either improve our working environment and to take steps to moderate our feelings and reactions.

The Five Domains

Sometimes these domains are represented by the acronyms CARES or SCARF, and slightly different names are given to each domain, but let’s think of them as:

• Certainty (how predictable is our environment)
• Autonomy (how much control we have over our own actions)
• Relatedness (the sense of belonging to a group)
• Equity (a feeling of fair and equitable treatment)
• Status (what we feel about how much we matter to the group)

Let’s look at the first two in this edition and consider how they affect our brain as a prediction engine.

Certainty - the level of predictability

As our brain tries to predict what will happen in our current situation, it assesses the overall level of certainty. Is there normally a lot of volatility in actions, decisions, and communication in the team? 

If a leader clearly communicates their expectations and also talks a lot about plans and future events, this helps to reduce uncertainty.

Keep in mind, too, that high levels of certainty could even be the certainty of bad things happening in the team. These might threaten the other psychosocial domains, but at least having an obvious pattern of predictable dysfunction increases certainty!

Autonomy - feeling in control

If certainty is about the predictability of our environment, autonomy is about feeling in control of our own actions, and the two are connected. When we sense a lack of control, we feel we cannot influence outcomes that affect us. 

This weakens our ability to predict, and not only do we feel more stressed, but our brain will search for ways to improve its predictions - often being forced to rely on seeing data when there is none!

So good leaders will increase the level of autonomy as much as possible. No job in a team can be completely autonomous, as other team members, or even those outside the team will require some fixed outcomes. 

But the more autonomy we have, the more in control we feel. And the more able we are to use our autonomy to increase our mastery over the work to be done.

The outcome of our work may be fixed, but leaders should grant as much autonomy as possible over where, when, and how we do it.

Next time we’ll look at Relatedness (or belonging to a group), Equity (a feeling of fair treatment), and Status (our significance to the group) and see how variations in these domains affect our brain’s ability to predict the future, and therefore to perform better in our teams.

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