How your brain's systems shape strategy, influence, and relationships at work

Executive overview

Most professionals default to one narrow mode of thinking, unaware that their brain has distinct systems and focus states that can be activated deliberately. Evan LaPointe of CORE Sciences maps three core systems — safety, reward, and purpose — onto everyday work: meetings, feedback, strategy, and culture. Which system is active, and which personality traits amplify or block it, explains most of why teams get stuck.

The gap between what science knows and what business does is the source of most workplace dysfunction — and closing it is a choice.

The three brain systems

• Safety system: activated by uncertainty, threat, or resentment; shifts your objective from contributing to self-protection
• Reward system: transactional; "that's not my job" is its signature phrase — narrowly focused on the personal reward list
• Purpose system: activated when you understand the impact of your work and care about the people affected; operates at any scale, from a single email to a company-wide initiative
• Brain also has focus states (alpha/beta/gamma) and ability (knowledge, reasoning, imagination) as additional levers
• Most organisations operate almost entirely in safety-beta and reward-beta — two of nine available cognitive channels

Personality and self-awareness

• People are far more different than similar; building the muscle to work with very different minds matters more than pretending similarity
• Openness is the key trait for vision and strategy tolerance; low openness wires abstract thinking to the brain's pain systems — vision conversations feel genuinely aversive, not just annoying
• Conscientiousness drives efficiency but creates friction in expansionary, "blow it all up" conversations
• Three options when your profile clashes with a situation: be vulnerable, hide it, or be unapologetic — vulnerability is least costly by far
• Self-awareness is intentional steering using intellect to verify or override instinct; self-consciousness is worry — only the former helps
• Teams benefit more from collective self-awareness than from individuals achieving personal transformation

Running better meetings

• Most meetings skip priming and jump straight to decision-making — assuming everyone shares context, information, and intended outcome; this assumption is almost always wrong
• Priming covers: what we're here to do, what context applies, and what principles govern the conversation (e.g., are we honouring sacred cows or challenging them?)
• Can be done in the meeting invite; takes under three minutes; Amazon's elaborate version is wise but not required
• Common failure mode: the meeting opens in convergence, fails to reconcile, then attempts priming midway through — just as time runs out
• Word choices matter: "I completely disagree" initiates combat in the room; "I don't see how these dots connect" activates the prefrontal cortex instead

Strategy, vision, and openness

• Ideas land in four zones: believed, believable, unbelievable but conceivable, inconceivable — where the line falls is shaped by personality and lived experience
• Vision arguments stall because someone's inconceivable threshold is being hit without their awareness that this is a personal response, not an objective problem
• Low openness + high conscientiousness = low tolerance for vision work; the translation tax — converting vision-language into ROI-language — is a real competitive drag
• Practical moves: ask for translations ("help me understand the second-order effect"), offer trust as a substitute for agreement, share your profile openly so others calibrate
• Reverse engineering is the best exercise for conscientious thinkers: work backward from desired outcomes to identify required inputs, or backward from situational reality to predispose better decisions

Influence: character and speed

• Repair the relationship before attempting influence — a bad relationship builds multi-hour delays into every interaction and compounds across the organisation
• Three speeds of influence:
  • Slow: let failure teach (the Abilene Paradox — everyone goes camping; can take months or years)
  • Moderate: teach a new lens, let people live with it; the Challenger Sale model — share information that breaks calcification, then let it work over days or weeks
  • Fast: cognitive dissonance in the moment — drill below behaviour to the belief and expose the logical gap
• Choose an influence character aligned with your strengths: compassion-based, logic/causality-based, creativity-based, enthusiasm-based
• Make your character explicit and get buy-in in advance: "I'm going to be the devil's advocate — is that okay?" buys future permission and creates consistency
• Asking for accountability activates safety systems and produces facade compliance, not real change

Building better relationships

• Relationships have three components, in order of biological weight:
  1. Ability/utility — knowledge, skill, reasoning, imagination; incrementable
  2. Trust — the brain's risk assessment; three levels from simple task delegation (trust 1) to "do it better than I would" (trust 3)
  3. Appeal — the experience of being around someone; biologically the most powerful filter
• A highly capable, trustworthy person who is a miserable experience gets sequestered from the network — information, delegation, and access stop flowing regardless of competence
• Start here: "What kind of experience am I?" Answer that before working on ability or trust
• Concrete appeal drains: low politeness, overbearing assertiveness, reflexive dismissal of complexity

Building a high-functioning habitat (culture)

• Mission/Vision/Values is a performative approach — it depends on artistic inspiration to land; track record is poor
• Deductive culture starts with a fact: who is glad we exist, and why? This is your role, not your mission — and role implies obligation
• From role, deduce: what value do we produce → what is our definition of done → what quality standard is non-negotiable → what teaming behaviour is unacceptable
• Replace "bias to action" with bias to impact — hamsters have bias to action
• The brain craves an answer to "why am I doing this?" — answering with purpose (people are counting on us) activates better cognitive regions than safety or reward answers
• Most teams are negligent in answering this question; saying "it's your job" is a safety-system answer that produces compliance, not engagement

Focus: alpha, beta, gamma

• Three active modes: alpha (daydreaming, quiet, generative — shower ideas), beta (execution, email, meetings), gamma (deep focus, learning hard things, breaking and rebuilding frameworks)
• Most teams operate almost entirely in beta, driven by safety and reward; this is the conscientiousness crisis
• Alpha generates ideas beta never surfaces; access it by reducing cognitive load — step away, go for a walk, sit in a park
• Gamma is where frameworks get broken and rebuilt; systematically blocked by "we can't talk about this forever" cultures
• Rule of thumb: 25% of the year in alpha and gamma combined is a useful audit benchmark; most teams are well below 5%
• Practical cadence: quarterly offsites for gamma-level thinking; a few hours of protected deep work weekly; redirect "calendar invaders" to the next scheduled offsite — say yes, but not now