Strategy Meets Reality Podcast

The Thinking Brain: Dr. Delia McCabe on Neuroplasticity, Nutrition, and the Neuroscience of Leadership

• Mike Jones • Season 1 • Episode 30

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The brain is your most powerful strategic tool—if you know how to use it.

In this episode of Strategy Meets Reality, Mike Jones talks with Dr. Delia McCabe—neuroscientist and expert in nutritional neuroscience—about how neuroplasticity, nutrition, and stress shape leaders’ ability to think, decide, and adapt. They dive deep into the biology of creativity, the traps of mental fatigue, and why the structure of your brain determines the structure of your strategy.

Dr. McCabe explains how chronic stress, poor sleep, and cognitive overload literally close down creativity—while the right nutrients, rest, and mental frameworks can rewire your brain for better decision-making. From “additive thinking” and uncertainty fatigue to the dangers of believing what you feel, this is a masterclass in how to think better, not just faster.

🔍 In this episode:

  • How brain structure shapes creative thinking
  • Why stress kills neuroplasticity and creativity
  • The additive problem—and why leaders avoid subtraction
  • Information overload and the myth of productivity
  • How to build resilience to uncertainty
  • Changing minds through emotion and safety
  • The “feeling of knowing” and decision-making traps
  • The delicate balance between human cognition and AI

🎧 Keywords: Neuroplasticity, brain health, leadership, neuroscience, cognitive load, uncertainty, stress, nutrition, decision-making, creativity, mental resilience, emotional intelligence, organisational change, AI and cognition

📘 Learn more about Dr. Delia McCabe:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-delia-mccabe/
Substack: https://deliamccabe.substack.com/

Send Mike a Message

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💬 Connect with host Mike Jones → https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-h-jones/

Delia McCabe (00:00)
And this is the additive problem.

Because it takes more neural energy to analyze a situation deeply and see what you can remove versus adding something.

when leaders are very stressed attention is fractured and they've got a huge cognitive load, that increase in cortisol is preventing them from doing the very thing that they need to do.

is be creative. What is creativity? Connecting new thought patterns, new ideas, existing knowledge to new ways of thinking. And so that is the basis of this neuroplasticity that is being hampered

Mike Jones (01:03)
Welcome back to Strategy Meets Reality podcast. Just before we start, I just want to put an apology out there. We had a technical issue with last week's episode. So unfortunately we missed a week and we've sorted that out now so we'll continue normal service from now on. So I do apologize. But great news though, I get to introduce you to Delia McCabe and I've been so excited to have Delia come on.

and you'll know why when she gives her introduction and we get into our conversation. So, Delia, welcome to the ⁓ episode. It's great to have you on.

Delia McCabe (01:38)
Thank you Mike, I'm really looking forward to this chat as well.

Mike Jones (01:40)
Just for our listeners, do you mind giving a bit of background, a bit of context about what you've been up to lately?

Delia McCabe (01:45)
With pleasure, Mike. One of the things that people always ask me is how did I start on this journey because I talk about a whole lot of different topics. So I started my career as a clinical psychologist and

the more I looked at what I was doing and how ineffective it was, the more I started asking questions about how does the brain actually function. So I decided that by becoming a neuroscientist I'd understand a whole lot more and I'd also get away from the replication problem that we have in psychology that most of your listeners will be very well aware of. So I decided that studying what happens at the neuronal level would help me with the way my brain works because I really need to understand how

things happen. I'm a first principles kind of thinker and once I started doing that it was as if I'd opened up Pandora's box because suddenly I started understanding that the health of the neurons

the environment that they're in, what we're exposed to, how we're trained to think, and all of the cognitive quirks that the brain naturally has that very few people are aware of and definitely don't factor into their own thinking. All of those things shape our experience, shape our creativity, our decision making, and everything we actually do. So for me, it was a really big pivot away from clinical psychology and at that point, my peers and my colleagues

they thought I was insane. But I'm very glad that I did that because it gave me a much more holistic perspective and now when I speak to people like you and the people that I work with, I quickly get them to understand what's happening really there at the first principle level and they go, wow. And then they can quickly make change. Because one of the things that few people really think about is they want to change their behavior, they want to change the behavior of their teams, they want to think differently.

They want to have a different perspective, but they very seldom consider the fact that any change that we want to make is really brain change.

You we don't make change out there. We make change in here. And you know, you can set the stage for increased neuroplasticity to make change easier. You can also do a whole lot of things to make it very much less easy. So that's the space that I now work in. And explaining this to people is super fun for me and it's great for them because now suddenly they've got ⁓ a different way of looking at how they

Mike Jones (03:49)
Mmm.

Delia McCabe (04:18)
changing their behaviour and how they're

Mike Jones (04:20)
That's fascinating, especially when you talk about increasing your neuroplasticity because as the show is named, when strategy meets reality, and that realising that we can think up all we want, but when our ideas hit reality, we've got to be ready to be adaptive to the changes that are going to happen. And it's interesting when you said about how we increase our neuroplasticity. So what would you advise to help increase that?

Delia McCabe (04:48)
Well, that's a big topic, Mike, because the brain responds to whatever it's exposed to, whether it's serving the brain or not. So one has to have a look at what it's being exposed to firstly. The second thing is, you know, the title of the podcast, you know, the word structure is very, very important because the structure of the brain impacts its function directly. And one of the things that I had to examine in a lot of detail when I stepped

Mike Jones (04:51)
me.

Delia McCabe (05:18)
away from clinical psychology was nutritional neuroscience because as I said I think about the first principles. So if you think about our brain it's only 2 % of our body weight so it's this big grey mushy squidgy super sensitive and sophisticated tissue. If you had to squeeze out all the water

60 % of what is left is made up of fat.

Now when I discovered that I was like wow, you know, I need to find out a little bit about fats and oils. And I can tell you that nearly 30 years later I'm still discovering more about fats and oils because it's the most complex discussion in nutritional neuroscience and in nutrition generally. And most people just, you know, scoff about this, the subject. To put it into perspective, I have a lecture on fats and oils and brain function and it's

three-hour

lecture because it's a huge topic. So just to go back to the 60 percent, so we take all the water out, 60 percent of what is left is fat. Of that 60 percent, between 20 and 24, 25 percent needs to be made up of essential fatty acids. Now they're called essential because your body can't make them, we have to get them in our diet.

Mike Jones (06:14)
Okay.

Delia McCabe (06:40)
The body can make saturated fat and the body can make mono-unsaturated fat but the body cannot make polyunsaturated fats. That's the omega-3s and the omega-6s. However, about 95 % of the population is deficient in

Mike Jones (06:41)
All

Delia McCabe (06:59)
the Omega 6s, the undamaged kind and Omega 3s. And why? Because they don't form a natural part of our diet anymore. And when they are used in food products, they get very damaged. So then they come along with trans fats, polymerized fats, cyclized fats, cross-linked fats, and those are all damaged fats. Now, this is where we come back to the structure part of the brain. The structure of the cell membrane

and the capacity for those cell membranes to now change and allow neuronal connectivity, which is basically little branches of the neuron connecting to another neuron and now making a new pathway. That is facilitated when the structure is optimal and the essential fatty acids allow that cell membrane to be very flexible and very malleable to allow that neuroplasticity.

Mike Jones (07:40)
Yeah.

Delia McCabe (07:57)
If you don't have that raw material, those essential fatty acids, it's very much harder for the brain to make those neuronal connections because of the biochemistry of those essential fats. They've got a lot of double carbon bonds. I know this sounds a bit boring and it's a bit like biochemistry, but those double carbon bonds allow the uptake of oxygen and oxygen helps make those membranes very

Mike Jones (08:18)
It's positive.

Delia McCabe (08:27)
very

malleable and flexible. So that's the first step in increasing neuroplasticity and it's critically important in utero, in the first few years of life when the brain is growing rapidly and also of course, excuse me, in our adult lives when we're learning so much. Sorry Mike. So that neuroplasticity depends directly on

Mike Jones (08:40)
Yeah.

That's right.

Delia McCabe (08:50)
on the structure which is facilitated by the essential fatty acids and as I said a lot of people are deficient in them.

Mike Jones (08:58)
And I suppose when I asked you about that, I probably wasn't thinking you'd go to that point, but it makes complete sense. When we think about strategic leaders that are here trying to grapple complexity, grapple these complex problems, then of course you think, well, the primary important part they need to look after is their brain. That's doing the cognitive function. And obviously then,

We hear a lot about diet and sleep and stuff like that and why that helps and it sort of makes sense but when you talk about it in that way you think actually there's a lot of stuff and actually what you told us is some really useful stuff that any leader can take and think well how is my diet helping the structure to be able to form those new neural pathways.

Delia McCabe (09:45)
Absolutely, Mike. it's a discussion that few people get into because not everyone wants to understand what's happening deep at that neuronal level. You you mentioned sleep, for example. When we don't sleep well, our neurons don't clean themselves or the environment that they operate in doesn't get clean. And it's very simple to explain this.

Mike Jones (09:56)
Mm.

Delia McCabe (10:09)
When we fall into a deep sleep, our neurons shrink and our cerebrospinal fluid flushes through the brain like a wave in a wave-like motion to get rid of the metabolic waste that accumulates during the day of cognition.

So if you don't sleep well, that metabolic waste isn't removed. And that obviously contributes to cognitive decline because then those metabolic waste products hang around and start forming damaging compounds that compromise neuronal functioning and structure. So all of these aspects work together to ensure that the structure, this beautiful brain can function optimally. And then of course we add

stress to the mix and we end up with even more of a problem because chronic stress, presence of cortisol which is a stress hormone among neurons actually stops that connectivity to...

different neurons and new neural patterns and new behavior from forming. So the cortisol is actually an inhibitor of that neuroplasticity. So when leaders are very stressed and they've got a lot on their plates and they're not focusing on one particular thing at a time and their attention is fractured and they've got a huge cognitive load, that increase in cortisol is preventing them from doing the very thing that they need to do.

which

is be creative. What is creativity? Connecting new thought patterns, new ideas, existing knowledge to new ways of thinking. And so that is the basis of this neuroplasticity that is being hampered by the presence of cortisol. So, you know, when you get down to the neuronal level, you start understanding what's actually happening when people say, I have brain fog, I'm not creative, I can't be productive. You know, I can't

Mike Jones (12:03)
Yeah.

Delia McCabe (12:06)
write my ideas out. I'm battling to stay engaged in my project and battling to engage my teams. You've got all of these negative influences that are impacting the brain at the neuronal level.

Mike Jones (12:20)
Yeah, that makes great sense. And it's interesting you say there about when they're stressed and when we think about strategy and I wrote about this the other day about perspectives and are we willing to challenge our own perspectives and deconstruct our own mental models to see different perspectives, different ideas? I suppose when you're when you've got these senior leaders that are stressed,

and we could always look at it and go, they're not willing to change. And then we think, are they set up to be able to do that? And are they too stressed thinking about their own current position to even entertain other new positions or new ideas going forward?

Delia McCabe (13:01)
Absolutely Mike and part of the problem here is we already know that when a brain is stressed it will always revert to a knee-jerk habitual response and that's because it can't make those connections. So we know that a brain that is calm and relaxed will be able to explore alternatives to what it used to do. So what you mention now is a very important part of this whole process of being a leader and being able to think clearly.

Mike Jones (13:01)
Cheers.

Delia McCabe (13:29)
and

creativity and make different decisions because if you can only exploit what you already know then you're only going to have that old toolbox at your disposal. You cannot explore anything new and so we speak about the explore and exploit challenge and the researchers have actually called it that because that's exactly what happens and you've seen it with people that you work with and so have I. One of the things I do, I've got about

a checklist of about fifteen things that we work through to analyze exactly where the extra cognitive load is coming from because this is just another quirk that the brain does and I'll just give you a little bit of a history to this research. ⁓ One of the researchers was looking at his son playing Lego and he said, okay, this is very interesting the way the son dealt with the challenges of building a structure.

Mike Jones (14:11)
Yeah, yeah.

Delia McCabe (14:22)
and mostly he added blocks to solve a problem. And so he thought to himself,

why don't I check this out with human beings, grown up human beings, you know, to see how they do this. And so they started doing research into how people deal with these Lego challenges. And then they said, it only to do with Lego? What happens if we give them menus or itineraries or something else to work with? And they found that what human beings generally tend to do about 60 % of the time, we add something to solve a problem. They also had a

Mike Jones (14:53)
Right.

Delia McCabe (14:54)
And this is the additive problem. They also had a situation where they were working in an organization and a new leader had come in and was going around to all the staff to ask the staff what they saw needed to be done to improve a particular aspect of the organization and they found that 80 % of the suggestions were additive. Only 20 % were let's reduce something.

So they had a look at this in a lot of detail and I really like this experiment and you're going to understand in a moment why. Because it speaks directly to neural energy. Because it takes more neural energy to analyze a situation deeply and see what you can remove versus adding something.

because if you add something you don't have to think deeply about what will happen if I take this away, effect will that have, what ramifications, what consequences. So you use more neural energy when you're subtracting something. So when I work with leaders and with people individually, I say to them, know, we're going to remove a couple of things from whatever you're doing and however you're doing it. And this is why we're going to do that. And I'm going to help you do that because most of them don't have excess neural energy. But that's something, you know, it's a neural

Mike Jones (15:51)
Yes.

Delia McCabe (16:13)
work we have just going for the easiest path because the brain is really very metabolically active and is always looking to hold on to energy. doesn't want to expend energy so that's why it will just add something and you know that also explains bureaucracy. It explains a whole lot of what we see going on in the world.

Mike Jones (16:15)
Yes.

Yes, as well as thinking.

Yes. That's really interesting because it was only today I was working with a team and you could see that every time they encountered a problem, i.e. they started to see gaps between the effects gap. So something different happened to what they expected or the alignment gap, someone done something they didn't expect, then their always response is to add more policy, more processes, more something on.

and then realising that this extra bit they've now added on increases the complexity which then increases the cognitive load of their people to actually do some work. And they never once thought about taking something away.

Delia McCabe (17:18)
Absolutely. Once you understand this principle and the way the brain naturally gravitates to it, to using that particular quirk, you can't unsee it. You see it everywhere. Suddenly it becomes pretty obvious and you say, that should be self-evident. But for me, because I always go back to the neurophysiology, I go, well it makes sense. The brain's always looking to preserve energy and so whatever it finds...

Mike Jones (17:28)
and

Delia McCabe (17:41)
However it finds a way to do that, it will do that.

And that's a huge challenge because it's firstly a sign that people are not trained to think critically. But secondly, for me it's a sign, you know, with the people I work with is that they actually don't have any extra mental bandwidth. They don't have the capacity to sit back. They're not calm and relaxed enough to do that because we now live in a world where speed is everything. You've got to do something really quickly. You must see the result of what you're doing instantly. If you don't, then you're not being effective.

Mike Jones (18:01)
No.

Delia McCabe (18:15)
So you've got that other pressure at the back of your mind all the time. So when leaders find themselves in that situation and they are very nutrient deficient in the nutrients that they have now become depleted in because of the chronic stress they're experiencing, they've got a double whammy. They have the speed pressure and they also don't have the cognitive capacity. So one of the things that they do is drink more coffee.

and people always laugh when I speak about coffee because they say, do you hate coffee? And I go, absolutely not. Once you know how coffee works, then you can use it. The problem is that most people use it for the wrong reason. Coffee is really great at increasing our capacity to focus and concentrate.

Mike Jones (18:45)
you

Delia McCabe (19:05)
because coffee contains caffeine and caffeine stimulates dopamine and dopamine brings along its best friend adrenaline so you get a stress spike so you're very focused and you're concentrating but it doesn't increase creativity so if you're trying to be creative it's doing the opposite so don't drink coffee if you need to think of a new idea

Mike Jones (19:28)
great.

I've heard beer is great for coming up with new ideas.

Delia McCabe (19:36)
Interestingly, alcohol

can help because alcohol is a central nervous system depressant. So that's a good thing in some ways but it can be a negative in others because it calms you, it allows you to access information that you can't access when you've got high levels of cortisol circulating. So yeah, that's another conversation mark.

Mike Jones (19:53)
⁓

Yeah, I know that's something that people are gonna have to speak to HR about. But yeah. But it is fascinating because, know, the whole thing about today is that, you know, it sort of comes a bit trope about the, you know, it's more uncertain, more complex and everything like that. And it is true. And we always say that we need to give people the capacity to act.

Delia McCabe (19:59)
They can't very well bring a beer to the desk.

Mike Jones (20:24)
And I think that we don't help in two ways. One is that we don't appreciate the cognitive load that people have already got on through probably ambiguity around what we actually want them to focus on, know, changing priorities all the time. And the other bit is around, I suppose, that additive thing where we keep adding more stuff on. So we're not removing any burden from them. We're increasing the burden.

for that. And then I suppose that with all that is this, you correct me if wrong, inherent affliction towards uncertainty that humans have. What's your view on that?

Delia McCabe (21:02)
Well, humans.

Humans don't like uncertainty. like certainty. But I'll come back to that in a moment. I just want to step back to what you were saying about the cognitive load. A couple of years ago, Slack, ironically, did some research and they wanted to see how people were using the information that they were gathering online. Because a lot of companies are using lots of different platforms to try and make work more stream-alarm and make people more productive. But what they found was quite sobering.

About 45 % of the people that were in this research project said that they battled to find the information they needed to make the decision. if leaders think that they want people to be able to act more and to stay engaged and be productive, but they keep on loading them with information,

the human brain has to go and look for the information it needs to be able to make that decision.

every single time it's searching and then doesn't find it, this is all neural energy expenditure. So that's a huge issue and leaders need to find ways to reduce that cognitive load because if they don't do that, people can't find what they need to make the decision. They then get irritated, their stress level goes up and that of course is exactly the opposite of what leaders want and that is one of the reasons I believe and I see other people are also speaking about this is why engagement

is so low. There's just too much information. But to get back to what you were saying about this uncertainty, the human brain has a couple of very important survival functions. And one of its primary functions is to look for patterns in the environment. If it can find patterns, then it can make a prediction about what could happen next.

Mike Jones (22:45)
Yeah.

Delia McCabe (22:51)
If it looks at a whole lot of information in the environment, it can't find any patterns. It can't make any predictions. It then becomes overwhelmed.

and it feels uncertain. Now it doesn't know what to do going forward. Now it's battling because it didn't find a pattern so it can't predict so what is the next step? So the more overwhelmed people become, the greater the chances are that they're going to suffer from burnout. It is inevitable because the brain will continue searching, grappling to find this pattern. It's one of the reasons that conspiracy theories come into

being. These are brains battling to make sense of what's going on in the world and so they tie together ideas to try to make sense of what goes on. And some of the ideas seem ridiculous and obviously are. Some of them turn out to be correct. However, it's a natural tendency for the brain to do this because uncertainty and overwhelm is what it wants to avoid at all costs because it sees that as a survival threat.

You know, the brain is a survival organ that developed, evolved in a very simple environment. We are not living in a simple environment anymore, but its architecture, its structure and function is still very much focused on escaping from that tiger in the jungle. Now, the...

Mike Jones (24:00)
sense.

Yeah.

Delia McCabe (24:20)
target doesn't exist anymore now we have psychological threats and so we have this ongoing need to figure out what's going on so we can make a decision based on how are we going to survive this and

Mike Jones (24:33)
Yes.

Delia McCabe (24:35)
That's a huge challenge. So now we've got that going on in the background in a very complex world. We've got tsunami loads of information, significantly less knowledge and even less wisdom. But the brain is still trying to work its way through all of this. And our brains are natural. There's a word called infovore. We're information voracious. We constantly look for information because the brain feels the more information it has.

the better equipped it is to be able to find a pattern, predict and survive. Now we've got so much and some of it we can't believe and some of it we're not sure about and do we trust this person that's sharing this information and what about this news channel? So there's an enormous amount of uncertainty in the world today and the brain isn't thriving in that situation.

Mike Jones (25:09)
Yes, yeah.

Yeah, I suppose it must be uncomfortable because we talk about in real complex environments when we don't really know we need to act and by the sense of acting you can see how it unfolds in the extended environment and you can learn from there and reorientate and do that. But trying to get leaders to understand that is quite difficult because they sort of go into this paralysis where they don't want to make

any decisions or do anything without the perceived perfect information that's going to inform that decision. And we have this sort of battle that going well we're in this world where I don't think the perfect information exists so what is enough to be able to then do something where we can then reorientate and learn.

Delia McCabe (26:14)
Absolutely, I think.

There are a things here. The one thing is that they're not comfortable with doing a test, just doing a little experiment to see what the outcome is of that because they're used to doing things on a big scale because of what they used to do in the past. Now remember, those neural pathways for what they used to do in the past are robust and we never overwrite a neural pathway. It's not as if we come along with a new behavior and we go, ⁓ I want to override neural pathway

for example, with this new behavior. That doesn't happen. We have to now create a new neural pathway and the old one will always stay more robust until the new one has been used often and consistently. So even though they may see that there's a new way to do that when they're chronically stressed and overwhelmed with too much information, their brain is going, no, let's go back to the knee-jerk reaction. Let's go to the habitual option. Let's go to the exploit what we

Mike Jones (26:46)
you

Delia McCabe (27:13)
So they've got this this catch-22 and then of course most of them are deficient in the nutrients that they need to keep their brain super neuroplastic So they then also have that problem. So there are a few factors at play in this process and As we you know said earlier, they'll add something to it rather, you know get a new consultant in

get someone to tell them what they can put into the workflow, not, hey, let's take something out and let's see what happens. So, Mike, it's a challenge. The challenge is we're working with brains.

Mike Jones (27:42)
Yeah.

Yeah, and it just starts laughing to myself then when you said you get consulting in and they add something else just like well it depends what consultant you get because most of the only answer is to remove people. They don't remove process or anything, they need to remove people and then they wonder why then people become more stressed because they've got more things to do because they removed the people to do stuff. Yeah that's...

Delia McCabe (27:54)
Of course.

Absolutely.

Mike Jones (28:09)
Yeah, and it's fascinating when you look at that level, because you're when you look at an objective point, you're thinking what we're trying to do is not difficult. But again, we're trying to work with the brain, we're trying to work with those really embedded pathways that have served them well before, so there's nothing to say that it's not going to work again. And I find this a lot when I'm trying to challenge the orthodoxy about how they approach strategy.

and I'm trying to get them to move beyond this fallacy that's been created and it's so hardwired into organisations now that we want strategy, we have an offsite, we do a vision statement, we do this stuff. that stuff not gonna, I really wonder if it ever worked, but it's definitely not gonna work now and I can see why it's so difficult to get them to switch to a different approach, more uncertain approach.

Delia McCabe (29:01)
Absolutely.

I think until they get to understand that, they'll keep on going back to the knee-jerk response. You know, just let's do what worked before. And now we live in a world that has changed so drastically, exponential change is just part of the world we live in. They can't expect the old strategies, the old tactics to work like they used to. There too many other variables they need to take into account. And you know, it also depends on the age of the leader, because sometimes, you know, older

leaders are more convinced that they're right.

They have this feeling of knowing as we've spoken about, not on this podcast but separately. They feel they know and so they don't want anybody else to prove them wrong. Their ego is also involved often and that's why they become paralyzed. So they're saying to themselves, not necessarily consciously, generally unconsciously, I can't make a mistake because I've got this track record of success and if I make a mistake now I'm going to be seen.

Mike Jones (29:49)
I'm going to...

Delia McCabe (30:02)
as someone who isn't competent anymore. So they've got all of these different variables operating and that generally leads to people just doing nothing because that's one of the things that the brain does when it experiences what is called decision fatigue. It either acts on a knee-jerk response or otherwise it stays still and does nothing. And we've seen this from research. People become paralyzed. They go, well, I don't know what to do. And they've got all this information vying for attention.

So when you notice that, now you know what's happening at the neuronal level.

Mike Jones (30:35)
Yeah, I'm just reflecting back. I remember like, soldiers and when you had young soldiers that were, say young soldiers, these are going through their sort of senior battle courses. And you'd see that response when, because we use sleep deprivation a lot, which is probably not good. And we put them in high stress situations with a lot of information, a lot of conflicting information. And you'd see that

some soldiers would just do something really random and they're more like stern than that. And you see some that just are overwhelmed and they do nothing. They just sit there and they can't do anything. I've always wondered why that was, but that makes perfect sense in that situation. oh sorry, go ahead.

Delia McCabe (31:26)
Sorry Mike, the thing to also keep in mind is that we can build our resilience to uncertainty.

and this isn't the kind of resilience where you say to someone well we're going to work you 24 hours a day and we're going to stress you out and you're going to be sleep deprived and you're going to come out stronger. It's not about that, it's about slowly increasing people's capacity to cope with a little bit more stress and teaching them how to hold different ideas in their head at the same time. And when you do that and you slowly stretch them out of their comfort zone, they become more capable of dealing with a situation that is unfolding rapidly and the situation

Mike Jones (31:38)
Yeah.

Yes.

Delia McCabe (32:01)
that they don't have an enormous control over. It's like any muscle. You build it slowly with consistent action and with good support.

I don't think leaders, because leaders don't understand how the brain functions and they don't use neuroscience in their leadership, you know, overall strategy and in the tactics that they use day to day. They don't understand this. So they haven't built a team, built a workforce that is now capable of dealing with this exponential change. So that's one of the problems we have. It is possible to teach people how to cope better with uncertainty, but they haven't set the stage for that.

Mike Jones (32:30)
Yeah.

Yeah,

and I think they, and I was having this conversation today, I don't think organisations are willing to slow down enough to do this and to practise this stuff. They just are in this constant tempo of activity, but they're not going, do you know what, let's sacrifice a bit of time in the short term to help trying to develop this stuff, so in the long term we are more...

resilient, more have a greater neuroplasticity so that we can deal with these fluctuations, uncertainty, these adaptions that happen. Yeah, it's a shame. I don't think people truly, truly, what's the word, appreciate it.

Delia McCabe (33:23)
They absolutely don't and one of the reasons they don't is because we don't teach people how their brain functions and I think that's a fault of education. We didn't used to need to know much about our brains because we didn't live in the kind of world we live in today. if children are educated into understanding their brain, they start understanding why they have biases, they start understanding what neural energy actually means, they start understanding about how to build up neural energy, how to increase neuroplasticity, how to increase cognitive resilience.

Mike Jones (33:29)
Mmm.

Delia McCabe (33:52)
If they grow up with that, they'll take that language and that particular way of looking at the world and their interaction with the world into the workforce. But we're not doing that. We're expecting something from them that they don't have the capacity to do. And there's a small percentage of people, and I work with those people, these are generally people that are very smart, they can see what they're not capable of doing, and they're willing to ask for help. These are not people that are stuck on the treadmill and that are trying to compete with everybody. They understand

Mike Jones (34:00)
Hmm... Die.

Yes.

Delia McCabe (34:21)
at the hidden edge.

is what most other people don't have and they want that hidden edge. So I'm fortunate to work with people like that and to be able to optimize their already mostly well functioning brains so they get an edge. They're prepared to say, hold on a second, I'm going to sit back for a moment, I'm not going to compete, I'm not going to look at what anyone else is doing, I'm going to optimize my team and myself. So I'm fortunate that I see those people, those are the ones I work with. The ones that I don't see are the ones floundering around and saying, what the hell is going on?

keep on adding something instead of saying hold on let's sit back and

Mike Jones (34:54)
Yeah,

Sorry, I think this is a common problem around because there's so much stuff around here like all about grit and perseverance. It's almost like if you wanna do well, just do more of the same, just better and quicker. And also this, I suppose, oversimplification of things is that we've got this world now where if you want to improve something, it has to be able to be boiled down into eight steps.

and think it doesn't work and I think we need to move away from this sort sloppy, lazy view of things and actually start to, like you said, get back to the first principle, get back to that understanding and really what are we trying to, what do we need? Because look, what you talked about, about these people that have got great neuroplasticity resilience, I think as we go into the workplace that's what we need because it's really uncertain and complex.

Delia McCabe (35:46)
100 % but as you said, know To get them to see that and to get them to want to make those changes I think

I've come to the conclusion that there's a certain percentage of people that can't change and whether that's related to their personality, it's related to the education that they had, whether it's related to those neural pathways that become ego driven or ego consolidated, can think about, those are people you're never going to change their mind. I wrote a sub-step article about why never to argue with anybody again.

and the researchers that are are quote in that article speak a lot about disconfirming information and how much people need to be able to change their mind and yeah and I was really quite shocked by this research because once again it speaks to my area of interest as well even though they didn't realize they were doing so they speak about something called the effective tipping point

Mike Jones (36:32)
Yeah, I'm glad you got onto this. That's what I was hoping we could get to. Yeah.

Delia McCabe (36:50)
and by affect they mean emotion. So at what point does the emotion tip them over to change their mind about what information they've been exposed to. when I read this article I thought people should be shouting this from the rooftops because it's so important. I suppose a lot of people didn't realize the importance of this research. So what they discovered that on average, Mike on average with the

sample that they had and I think the sample we can extrapolate from the sample to our general to the general population because of the mechanisms involved the neurophysiological and the physiological mechanisms involved but what they discovered that was that people in their groups needed about if they had on average twenty percent disconfirming information about what they previously believed they actually dug their heels in.

and they believed more.

about what they originally believed versus the disconfirming information on average twenty percent okay then they also discovered and this was the really sobering part people need between forty to eighty percent of disconfirming information this is information disconfirming what they believed before to change their minds just think about that forty to eighty percent

Mike Jones (38:11)
Wow.

Delia McCabe (38:13)
We live in a world where we have trained algorithms.

to feed back to us what we already believe. we are very seldom ever exposed to between 40 to 80 percent of disconfirming information because just to get back to the affective part of this tipping point, that means that they must get such an uncomfortable feeling. It's actually a rise in anxiety and this is a visceral physical response.

Mike Jones (38:21)
Yes, yeah, yeah.

Delia McCabe (38:44)
to be able to change their mind. They must feel so uncomfortable that they can't tolerate that feeling anymore and so then they say hold on a second I need to think differently about this. So people naturally gravitate away from feeling anxious and feeling physically distressed and so they're not going to allow themselves to get to that 40 to 80 percent to be able to change their minds. It would have to be a huge

like you know

cataclysmic event for people to change their minds because of the way we've trained the algorithms, because of our low neural energy, because of being tribal creatures, we don't want to leave our tribe. There all these different variables involved and if someone wants to go and read the article they can go and read it, it's fully referenced and I think it's a fantastic way to fully grasp how hard it is for people to shift the way they're thinking and to change those neural pathways.

Mike Jones (39:41)
Yeah, and you can see that in our sort of discourse at the moment between the sort of left and right at the moment, how entrenched people are coming. But it's interesting though for thinking about that and so leaders trying to deal with different stakeholders

What would you recommend for them? How could they help change or get support from stakeholders who might necessarily have their own view of how things should be done?

Delia McCabe (40:11)
Well, they've got to be able to present enough information in enough different ways to get the people to look at it from a lot of different perspectives. And one of the ways to get people engaged is to engage their emotions. So they could, for example, use a story related to what they're trying to share and explain how a person was doing something a certain way and then they changed the strategy and they started doing it a different way and what the outcome was. Because people

gravitate to successful stories and they want that outcome for themselves. So that's generally what I'd suggest to people. Find some way to bring an emotion into this discussion because people want to be part of a good outcome. But they need to keep in mind that the ego is a very stubborn thing and if a person has aligned themselves with believing a certain thing then they need to feel safe to step away from that thing, that idea and

know that they're going to be with other people that are going to see the same thing or see it similarly.

A lot of people don't change their mind because they feel that if they do change their mind, there's no one there to join them on the other side. So one of the things to do when you're explaining something to people and you're showing different perspectives and saying, well, we may need to shift, is for them to feel that if they change their mind, they've got people on the other side that see things similarly. And that is very, very helpful because we are tribal creatures. We don't want to stand alone. Standing alone meant that we were more at risk of, you

of our demise. So we want to know that if we change course, we think a different way, there are other people that think similarly. Then we're not alone and we're not at risk. So those are just a few ways to attempt that.

Mike Jones (41:55)
That's

really useful and coming back to something you said earlier about the knowing is that in the same same idea as what we're talking about there?

Delia McCabe (42:04)
No, it is similar and it's kind of linked but I think it needs its own little explanation. So the feeling of knowing is the belief that how you feel is knowledge about reality and about facts. And this, it's a difficult concept to wrap your head around but it is also directly impacted to how we feel, our visceral response.

People forget that we are embodied beings and our emotions travel significantly faster than our thoughts. And that had to be the case because we had to be running away from that tiger before we thought about whether it really was a tiger.

Mike Jones (42:45)
Yeah, true.

Delia McCabe (42:45)
or maybe

that it was a bunny rabbit. So our emotions and what we call them our feelings have to move a lot faster throughout our body and our brain versus cognition. So that's the first thing to keep in mind. But this feeling of knowing, this belief that a feeling is giving you information and knowledge about reality.

is a little bit different and I'll give you an example just to give just to make it clear for the viewers. in 1986 the Challenger exploded. don't know how you were probably a spring chicken so you may not remember that that incident mark but it was a huge huge you know global incident and some researchers who were studying flashbulb memories. Now this is memories that are related to a very emotive event. They decided

Mike Jones (43:21)
Is it?

Delia McCabe (43:37)
to use that natural disaster as an experiment. And so what they did, they got a group of people together and they asked them where they were, what they were doing, and how they felt when the Challenger exploded.

and you know seven people died so it was a big thing globally and a lot of people felt strongly about that event and they wrote down you know those three things in a little summary and the researchers kept that summary and two and a half years later they went back and asked the people what they recalled.

the results are really interesting because the first thing that they found was that about 25 % of the difference of the reports were strikingly different. So that means what the person had said two and a half years later and what they had said originally were very, very different. So the memories weren't similar. 50 % had some errors of difference. ⁓

Only 10 % of the people had all the facts right, so they remembered it perfectly from two and a half years previously to now. One of the people's responses really caught their attention though, and this epitomizes the feeling of knowing. This person wrote, that is my handwriting, but that's not what happened. So,

They saw that they had written what had happened two and a half years ago, but now they were saying that wasn't what happened. So they disbelieved themselves. Now, we could say to ourselves, well, this is just an experiment about memory. It's not. What was telling, and they've done other research, you know.

many other research projects related to memory. But the thing that's telling is the confidence that the people feel when they speak about what happened. They're super confident. There's something called the weapon memory effect. When people are involved in a violent crime, they say certain things about the people involved in the crime, but they're generally wrong because what they focus

on is the weapon, naturally, but they're so confident in talking about what they've seen. Now this is where the feeling of knowing comes in, is that confidence that you write and that the way you feel is information about knowledge, about facts, about reality.

and there many other experiments that I could list for you where this happens. The problem is that when people take this feeling of knowing and they apply it to the real world, they generally are doing the wrong thing because it's a visceral response. They're not using their prefrontal cortex to examine it and say, on a second. They're not using this most powerful part of the brain to analyze what they're

how they approaching the challenge, the decision they need to make. That is the biggest problem we have is believing that this feeling is knowledge of our reality. So we need to keep that in mind. That is a huge problem we have because it makes sense to have the capacity to have a feeling

Mike Jones (46:32)
Meh.

Delia McCabe (46:49)
about whether you should pursue an idea, you should pursue a solution. We need to have that but now with so much information in the world we now have feelings about everything and sometimes and I like to do this and I like to observe this with people in person I'll say something quite startling to them about the brain.

My favorite one is that you don't get a rewrite for these opportunistic periods of brain development. I'll say this to people and I will watch them. They will actually move their bodies away. Physically, go, that can't be true. They get this feeling because they don't like that knowledge. If you don't like the knowledge, you have a visceral response to it. You move away from it physically and you basically put up this bound

Mike Jones (47:32)
Mm.

Delia McCabe (47:39)
I don't want to believe that. It's too uncomfortable to believe that. Don't tell me that I don't like it. And that's the biggest danger of the feeling of knowing.

Mike Jones (47:44)
Yeah.

I see this a lot in strategy development because we get to some really difficult things and there was a lady on LinkedIn wrote a comment about our favourite thing around strategy is the unlimited choices. So, exerting your limited resources to unlimited choices. said, well, I was thinking, well, that's not true because it's never unlimited.

actually it's very limited choices that we face and normally they're not very palpable choices that we have. And we have our leaders then, they sort of, even though they could see it and we could all see it and sense it, but there's almost this visual reaction that they move away from it and almost start to deny it. And you can see that they're telling themselves that that's not true.

and then they start and it's really hard to then get them to make these uncomfortable decisions to move forward because they're trying to find a look for any sort of information to confirm that they are right and that is not actually the truth even though we've just been exploring that and it was very obvious to everyone that was involved.

Delia McCabe (49:05)
There you have seen that feeling of knowing in action and it's a very hard

concept for a person to become comfortable with that they will fall for it as well and then secondly learn to track when that could be happening and This is when distributed cognition becomes extremely important because when we experience bound cognition, you know We just in our own heads and we are thinking this thought and we ruminating on it and it's going around and around We are very less

Mike Jones (49:17)
Mmm.

Yeah.

Delia McCabe (49:39)
to see that in action. But when we have distributed cognition, when we've got quite a few people involved in this strategy or this thought process or this thought experiment, whatever you want to call it, then someone can call that out. But you've got to be open to considering that. You've got to be open to saying, hold on a second, is that happening here? Now, in a very complex world, it's never been more important for us to be able to tackle that issue because it's a natural survival mechanism.

It's something that is part of us

being embodied beings. can't make decisions rationally. We have to have some kind of emotion attached to it, but we must be able to say to ourselves, we've had that reaction and now let the prefrontal cortex step in. excuse me, Mike, I'm going to go back to first principles again. The prefrontal cortex is only 10 % of the brain volume, but it uses 25 % of the 25 % that the brain already uses.

Mike Jones (50:13)
Yeah, yeah.

Delia McCabe (50:41)
for neural energy. So at 10 % of the weight of the brain it is the most metabolically active part of the brain and it is not optimally online 24-7.

because it is constantly trying to make new connections, trying to anticipate, trying to think, hey, what's the consequence? Analyzing, excuse me, patterns, assessing a situation from different perspectives. This all uses more neural energy than the visceral response that we have. If we're running low on neural energy, we have a lot of cortisol circulating, our prefrontal cortex battles to function optimally.

because it cannot step back and inhibit that emotional response with ease. It stays in that emotional visceral response instead of stepping aside and going okay now we're going to let the cognition have its moment in the sun and that's part of the problem we have.

Mike Jones (51:42)
Yes, and definitely when we think about in the process of doing shashi, I talk about the cognitive, behavioral, and affective process that you need to go through. But I think people don't really want to go into that. They tend to have shortcuts. I think AI is becoming that shortcut where it will tell you the answer. And that means we're not needing to use...

use our brain, I suppose, critically think. But then I wonder, are we just suffering from that knowing and we're never really gonna get that action because we've not made that process to try and understand and grapple with those conflicting information and those surfacing those tensions.

Delia McCabe (52:21)
think there are lot of variables involved in that challenge. think that the complexity we're now surrounded with means that there will be a group of people who are not used to thinking critically, they don't have the neural energy to do that, their ego will stop them.

they probably have some financial investment in something like AI which is prompting them to push that narrative. They haven't been educated in holding two distinctly different ideas in mind at the same time. So you've got all of those things operating and

For me personally, understanding what I do about the human brain and how it develops and functions, I'm very curious to see how it all plays out because...

Mike Jones (53:05)
Yes.

Delia McCabe (53:07)
I hear people telling me, yeah I use AI, I don't use it for creativity but I use it to help my content production and writing programs and I'm going yeah but where is that distinction between what AI is providing and your own creativity and cognition and will you know when you stepped over the boundary and are now handing over more and more of the creative?

aspect of your business to AI and are you capable of knowing when you're losing your creative edge? Are you observant enough to notice that because if you're building this neural pathway for AI to do some of the slog work for you

you may find that your brain is your worst enemy because what does it do? One of its primary goals is to neural energy and you will be saving neural energy so it will gravitate to the path of least resistance and who is standing there at that crossroads to say you're crossing over now, you are handing over too much, you're going to lose your own innate capacity to be creative and then you're going to be using this knowledge that has been

scraped from the world of... sorry, let me say it, information scraped from the world of information and now you're using that to spur on a creative process that no longer is your own. So I watch these people and I smile to myself and I say you don't realize that you're actually playing with something super super dangerous because of first principles.

Mike Jones (54:20)
Yes.

Yeah, yeah.

Yes. Yeah, that's, that really enforces the point before where I think we get into this point where we try to oversimplicate things and we try to reduct things down into silver bullets or little check lists or steps.

And we're not really doing that bit with actually challenging ourselves building our cognitive resilience our you know cognitive capacity our creativity our neuroplasticity because again, I think it's that thing where we We look to the now and think we ain't got time now. Actually it's easy we just do this and we don't realize we're sort of incentivizing our brain to go to that way rather than

challenging ourselves and challenging each other to make sure that we are being sharp and we're on point. Hmm, interesting.

Delia McCabe (55:30)
Absolutely,

Mike. Because we are our brains and we're using the organ that we're trying to grapple with, that's the issue with metacognition, it's very hard to check yourself all the time and say, how am I thinking about this?

This is probably the message that I'd like to leave with the people that watch and listen to this podcast. You need to become capable of doing that if you want to use your brain optimally. You need to become capable of saying, I need to check that because that's my natural knee-jerk cognitive response. Is it based on an emotion I'm feeling? How is it shifting my perspective? Can I hold these two different

ideas in my mind, can I do a little test to see what the outcome will be? We must learn to use our brains optimally if we want good outcomes. If we want to have homogenous grey outcomes like everyone else does, then carry on doing what you're doing now. But if you don't want that and you really understand that this is the most sensitive and sophisticated organ where real creativity comes from and real intelligence comes from, not what we

conflating with AI and speed, then you will honor this beautiful brain and you will think about how you're thinking and you will make sure that you're nourishing those neurons optimally so that they can be as neuroplastic as possible.

Mike Jones (57:00)
Yeah. There's so much great stuff to take away. Not even, not even just personally like, no, I'm gonna go away and make sure that, you know, I'm feeding my brain correctly and, you know, I'm setting the right conditions for it. But also, you know, with clients thinking about that knowing and are we setting the right conditions to...

enable people to best understand what's going on and going on themselves so we can help that transition to a new way of thinking, a new worldview. I found this absolutely fascinating and I will link your sub-stack into the show notes for people to read your fantastic articles. I follow you so I like reading your stuff, it's always interesting. But no, thank you so much, Delia, for coming on. It's been absolutely wonderful.

Delia McCabe (57:48)
Thank you Mike, it was a delight. Enjoy the rest of your evening.

Mike Jones (57:52)
And you. And for the listeners, if you've enjoyed this as much as I have, please like, share, because no doubt there'll be people in your network that will get so much value from this conversation. otherwise, I look forward to seeing you next week. Goodbye. See you later.