Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences)

1. Prioritize Positive Experience

Focus on what kind of experience you are for others when they work with you, as this is biologically paramount for effective collaboration. If you are a miserable experience, address this first, as it undermines your ability and trustworthiness.

2. Build Relationships: Ability, Trust, Appeal

Strengthen professional relationships by developing your ability (knowledge, skills), building trustworthiness (reducing perceived risk), and cultivating appeal (being a positive and enjoyable experience for others). All three are crucial for strong connections.

3. Prime Meetings for Success

Before decision-making, dedicate time to “priming” everyone by clearly stating the meeting’s purpose, type of conversation, and underlying principles. This ensures alignment and a shared understanding of objectives.

4. Create High-Functioning Habitat

Actively design your team or company’s “habitat” or culture to predispose people to high-functioning thinking and interaction. This involves setting an environment that fosters productive collaboration rather than working against it.

5. Culture: Logical Deduction, Not Inspiration

Build company culture on logical deduction by defining your “role” in the world (who is glad you exist and why) rather than relying on performative, inspirational mission/vision statements. This factual grounding provides a stronger basis for shared beliefs and permissions.

6. Answer “Why” with Purpose

Consistently provide a clear, purposeful “why” for tasks and projects, emphasizing the impact on others and the world. Move beyond negligence or purely safety/reward-based motivations to activate the brain’s purpose system for deeper engagement.

7. Shift to Bias for Impact

Shift your team’s mindset from a “bias to action” (just doing things) to a “bias to impact” (creating valuable effects). This ensures efforts are directed towards producing tangible value aligned with your company’s role.

8. Cultivate Alpha & Gamma States

Intentionally allocate time for “alpha” (daydreaming, subconscious processing) and “gamma” (intense, deep focus) brain states, aiming for roughly 25% of your work year. These states are crucial for breakthroughs, innovation, and deeper problem-solving.

9. Schedule Deep Focus Time

Integrate dedicated alpha and gamma time into your schedule, ideally on a quarterly cadence for strategic deep dives and weekly for a few hours of intense focus. Use these blocks to address complex problems, innovate, and re-evaluate.

10. Utilize 3x3 Focus Grid

Use a 3x3 grid (Safety/Reward/Purpose systems x Alpha/Beta/Gamma focus states) to understand and intentionally activate different thinking channels. Avoid over-reliance on “safety beta” and “reward beta” to unlock more diverse and impactful thinking.

11. Bridge Science-Business Gap

Identify areas where your business practices diverge from what science knows about human behavior and brain function. Actively work to reduce this “dysfunction gap” by adopting scientifically-backed approaches to improve performance.

12. Understand Personality Differences

Develop the capacity to work effectively with people who think and react very differently from you. Recognize that individual experiences and personalities significantly shift how ideas are received and processed.

13. Vulnerability in Sharing Traits

Practice vulnerability by openly sharing your personality traits (e.g., low openness, high conscientiousness) and how they influence your reception of ideas. This honesty fosters trust and helps the team understand your perspective, leading to more efficient collaboration.

14. Leverage Strengths, Patch Weaknesses

While leveraging your strengths, be aware of your weaknesses and identify team members whose strengths can “patch” your deficiencies. This awareness improves team fluidity and prevents operational slowness.

15. Adopt Growth Mentality

When assessing your personality traits, adopt a growth mentality rather than a justification mentality. Instead of defending natural tendencies, consider how altering behavior could better achieve desired outcomes.

16. Cultivate Personal Self-Awareness

Cultivate self-awareness by understanding your natural brain preferences (e.g., anxiety, creativity) and intentionally steer your thoughts towards activating optimal brain regions for a given situation. This prevents default preferences from dictating your response.

17. Understand Brain Systems

Recognize which of the three brain systems (safety, reward, purpose) is active in yourself and others. Understand that a safety-activated brain prioritizes self-preservation, while a purpose-activated brain seeks broader impact.

18. Shift Brain Departments

Shift thinking from relying on past knowledge (history department) to experimental, open-minded (science department) or creative, boundless (art department) thinking for better solutions. This is crucial for innovation in product and service development.

19. Understand Idea Reception

Recognize that people categorize ideas differently (believed, believable, conceivable, inconceivable) based on their experience and personality. What is “unbelievable” to one person might be “believed” by another, impacting how strategy and vision are received.

20. Reverse Engineer Outcomes

To cultivate openness, especially if you’re conscientious, become obsessed with reverse engineering desired outcomes. Deconstruct the inputs that generate success and understand underlying conditions to predispose your mind to generate better ideas and decisions.

21. Increase Situational Awareness

Actively increase your situational awareness by immersing yourself in the realities of your work, such as talking to customers. This ensures your daily decisions consider the broader impact on people and the market, preventing disconnection from reality.

22. Choose Influence Character

Be intentional about your influence style by choosing a “character” or mode that aligns with your personality and the situation (e.g., compassionate caregiver, logical challenger, enthusiastic leader). This provides consistency and helps others understand your approach.

23. Select Influence Speed

Choose an appropriate speed for influence: slow (letting failure teach), moderate (teaching new perspectives), or fast (using cognitive dissonance to challenge beliefs directly). The choice depends on relationships and habitat.

24. Avoid Backwards Meeting Flow

Structure meetings with an initial expansionary (priming) thought process before moving to convergence and decision-making. Avoid starting with convergence, which often leads to misaligned debates and last-minute priming.