The premise of this session reverses the standard frame on resistance entirely. Most change management advice treats resistance as an obstacle to overcome — something to be reduced, neutralized, or argued past. Dr. Mark Jaben's argument, grounded in neuroscience research, is that resistance is exactly what a leader should want, because resistance is the signal that there is data the leader is missing — and that missing data is what stands between a good change and a misguided one.
The session opened with a pointed example. Two articles had recently appeared in medical journals, written by doctors calling out their own institutions for changes made under the banner of Lean. In both cases, what the doctors had been exposed to wasn't Lean — it was what Mark Graban calls L.A.M.E., Lean As Misguidedly Executed. In a follow-up email exchange, one comment captured the frustration: doctors who won't even look at the evidence about Lean, deciding it won't work in healthcare the way they might decide a new medication won't work even where evidence shows it will.
Jaben's response to that frustration was the heart of the session. You do have to deal with resistance — and you should want to. But you don't have to suffer because of it. Resistance is what gives a leader access to the data they're lacking. If the intention is to avoid a misguided decision — a choice that seemed correct at the time but could have been anticipated to fail — resistance is the mechanism that surfaces what the leader couldn't see on their own.
The session is a guided tour through the neuroscience of how the brain actually makes decisions, why facts and metrics rarely overcome resistance, and what leaders can do differently. The framing is practical throughout. Jaben isn't interested in neuroscience for its own sake — he's interested in why organizations function or fail to function, and what the research says leaders should do about it.
Dr. Mark Jaben is an emergency physician with more than 30 years of experience in community emergency medicine. He graduated from the University of Miami School of Medicine in 1981 and completed an emergency medicine residency at University Hospital in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1984. His career has included work with multiple hospital systems in the United States and New Zealand.
Jaben has spoken and written extensively on how healthcare systems can apply continuous improvement, Lean, and Kaizen principles to improve healthcare — not only for patients but for the people who care for patients. At the time of the webinar, he was completing a book offering a deeper dive into the neuroscience of change, expected later that year, with an associated website at freethebrain.com. The host noted that Jaben had also written for the KaiNexus blog, including a post on empathy referenced during the session.
The session was a conversation between two Marks — Dr. Mark Jaben presenting, and Mark Graban (VP of Improvement and Innovation Services at KaiNexus) hosting and pressing on the practical applications.
The first conceptual move Jaben made was to distinguish a problem from a dilemma — and to argue that change is a dilemma.
A problem has a solution. You apply the solution, the problem goes away. A dilemma has no such solution. A dilemma never goes away. It's a balancing act between valuable but conflicting options — a judgment that weighs the chance for benefit against the risk of harm. A dilemma requires a strategy to find the right balance among competing leverage points.
Jaben's image for this was a tightrope walk. The balance starts over with each new step. Tip too far one way or the other, and the result is a fall. Done well, each step leaves the walker still upright, still balanced, still moving forward. Change works the same way. There is no solution that makes the dilemma disappear — there is only the ongoing work of finding and re-finding the balance.
This matters because treating change like a problem leads leaders to look for the solution, apply it, and expect the resistance to vanish. When the resistance doesn't vanish, the leader concludes the people are being irrational. The dilemma framing says something different: the resistance is part of the balancing act, and it carries information about where the balance actually is.
Jaben introduced the distinction that ran through the entire session. An ideal change has two components. It must work — it must address the issue at hand. And it must be workable — it must be feasible given the way the work is actually done now.
What works can be figured out through a disciplined, rational approach. Data, analysis, evidence. What is workable is different. Workability depends on how a person feels about the change, whether they can actually do it, and — most significantly — whether they believe it will make them more successful than what they're currently doing.
That belief depends on what Jaben called the parameters of success: how the person is being judged, what will happen if they miss the mark, what their most prominent concerns are at the moment. He called these the brain's sorting criteria. Workability is a value judgment, and it's largely made outside conscious awareness.
The gap that Jaben spent the session on: improvement efforts overwhelmingly focus on what works. They marshal evidence, metrics, and rational arguments. But the actual obstacle is usually whether the change is workable — and workability lives in a part of the brain that data and argument can't reach directly.
The term Jaben used, drawing on Shankar Vedantam's work, is the hidden brain — the brain functions that operate outside a person's awareness.
The brain factors in values, preferences, and beliefs, using the sorting criteria of the moment to interpret what it observes and to generate a story — an explanation, an interpretation that provides a basis for action. The crucial point: a person cannot articulate what goes on in the hidden brain. They aren't fully aware of why they feel the way they do.
This has direct consequences for change leadership. Leaders can know and define the data they use to make rational decisions about what works. But they do not have good access to the data in the hidden brain — and it's that data the brain uses to decide whether a proposal is workable, what matters, and whether to resist.
Several practical implications follow. Don't expect people to fully know why they feel the way they do. Don't expect them to articulate all their reasons or all their sorting criteria — they aren't aware of them all. And even if they were aware, there's no way to know how the sorting criteria will be prioritized until the person is actually facing a real circumstance. Jaben drew a sharp conclusion from this about meetings: the criteria people use in a meeting to agree on an action plan may look quite different from the criteria that apply at the front line in a real situation. This is one reason meetings are so often unproductive, and it's why even the best plan has to be tested and trialed in actual conditions.
Jaben grounded the hidden-brain argument in the split-brain research from the 1940s onward. Patients with uncontrollable seizures were treated with a procedure that severed the corpus callosum — the connections between the right and left hemispheres. The procedure didn't work well for seizures, but it gave researchers a way to study how the two sides of the brain function separately.
The classic experiment: a picture of a chicken claw was shown to the patient's right visual field and a snowy field to the left visual field. The patient was then asked to choose appropriate pictures. He chose a chicken with his right hand (matching the chicken claw) and a shovel with his left hand (matching the snow scene). Both choices were appropriate for what each hemisphere had seen. But because the hemispheres couldn't communicate, when the patient was asked why he chose the shovel, he didn't say "I don't know." He said he needed the shovel to clean out the chicken coop.
There had been no mention of a chicken coop, no suggestion of cleaning anything. The patient had constructed a story to fit the facts in front of him. The story was plausible and reasonable given what he could see. It just wasn't real. And — the part Jaben found most telling — when challenged, the patient defended the story as if it were a statement of fact. For him, it was the truth.
The lesson: the brain gathers data through the senses, uses its sorting criteria to interpret that data, and generates a story. It pays attention to what it's concerned about at the moment, which means what a person observes is shaped by what they're already looking for. The brain doesn't look for everything — it looks for just enough to decide how to act. The story is built on an incomplete data set. It is invariably missing something. The brain isn't into reality. It's into plausibility — a story that makes sense, but isn't necessarily right.
The conclusion Jaben drew applies to everyone in an organization: the supervisor, the staff, the CEO, the doctors, the nurses, the patients. None of them have it quite right. Each is missing something. Each constructed a plausible story from incomplete data, filtered through their own sorting criteria. The change that looks ideal to one person looks different to another, because they're sorting for different things.
Jaben made a point that he acknowledged runs against the popular understanding. Emotions don't drive the brain's choice. Emotions don't determine the choice. They're the way the brain makes a person aware of a decision that has already been made.
The choice is made in the background, in the hidden brain, based on an interpretation of the situation. Emotions, feelings, and hunches are the messenger — a rapid communication scheme that lets a person in on what has already been decided. What a person is aware of is the choice. They are not aware of all the activity that produced it.
This reframes a "gut reaction." When Mark Graban asked whether going with your gut is another way of describing the hidden brain, Jaben's answer was yes — the gut reaction is the voice that emerged from the internal argument as the choice the prefrontal cortex weighed in on. The problem is that the gut reaction is not always right.
Jaben described the hidden brain as made up of many different voices, each with a specific concern. When the brain faces a situation, these voices argue about what the person should do. It's a cacophony, and the person isn't aware of it.
The result of the argument isn't a mediated settlement. The loudest voice wins. The prefrontal cortex then has the job of judging that loudest voice — deciding whether to defend it (rationalize it as the best choice) or challenge it (apply its analytical power to find a better version). Only after that judgment is the choice escalated to awareness.
This is a crucial realization for change work. Other perspectives, other possibilities, other choices — they're all in there. They're just drowned out. There are always options, even if they aren't immediately acceptable or recognizable. A leader doesn't really have to convince anyone of anything. The leader has to create the conditions where those other, suppressed possibilities become worth the brain's energy to consider.
Jaben also flagged a counterintuitive point about certainty. If you feel certain about something, you should be concerned — you're likely missing something. If you feel uncertain, you should almost rejoice, because your brain has at least recognized that it's missing something, which gives you the opportunity to find a more acceptable response.
The prefrontal cortex does the work of reaching a desired outcome and analyzing and testing options. Jaben emphasized that it is fragile and easily overwhelmed. Put too many things on its plate, give it too much to do, add hunger, thirst, and fatigue — and it gets overwhelmed and can't do its best work.
When the prefrontal cortex is overloaded, the brain can't even entertain other options. If someone brings up an ideal option, the overloaded prefrontal cortex has no energy and no bandwidth to process it. The message that gets transmitted to awareness is: resist.
This has a direct implication for the journal-article doctors who rejected Lean. They may, in an unaware way, recognize that Lean could work. There may be plenty of evidence. But if they're carrying burnout and overload — too much in front of them already — their prefrontal cortex doesn't have the capacity to consider anything new. They aren't being irrational. They're overwhelmed. And asking an overwhelmed person to change asks them to spend energy they don't have.
Jaben paused mid-session to take questions, and one from an attendee named Paul asked him to elaborate on a claim he'd made — that fighting resistance with data aims in the wrong direction.
His explanation: when leaders use metrics, data, reason, experience, and memory, they're trying to attack the problem through the brain's rational, aware functions. But the real obstacle is usually not inside awareness. It's in the hidden brain. The real obstacle has to do with the person's judgment about what's workable, not what works — and improvement efforts overwhelmingly target what works.
So even when Lean is genuinely proven to work, the resistant doctors don't think it's workable for them. Throw in burnout and overload, and their prefrontal cortex doesn't have the capacity to consider it at all. No amount of additional evidence changes that, because the evidence is aimed at the wrong target.
Jaben anchored the central practical distinction in functional MRI research by Gregory Berns and colleagues at Emory University. Researchers took people with closely held beliefs and placed them in an fMRI, which detects which parts of the brain are active during a given mental task.
When subjects expressed a closely held belief, the amygdala lit up — the area that governs the stress response, the fight-or-flight response. The researchers then offered to pay subjects to vote differently from their previously expressed position. Some refused. Some were willing. For those willing to consider a different position, the fMRI showed processing had moved to the prefrontal cortex — a completely different part of the brain.
The conclusion: when a person is willing to consider something different, their processing has shifted from the amygdala to the prefrontal cortex. Jaben's framing of the lesson — it's unlikely you'll have a fruitful discussion with someone who's favoring the voice of their amygdala and defending a belief. Someone in a defending stance is simply not in the frame of mind to consider options, alternatives, or possibilities. To do that, they have to be in challenging mode.
When two people are each defending their own belief — each in a defending stance — the result is what Jaben called dueling solutions. Each person acts only to protect themselves and defend their choice. The organization grids itself into a stalemate where no real consideration of options is possible.
Jaben connected the dueling-solutions trap directly to the failure of "buy-in" as a frame for improvement.
Each person is defending the change their own brain has decided will fix the problem preventing them from being successful. People at different levels of an organization are responsible for different things, judged by different criteria, and see the world through different sorting criteria — administration versus doctors versus nursing, finance versus operations, cost versus quality. Because each person's story is built from incomplete data filtered through their own concerns, the stories differ. And as long as the stories differ, dueling solutions is what you get.
The standard organizational move is to intervene at the choice stage — implement a best practice, impose a standard, roll out someone's plan that "surely will work" — and then hold people accountable and try to get their buy-in. That approach might address what works. It doesn't address what's workable, unless the brain is in challenging mode and ready to do the hard work of trialing and testing.
Jaben's reframe of buy-in: if someone is buying, someone is selling — trying to convince you of something you need. But if a change is truly valuable, does the person really need to be convinced? Instead of buyers, what improvement needs is investors — people willing to commit their assets (their interest, energy, and work) to achieve a return that benefits everyone. If you're thinking in terms of buy-in, you're in the wrong frame of mind for improvement.
The alternative to fighting at the choice stage is to focus at the desired-outcome stage. Rather than debating solutions, the work is to merge the individual desired outcomes into a shared outcome — one that isn't just any single person's outcome, but one that everyone involved can share and invest in.
This is what creates the conditions for someone to move from a defending stance into challenging mode. Jaben was careful to say that a leader can't manufacture the catalyst that triggers that shift. It's impossible to know what will resonate for someone else, because neither person can know all of the other's sorting criteria. What a leader can do is create the conditions — acknowledge each story, including their own, acknowledge that everyone is missing something, surface the full array of concerns, and craft a shared outcome.
The shared outcome becomes an arbitration tool. When dueling solutions emerge, the leader doesn't get caught up in each party's competing choices. They go back to the shared outcome, confirm it's still the right one, and use the resistance to learn where the obstacles are. The shared outcome is what the testing of options gets judged against.
Jaben also noted that trialing and testing isn't only for process steps. Sometimes you have to trial and test beliefs to learn what the sorting criteria actually are. If you can change the sorting criteria — rebalance what matters — then what's observed changes, the story changes, and the subsequent choices change. But that requires accessing what's going on in the hidden brain.
Jaben offered a piece of brain mechanics that explains why surfacing suppressed options is hard. The brain works on negative feedback loops. Rather than regulating by choosing what to do, the brain operates more efficiently by inhibiting things from being done. Neurons fire constantly; the brain works by inhibiting some of them at certain times. The prefrontal cortex operates this way.
So the other voices in the hidden brain — the other options — are real, but the brain doesn't present them to awareness. It presents a single choice, and as long as that choice seems good enough, it suppresses the others and rationalizes the choice.
The key to change is to give a voice to those suppressed possibilities — to un-suppress them. But that won't happen from a defending stance. The more threatened a person feels, the more tightly they cling to their story, no matter how poor it is. Unleashing those voices only happens in challenging mode.
Jaben introduced one more piece of neuroscience with an uncomfortable implication. Mirror neurons activate when a person sees someone else doing or feeling something. Watch a person raise her hand, and the motor neurons that would direct your own hand activate, even though you're not raising it. This is why a person can feel the pain of others — why drivers slow down and look at a wreck on the other side of the highway. Mirror neurons give people the capacity to identify with another person's experience, which adds to the data the brain factors into its story.
Then the uncomfortable finding. Researchers put subjects in scenarios with successively more power and control, scanning them at each step. The more power and control a person had, the less active their mirror neurons became.
The implication for organizations: as a person climbs the ladder, their brain is increasingly built to disregard others and discount their experiences. Everyone is subject to this effect. The leaders most responsible for crafting change are, by virtue of their position, the ones whose brains are least naturally inclined to take in the experiences of the people the change affects. Accessing the stories of others — which the whole approach depends on — runs against the grain of how a powerful person's brain operates by default.
Jaben made the point that resistance has many faces. Someone saying "no" is obvious. But "no" doesn't always mean a person is in a defending stance — and dismissing everyone who says "no" as a saboteur means missing valuable feedback. Silence can be resistance. "I'll try," said with little enthusiasm, is often resistance.
But no matter how it shows up, there are only three reasons a person resists. It's a problem with purpose — they don't agree with your story or the problem you've defined. It's a problem with process — they don't see how they can be successful doing it. Or it's a problem with priorities — it's just not worth their effort right now.
If a leader can learn which of the three is at the root of the resistance, they have a place to trial and test and a direction to go to reconcile the stories.
Jaben offered a definition of respect that he tied directly to the neuroscience. Respect is the practical application of how a leader deals with resistance. It's not about hearing what other people say. It's about listening for what they fear — which is failure, not meeting the mark — for their concerns, for what success means to them, for what will happen if they miss. It's about gathering the full array of sorting criteria, including the leader's own, and rebalancing what matters to reveal a shared outcome people will invest in.
This takes genuine curiosity — a real desire to reach an ideal change by seeking out resistance. Faked curiosity is easily seen as disingenuous and gets nowhere.
When Mark Graban asked whether all of this could be boiled down to practicing empathy, Jaben's answer connected to a blog post he'd written for KaiNexus arguing that we have empathy backwards. Empathy is not the starting point. Empathy is a result. If a leader genuinely deals with everyone's sorting criteria, the emotion that comes out — in the leader's own brain — is empathy. Understanding another person's situation and taking their concerns into account isn't only helpful to them. It's helpful to the leader, because it's how the leader gets the data needed to avoid a misguided decision.
Even the best data and the right choice get nowhere if the other person doesn't see the leader as credible. Jaben emphasized that a leader doesn't determine their own credibility on a given matter — the other person does. Even a well-respected person can be judged not credible on a specific issue, depending on their actions and statements.
Drawing on philosopher Onora O'Neill's BBC Reith Lectures, Jaben framed credibility around two avoidances: avoid deception and avoid coercion.
Deception revolves around the language, terms, data, and metrics a leader uses. No single piece of data fully describes the actual circumstances, and no metric fully represents the desired outcome. O'Neill's standard: data must be capable of addressing the issue at hand, believable, gathered in an acceptable manner, and verifiable by the people the data affects.
Coercion can occur unintentionally — when a leader pushes for solutions that won't work or aren't feasible given current conditions, devises a standard or imposes a plan that makes it harder for someone else to be successful in their own responsibilities. Often nobody stopped to explore those consequences, so the coercion is inadvertent.
Jaben's examples landed close to home. The poster child for deceptive data, in his view, is the typical satisfaction survey — small sample size, methods the frontline can't see, results that carry little meaning to the people being asked to change. And the poster child for unintentional coercion: devising a plan in a meeting or a kaizen event where not everyone affected was present, then implementing it without a pilot test. Nobody in the room intends to be deceptive or coercive. The structure of how the work was done made it so anyway.
Acting without coercion implies a commitment to tease out the options that let everyone be successful in their responsibilities, even when those options aren't immediately recognizable — a commitment to solve the problems other people will have implementing your idea, and a willingness to examine how you do your own work and accommodate needs beyond your own.
When an attendee asked for a concrete example of moving someone into challenging mode, Jaben told a story from his own emergency department practice.
He was working at a small critical access hospital with limited resources. A patient was seriously ill — kidney problems and pneumonia — and needed to be admitted. Jaben called the hospitalist at his own hospital, who said the case was too much for them. He called the tertiary referral center, which was willing to take the patient but had 20 people already waiting to be admitted from its own emergency department and no space. There was no other tertiary center anywhere close.
Jaben called his hospitalist back and asked what they were going to do. The hospitalist said to keep the patient in the emergency department until a transfer could be arranged — potentially until the next day.
Jaben could have argued. His choice was to move the patient upstairs; the hospitalist's choice was to keep the patient in the ER. That's dueling solutions. Instead, he backed up. Can we agree this patient needs to be admitted? Yes. Can we agree he needs to be admitted somewhere? Yes.
What the hospitalist was actually responding to — his sorting criterion — was that an inpatient-to-inpatient transfer the next day would be extraordinarily difficult, far harder than an ER-to-ER transfer. Both men knew that. Once Jaben understood that concern, he offered to call the tertiary center back and negotiate a specific transfer window. The tertiary center, when pressed, revealed they could probably take the patient within six to eight hours. Jaben called the hospitalist back with a deal: admit the patient upstairs now, start treatment, and the transfer will happen in six to eight hours.
What Jaben had done was surface the hospitalist's actual sorting criterion, reconcile it with his own concern, and craft a shared outcome — the best interest of the patient — that both could invest in. It wasn't the standard way of doing it. Given the circumstances, it was what worked best.
Jaben tied the neuroscience back to the methods the audience already uses. Kaizen translates as "change for the better" — and the implication is that the change is better for everyone involved. Lean, Kaizen, A3 thinking, and the Improvement Kata all address the challenge of finding what works and is workable. But practitioners often skip straight to the options-and-choice stage, which is understandable given how the brain operates but is also where dueling solutions takes hold.
He mapped the connection specifically. The left side of an A3 — finding the root cause — is in essence the work of crafting a shared understanding of what the right side will address. The Improvement Kata starts with direction before the current condition. But, Jaben asked, how do you get to that direction in the first place? That's where he argued a process and a routine are needed — a structured way to surface stories and sorting criteria, get people into challenging mode, and craft the shared outcome before debating solutions.
When Mark Graban offered the journal-article doctors as a test case — Graban defending the story that Lean applies in healthcare, the doctors defending the story that it doesn't, both in dueling solutions — Jaben confirmed it as an example and pushed further. Healthcare organizations are always balancing quality against financial viability. Doctors understand the need for financial stability but focus primarily on the quality of the outcome for the patient in front of them. The people running the hospital recognize quality matters but focus primarily on financial viability. They start in different places, so they reach different solutions about what works. The real work is backing up to that fundamental balance point — a discussion Jaben said he had rarely seen happen at the level it should.
Jaben's framework is a model of how the human brain processes change. None of it is software. The work of surfacing stories, identifying sorting criteria, moving people from defending to challenging mode, and crafting shared outcomes happens in conversations and relationships, not in a platform.
Where infrastructure connects is in the conditions the framework depends on.
Jaben's argument about the overloaded prefrontal cortex has a direct operational implication. A person whose prefrontal cortex is overwhelmed can't consider change — there's no bandwidth left, and the message to awareness becomes "resist." A great deal of that overload, in improvement work specifically, comes from the friction of managing improvement itself: ideas tracked in spreadsheets, status buried in email, no visibility into what's happening, the same problems re-solved because nobody could see that a solution already existed. Infrastructure that removes that friction — that holds the improvement work, makes it visible, and routes it without manual chasing — reduces one source of the overload. It doesn't clear a clinician's clinical workload, but it can keep the act of participating in improvement from being one more thing piled onto an already-overwhelmed prefrontal cortex.
Jaben's point about credibility and deception connects to how data is presented. His standard, drawn from O'Neill, is that data must be believable, gathered in an acceptable manner, and verifiable by the people it affects. His example of deceptive data was the typical satisfaction survey — small sample, opaque methods, results the frontline can't trust. Infrastructure that makes the source of improvement data transparent, that lets people see how a number was produced and trace it back to the work, supports the credibility the framework requires. A leader trying to lead change without coercion needs data the affected people can actually verify.
His point about unintentional coercion — plans made in a meeting where not everyone affected was present, implemented without a pilot test — connects to how improvement work gets captured and trialed. The framework calls for trialing and testing both process steps and the beliefs underneath them, on a small scale, before anything is imposed. Infrastructure that holds those experiments, tracks what was tried, and records what was learned makes the trial-and-test discipline operationally real rather than aspirational. It also makes it possible for the people affected by a change to see the experiment happening and contribute to it, which is the opposite of the closed-meeting coercion Jaben warned about.
And the shared-outcome work the framework centers on — surfacing the full array of concerns across administration, nursing, physicians, finance, operations — depends on those concerns and the resulting improvement work being visible across the organization rather than locked inside individual departments. The dueling-solutions trap is partly a visibility problem: each function defends its own story partly because it can't see the others. Infrastructure that makes improvement work visible across functions and facilities gives the shared outcome somewhere to live and gives the different functions a common surface to reconcile their stories against.
None of this changes what Jaben was teaching. The neuroscience is the neuroscience. The distinction between defending and challenging mode is the distinction. The shift from buy-in to investment, from solutions-first to shared-outcome-first, is the shift. What infrastructure does is help create the conditions — less overload, more credible data, real trialing and testing, cross-functional visibility — under which the brain is more able to move from resisting to engaging.
Why does Dr. Jaben say resistance is not the enemy? Because resistance is the signal that there is data the leader is missing — and that missing data is what stands between a good change and a misguided one. Resistance represents a calculated judgment by the brain that a proposed change is less likely to make the person more successful than what they're currently doing. If a leader's intention is to avoid a misguided decision, resistance is the mechanism that surfaces what the leader couldn't see on their own. The better question, Jaben argued, isn't "why do I have to deal with resistance" — it's "what makes me think resisting isn't their better choice?"
What's the difference between a problem and a dilemma? A problem has a solution — you apply the solution and the problem goes away. A dilemma has no such solution. It's a balancing act between valuable but conflicting options, and it never goes away. Change, Jaben argued, is a dilemma, not a problem. Treating change like a problem leads leaders to look for the solution and expect resistance to vanish. The dilemma framing recognizes that change requires an ongoing strategy to find and re-find the right balance, like a tightrope walk where the balance starts over with each step.
What's the difference between "works" and "workable"? A change works if it addresses the issue at hand — that can be figured out through rational analysis and evidence. A change is workable if it's feasible given how the work is actually done, and whether the person believes it will make them more successful than what they're doing now. Workability is a value judgment made largely in the hidden brain. Improvement efforts overwhelmingly focus on what works. The actual obstacle is usually whether the change is workable — and workability can't be reached through data and argument alone.
What is the "hidden brain"? The brain functions that operate outside a person's awareness. The hidden brain factors in values, preferences, and beliefs, using the sorting criteria of the moment to interpret what it observes and generate a story. A person cannot articulate what happens in the hidden brain — they aren't fully aware of why they feel the way they do. Leaders can define the data they use for rational decisions, but they don't have good access to the hidden-brain data that determines whether a change feels workable. The term draws on Shankar Vedantam's work.
What are "sorting criteria"? The factors the brain uses to decide what matters and whether to resist — how a person is being judged, what will happen if they miss the mark, their most prominent concerns at the moment. Sorting criteria are largely in the hidden brain, so a person can't fully articulate them, and there's no way to know how they'll be prioritized until the person faces a real circumstance. Surfacing the full array of everyone's sorting criteria, including the leader's own, is what makes it possible to craft a shared outcome.
What did the split-brain research show about how the brain makes decisions? That the brain constructs plausible stories from incomplete data. In the classic experiment, a split-brain patient was shown a chicken claw and a snowy field to separate visual fields and chose a chicken and a shovel. Asked why he chose the shovel, he said he needed it to clean the chicken coop — a story he invented to fit the facts, then defended as truth. The lesson: the brain gathers just enough data to decide how to act, builds a plausible story that's invariably missing something, and defends that story. Everyone in an organization is doing this — none of them have it quite right.
Do emotions drive our decisions? No, according to the research Jaben presented. Emotions don't drive or determine the brain's choice — they're the messenger. The choice is made in the background, in the hidden brain, based on an interpretation of the situation. Emotions, feelings, and hunches are how the brain makes a person aware of a decision that has already been made. A "gut reaction" is the voice that emerged from the internal argument as the choice the prefrontal cortex landed on — and it's not always right.
What's the difference between defending mode and challenging mode? Defending mode is processing in the amygdala — the stress, fight-or-flight response. A person in defending mode is clinging to their story and is not in the frame of mind to consider options or alternatives. Challenging mode is processing in the prefrontal cortex — willing to consider something different, to trial, test, and learn. Functional MRI research by Gregory Berns and colleagues at Emory showed that when people became willing to consider a different position, their processing shifted from the amygdala to the prefrontal cortex. You can't have a fruitful change discussion with someone in defending mode.
What are "dueling solutions"? What happens when two people are each defending their own belief — each in a defending stance. Each person acts only to protect and defend their own choice, and the organization grids itself into a stalemate. Dueling solutions is the predictable result of intervening at the choice stage (imposing a standard, rolling out a plan, demanding buy-in) when people's underlying stories still differ. The way out is to stop fighting at the choice stage and back up to craft a shared outcome.
Why doesn't "buy-in" work? Because if someone is buying, someone is selling — trying to convince a person of something. If a change is truly valuable, Jaben argued, the person shouldn't need to be convinced. Buy-in is the wrong frame for improvement. What improvement needs instead of buyers is investors — people willing to commit their interest, energy, and work to achieve a return that benefits everyone. Buy-in efforts also typically happen at the choice stage, where differing stories produce dueling solutions, rather than at the desired-outcome stage, where a shared outcome can be crafted.
How does prefrontal cortex overload affect someone's ability to change? The prefrontal cortex does the work of reaching a desired outcome and analyzing options, and it's fragile and easily overwhelmed. Too many demands, plus hunger, thirst, and fatigue, overload it. When it's overloaded, the brain can't entertain other options — even an ideal option brought up by someone else can't be processed, because there's no bandwidth. The message that reaches awareness is "resist." This is why burned-out, overloaded people resist change even when they might recognize, in an unaware way, that the change could work. Asking an overwhelmed person to change asks them to spend energy they don't have.
What are the three reasons people resist? Purpose — they don't agree with your story or the problem you've defined. Process — they don't see how they can be successful doing it. Priorities — it's just not worth their effort right now. Resistance shows up in many forms (a flat "no," silence, an unenthusiastic "I'll try"), but it always traces to one of these three. Identifying which one is at the root gives the leader a place to trial and test and a direction to reconcile the differing stories.
What's a "shared outcome" and why does it come before solutions? A shared outcome is a desired outcome that everyone involved can share and invest in — not just any single person's outcome. Crafting it before debating solutions is what creates the conditions for people to move from defending mode into challenging mode. The shared outcome also functions as an arbitration tool: when dueling solutions emerge, the leader goes back to the shared outcome, confirms it's still right, and uses the resistance to learn where the obstacles are. Debating solutions before there's a shared outcome produces dueling solutions.
How does Jaben redefine "respect"? As the practical application of how a leader deals with resistance. Respect isn't about hearing what people say — it's about listening for what they fear (failure, not meeting the mark), what their concerns are, what success means to them, and what their sorting criteria are. It's about gathering the full array of sorting criteria, including the leader's own, and rebalancing what matters to reveal a shared outcome people will invest in. It requires genuine curiosity, which can't be faked.
Is this all just about practicing empathy? Not quite — and Jaben argued we have empathy backwards. Empathy is not the starting point. It's a result. If a leader genuinely surfaces and addresses everyone's sorting criteria, the emotion that comes out of that work is empathy. Understanding another person's situation and taking their concerns into account isn't only helpful to them — it's how the leader gets the data needed to avoid a misguided decision.
What does it mean to be "credible," and how do leaders lose credibility unintentionally? Credibility, drawing on philosopher Onora O'Neill, comes down to avoiding deception and avoiding coercion. Deception involves the language, data, and metrics a leader uses — data must be capable of addressing the issue, believable, gathered acceptably, and verifiable by the people it affects. Coercion can be unintentional — pushing for solutions that won't work or aren't feasible, devising a standard or imposing a plan that makes someone else's job harder. Jaben's examples of unintentional failures: typical satisfaction surveys (deceptive data), and plans made in a meeting without everyone affected present, then implemented without a pilot test (unintentional coercion). A leader doesn't determine their own credibility — the other person does.
Does democratic multi-voting on solutions align with this approach? Partly. Jaben said putting options up and having people vote can be a fine technique for getting people to apply their sorting criteria and make a choice — it surfaces some hidden-brain data. But the artificial nature of a meeting means what feels important there may not be what's important in the heat of real work, which is why trialing and testing is still required. On consensus more broadly, Jaben argued we have it backwards: consensus is not a driver, it's a result. Forcing consensus too early — at the choice stage — drives people who disagree into a defending stance and produces dueling solutions. Reconcile the stories and sorting criteria first; the shared outcome and then genuine consensus emerge from that.
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