“How do we use this software, this hardware, which evolved for such a different set of circumstances, to live healthy, meaningful, happy lives now?”

This phrase, said by Michael Platt, one of the leading experts in Neuroscience today, is for me a good summary of one of the biggest challenges that executives (like me) will face over the next few years in their careers.

I believe that one of the major themes in the corporate world today—and which, however obvious it may seem, took decades to begin to be perceived as a factor of enormous impact on the entire system—is the unconscious biases present in our decision-making.

A few years ago, I read an article that said that the average height of the presidents of the 500 largest companies in the US was 1.85 m, while that of the average American man was 1.75 m. This comparison, in itself, is already loaded with gender bias, since it does not compare the height of former presidents with the average of the American population, but rather with the average of the American man. In other words, women are not even considered to lead large companies, according to those who conducted the research.

The most explicit bias in this study is that of misattribution: we take an attribute valued by society — height — and associate it with something that has nothing to do with it, such as the management, innovation, leadership, and strategic decision-making skills of a successful CEO. Although it may seem strange, there is an evolutionary explanation for this, which dates back hundreds of thousands of years. In times when men lived by hunting and gathering, the physically strongest had a competitive advantage over the others. But, if this happened thousands of years ago, does it still influence us? Clearly yes. And there is absolutely nothing we can do about it, since this “evolutionary learning” is marked in our cognitive system as something positive for the survival of the species.

Some time ago, I conducted a selection process for a position at my company. Before starting, I spent days listing my main biases to avoid them during the candidate evaluation. One of them, for example, was the tendency to look for people who had studied at the same university as me, associating this with a higher probability of success in the company (known as confirmation bias). Utter nonsense, right? But how many people, including HR professionals, don’t do this every day?

With this in mind, I decided that I would not look at or ask about the candidates’ educational background. I would only focus on the skills expected for the position. The result was fantastic: I hired someone from a different university and with a completely different profile from mine. It wasn’t easy, I admit, but with a high degree of effort, I managed to escape some of my own traps.

In my view, the big question now is: is there a way to escape not only these, but all the traps unconsciously formed by our brains that often lead us in undesirable directions?

The answer is yes, and it lies in advanced neuroscience studies, combined with technology and an understanding of human behavior. The renowned professor Michael Platt, mentioned at the beginning of this article, has been developing some of the answers for the corporate future that awaits us in his laboratory.

Imagine, for example, that during a selection process, HR professionals or managers responsible for hiring have to use a headset capable of mapping the brain in real time and emitting signals when it perceives that certain (undesirable) areas are more activated at the time of the evaluation. Will we be able to anticipate our biases through this equipment and thus guide ourselves along new, more effective paths to make decisions?

On the other hand, Platt also mentions the possibility of job candidates using the same headset, so that, during the interview, it is possible to know their profile and personality with a high degree of precision. Thus, it would be possible to direct them to a position, team, or company within the group where they would be more likely to develop their potential and help the business grow.

Ethical issues aside, if “already-realities” like this become commercially established, they will not only demystify neuroscience as a predominantly academic field, but will also open up an unexplored universe with enormous potential to develop people more effectively, as well as generate consistent results for companies.

It’s definitely a blue ocean for neuroscience — and it’s about to invade companies like yours and mine.