Applications of Neurological Dominance

Teamwork For most things in life there are no right or wrong answers, simply different approaches. To find the best way to approach something therefore involves listening to lots of ideas and opinions before deciding on a course of action. To demonstrate the importance of teamwork we often use an exercise borrowed from the military. We ask people to imagine that they have survived an air crash in freezing cold conditions.

They have a number of items that they have salvaged from the wrecked plane (such as a pen knife, some spare clothing, a newspaper etc.) and we ask them to work by themselves to rank the items in order of how important each item will be to their survival.

We then ask the group to go through the same exercise, discussing each item in detail and deciding the various ways in which each item could be used.

When the individual and group results are scored against an "expert" view that comes from the SAS, we invariably find that the group results are much higher than any individual score. The exercise therefore demonstrated that, provided people listen to and consider the views of others, a team will always outperform a group of individuals who are not working together.

The benefit an understanding of Neurological Dominance offers in this situation is that it provides teams with a means of understanding of the different contributions team members can make. By understanding these differences we find that team members tend to respect the views of each other better and therefore perform at a higher level.