If you ever needed cognitive diversity and thinking agility, now is the time! With the current global atmosphere of rampant change and volatility, you need to leverage all of the thinking resources available to you, especially when it comes to effective decision making in the face of crisis.

It is always thrilling to see the application of Whole Brain® Thinking have significant impact! This week in South Africa I was delighted to honor that achievement by bestowing our Big Thinker Award to Pieter du Toit for his application of Whole Brain® Learning Design to Higher Education.

Even in normal times, managers in the core of any company face significant challenges; they have to communicate up, down, and laterally in order for everyone to be productive. But, in a merger all of those relationships change all at the same time.

When we talk about the success or failure of mergers and acquisitions, we’re usually looking at things from a big-picture perspective, using financials as our main units of measurement.

The raise, the product pitch, the vacation destination, the big purchase decision—in work and in life, negotiation is a constant presence. And naturally, we each want to get our own way. But there’s no reason one side has to end up feeling like a loser in a negotiation.

To be satisfied with the end result and keep your relationships intact, try these 7 negotiation tips.

Everything in the world around us has changed. But have you? Has your team?

Here’s the challenge: Change requires a different mindset, but the brain loves routine. It naturally seeks and organizes around patterns and mental maps you’ve developed in your thinking throughout the course of your life. Sometimes these maps are helpful; sometimes they’re not. Most change requires that we challenge our mental maps and form new connections in the brain—and this takes energy and motivation.

Not only that, isolated facts have little effect on mindsets. This probably isn’t news to you if you’ve ever read comments on social media or argued with someone over a heated topic. If the fact doesn’t fit the current mindset, it gets rejected instantly.

What is it about our brains that resists change so tenaciously? Why do we fight, even what we know to be in our interests?

A new year is like a fresh, clean slate. Or is it?

Some of us are still carrying over the clutter and chaos of the previous year (or decade). While it’s true that some people do work best in the mess, it’s not just untidiness we’re talking about here. Even if you work primarily in a creative role, you still need to have some structure and organization to keep all the loose ends together and make sure nothing falls through the cracks. After all, if you want that creativity to pay off, you need more than just great ideas.

So if you’re ready to finally get organized and keep it that way—or if you’re just looking for some new tips and tricks to keep it interesting—try some of these ideas to help you start the year off clear-eyed and focused.

The other day, a friend shared with me this nightly after-dinner routine at her house: She and her husband clear the table. She loads the dishwasher. She leaves the kitchen. He stays behind and rearranges all the dishes in the dishwasher.

“He always complains about how I load it,” she told me. “He says I don’t use the space efficiently enough. So we just have to run it more often! I’d rather do that than spend all day trying to organize every dish in there just so.”

I’m not going to weigh in on who’s loading the dishwasher correctly, but I do get where he’s coming from. There’s nothing more annoying than watching someone tackle a task when you know there’s a better way. No matter what you say or do, they won’t listen to reason, even though your way is the more precise way. Or the more efficient way...or thoughtful...or creative...

You know, the right way.

Sometimes, it feels like we spend a lot of energy trying to make sense of each other and the world around us. Whether we’re navigating the dishwasher protocols of our significant others, delegating a task to a direct report at work, or trying to find our way to the solution to a nagging business challenge, one thing is clear: Other people don’t always do things the way we would do them. And that can be pretty irritating.

The question is, why do people approach tasks, problems, decisions, ideas, and, yes, even the dishwasher, in completely different ways? Why do we all take different routes to the same destination?

If you’re a leader, you set the direction and vision for your organization or department, but there’s still a lot that’s not completely under your control: the behavior of other people, the state of the economy, the unfolding of world events, the overall pace of change. Sure, you can anticipate and react to these things, but you can’t totally control them.

What’s surprising, though, is how few leaders take the time to notice the one thing they can always control, even when the world is out of control: their thinking.

The brain loves novelty, and it's a good thing, because our world at Herrmann is brimming with newness: new products and platforms, interesting new applications of Whole Brain ® Thinking, new technologies expanding the reach of our systems, new thinkers engaging in new places around the world, and fantastic new practitioners adding to our global community. What better time than now to transform our “face” to the world and as we grow into the future.