When we’re watching the movie Gladiator, we can imagine how brutal combats took place in the arena. Dozens of humans died an unmerciful death on the sand. The audience cheered for the show, and they might have been happy that they had survived the day. It was other’s turn to die that day.

Times have changed a lot in the past centuries.

We see the audience cheering for the Formula 1 race week after week. Gladiators take on the branded “armor” and fight with each other. Or the bull and the toreador in the arena in Spain. Sometimes it’s the bull’s turn to win. Or the raving audience in a basketball arena.

What has changed?

Fortunately, fewer get killed during the action. However, the stage shows striking similarities.

What has changed in the behavior of humans? We still want to have fun. We still want to get money, sex and power. To make things more complicated, ethical principles, religious concepts and social imperatives have been imposed on us, humans to shape behavior and social interactions. We usually engage interaction with other humans based on several assumptions and a set of values and beliefs, we anticipate that others will behave and react as we do.

Regarding our assumptions and a set of values and beliefs, we have arrived at an important point. Let’s have a look at what’s going on here.

We have 80-100 billion neurons in our heads. There is an “external reality” with an even larger magnitude of data points. In the middle, however, evolution provided us a working memory in our heads to try to cope with the unconceivable magnitudes of information. We do not need to be very smart to conclude it is futile.

We can move one step further. Sometimes I hear opinions that some insist to be rational. They mean hereby that they are aware what’s going on, they reflect on what’s happening in their minds. They are convinced that they control what’s going on.

Let’s have a look at the peculiar workings of our minds. It wants to be efficient and to preserve energy. Our minds like the patterns. If we face a tree in front of us, first our brains play back the pattern of a tree we had seen earlier. Unless there is any striking new feature or piece of information among the perception data, our brains suffice with the pattern. We can’t catch the trick.

If we perceive something, then the incoming information will go to the specific area of the neocortex for further analysis. Milliseconds before the result of the analysis could be available, the same perceptual data arrive at the amygdala (responsible for fear sensation in a cooperation with other parts of the brain and the sensation of rewarding, too). This time difference has tremendous consequences for our existence.

We cannot live our lives without emotions. Since the amygdala plays an important role in the management of the emotions, all of our perceptions and memories will be marked and enriched with emotional content. The brain regions playing a key part in emotion handling are placed beneath the newly developed brain region called neocortex (responsible for thinking, logic, judging, analysis). This older, so called limbic system gets the perceptual information earlier than the neocortex and it is so powerful that it can override higher brain functions.

To sum up what we have learned so far: our brains have evolutionary older parts granted with upper hand in actions. Our minds, however, do a great job to make us think we keep everything under control – included our emotional life. Or course, it seems to be a contradiction.

We live our lives in fundamental existential pressure. We want to make sure to be alive as long as possible. There are different ways how we want to achieve this ideal goal. We want to live longer. The longevity has no value in itself. If we cannot attach a meaning to the amount of years, it would be a miserable vegetation. Others see a possible way to live longer by replacing our body parts with available implants. I can only see one massive obstacle on the road ahead: how can we manage our minds that interfere to derail our ambitious goals. Sometimes this pre-programmed “software” forces us to execute behaviors against ethical principles or social contracts. It is so powerful that we execute it even if we could face punishment for breaking the rules of the community or the ruler.

Let us imagine a corporate environment we live in day by day. We have the human condition as described above. We have the biological program. We have a set of community rules, ethical expectations, social rules, and on top of them a complex set of regulations set by the corporation. These regulations prescribe the rules how to work. We usually call them “methods”. We flag or label them to differentiate from other “methods”. Waterfall project management, Prince 2, Agile, Scrum and Teal. In his brilliant book, Frederic Laloux analysed earlier societies, cultures and consciousness of people in the respective periods. We deal with the “methods” similarly to how we manage religions, scientific paradigms and ethical imperatives. The best one is always ours.

There is no way to decide which one is the best method. It is so because we have a fundamental underlying conflict. As long as we cannot resolve and manage our minds (since it is managing us now), you cannot find the best method for work. Subjective preferences will drive us, the stronger patterns rule our actions and our behavior. Methods will work only for those who reach a proper level of mastering their minds. Rules, beliefs and biological forces inhibit free thinking and freedom. Therefore, until we cannot find the way to overcome the constraints imposed on us by our brains and minds, any method in a corporate culture won’t work. Let it be new or old or the newest fancy one. We cannot expect much progress unless we can figure out how each of us will overcome our limitations. Let it be emotional, sexual, social, financial or sole interests. Till that point we will use methods that some of us will appreciate, others will fear them. Freedom sounds as a fancy utopia until we get rid of our “chains” – of course not to the cost of our human fate-mates.