• The two hemispheres of the brain don’t do different things, i.e. one is analytical the other is creative, but rather they do all the same things, but differently. 
• The left deals with explicit information, the right with implicit – the left with narratives, the right with metanarratives.
• Half of all communications are implicit in nature, and we tend to overlook metanarratives (the implicit) aspect of our work, focussing almost all of our attention on explicit information. 
• The result of our over-emphasis on explicit information, is that we tend not to notice when we are engaging with the wrong values, or that we are reinforcing toxic paradigms. 
• Without a deeper understanding of how metanarratives work, we tend to lean towards the natural flow state of the left hemisphere, which is an extrinsic flow state. The result is that we tend to build everything we do upon a motivation ‘engine’, which prefers to use extrinsic motivation and extrinsic values and works towards an extrinsic purpose. 
• The result of using this ‘engine’ is that we struggle to create long-term and meaningful change on the issues that we care about.
• In some cases, we engage the very paradigm and values which created the problem in the first place. See the link between the marketing paradigm and climate change.
• Using insights from neuropsychology we can start to rebuild new models for our work, including a new motivation model, new values theory, and how to work with metanarratives – the implicit aspect of our work.
• These insights challenge our dominant thinking and assumptions. They make time to learn and embed, but given their potential for bringing about meaningful and lasting change on the issues that we really care about, time and investment into learning these new approaches will pay enormous dividends. 

Solutions

This presentation is proposing a new way of thinking about some of our basic assumptions we have around motivation and audience engagement.