I am not here to teach you.
I am here to show you what is already there.
There is a kind of knowing that arrives before the reasoning. A decision that completes before you consciously make it. A reading of a room that is accurate before you have assembled enough information to justify it.
Most leaders are producing this intelligence continuously.
Most are ignoring it simultaneously.
Not because they lack the capacity. Because nobody has ever introduced them to the part of the brain generating it, or given them a way to work with it rather than in ignorance of it.
That is what I do.
Not from a stage, dispensing frameworks at a room full of people taking notes. But as a guide — someone who has spent thirty years mapping this territory, who knows where the paths are and where they lead, and who can hold the lantern while you find what has always been there.
I am Dr Lynda Shaw. Behavioural neuroscientist. Leadership psychologist. Author of Off Piste Thinking: How Smart Leaders Avoid Bad Decisions.
And the person who is going to introduce you to the stranger who has been in your boardroom all along.
The Research
The discovery that started everything
In my doctoral research at the Combined Universities Brain Imaging Centre, I used functional MRI to study something that had always fascinated me: what does the brain do with emotional information it never consciously receives?
The answer — demonstrated across nine specific brain regions in three experiments — was both clear and extraordinary. The brain processes emotional significance below conscious awareness. Before we know it is happening. Before we have any opportunity to examine, override or act on it.
That finding has informed everything I have done since.
Because the same process happening in the scanner is happening in every boardroom, every leadership conversation, every significant decision your organisation makes.
The hidden brain is always working.
The question is whether you are working with it, or being run by it without knowing.
The Work
Thirty years alongside senior leaders
I work with C-suite leaders, boards and senior leadership teams across financial services, law, technology and professional services.
My work sits at the intersection of neuroscience, leadership psychology and social anthropology — three disciplines that between them explain most of what actually drives human behaviour in organisations.
I do not deliver programmes at people. I work alongside them — exploring the specific hidden brain patterns shaping their decisions, their culture and their performance, and finding the practical interventions that make a measurable difference.
Every engagement begins with the same question: what has the hidden brain been doing here? And every engagement ends with leaders who can finally answer it.
Credentials
- Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine
- Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society
- Past President and Hall of Fame inductee, Professional Speaking Association
- Author: Off-Piste Thinking: How Smart Leaders Avoid Bad Decisions (2026) and Your Brain is Boss
- Your Brain is Boss and Beat the Bullies Use Your Brain.
The Person
The explorer behind the scientist
I am, in equal measure, a scientist and an explorer.
I have trekked through mountain regions, kayaked among Antarctic icebergs, and sat quietly with people in remote villages and cosmopolitan cities, always curious about why people do what they do. Cross-cultural perspectives are not a footnote to my work. They are central to it.
I am fascinated by consciousness, by the vast, largely unmapped territory of what we are doing when we are not aware of doing it. Off-Piste Thnking is not a metaphor. It is the most interesting thing I know.
My family is at the heart of my world. And my deepest motivation is making the world a better place for my grandchildren, by improving the quality of the decisions made by the people who shape it.
There is more going on than we realise.