Human performance is psychophysiological
Performance at work involves thinking, emotion, physiology and environment interacting — not cognition on its own.
Ideas + research
The questions the next era of work is asking of humans.
SOMA explores contemporary research and ideas around human capacity, leadership and the changing demands of work — distinguishing established evidence from working hypotheses and emerging questions.
What we know
Evidence and established thinking we can responsibly stand behind.
What we're testing
Ideas being explored through SOMA's work.
What we're exploring
Questions where evidence or organisational application is still developing.
Themes
The territory we think in.
The future of high performance
As technology scales, the question shifts: which human capabilities and which human capacity become more valuable?
Compassion + accountability
How teams hold high standards and human regard at the same time, rather than trading one for the other.
The ability to be wrong
Updating a view under pressure is a learnable capacity — and a condition for good judgement and productive challenge.
An intelligence advantage
What becomes available when organisations draw on more than analytical intelligence alone.
The practice is the return
Why repeated practice, rather than one-off insight, is where behavioural development tends to show up.
Human sustainability
High performance without human depletion — load, recovery, role design and the conditions capacity depends on.
Heart–brain interaction + coherence
Psychophysiology, heart rate variability, autonomic regulation and cardiorespiratory interaction — an area we treat carefully. Coherence is not a direct measure of intelligence, leadership or performance.
Our standard
We publish only what we can stand behind.
Where something is established, we say so. Where something is a working hypothesis or an open question, we say that too — and we don't claim that science proves a methodology.
What we know. What we're testing. What we're exploring.
Our north star
High performance
without human
depletion.
Work will keep changing. So will the demands placed on humans. The opportunity is to develop capability, capacity and the conditions that allow both to thrive.