Why Leaders Struggle Until They Understand the Brain – Exclusive Interview with David Bovis

David Bovis is a leadership strategist, keynote speaker, and founder of Duxinaroe, specialising in the application of neuroscience to leadership, decision-making, and performance under pressure. His work focuses on understanding why experienced, well-intentioned leaders in manufacturing environments often struggle to deliver sustainable change, despite strong operational systems and proven improvement methods.

David Bovis, Founder of Duxinaroe Ltd.

Who is David Bovis? Introduce yourself – your hobbies, your favourite things, and the person you are at home and in business.

I was always a natural creator drawn to art, design, and making things. That instinct was later channelled into engineering, which gave me discipline, structure, and a deep respect for how complex systems really work.

I entered the world of change and transformation following my apprenticeship and have now spent forty years working in manufacturing and industry around the world. That combination, creative instinct on one side and engineering rigour on the other, shaped how I see the world. It gave me a balance between emotional intelligence and pragmatism, between seeing possibility and understanding constraint.

Early in my career, particularly through exposure to venture capital and consulting environments, I became fascinated by a recurring contradiction. Intelligent people, with good intent, often clash deeply when trying to improve performance. I found myself asking a deceptively simple question that stayed with me for years: what is a belief, really, and why does it have such power over behaviour?

After more than a decade of searching, I found the answer not in management theory, but in neuroscience.

At home, I’m a husband and a proud father of three. I value simplicity, but only once complexity has been properly understood. I have little patience for simplistic answers that ignore reality and create problems further down the road. I care about honesty, time, and depth. I enjoy staying physically active, riding motorcycles in the summer with friends, and having conversations by a beach, in the sun, that go beyond surface-level explanations.

In business, I’m the same person. I think in terms of long-term impact rather than short-term gains. I’m direct when needed, but always mindful that behaviour is driven by emotional history, experience, and how the brain has learned to survive. I’m not interested in fashionable language or quick fixes. What matters to me is respect for people, clarity of thinking, genuine connection, and helping leaders understand what is really driving behaviour, in themselves and in others.

What inspired you to focus on leadership and culture change as your life’s work?

After four decades in manufacturing, across automotive, aerospace, defence, food, FMCG, and Tier 1-3 supply chains, I noticed a deeply frustrating pattern.

The same problems kept repeating. Change programmes stalled. Engagement declined. Resistance increased. Each time, the response was to introduce new tools, new frameworks, or new systems.

What struck me was how rarely we questioned the assumptions people were making about people, (top down and bottom up). We focused heavily on process improvement, capital investment in technology, and eventually even behaviour change. Yet we ignored what was happening both upstream and downstream in the human brain.

Through successive waves of tools-based improvement initiatives and new systems promising Quality, Cost, and Delivery improvements, up to RPA and now AI, the same logic persisted. Technology improved, while the human conditions under which people were expected to perform became more pressured, more controlled, and less humane.

Then we seemed surprised by global disengagement figures and decades of stagnant productivity growth.

Once I began to see these patterns through a neurological lens, the cause became obvious. Leadership and culture challenges were not capability gaps. They were misdiagnoses, reinforced by a language set that never evolved to include how the brain actually works.

Ironically, the very function of the brain that allows us to ignore inconvenient truths is also what makes these problems so persistent. Helping leaders see that, and learn how to work with it, became my focus.

How did your background in engineering and applied neuroscience lead you to create the BTFA™ model?

Engineering trained me to look for root causes rather than symptoms. Philosophy exposed humanity’s long struggle to understand the mind. Psychology pointed inward. Neuroscience finally provided the missing empirical lens.

In industry, we train people to analyse mechanical systems, process flows, and constraints in extraordinary detail. Yet we largely ignore the biological system that designs, interprets, and reacts to all of them: the human brain.

Neuroscience is not part of our shared cultural language. Parents, teachers, coaches, managers, and even medical professionals rarely think in terms of neurological function when interpreting behaviour. As a result, we misinterpret reaction as intent and emotion as attitude.

BTFA emerged from bringing these worlds together, alongside my own lived experience as a human being, a parent, a leader, and someone who often felt misjudged by systems designed to prioritise short-term outputs over long-term sustainability.

The framework describes a simple but profound mechanism: what we believe shapes how we think, how we think shapes how we feel, and how we feel governs our reactions, decisions, and actions, especially under pressure.

It’s not a theory. It’s a way of making an incredibly complex human mechanism visible and usable.

What problem do most organisations face that traditional leadership tools can’t fix?

Most organisations suffer from misalignment.

Leaders believe one thing, systems signal another, and people experience something else entirely. Traditional tools focus on efficiency, utilisation, cost, and various other performance metrics, often in pockets, rather than systemically. Even psychology, when involved, focuses on differences, like personality traits, rather than common neurological realities.

From a neurological point of view, it becomes very easy to see that disengagement and resistance are not character flaws. They are biological responses to perceived threat. Gallup consistently shows misalignment as the strongest precursor to disengagement, which is simply another way of describing brains being forced to operate under incompatible conditions.

When people feel overloaded, undervalued, or unsafe, performance does not improve by pushing harder. The brain shifts into protection mode. Learning slows. Problem-solving narrows. Compliance replaces commitment. These are common reactions in any brain that hasn’t been conditioned to react otherwise.

Traditional tools simply aren’t focused on these underlying issues. They aren’t designed to fix a human problem we systematically fail to describe when speaking in logical, mechanistic, and commercial terms.

What is the core idea behind your BTFA™ framework, in simple terms?

Performance is not driven directly by behaviour. It is driven by emotional state, which is shaped by thinking, which itself emerges from deeply established neural wiring, which we call belief.

Belief, thought, emotion, and action operate simultaneously, what is wired fires. Chemicals are released. Behaviour follows.

BTFA helps leaders understand the chain and work with it consciously, rather than reacting to outcomes without understanding their cause.

How does neuroscience help leaders make better decisions and build strong teams?

Neuroscience explains why people behave differently under pressure.

When leaders understand how threat, safety, prediction, and emotional regulation influence judgment, they stop personalising resistance and start designing better environments.

This leads to clearer decisions, more honest conversations, and teams that can think, learn, and adapt rather than simply comply under stress.

It also reframes compassion. Caring for people is often seen as a weakness in business. An inherited opinion at best, despite its prevalence. Neuroscience shows the exact opposite and delivers verifiable data to back it up.

The greater challenge is developing emotional maturity on a broad basis (top-floor to shop floor), so compassion is not abused, and trust is not undermined. That is why so many leaders default to imposed control, not because it works better, but because their own brains respond defensively when trust is broken... as they are designed to.

Can you share a real example where BTFA™ transformed a team or company culture?

I worked with a leadership team that believed an individual was deliberately obstructive and disengaged.

Through BTFA, they began to see how their own judgements were filling gaps in their knowledge, with assumptions, and that the environment they had created unintentionally signalled threat, rather than expectation.

Once they changed how they framed communication and signalled safety systematically, the individual’s behaviour shifted almost immediately. Nothing about the person changed. Only the beliefs behind the signals that the system was sending did.

That is what a real root cause looks like.

What makes your approach different from other leadership or change programs out there?

We don’t train organisations. We educate people. Most programmes focus on behaviour, tools, or motivation. BTFA focuses on awareness.

When leaders understand how their own beliefs and emotional states shape others, behaviour changes naturally.

It’s not about doing more. It’s about seeing differently.

Who is the ideal client for your leadership and culture change work?

Leaders who genuinely believe people are their greatest asset and want that belief to shape how performance is achieved.

They are often highly experienced, have tried many standard approaches, and sense that something fundamental is missing. When they hear BTFA, the pieces start to fall into place.

Our clients genuinely care about results and people, but are dissatisfied with the human cost of success when following the herd.

What is the biggest mindset shift leaders must make to succeed today?

That performance does not come from control.

It comes from creating conditions in which brains can operate optimally. Letting go of old assumptions about pressure, motivation, and accountability transforms leadership challenges that once seemed intractable.

We see this in practice all the time.

How can someone get started, and what results can they expect?

Most begin with our structured BTFA experience, individually or in cohorts. This requires no more than 4 hours a week over 5 weeks, making it accessible for even the busiest executive or stressed manager/supervisor. Leaders often report a rapid increase in clarity, less conflict (in teams and in their personal lives), and better decision-making under pressure. From there, organisations expand access, develop internal capability, and embed the thinking more broadly.

Our goal is the fast and effective transfer of the knowledge and capability it took us decades to compress into this experience, not dependence on third-party support.

What advice would you give leaders who feel overwhelmed right now?

Stop assuming the problem is effort, time, or money.

You cannot control everything around you, but you do have agency over how your brain reacts and how that reaction impacts others.

When leaders understand that and learn to work with human biology rather than against it, leadership becomes less exhausting and far more effective.

That ancient wisdom still holds: know thyself.

The difference is, today we have the science to prove why this improves the quality of life and hits the bottom line, hard!

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