Windows of Possibility

What neuroscience is revealing about how people actually change

This might surprise some people, but I’ve not been a big fan of the On Being podcast. Krista has amazing guests, and she really does a good job of interviewing, but there’s something about it that gets under my skin a bit. But in small doses, I will listen, and I’m glad I did when a good friend shared this one with me.

It was a conversation (podcast here!) with neuroscientist Gül Dölen, a researcher at UC Berkeley who studies how the brain changes, and specifically, what it takes to make that change deep and durable.

Her field is psychedelic-assisted therapy.

If that phrase immediately brings up images of counterculture experiments or recreational drug use, you’re not alone. But the work happening in this field today is largely focused on rigorous clinical research exploring how carefully administered psychedelic therapies may help people suffering from complex PTSD, treatment-resistant depression, and long-term addiction. Researchers like Dölen are trying to better understand how these treatments may create opportunities for healing when other approaches have fallen short.

Gül Dölen’s field is psychedelic-assisted therapy. Our field at AG Collaborative is leadership development.

On the surface, these two things are not an obvious pairing.

But about halfway through the episode, it clicked for me: this is exactly what we’ve been doing at AGC — we just didn’t have the neuroscience to explain it.

The Critical Period

Dölen studies what neuroscientists call “critical periods” — specific windows in development when the brain is unusually open to learning. You’ve experienced this. Children learning a second language become fluent in ways adults simply can’t match. Not because they’re smarter. Because their brains are in an open state, a window where new patterns can be formed deeply and lastingly.

The tragedy, she explains, is that most of the time those windows close. The brain optimizes. It becomes efficient, pattern-driven, and resistant to change — which is great for performance, but terrible for transformation.

What the research on psychedelic-assisted therapy is revealing is that certain conditions can reopen those critical periods in adult brains. Not permanently. Not indiscriminately. But enough to allow for genuine, lasting change in how a person sees themselves, relates to others, and moves through the world.

Veterans with treatment-resistant PTSD. People with decades of addiction. People who, by every clinical measure, were stuck — experiencing transformation that looked, in her words, “miraculous.”

What Actually Creates Change

The substance isn’t the transformation.

The open window is just the condition for transformation. What actually does the work, what makes the change stick, is what happens inside that window. The therapeutic context. The guided processing. The hard work of taking new insight and rebuilding it into the way you actually live.

She describes veterans who showed up expecting ibogaine, a psychedelic medicine being studied for its potential in treating addiction and trauma, to fix them. And almost every one of them said the same thing: the real work started the day after.

“It’s learning,” she says. “And learning is hard. It takes practice and work.”

One more thing she’s clear about: the setting is everything. The same substance in the wrong environment doesn’t heal; it can actually harm. Real transformation requires the right conditions, not just the right catalyst.

So What Does This Have To Do With Leadership?

Everything, actually.

At AG Collaborative, we’ve spent years doing something that (I now realize) has a neurological parallel to what Dölen is describing. No, we are not recreating 9 Perfect Strangers and lacing smoothies with LSD.

We create conditions that function like a critical period opening. Not through plant medicine. Through something equally powerful when done right: experience, reflection, and the kind of honest conversation most organizations spend enormous energy avoiding.

Think about what happens in a well-designed off-site. Or in a facilitated conversation where someone on the team finally says the thing that everyone has been thinking but no one would say. Or in the moment when a leader sitting across from their team hears, maybe for the first time, how their behavior is actually landing.

Something opens.

The defenses come down. The usual loops of thought and reaction get interrupted. A leader who has operated on autopilot for years suddenly has access to a different view of themselves and the people around them.

That’s not a metaphor. That’s a window.

Last year we had the opportunity to work with a handful of key leaders at a construction company. These guys showed up white-knuckled, wondering what they had gotten into with a leadership program and coaching experience. Most had never done either. At the end of our time together, we heard story after story about how their trust in this group had skyrocketed and the change was being recognized out on their teams (and for some even at home). No magic trick or miracles. But it took us building the right setting, cracking the window open, and slowly lifting it up and keeping it open for this group to dig in and grow in some profound ways.

Why Most Change Doesn’t Stick

Here’s the uncomfortable truth that Dölen’s research makes plain and that we see confirmed in our work constantly:

Opening the window is not the same as transformation.

This is where most leadership development fails. A great speaker. A powerful framework. An emotional moment in a breakout session. The window cracks open, and then everyone gets on a plane and goes back to the exact same environment, the exact same pressures, the exact same unspoken norms that created the patterns in the first place. Within two weeks, the window closes. Nothing stuck. Not because the people weren’t capable of change. Because the conditions for change — the right context, the supported practice, the sustained work — weren’t there.

This is what we mean when we say AGC is not your box-checking development partner.
The box-checking version of development is: bring in a facilitator, give people a framework, call it done. Check the L&D box. Move on.

The transformation version is harder. It requires leaders who are willing to sit in the discomfort of honest reflection. It requires organizations willing to build the conditions — not just the content — for real learning. And it requires the follow-through: the coaching, the accountability, the practice of showing up differently, over and over, until the new pattern becomes the default.

NFW – Not for wimps. One of our core values at AGC is Transformation and the subtext is NFW. True growth and evolution can be exhilarating, but it almost always feels vulnerable and challenging. But damn, it is so worth it.

Building the Container for Change

When I look at our work through the lens of what Dölen is describing, here’s what I see: The container we build for people to do this work happens first. Without the right setting and container to do vulnerable and courageous learning, the window never opens.

Our facilitated conversations are designed to disrupt the autopilot, to create enough productive disruption that people have to see something they weren’t seeing before.

Our experiential exercises aren’t team-building activities. They’re pattern interrupters. Carefully designed moments that bypass the usual defenses and get to something real.

Our Above/Below the Line framework isn’t a nice model to put on a slide. It’s a map for the exact moment when someone is in the window, helping them understand what they’re experiencing and what they can actually do with it.

And our follow-through — the coaching, the check-ins, the application work — that’s us fighting to keep the window open long enough for something to lock in.

When the Window Opens

If you’ve been part of a development experience that moved you, and then faded, it’s worth asking: were the conditions actually right for transformation? Or was it content without context?

If you’re designing development for your organization, the question isn’t just what you’re teaching. It’s whether you’re creating the conditions — the safety, the disruption, the guided processing, the practice — that make learning actually land.

The window is real. The question is what you do when it opens.

Coffee or Cocktails on us! 

If you’re curious about what leadership growth could look like in your organization, we’d love to connect. AG Collaborative partners with leaders and teams to strengthen culture, elevate performance, and create workplaces where people can truly thrive.