Sharon Drew Morgen – Page 2 – What? Did You Really Say What I Think I Heard?

Do you enter conversations to listen for what will confirm your assumptions? Do you assume the responses to your questions provide an accurate representation of the full fact pattern from which to base follow-on questions? Do you assume your history of similar topics topics gives you a more elevated understanding of what your Communication Partners (CPs) mean?

If any of the above are true, you’re biasing your conversation. By entering conversations with assumptions and personal goals, and listening through your historic, unconscious filters, you unwittingly direct conversations to what you expect to hear and may miss a more optimal outcome. But it’s not your fault.

OUR BRAINS BIAS WHAT WE HEAR

The most surprising takeaway from my year of research for my book (What? Did you really say what I think I heard?) on closing the gap between what’s said and what’s heard was learning how little of what we think we hear is unbiased, or even accurate. Indeed, it’s pretty rare for us to hear precisely what another intends us to hear: our brains don’t allow us to.

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Our brains listen through our existing neural circuitry, reducing our ability to accurately translate what’s been said to what we already know, leaving us unaware there might be a misunderstanding regardless of how carefully we listen.

Here’s a simplified explanation of how brains listen. Sound actually enters our ears as meaningless sound vibrations which become electrochemical signals that are dispatched to a similar-enough synapse. Unfortunately, whatever doesn’t match exactly gets deleted. We’re left assuming that what we think we’ve ‘heard’ is accurate even though there’s a good chance it’s not.

So your CP might say ABC and your brain tells you they said ABL without even mentioning it omitted D, E, F, etc. I once lost a business partner because he ‘heard’ me say X when three of us confirmed I said Y. “I was right here! Why are you all lying to me! I KNOW she said that!” And he walked out in a self-generated rage. This makes it tough for any communication where mutual understanding is so important.

Indeed, as outsiders – as sellers, leaders, or influencers of any kind – with different beliefs/values, backgrounds, etc., and entering conversations with our own goals and unconscious biases, we end up unintentionally misunderstanding, mistranslating, or mishearing, but believe what we think we’ve heard is true. In other words, our natural inability to hear accurately causes us miscommunication and flawed understanding. Not to mention lost business and lost relationships.

Net net, we unwittingly base our conversation, questions, and intuitive responses on an assumption of what we think has been said, and succeed only with those whose biases match our own. [Note: for those who want to manage this problem, I’ve developed a work-around in Chapter 6 of What?)

ENTERING CONVERSATIONS WITHOUT BIAS

I want to go back to the problems incurred by entering conversations with personal biases:

by biasing the framework of the conversation to the goals we wish to achieve, we overlook alternative, congruent outcomes. Sellers, coaches, leaders, and managers often enter conversations with personal expectations and goals rather than collaboratively setting a viable frame and together discovering possibility.
by listening only for what we’re (consciously or unconsciously) focused on hearing, we overlook a broader range of possible outcomes. Sellers, negotiators, leaders, help desk professionals, and coaches often miss real opportunities to promote agreement and discovery.

Here are some ideas to help you create conversations that avoid restriction:

As an influencer, shift your goal from information gathering (for you) to facilitating the route to change (for them).
Enter each conversation with a willingness to serve the greater good within the bounds of what you have to offer, rather than meet a specific outcome. Any expectations or goals limit outcomes.
Enter with a blank brain, as a neutral navigator, servant leader, change facilitator.
Trust that your CP has her own answers. Your job is to help her find them, as they are often unconscious. This is particularly hard for influencers who believe they have ‘the answers’. (And yes, all influencers, sellers, leaders, negotiators, and coaches are guilty of this.) I’ve written an article to specifically address this.
Your biased questions will only extract biased answers. Use questions that make their journey to discovery more efficient, like “What has stopped you from making the change before now?”. [Note: I’ve developed Facilitative Questions that lead folks through their unconscious thinking patterns.]
Enable Others to discover their own route to Excellence rather than attempt to influence a specific behavior you might deem important.
Get rid of your ego, your need to be right or smart or have the answers. Until your CP finds a way to recognize their own unconscious issues, and design congruent change that matches their idiosyncratic ‘givens’, you aren’t helpful regardless of how much you know.

By listening with an ear that hears avenues to serve, to understand what’s been said without unconscious bias, you can truly serve your Communication Partner.

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Sharon-Drew Morgen is a breakthrough innovator and original thinker, having developed new paradigms in sales (inventor Buying Facilitation®, listening/communication (What? Did you really say what I think I heard?), change management (The How of Change™), coaching, and leadership. She is the author of several books, including her new book HOW? Generating new neural circuits for learning, behavior change and decision making, the NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell). Sharon-Drew coaches and consults with companies seeking out of the box remedies for congruent, servant-leader-based change in leadership, healthcare, and sales. Her award-winning blog carries original articles with new thinking, weekly. www.sharon-drew.com She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.

Sharon Drew Morgen August 4th, 2025

Posted In: Listening

I just read a discussion stream on LinkedIn debating why you’re told ‘Send me an email.’ when prospecting. It’s simple: you’re being rejected. People want to remove themselves from your push. It’s a problem created by the sales model itself.

I want to begin with a question that has plagued me since I ran a How Buyers Buy training program for KLM in 1987 when teaching them how to integrate the Buy Side into sales: Would you rather sell, or have someone buy?

You’ll say you’d prefer that someone buy. But your continued focus on the Sell Side largely ignores the Buy Side, causing you to struggle unnecessarily getting call-backs, closing, making appointments. Or equally ineffective, you assume your solution, your knowledge, your personality will facilitate buying. It doesn’t.

Surely you’ve realized that the Sell Side is quite different from the Buy Side. Two different activities and mind sets, both involved in a purchase, yet only one of them is addressed in your sales process.

SELLING VS BUYING

Buying is a How, a strategic change problem. Selling is a What and Why, a tactical solution placement problem. Buying involves cultural change and risk to the jobs, resources, and norms of the buyer. Selling involves finding people to give you money for your solution. Two different things requiring wholly different skills, goals, and intentions.

Selling doesn’t cause buying; buying is a change/risk management issue before it’s a solution choice. The very act of selling and your approach to each contact; the very questions you pose and assumptions you make; the content you share causes resistance with all but those 5% ready to buy.

Before people self-identify as buyers they have work to do…work not related to need or purchase, and certainly not involved with what you’re selling: until people manage and get buy-in for their risk of internal change and have tested workarounds – How, rather than What and Why – they cannot risk bringing in something new. In fact, a new solution is the last thing they need. Literally. And the sales model does not address this majority element of a buying decision.

SALES PLACES SOLUTIONS

The goal of sales is to place solutions: Find people who need what you’re selling, ask questions to confirm, then pitch. It assumes:

you’re asking the right questions at the right time in their change/decision cycle and you can listen without bias;
the prospect knows specifically what an external solution must include to be incorporated into their system congruently;
the prospect has completed their 13 steps of change, tested workarounds, and gotten necessary buy-in;
the person you’re speaking with speaks for the buying decision team, and knows all their criteria for change and risk;
the risk of bringing in your solution has been managed.

Folks who haven’t yet completed their necessary change/risk management process ignore sellers: they’re still trying to solve their problem internally and haven’t considered going ‘outside’ for a fix. These are the folks who agree to meetings just to take your information. Or the folks who won’t take a call, even though they might later (once they’ve got all their ducks in a row) discover they need you.

By starting with a different goal (i.e. NOT need, but Change Facilitation) and skill set (Listening for Systems, Facilitative Questions™, 13 Steps of Change, etc.), these folks can be easily found and quickly facilitated through their steps of change with their stakeholders included. Once this is done, they buy quickly. With no rejection.

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All people must figure this stuff out before they self-identify as buyers, with you or without you. Because of the rigid focus of the Sell Side, they do this without you, leaving you selling to the low hanging fruit – a 5% close rate.

WHY SALES FAILS

The sales model turns a seller into a hammer looking for a nail. It ignores three quarters of the real buyer’s decision journey.

Back in the day when Dale Carnegie told you to sell to need the buying process was much simpler. By maintaining that model, sales has become a stigmatized process that pushes content per the needs of the seller – the reason sales closes such a small percentage, and the reason sellers are told to ‘send me an email’.

Buyers have one criteria:to fix their problem with the least disruption to their system or they will maintain their status quo! The risk of the change must be equal to, or less than, the risk of staying the same. The time it takes them to figure all this out is the length of the sales cycle.

A buying decision is a risk management problem before it’s a solution choice. And the sales model – the Sell Side – doesn’t include facilitating change and risk – the Buy Side – which must be completed before people self-identify as buyers.

So long as you use the sales model as your only tool to facilitate a buying decision, you will have difficulty closing. That’s just not how buyers buy.

FACILITATE BUYING FIRST; SALES SECOND

What if you begin selling by

using a Change Facilitation model to first search for people solving a problem your solution can resolve,
then facilitate them through their risk and change,
help them get buy-in from all who will touch the new solution,
sell when they’re ready to buy.

It would require new skills but you’d find real prospects on the first call and close in half the time. Are you willing to learn a new skill to facilitate buying?

I’ve invented Buying Facilitation® (Stage 1, Buy Side) process to first find folks during their problem-solving phase and help them through their change/risk management and buy-in. Then sales (Stage 2, Sell Side) places the solution.

You need both. Call me if you want to learn Buying Facilitation® and increase your sales to 40% close. Do you want to sell? Or have someone buy?

__________________

Sharon Drew Morgen July 28th, 2025

Posted In: News

With the best will in the world, with great leaders and well-intentioned methods, our projects are beset by time delays, lack of buy-in, and resistance. But it doesn’t have to be that way. With a few modifications, with the understanding that change involves systems management, we can avoid these problems altogether.

Change Management (CM) processes seek to modify something that has worked well-enough for some time and has been habituated into the daily norms. Unfortunately, these processes sometimes fail to incorporate the systems involved:

when leaders assume they know the problem without involving the voices of the folks with firsthand, in-depth knowledge of the day-to-day activities;
when folks with the closest association to the problems don’t get the chance to offer ideas or explanations during goal setting;
when new activities are mandated to people who’ve had no voice in generating them;
without including specific implementation practices that incorporate the new into the full set of elements that define the culture;

projects may not proceed as intended. Too often leaders merely try to change behaviors without changing the underlying system that generated them.

CHANGE MUST INCLUDE THE WHOLE SYSTEM

A request for change represents a threat unless it’s accepted and conforms with the norms of the existing system. It’s not as simple as merely doing something different.

Unfortunately CM initiatives focus on altering the problematic behaviors/activity without ensuring the values, beliefs, norms and mental models of the existing system that generated them are addressed. But with a shift in thinking it’s possible to prevent resistance and encourage buy-in and new, creative ideas.

THE RISK OF CHANGE MUST BE IDENTIFIED

Before agreeing to any sort of change, and to ensure buy-in and implementation, it’s important to understand the systemic elements that must be addressed:
How will the new match the existing beliefs, values, norms, rules, routines? Are they compatible? Are the core beliefs/values of the group maintained?

How will daily tasks and working/reporting relationships change?

How are individual ego beliefs and job identity factors managed? Are the folks most affected by the new included in information gathering and goal setting at the beginning so they have input around their own (new) jobs? Do these folks get a voice in generating the goals and outputs for a new solution? In sharing their unique experiences to best understand the problem?

What must be relearned and in what time frame?

Will the new represent the output needed by those most affected? Have their voices been included from the beginning and have a say in the change process to avoid resistance? How will resistance be managed?

Unless there are answers to questions like these; unless the risk of the proposed change is known, understood, and managed; unless the stability, beliefs and norms of the system are agreed-upon and maintained by those with the greatest proximity to the solution, change becomes a threat to the system and folks will resist doing anything different.

THE STEPS OF CHANGE

In my work developing systemic change models for sales, leadership, change management and System Dynamics, I’ve unpacked 13 Steps of decision making and change, some of which must take place before a problem can be accurately diagnosed or the goal defined. Here are the main categories:

1. Where are you? What’s missing?

The voices of everyone who touches the existing problem and will be involved with the new solution must be heard from before the problem is defined or goals are set. Starting a project with partial information and flawed assumptions automatically triggers resistance and failure.

2. What caused and maintains the problem?

The originating system must recognize an incongruence and understand the risk of change or it won’t consider doing anything different, regardless of the need or efficacy of the solution. Since whatever is in place has been working well-enough for some time and a part of the system, it’s necessary to examine:

What is keeping this problem in place? (rules, beliefs, norms, activities, jobs, culture)
What has prevented this problem from being resolved already?
What beliefs/values/norms of the existing activity must be retained?
Is there anything we already have that might solve our problem if used differently?

3. Brainstorming

Brainstorming sessions to discuss ideal outcomes and the risks of each must take place before goal-setting and include the voices (or their representatives) of the folks familiar with the originating problem:

- The foundational beliefs/values incorporated into the current activities that must be retained in the new;
- Ideas for solutions from each department/working group;
- Understanding the elements holding the old in place and what would change if it’s altered;
- Understanding the risks to making, or not making, a change. Is the risk of change more/less than maintaining the status quo?
- Possible solutions including potential workarounds) must include all voices and potential danger signs brainstormed.

4. Managing risk

The risk of change must be equal to or lower than the risk of staying the same. Change can’t proceed successfully unless the risk of change is understood and approved by all. Problems crop up:

- - Without a full complement of accurate data: flawed assumptions get made that will affect the long term success; goal-setting might be biased; resistance and time delays may result; unknown risks may cause inadequate buy-in.
  - unless the core beliefs and values of the company or team are factored in during goal setting.

5. Implementation

Implementation is a ‘how’, not a ‘what/why’:

- - What/Why are information focused; How is implementation focused.
  - What/Why are content based; How is systems based.
  - What/Why resides in the conscious mind; How gets generated from the unconscious brain.
  - What/Why captures information; How processes and manages risk.
  - What/Why is tactical; How is strategic.
  - What/Why requires information gathering and research; How requires buy-in and an understanding of the risk of change.

Too often CM practices focus on the rationale – the What and Why – behind a change and fail to understand the strategic nature (the How) of the change and how closely tied it is with the culture. If a system believes the risk of change is greater than the risk of staying the same, they will do nothing.

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HOW TO VS WHAT/WHY TO

If you’re a leader or outside consultant helping clients through a CM initiative – a seller, consultant, System Dynamics practitioner, coach, OD consultant – remember: Change is strategic, not tactical.

Let me take a moment to explain the skills necessary for the ‘How-To’. To gather accurate information, to assemble the right people, to recognize and incorporate the foundational elements of the system (the norms, rules, beliefs, values, mental models), to manage risk, requires different skills than the ones currently used in standard CM practices.

Behavior change can occur only after the originating neural circuits that instigated the problem get revisited. and possibly reconfigured. That causes a problem: when change is approached tactically (Why/What), the neural circuits where new instructions for new behaviors must emerge can’t be discovered.

Standard questions include too much bias to gather accurate data, and the way brains ‘listen’ (not very well) is filled with so many distortions and deletions that we only hear 10-35% of what a speaker intends.

So using biased questions, speaking to each other without fully understanding, focusing on reasons for change rather than fixing the underlying system that caused the problem causes lack of buy-in and resistance. And without the culture understanding the risk of change (certainly an affront to Systems Congruence), it’s pretty hard to get cultural change accepted.

I’ve invented a wholly new form of brain-directional question that works with the Stategic and the How to locate the origination point of the problem; a new form of listening that avoids bias; and a change model that includes 13 steps specifically designed to make it possible to define the proper goal, understand the risks, garner new ideas and buy-in, and implement.

Should you wish to learn the elements involved in systems management or help your team through the implementation process I’d love to support you. sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

_________________________

Sharon Drew Morgen July 21st, 2025

Posted In: News

I recently received three instances of AI generated content that were personal: a ‘photo’ of me, a ‘recap’ of one of my articles, and an ‘explanation’ of a decision facilitation model I spent decades inventing.

Photo? My photo (see graphic) is a near likeness. Obviously me – long curly white hair is one of my ‘features’ – but about 15% ‘off’: forehead a bit higher, hair just a bit curlier, eyelashes not as long. But so close that people who don’t know me would assume it was real. A friend said it was missing my ‘sparkle’.

Article? The article recap https://bit.ly/4lf6vfD surprised me. Two lovely people – colleagues maybe? – seem to be having a charming conversation about my tour de force essay on how sales became what it is now (95% fail-to-close rate; focus on the Sell Side with no Buy Side assistance that restricts the target audience rather than a broader group currently managing their buying decision journey.). The original essay –Let’s Make Sales Relevant Again – is filled with nifty insights on the makeup of the decision teams at the core of the buying process: the AI version misses the nuance and doesn’t quite understand the differences between how buyers by vs how sellers sell. It’s ‘almost’.

People unfamiliar with my work or haven’t read the original article wouldn’t fully understand the history of how buying decisions have changed since Dale Carnegie invented the current solution-focused sales model, and why it’s necessary to add new thinking to correspond with today’s environment.

Definition? The third instance, the ‘definition’ of Buying Facilitation ®’, is the most disturbing. Someone sent me ChatGPT’s interpretation (different from Perplexity’s version that’s a bit more accurate) of Buying Facilitation® that’s just plain wrong, although it does mention me as the inventor. But that’s where the accuracy ends.

Using an amalgam of the most used terms and standard assumptions in sales, there’s no precedent for my work for AI to cull from except for my own articles and books …obviously a drop in the ocean of available information on ‘sales’.

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The current information available on ChatGPT makes Buying Facilitation® into just another ‘sales’ model transposing my original ideas to the opposite meaning and intent (the Sell Side).

If a reader is unfamiliar with my work or the model, they would mistakenly assume ChatGPTs version is correct, and my work, my decades of inventing, training, and writing hundreds of articles and books (including one New York Times Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity) to provide sellers tools to actually help buyers buy and my focus on sellers becoming true Servant Leaders, would be lost forever. This one disturbs and depresses me greatly.

THE DOWNSIDES OF AI

Obviously there are great upsides to AI in medicine and science. When used correctly it can be used as a teaching tool to help students learn, as does Kahn Academy, or as an idea generator. But when used for research, it has real flaws:

When we assume the information AI offers us is accurate and we use this as the basis for research, decisions or actions, we miss the full fact pattern, nuance, or range of ideas and knowledge available.
It reduces the time we spend creating or thinking up new ideas.

But the problem is much broader: AI not only proliferates misleading and inaccurate information but reduces natural discussions and debates on the edges where change emerges. It reduces new idea generation.

THE SADNESS OF AN ORIGINAL THINKER

AI negates – by definition! – original thinking.

As an original thinker, I’ve spent my life unpacking the route between the conscious and the unconscious to make it possible to facilitate permanent change: decision making, behavior change, cultural change, from the origination point in the neural circuits in the brain; 10 years inventing a wholly new form of question (Facilitative Questions® are brain directional, not information-gathering) that lead Others, without bias, to where their decisions arise so accurate, congruent decisions can be made quickly; a way to listen without bias; a change management model that includes risk management, etc.).

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AI provides composites of conventional, tired thinking: Questions biased by the verbiage, goals, and intent of the Asker; ‘behaviors’ seem to arise from the sea like Venus with no attachment to the neural circuits they arise from; decisions made by weighing options instead of weighing the belief-based criteria from where they arise.

Is this the accepted norm when it’s possible to think differently and assure different results – results that trust that Others have their own answers, with no bias from an influencer?

Since the customary approach to change is behavioral (it’s not possible to permanently change behaviors by trying to change behaviors without getting to the source that generated them) my work, and that of other original thinkers whose work challenges the status quo, faces extinction if AI merely uses mainstream words and ideas to interpret it.

I’m not the only one who is afraid. How do we address this?

How do we insure that original ideas and models get shielded from being smooshed into existing ideas and models, and the new, the original, the very developments that bring the world forward, get maintained?

How?

_____________________________

Sharon Drew Morgen July 14th, 2025

Posted In: Change Management

I recently did a workshop for a group of System Dynamics practitioners who do a mighty job of figuring out the elements involved in large scale problem-solving to help clients make informed change decisions. But too often, the clients fail to implement their findings.

This is a problem in most industries: well-meaning and highly skilled professionals listen for, and collect, the What and Why of a problem and assume the client will know what to do with it. But they don’t.

The assumption here is that the information, the What and the Why, should drive implementation. But What/Why and How are wholly different activities that require wholly different skills.

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN WHAT, WHY, AND HOW

What and Why are different from How:

What/Why are information focused; How is implementation focused.
What/Why are content based; How is systems based.
What/Why resides in the conscious mind; How gets generated from the unconscious brain.
What/Why captures information; How processes and manages risk.
What/Why is tactical; How is strategic.
What/Why requires information gathering and research; How requires buy-in and an understanding of the risk of change.

We assume that having good information should cause behavior change. But behaviors are merely expressions – outputs – of the underlying system that generated them and will not change permanently unless the system itself changes.

Trying to change a behavior by merely trying to change a behavior by providing good, relevant information will only cause resistance and incurs a very high fail rate.

Here’s why What and Why are ineffective at generating change:

Information vs Implementation: Information, in and of itself, does not cause anyone to change their mind or adopt something new regardless of its accuracy or efficacy. It’s a little understood fact that we rarely hear or interpret new information accurately.

Due to the way brains ‘listen’ (Not very well. Mechanical, electricochemical, and involves distortions and deletions. See my book WHAT?) all incoming content is translated by the Listener’s existing neural circuits, ensuring that what is heard is some rendition of what they already know. In fact, there’s a 65-90% chance that Listeners will misunderstand the incoming information. Not great odds when providing information and expecting clients to implement with it.

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Content vs Systems: I define a system as a group of elements that agree to the same rules, and change is systemic. When people attempt to use content as the means to justify modification before the system agrees, it will be resisted. You cannot change one element of a system without it self-destructing, regardless how compelling the information.

To implement, to cause change and make different decisions to acquire new/different behaviors, it’s compulsory to change the beliefs, rules and norms of the originating system. Like the computer, it must be reprogrammed.

Conscious vs Unconscious: Our conscious choices arise from the unconscious systems that define our lives and prompt our behaviors. Permanent change must be initiated in the originating unconscious systems that caused the problem to be resolved. To accomplish this is the How. What and Why provides information to the conscious.

Information vs Risk: information consists of facts which may inspire change once the system is prepared and set up with accompanying beliefs, norms, and rules to integrate it. But when used to inspire core change it represents a risk to the system and has a good chance of being ignored, rejected, or resisted.

Tactical vs Strategic: Implementation requires a strategy: how to congruently change the underlying system that prompted the current problem to end up with permanent change and follow-on without resistance. This requires getting to the unconscious, trialing new choices, getting buy-in, understanding risk, and assigning tasks with follow up.

When we try to use standard skills to implement, it’s hard to lead clients to their unconscious. Sadly, well-meaning practitioners offer tactical support (the What and Why) that isn’t helpful when seeking fundamental change.

Information gathering vs Buy-in and Risk Management: What and Why are involved with research, information gathering, content. Implementation requires systemic change. Professionals seeking to enable implementation or change must employ a different skill set: listening without bias; posing questions that lead to unconscious origination points; enabling clients to assemble the stakeholders and understand their risk.

The biggest hurdle for most practiioners is to trust that Others have their own answers. Too often professionals assume THEY have the ‘right’ answer because their information is ‘good’ and necessary. But outsiders can never understand the set up of the Other’s culture or system. It’s unconscious even to them…but we can facilitate them in their own discovery so they can implement using their own norms and rules that conform to their systems.

HOW-TO

To implement small- or large-scale change, several elements must be involved:

Professionals as Servant Leaders must enter understanding their job to facilitate Others to discover their own systems, their own answers, their own implementation strategies. Most leaders and practitioners understand this; they just don’t have the skills (the How) to implement it.

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(Representatives of) the people and policies that underlie the present state must be assembled and become part of the change process from the beginning. They are a vital part of the underlying system.
It’s necessary to acquire buy in from the elements that operate in the current system and will be part of the new solution. Without this, the What and Why will be suspect, interpreted by the existing assumptions that have generated the existing problem and most likely ignored or resisted.
For new outputs/behaviors to be triggered that will align with the new needs, it’s vital that the system with the problem understand the core beliefs that define their originating system.
The risk of change must be understood by all and strategies put in place to mitigate any possible fallout before implementation will be considered without resistance.

How requires different skills: ways to pose unbiased questions; ways to listen without bias; knowing the 13 steps all change takes. But first it’s necessary for practitioners, sellers, healthcare professionals, and coaches truly take on board the belief that Others – the client, the patient, the buyer – have their own answers.

Right now, the assumption is that the influencer is the one who has the solutions (the What and Why) and it’s their job to tell clients how to implement. But without How skills, clients stumble. Professionals need a different skill set to help them.

I’ve spent 50 years designing models to facilitate congruent change and implementation. If you are interested in learning how to help clients implement, or help clients and prospects make decisions efficiently, please contact me. And if you’re interested in being part of an Implementation consulting group I’m forming, let me know. sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

_____________________

Sharon Drew Morgen July 7th, 2025

Posted In: Communication

Have you ever wondered where your thoughts come from? Everything we think – and notice, are curious about, believe in – emerges from our neural circuits that have been developed throughout our lives. It’s a brain storage thing, causing us to bias and restrict our entire lives.

From birth, our parent’s beliefs become part of our unconscious, very personal, ecosystem; the cultural norms of our youth begin creating our lifelong beliefs, habits, behaviors, and identity; the schools we attend introduce us to the way the world works and how to behave accordingly; our professions are chosen to comfortably maintain the biases we’ve accrued and person we’ve become.

Net net, our lives are a conglomeration of our history and unconscious biases, causing us to live and work, marry and spend time with people whose norms, interpretations, and beliefs are very similar to ours.

Our normal skill sets and brain neurology aid and abet us: we unwittingly listen through biased filters and hear restricted versions of what was said (I wrote a book on this: What? Did you really say what I think I heard?); we play and read and watch according to what we’re comfortable with and rarely venture far afield; and aided by the way our brains filter and prune incoming data, we notice what we notice in response to our personal norms, values, and learned habits.

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Our lives are lived in a reality of our own making to maintain our status quo. And yet, regardless of our natural biases, we seem to believe, with certainty, that what we see, hear, and feel is ‘real’. We even restrict our lives accordingly – our politics, our curiosity, what we read, our professional choices. In other words, we each live in a unique reality that gets maintained every moment of every day.

Our personal ‘reality’ is the basis of our unconscious biases and interpretations; so automatic and habituated, so accepted by all around us that we’re often unaware that our actions may harm others whose world views are different from ours.

WE CANNOT UNDERSTAND OTHERS

Given the subjective nature of our lives we cannot help but judge others accordingly. I, for one, never lock doors. My car is always unlocked. My house is always open even when I travel. Many people would find this unthinkable, but they don’t know my reality. As an incest survivor and a rape victim, I always need a quick way in and out. If a door is locked around me, I hyperventilate, panic. Terrifying. But without understanding my reality, you might have judged my actions as being unsafe.

Given the givens, it’s obvious that none of us can truly understand another’s interpretations of anything, or their resulting behaviors. And even though it’s difficult to even notice anything we’re not programmed to notice, we judge each other’s actions against our own.

A problem emerges when we run into others with different lifestyle choices, or communication styles, or education, or assumptions, or race, or political beliefs and behave automatically in ways that inadvertently harm them. We may not have the skills to connect with them in ways they understand or wrongly misinterpret their intent or judge their choices.

I believe that most people don’t intend to harm anyone. But without common ground, the best we can do is act from our habituated interpretations and assume because we ‘mean well’ that we’re not causing harm.

NEED FOR CHANGE

Historically, we’ve done a bad job resolving the problems of inherent bias that may ultimately harm others. I think this might be changing. Companies and public servants are now taking unconscious bias seriously and requiring unconscious bias and diversity training in the hopes of giving people new choices and eradicating harm. Good. But I have a concern.

As someone who has spent decades coding and scaling the stages of how human systems change, I know it’s not possible to cause change from the outside, by merely trying to change a behavior. To change, we must each find a way to shift our own core norms and biases from within (i.e. inside/out).

Current training approaches offer information, practice, scientific data, videos, etc., assuming that the offered data will cause behavior change (outside/in). But that’s like asking a forward moving robot to move backwards by showing it videos of other robots moving backward! Obviously the change must come from new programming. You can’t change a behavior by trying to change a behavior.

Merely assuming that people can change when offered ‘good’ or ‘rational’ reasons to change cannot fix the problem permanently because it:

doesn’t get to the root of someone’s unconscious, and very subjective, biases;
tries to persuade and change behaviors with subjectively chosen information that doesn’t address the neurochemistry that triggers the originating bias;
has no way of knowing the full range of unconscious biases within each individual learner;
doesn’t teach how to transcend someone’s habituated ‘unconscious triggers’ that go off automatically when their beliefs are invaded;
fails to install permanent, instinctive, alternative neural circuits that cause new behaviors.

Current unconscious bias and diversity training assumes people can learn enough from recognizing problems and practicing ‘real’ situations, etc. to recognize their unconscious bias in hopes they’ll know when it’s time to change behaviors. But with our choices arising in five one-hundredths of a second from automatic and electrochemical neural circuits, it’s hard to know exactly how to change a possibly offending behavior in time.

In other words, just when our brains are unconsciously registering ALERT, we are supposed to tell ourselves ‘Nope. Wrong thinking. Don’t do that. Do something different. NOW!’ just as it’s occurring. It’s possible to do so, but not with the training currently offered.

WHAT IS BIAS? AND WHY IS IT SO HARD TO CHANGE?

Bias is the unconscious, habitual, involuntary, and historic reaction to something deemed ‘different’ (skin color, gender, lifestyle choices, etc.) that negatively triggers someone’s largely unconscious beliefs and values causing an immediate, unconscious, and automatic reaction.

Our reactions to external stimuli follow our brain’s historic and habituated neural pathways whenever our unconscious triggers go off. To alter these, it’s necessary to go to the source where they occur in the brain; it’s not possible to permanently change behaviors by merely changing behaviors.

Changing core biases permanently is not a behavior change issue; it’s a core Identity/Belief problem that must be resolved at the source, within the system that created it. Basically, this level of change is a systems problem. To consider real change we must understand the system that created it.

WE MUST UNDERSTAND SYSTEMS TO ADDRESS BIAS

A system is a conglomeration of things that all agree to the same rules. For us, our system keeps us who we are as unique individuals, a composite of our physiology and neurology mixed with our norms, culture, history, values, beliefs, dreams that we hold largely unconsciously and formed during our lifetimes. Systems always seek stability; as a way to maintain balance, they define our politics, our mate selection, even how we listen to others with an unconscious structure of filters that get triggered by situations that make us uncomfortable.

When we try to get others to change by merely requiring behavior changes, their internal systems resist as there is no neurological, physiological foundation from which to act. For permanent change to occur, for new behaviors to be chosen, there must be a change in core beliefs before new skills or situations are offered.

Here are the elements necessary to include in bias or diversity training to trigger permanent behavior change:

Listening: our habituated listening filters and neural pathways automatically bias whatever anyone says to us; we set up our lives to avoid discomfort, and uniquely interpret differences in what has been said so our brains can keep us comfortable. When information is offered as evidence, our historic, habituated, biased listening filters kick in and uniquely interpret incoming data, often differently than the intended meaning. Indeed, it’s not even possible to hear anyone without bias; when what we hear (or see, or feel) makes us uncomfortable, we react historically regardless of how far the intended meaning is from our interpretation.
Questions: all normal questions are biased by the Asker’s subjective curiosity, thereby restricting the Responder’s replies to the Responder’s reaction and interpretation of what was heard, and potentially overlooking real answers.
Historic: biases are programmed in from the time we’re born. Every day we wake up with the same biases, kept in place by our choice of friends, TV, neighborhoods, professions, reading materials, etc. To permanently shift our biases, we’d have to change our historic programming.
Physiological: who we ‘are’ is systemic; our beliefs and norms, character and values have been programmed in and become our Identity, creating the behaviors and responses that will unconsciously maintain our status quo in everything we do and every action we take.
Triggers: because of our lifetime of inculcated beliefs, values, norms and outlook, our brains react chemically, unconsciously, and automatically when there is an untoward activity.
Information: our training programs typically tell, show, explain, offer stories, videos, etc. etc. using our biased choices, in our favored formats, in our languaging, in hopes that our information triggers recognition, or new behavior adoption to people who may not process what we’re telling them in the way we would prefer. They may not interpret, or know how to recognize a need for, or understand, how to make sense of whatever we’re telling them.
Behaviors: as the expression and execution of our beliefs and status quo, behaviors translate our core systemic beliefs and norms into daily action. Behaviors represent us; they are not ‘us’.

To change behaviors permanently it’s necessary to change the system, the programming, that created them to begin with. And this cannot be accomplished by merely trying to change the behaviors that created the problem to begin with. Remember Einstein?

CHANGE IS A SYSTEMS PROBLEM

Change is the alteration of something that has existed in a certain way, using specific and accepted norms, in a specific configuration, for a period of time. To amend our responses to bias, we must first recognize, then modify, the specific triggers (historically produced for a reason) that have been developed to operate unconsciously as the norm.

It’s basically a systems problem: for permanent change to occur, we must reconfigure the system that has created and maintains the status quo. Anything new any problem to fix, any new information that creates disruption, any new activity the system is asked to take, demands changing the status quo.

Indeed, any new decision is a change management problem. The way we are addressing the problem now doesn’t enable permanent change. Change means that a system must go through a process to become something different:

a trigger alerts the status quo that something may be awry;
a careful examination by all elements within the status quo must occur to find any incongruence;
agreement within the system (rules, stakeholders, identity, etc.) that change is necessary and that a fix won’t cause permanent disruption;
an initial attempt to fix anything missing on its own (using the same elements that created the problem to begin with);
the realization that the problem cannot be fixed from within the system;
an examination by everything that created the problem of any new possibilities that will create Systems Congruence;
an understanding and acceptance of the downside and disruption of a change (i.e. if politics change, how do we speak with family? If same-sex relationships, what happens with our church group?);
a fix is found that is agreeable, with full knowledge of how to circumvent any disruption it will cause;
new habits, new triggers, new neural pathways, etc. are developed in a way that incorporate the ‘new’ with the old to minimize disruption.

If all of the above aren’t managed, the system will fill in the blanks with something comfortable and habituated (regardless of its efficacy). In other words, if there is not systemic agreement, no known way to resolve the problem using its current givens, no known way to incorporate something new with the existing system so the system doesn’t implode, no change will happen regardless of the need or the efficacy of the solution.

Indeed – and I can’t say this often enough – you can’t change a behavior by trying to change a behavior. And all current bias and diversity training involves a focus on getting behaviors changed without addressing the source that created the behaviors and triggers to begin with.

WHAT IS A BEHAVIOR?

Current bias training attempts to get behaviors changed by offering information: showing and telling people what’s wrong with what they’re doing and what ‘right’ would look like – all of which can be misinterpreted, misread, or objected to, regardless of our intent.

While it certainly can make people more aware, these attempts will not cause permanent change: they develop no new habituated triggers or neural pathways to set off a new response to a stimulus. Let’s delve into this a bit.

Behaviors are what we do – transactions automatically initiated by our core system of beliefs, norms, and experience – to express who we are. We all develop behaviors that ‘be’ who we are, to represent us. Behaviors are the output, the forward movement of the robot, the actions others see.

To permanently change a behavior, a system must:

shift the core beliefs that inform any habituated, unconscious bias and develop additional beliefs, assumptions and triggers;
create new neural pathways to the brain that lead to choosing more respectful outputs, habits, behaviors;
listen with a different listening filter than the habituated ones;
enable the person to change themselves, using their own unconscious system of norms to design new behaviors that won’t offend the system;
interpret another’s actions in a neutral way that doesn’t offend our own beliefs – or change our beliefs.

To change our unconscious, automatic responses that cause us to respond defensively, the system that has created and maintains the status quo must be reconfigured to produce alternate outputs while still maintaining Systems Congruence. Offering any sort of information before the system knows why, how, when, or if to do anything different – a belief change – will only inspire resistance as the system won’t know how to apply it. It’s a belief change issue: when we change our habituated beliefs and norms (our programming), our behavior will automatically, and permanently, change.

CHANGE IS A SYSTEMS PROBLEM

Real change demands a systemic shift to create new triggers, new assumptions, new neural pathways, and ultimately, as an outcome, new behaviors. No one, no information, no person, from outside is able to go into someone’s unconscious to (re)create all these things. And permanent change will not happen until it does.

The goal is not to train someone to rid themselves of unconscious bias; it’s to help their system discover the underlying beliefs that cause them and enable them to develop new beliefs and responses.

Over the past decades, I’ve coded the 13 steps that constitute the route to systemic, human change so people can make their OWN internal changes that will lead to new choices, i.e. new behaviors. I’ve taught this model in sales as Buying Facilitation® to global corporations (KPMG, Morgan Stanley, IBM, P&G, Kaiser, etc.) for over 30 years, and written several books on it. The book that details each of the stages is Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell.

We must become Facilitators, not Influencers. We must teach folks to create and habituate new neural pathways and filters.

Listening: We must avoid habituated neural pathways when listening to others. I have a whole chapter on this in What?. Not difficult – you just need to develop triggers that will alert you to the need to do something different before you get triggered into a biased reaction.
Questions: I developed a new form of question that doesn’t interrogate and is not biased by the needs of the questioner, but instead acts like a GPS to guide people through their own unconscious. These Facilitative Questions are systemic, use specific words, in specific order, that traverse through the steps of change sequentially so others can note their own incongruencies. So: What would you need to know or believe differently to be willing to take an extra step and consciously choose to listen from a ‘different ear’?
Beliefs: by shifting the focus from changing behaviors to first changing beliefs and systems, we end up with permanent core change, new triggers and habits.
Information: we make several types of information available for the learner to choose from, to fit their own learning criteria and styles, and needs to fit into their unique areas of deficiency.

I’ve developed a new way to train that facilitates self-learning and permanent change from within the system. For those wishing a full discussion, I’ve written an article on this that appeared in The 2003 Annual, Volume 1 Training (I’m happy to send you a more specific discussion of this if you’re not already bored) Just note: my process leads people, without any bias, to those places in their brains, into their system of beliefs and cultural norms, which made the decisions to employ their biased behaviors to begin with, and teaches them how to reconfigure their system to adopt something new (so long as its aligned with their beliefs). We are making the unconscious conscious and developing more appropriate triggers and behaviors.

How will you know that by adding systemic change elements to your training that you can enable more people to make more appropriate behavioral choices around their bias?

If you would like my help in designing a program that resolves unconscious biases permanently, I’d love to help. I believe it’s an important task. I believe it’s time we had the tools to enable learners to permanently change and become non-judgmental, accepting, and kind. And above all, cause no harm. All of our lives depend on it.

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Sharon Drew Morgen June 30th, 2025

Posted In: Change Management, Communication, Listening

We all prefer safe, inclusive, and accountable workplaces, but sometimes the culture lets us down. Certainly companies try by running programs to lead us to greater awareness and better choices.

Yet these often fail to achieve the desired results. Why? Can training change behaviors to ensure all employees feel safe and respected?

WHAT IS A BEHAVIOR?

My definition of a behavior highlights the difficulty instigating change. While AI defines behaviors as ‘an organism’s response to external stimuli, including actions and inactions,’ my definition goes to the source to where, when, if, and how they arise:

Behaviors are outputs from, and representations of, our underlying foundational, norms, rules, beliefs and values.

Beyond merely responses, behaviors are observable expressions of who we are, triggered automatically by neural circuits in response to external stimulation.

Standard training attempts to change behaviors by trying to change behaviors, thereby failing to change a behavior at the source, leaving the neural circuitry and underlying values that triggered the actions in place, ensuring they’ll continue. So as a vegetarian, presenting me with proof as to why I should eat meat would lead to me resisting because my beliefs remain intact.

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RULES GOVERN CHOICES

Once offending words and actions show up in the workplace, the problem becomes one of culture. When employees exhibit unsafe, non-inclusive, or not accountable actions, their behaviors have been tacitly sanctioned by the workplace culture; the core beliefs, norms, and rules of the company don’t specifically rule them out.

Take gender discrimination as an example. For intolerance to show up there are either spoken or unspoken agreements within the culture that make it ok. While management makes clear that discrimination is not allowed, maybe complaints are not conveyed to HR, or HR tells the victim they need to behave differently with the offending person, or the offender may be admonished and sent back to their desk. Eventually the employee leaves the company, almost ensuring that the existing cultural norms persist.

To ensure a culture of safety, fairness, and accountability, it’s necessary to actually state – in the corporate vision, rules, identity and daily communication – that any form of prejudice is cause for dismissal. Indeed, hiring practices would include vetting for respect.

Of course rules of conduct are endemic and unique to each company culture. Most are unspoken, some are obvious: we know to wear a T-Shirt at Facebook and business casual at IBM; we know not to wear a bathing suit to visit a client. But often the rules are unstated and hiring practices don’t specify what is not acceptable.

Obviously, hiring employees with a natural respect for the values we seek to engender is a good place to start. During the hiring process, comments like:

What would you do to provide safety, fairness, and respect in your team?

Please be aware that safety, fairness, and respect are the bedrocks of our culture, and any actions that don’t promote these are grounds for immediate dismissal.

provide clarity and intention. Over time, the employee population will represent the new values.

THE PRACTICE OF CHANGE

We currently assume that problematic behaviors can be altered when ‘good’ information is shared, understood, and practiced. But permanent change requires a modification to the system that generated the problem to begin with.

Companies seeking a safer and more respectful workplace environment must change the values and norms of the company. Much more complex than merely changing behaviors, change of this magnitude requires buy-in and risk management to ensure everyone behaves using the same principles. This includes several steps:

Assemble, or have represented, all who will touch the final solution and agree on the desired goal;
Identify the foundational values, beliefs, norms, and rules essential to achieve their goal;
Compare the difference between the new beliefs and the status quo to recognize what, specifically, the new objective would include;
Understand, and generating working groups to navigate and resolve the risk to the system of adopting different activities;
Understand and agree on the types of resources (a Listening course? Visiting companies with established inclusive workplaces?) necessary to achieve the new goal;
Design an active implementation with assigned tasks, timelines, and lines of communication to include regular shout-outs to all employees in order to maintain the daily focus on the new company identity;
Ensure hiring practices include specific mention of what’s expected and what will be tolerated;
As a continued follow-on, create a grievance committee, comprised of a group of employees that represent the different departments and roles, to take each complaint seriously;
Maintain semi-annual on-line training on change facilitation so employees understand the company’s commitment to the norms of safety, respect, fairness, and inclusiveness.

Changing a company culture is an arduous task. And it’s certainly a vital one.

THE RISK OF CHANGE

There’s one more element to discuss: the risk of change is the elephant in the room.

Any change in norms that a company promotes represents a risk to folks who accepted their job without knowledge of the new requirements and who don’t comply naturally. These are the folks we want to reach, of course, but since their behaviors are most likely unconscious, we must help them integrate new beliefs and values to meet our new expectations. As stated above, merely telling them what is no longer tolerated won’t cause permanent change.

The question becomes, what is our risk when folks hired before the new norms were in place continue their unsafe activities? And what about those folks who can’t change but whose jobs are vital and can’t easily be replaced?

Risk management in change of this type is pivotal: how does the innate risk get addressed once a company that has tacitly overlooked racist or sexist comments, for example, draw new boundaries of what’s acceptable?

To manage risk, it’s necessary for the topic to be brainstormed across the company culture. Questionnaires sent to each employee to be discussed within their departments. Managers will discuss the necessity and risk of change at supervisory sessions.

Conclusion:

We all want our workplace to be a safe, inclusive place to work, where we hire employees to carry the company vision to each other and to our clients. For this it’s necessary to hire people who will carry out the desired values, and develop training programs that get to the neural sources to where behaviors originate.

The question becomes: How will you and your company know when it’s time to take the necessary steps to ensure a safe, inclusive, and accountable workplace culture. And what steps are you willing to take to achieve it?

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Sharon Drew Morgen June 23rd, 2025

Posted In: News

change-1080462_960_720 As an influencer, how often do say to yourself “Why doesn’t she understand me?” or “If he understood me better this decision would be a no-brainer.” It’s natural to assume Others will understand – and comply with – your suggestions. Have you ever wondered what’s happening when they don’t?

As an influencer, part of your job is to facilitate change. But how? In general, you’ve likely used great rationale, logic, and leadership, data sharing, or just plain directives. But what if your Communication Partner’s brain isn’t set up to hear you accurately? What if your words are misinterpreted, or not understood? You naturally assume your words carry the meaning you intend to convey. But do they?

Sometimes people misinterpret you and your audience is restricted to only those who naturally understand your message. Sometimes people ignore you, regardless of how important your message, how engagingly you deliver it, or how badly they need it.

What if ‘changing minds’ is the wrong way to think about it, and if your real job is to ‘change brains’? What if the Other’s brain, it’s neural circuitry, was in charge and your job was to facilitate the way it went about decision making?

OUR BRAINS ARE THE CULPRIT

Thinking about using any form of content-based sharing as a persuasion strategy, let me share a confounding concept: words have no meaning until our brain interprets them. According to John Colapinto in his fascinating book This is the Voice,

Speech is a connected flow of ever-changing, harmonically rich musical pitches determined by the rate at which the phonating chords vibrate, the complex overtone spectrum is filtered by the rapidly changing length and shape of the mouth, and lips, interspersed with bursts of noise…It is our brain that turns this incoming stream of sonic air disturbances into something meaningful. (pg 54)

Seems to parallel how we ‘see’ color. We don’t, exactly. Light vibrations enter our eyes and get translated into color by our rods and cones. Otherwise, the world is gray! Indeed, both what we see and what we hear are largely out of our control, influencing what we notice (or not), how we decide (or not), what we think and hear and are curious about (We can’t be curious unless we have the circuitry to think with!).

Here’s a greatly simplified explanation of how brains translate incoming words (or sounds, or…) as I learned when researching my book WHAT?: Spoken words, like all sounds, are merely meaningless electrochemical vibrations that enter our ears as ‘puffs of air’, as many neuroscientists call the vibrations, that get filtered, then automatically dispatched as signals to what our brain considers a ‘similar-enough’ circuit (one among 100 trillion) for translation. And where the signals don’t match, a Listener’s brain kindly discards the difference!

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People understand us according to how the selected circuits translate these signals, regardless of how different they are from the intended message.

In other words, people don’t hear us according to what we say but by how their historic circuitry interprets it. To me this is quite annoying and hard to address: not only does that restrict incoming content to what’s already familiar to us, there’s a chance that what we think was said is only some fraction of what was intended.

Unfortunately, neither the Speaker or Listener understands how far from accurate the translation is. Listeners assume their brains tell them exactly what’s been said; Speakers assume they’ve been heard accurately. Turns out these assumptions are both false; communication potentially ends up biased, restricted, and subjective.

THE BRAIN/INFORMATION PROBLEM

The misinterpretation problem gets exacerbated when words get sent down circuits that unwittingly incur resistance, as Others ‘hear’ something that goes against their beliefs. If my brain tells me you said ABL it’s hard to convince me you said ABC. I’ve lost friends and partners that way and didn’t understand why until my book research. And sadly, it all takes place outside of conscious awareness.

This is especially problematic when there’s a new project to be completed, supervision to correct a problem, or Business Process Management to be organized. It’s a problem between parents and teenagers and a curse in negotiations. As leaders, without knowing how accurately we’re heard, we have no idea if our directives or information sharing is being received as we intend.

This possibility of misinterpreting incoming words makes the case for providing information when it can be most accurately translated: when the Listener knows exactly what they are listening for, the brain has a more direct route to the appropriate circuits to interpret them.

Instead of starting with goals or solutions for Others, we need their direct buy-in first. To invoke change, help Others figure out what they need from you then supply content that will be applied accurately. In other words, instead of shooting an arrow to hit a bullseye, first shoot the arrow then draw the bullseye where the arrow lands!

INFORMATION IS LAST

After 60 years of studying, and developing models for, systemic brain change and decision making, I’ve realized that offering ideas, directives, suggestions, or information is the very last thing anyone needs when considering doing something different (i.e. buying, changing habits, etc.). And yes, it goes against most conventional thinking. But hang with me.

As a kid, my then-undiagnosed Asperger’s caused me to act differently than people around me. I was in trouble often and never understood why. I began reading voraciously on how to change my behaviors: how to visualize, to motivate myself, be disciplined. But they were all based on trying to fix my seemingly automatic actions, to change my behaviors. And I failed repeatedly to make any of the changes permanent.

I finally acknowledged it’s not possible to change a behavior by trying to change a behavior, my brain was the culprit. I then began developing neural workarounds to:

create new brain pathways to new behaviors,
consciously change the circuits causing my behaviors,
enhance my ability to translate incoming words accurately.

I know, I know. It’s odd, and there was lots of trial-and-error. But eventually I figured it out and dedicated the rest of my life to developing, writing about, and teaching systemic brain change models for conscious behavior change.

Thankfully, my concepts caught on in sales, coaching, leadership, and change management: my facilitation models help people orchestrate their own change based on their own internal norms, values, and criteria: in sales, my Buying Facilitation® model teaches people on route to fixing a problem how to become buyers. In coaching and change management, I provide the skill sets to enable people to discover, and act on, their own unique criteria and avoid resistence.

CHANGE FACILITATION

For those of you whose job is to get Others to do something you want them to do, let’s look at it from the side of the people you seek to change.

In order for change to occur, people must understand the difference between their status quo (their problem) and the new activity you want them to do. Below are all the specific factors they must address to be ready, willing, and able to change:

Conform to norms: Change is more than doing something different; it demands a reconfiguration of the brain circuitry. And it’s only when an incongruence is noticed that something different is required. By first facilitating people through their discovery – by leading them to the underlying beliefs and values that created the circuits that caused the problem – they can discover an incongruence and be willing to change. It’s got nothing to do with new content or imposed regulations, regardless how important they are. I created a new form of brain-directive question (i.e. not information gathering) called a Facilitative Question that’s quite effective at leading others to their own, often unconscious, answers.

Cost: It’s not until the ‘cost’ (resource, results, disruption) of a fix is identified and agreed to by all stakeholders (including mental models and beliefs) that it’s possible to know if a problem is worth fixing. No one naturally seeks out change if all seems fine, regardless of the problem or the efficacy of the solution.

Disruption: Because our internal systems seek balance (homeostasis), we avoid disruption. And the time it takes us to find a route through to a change that matches our values and avoids risk is the length of the change cycle. If new behaviors are required that cause someone to be out of balance, they will be resisted.

Personal: When change is sought, people must discover their own route to change that match their values and maintains homeostasis. And outsiders can ever understand someone’s history, values, norms, or neural configurations.

EACH PERSON MUST DESIGN THEIR OWN CHANGE

To facilitate change efficiently, we need a shift in thinking. Instead of trying to have the answers for Others, first focus on the goal of helping Others discover how to handle their own change issues; enable them to discover their own incongruences. Then they’ll know exactly where they need to add or subtract something to fix it, and the influencer can supply the information to complete the process.

Here’s a situation where I used a carefully crafted sentence to direct a friend’s thinking to where her choice points lie.

I have a lovely young friend who, to me, had serious energy problems. Some days she had difficulty getting out of bed, even with 5 children. Some days she didn’t have the energy to cook or work. And she’d been having this issue for decades. After knowing her a year I finally said, “If the time ever comes that you wish for additional choices around your store of energy to be more available for your kids, I have a thought.”

By shifting the context to her children, by giving her control over her choices and not trying to change her, by leading her to each of her decision points, her system didn’t feel threatened. She welcomed my thoughts, got help (My naturopath discovered she was actually dying from a critical lack of vitamin B12.) and now is awake daily at 5:30 a.m. with endless amounts of energy.

No matter what the problem or solution may be, unless someone understands that change won’t cause major disruption, unless the new fits with their values and criteria, unless all the people involved agree to change, they won’t consider doing anything different. So how can we help Others find their own excellence?

13 STEPS TO CHANGE

You must begin by trusting Others have their own criteria for change. Instead of starting with answers or goals, lead them down their unique path through to discovery, to notice any incongruences they can’t resolve on their own. Then they’ll know exactly what they need from you and be ready to hear your information. And as you’ve already helped them help themselves, they’ll come to you for their needs and trust has been established when you offer them new ideas.

The facilitation model I developed leads buyers, teams, coaching clients through to discovery. It involves 13 specific steps that follow the sequence all brain change takes as a precursor to behavior change, providing the tools to help the Other figure out their own path. By then they’ll need your information. To address change congruently, people must first:

recognize the full set of givens involved;
identify and include all stakeholders, beliefs, criteria, and norms;
try workarounds to fix the problem internally if possible;
understand and accept the risk of change;
get buy-in to adopt the new.

It’s not so simple as an outsider gathering or sharing information or posing questions to help the influencer understand. Because until they know that the cost change will be equal to or less than their status quo, they will not take action.

Historically, I’ve taught this facilitation process successfully to 100,000 sales professionals and coaches. But with the new technology, it’s quite possible to use it in marketing for Deal Rooms, ABM discussions, and Sales Enablement.

So as you consider delaying your storytelling or pitching until you’ve facilitated change, ask yourself:

Would you rather speak or be heard?
What is your job – to serve Others through to their own form of excellence or get your point across to anyone who can listen?
Do you seek a quick hit or a long-term relationship?
Would you rather be a servant leader or an information hawker?

You decide. It’s possible to serve Others and be available with information when and as they need. Sellers can first facilitate buying, coaches and facilitate permanent change, and marketers can develop content that leads people through to brain change. I’m here if you have questions. Or go to www.sharon-drew.com to learn about my facilitation and brain change models.

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Sharon Drew Morgen June 16th, 2025

Posted In: Communication

Have you ever wondered why people agree to an appointment from your prospecting calls? Obviously, it’s not because they need your solution or they’d close more consistently after your visit. You’re charming, your solution great, your pitch deck is creative and your content informative. So it’s not you or your solution.

But ask yourself: if people agree to a meeting but are not likely to buy, why did they take the meeting? Choose one from below:

They needed information to help them resolve their problem internally, without you.
One or two people from a team are gathering information to convince others of possible solutions for a need not yet fully established.
They’re comparing your information against your competitors.
One or two people are representing the team as they progress toward resolving a problem and they need ideas to discover their own workarounds.

With a goal to get an appointment, you’re wasting valuable time chasing after folks who aren’t ready to buy, or aren’t buyers at all. You’re:

creating a double sale – the first being to get them to buy the appointment;
calling people who haven’t (yet) self-identified as buyers, are in the middle of their discovery process, and don’t see a need for an appointment or they would have contacted you;
placing hundreds of calls to get one appointment when you could use the same time/effort to actually find a real buyer and make a sale.

By seeking anyone who will take an appointment, you’re making it possible for folks to use you to glean information. But there’s a bigger downside: you’re not recognizing or serving people on route to becoming buyers – real prospects who WILL buy when they complete their change/decision process.

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WHAT YOU MISS WHEN SEEKING AN APPOINTMENT

With a ‘need’ and ‘appointment’ focus, you’re missing real prospects on route to becoming buyers but haven’t completed their journey.

Instead, seek out folks in the process of becoming buyers and facilitating their necessary Pre-Sales change management journey – the Buy Side. After all, until they’ve got their ducks in a row, and understand their risk of change and get buy in, they won’t even look at marketing or sales content!

Unfortunately, the sales model overlooks this entire group of highly viable prospects. But if you seek folks in the process of solving a problem in your area of expertise and help them through their change and risk management decisions, they’ll buy quickly.

The missing piece here is the difference between the two buying processes: the Sell Side and the Buy Side. And the Buy Side has very specific considerations currently overlooked by the Sell Side.

THE SELL SIDE VS THE BUY SIDE

By contacting people with only a sales hat on, before they’ve

completed assembling their full set of stakeholders,
recognized the criteria that defines their problem,
tried familiar workarounds,
assessed their risk and found it manageable,

you’re discarding highly qualified prospects (40%) who won’t take a meeting but could use your help. By overlooking the Buy Side decision process, you’re missing your sweet spot: helping people as they fumble through their factors to determine if their risk of going ‘outside’ (to buy something, to bring in a consultant, etc.) is worth the disruption that bringing in something new causes.

Turns out that risk is the deciding factor if someone buys, not need; defining and controlling for it constitutes 70% of their decision path! And this must occur before they can buy anything, regardless of need.

SELLING DOESN’T CAUSE BUYING

The sales model has no relevance in the Pre-Sales change management decisions all people take before self-identifying as buyers. Consequently, selling doesn’t cause buying as they are two wholly different concepts: A buying decision is relational – change management and risk driven; sales is tactical – solution placement driven.

When people have a problem they don’t BEGIN by considering or making a purchase (tactical), but by figuring out all the systemic stuff they need to figure out (relational) to end up with a change that aligns with internal norms. No one wants to buy anything, merely resolve a problem at the least risk to their culture/system.

By focusing on getting appointments, you’re not only overlooking and discarding these very viable prospects, you’re neglecting a perfect opportunity to get on their side of the table and provide value-add that would facilitate them through the steps they must take before they’re buyers. It’s only when their

change management work is complete
AND all (all!) stakeholders are involved
AND they’ve realized they cannot resolve the problem on their own
AND they have the buy-in to proceed
AND they understand the ‘cost’ (risk) of any change caused by a new solution,

that they’re buyers.

This is where they ‘go’ when you think they’re dragging their feet or having ‘indecision’. By helping them precisely where they need help, you’re collapsing the sales cycle by at least half and creating a competitive advantage. And most of my clients end up on the Buying Decision Team because they’ve been so helpful.

But this requires you begin with a different goal and new skills, seeking people on route to change in the area you can support. Because their Pre-Sales change work is based on people, policy, buy-in, change, and resource, you’d be meeting them on the Buy Side.

Remaining on the Sell Side ensures you’ll only find the low hanging fruit – people who are ready to buy and considering your competitors – when it’s so easy to find folks on route to buying and facilitating their journey.

DALE CARNEGIE DID IT SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO

In 1937, Dale Carnegie told you to make face-to-face sales calls. In those days, there was little choice: cars were rare and quite expensive, phones were party line, and advertising was the Sears Catalogue that came out once a year.

These days, the internet transmits your content making your pitch unnecessary. But it’s much bigger than that; buying decision teams are no longer in one venue; people have partners and old vendors willing to help them resolve problems; and the time it takes them to understand if the risk of change carries too much disruption is the length of the sales cycle.

Before anyone becomes a buyer they have internal change work to do. To truly facilitate this end of the buying decision path, it takes a new goal at the beginning (find folks IN their change process instead of trolling for ‘need’ or appointments) and wholly new skills.

I’ve invented a facilitation model (Buying Facilitation®) that begins with a ‘change’ focus and finds and serves these folks on route to becoming buyers but can’t consider themselves buyers until they’ve managed all the change issues and understand their internal risk.

With a goal of finding people during their change/decision cycle, Buying Facilitation® closes 40% from first call by facilitating them down their essential change/decision steps and then selling: Once they’ve discovered ALL the stakeholders, understand the full fact pattern, gotten buy-in and establish risk tolerance, then they’re ready to buy. They might even ask you to visit them and will have 10 people present. Then you’re a true servant leader.

I’m suggesting you expand your skill set to add ‘facilitate the Pre-Sales buying decision path’ before you sell. You can use this on your cold calls and close 40% from first call. Otherwise, you’re wasting so much of your valuable time seeking appointments with people who aren’t buyers.

______________________________

Sharon Drew Morgen June 9th, 2025

Posted In: News

Trust. The big kahuna. The sales industry seeks it; doctors assume it; couples demand it; change can’t occur without it. But what is it? Why isn’t it easier to achieve? And how can we engender it in relationships?

I define trust as the awareness of Another as being safe, similar, and sane enough to connect with, and occurs when they

have core beliefs that align and seem harmonious with mine,
feel heard, accepted, respected, and understood by me,
feel compatible or safe as a result of our interacting,
believe their status quo won’t be at risk when connected to me.

Unless these criteria are satisfied, trust can’t occur no matter how kind, professional, necessary, or well-intended another person or message is. It’s a Belief issue.

BELIEFS DEFINE US

Every one of us has Beliefs unique to us. Our Beliefs are the norms and rules we live by, developed over our lifetimes to make decisions and act against. We gravitate to, and trust, folks with similar foundational Beliefs and world views that match well-enough with our own to proclaim “safety”.

Largely unconscious, illogical to others and hard to change, our Beliefs regulate us, define who we are and enable us to show up congruently in the world. We even listen through ears biased by our Beliefs.

Sample

Beliefs instigate our habits and assumptions, restricting our life choices such as our occupations, politics, values, mates – even our child rearing practices. And our Beliefs are the initiators of our behaviors – behaviors being Beliefs in action, the expressions of our core systems.

Sadly, because everyone’s Belief systems are unconscious and idiosyncratic, and because we each view the world through our own Beliefs and perceptions, it’s difficult to accurately perceive Another’s internal world view. It’s here, in our Beliefs, where our world views collide.

For those folks whose jobs are to influence, there’s an immediate problem. The content they share, or even their unique delivery style, may unwittingly offend the Belief system of the Communication Partner (CP). Bad news for sellers, coaches, managers, etc. who attempt to promote change or buy-in by pushing their ideas and instead cause resistance and distrust.

DRIVERS FOR TRUST

I’d like to offer thoughts on some of the ways we fail when trying to engage trust, then provide some ideas of how to stimulate it.

Relationship Building: We’ve been led to believe that having a relationship encourages buy-in to new ideas. But it’s a conundrum: polite as an interaction appears or how necessary our message, we can’t easily build a relationship with folks with divergent Beliefs, or fight their automatic filters that react to us immediately. In other words, “pushing in” doesn’t work, even if our data and intent are accurate, and even if we think we have a relationship that entitles us to ‘share.’ We might have a superficial connection, but not a relationship; “making nice” does not constitute a relationship, or engender change or trust.

Information: As influencers we often attempt to “get in” with the information we assume our CPs need, without accounting for how it will be perceived. Sometimes the “right” data inadvertently tells our CP that they’re wrong (and we’re right). We fail to realize that our CPs only understand our intent to the degree it matches their Beliefs, or how their listening filters translate it for them. With the best will in the world, even with good data to help folks who need what we’ve got to share, we aren’t heeded.

In fact, information is the last thing needed to facilitate change or buy-in since people unconsciously defend their status quo. It’s our brain’s fault! Because all incoming data is translated for us automatically by our historic neural circuits, new ideas aren’t always interpreted accurately and run the risk of causing resistance. (See my book WHAT? on this topic.) So save the information sharing for when a clear path to mutual Beliefs and trust has been developed.

Think about it: if you’re an environmentalist, the “rational/ scientific” data you offer to “prove” climate change won’t persuade those who disagree; if you’re a proponent of the medical model, you won’t use alternate therapies to manage an illness no matter how strong the data for changing your nutrition.

Clear Communication: We all think we communicate clearly, yet we’re not as effective speaking in ‘Other’s language’ given our CPs unconscious, biased listening filters that end up preventing our “risky” data from being heard accurately. Certainly we believe we’re choosing the “right” words and approach to convey our intent. Yet our message is heard accurately only by those with similar Beliefs and resisted by the very people who need our information the most.

FACILITATE BELIEF CHANGE FIRST

Since our great ideas and eager strategies don’t engender trust in folks with different Beliefs, and without trust we can’t change minds, what should we do?

As coaches, sellers, and leaders, we must carefully initiate conversations based on them discovering their own answers, with a goal to match their Belief criteria before offering new ideas. In this way we can help our CPs open up new possibility that actually creates trust:

Enter each conversation with the goal of assisting your CPs in discovering how their Beliefs instigated their behaviors. Entering with the goal to offer information, or get your question answered, or extract promises of action will automatically engender distrust and resistance.
Ask the type of questions that facilitate and enable internal discovery; conventional questions merely pull data biased by the needs of the Asker. I designed Facilitative Questions (see below) that enable congruent change without bias by leading the CP through their unique route to discovery.
There is a specific series of steps that change entails. I’ve spent decades coding the steps of change for decision making and new habit generation. These promote congruent change by leading Others down their own choice points. Learn the steps, and help your CP traverse the steps to match Beliefs and encourage acceptance prior to mentioning your idea.
Trust that your CP has her own answers and that she’ll shift toward excellence as appropriate for her. It won’t show up exactly as you’d hoped; but there will be a new opening for collaboration without resistance.
Understand that until or unless your CP can recognize his own incongruences, there is no way he’ll welcome comments from you that sound like you’re saying he’s wrong or insufficient.

In other words, create a Beliefs-based bond that will open the possibility of you offering information later, once they’ve discovered exactly where they need it and how to use it.

FACILITATING TRUST THROUGH QUESTIONS

I’ve developed a new form of question (Facilitative Questions) that teaches others to scan their own internal state. These questions are unbiased, systemic, formulated with specific wording, in a specific order, and based on systemic brain change, not information gathering. They also take our CPs into a Witness state, beyond their automatic responses, and from which they can have a neutral, unbiased look at their status quo to notice if it’s operating excellently, and consider change if there might be a more congruent path.

Take a look at a conventional question vs a Facilitative Question:

Conventional: Do you think it’s time for a haircut? or Why do you wear your hair that way?
Telling someone they need a haircut, or asking them if they noticed they need a haircut, or giving them an article on new types of hair styles – all based on your own need to convince your CP to change – will cause defensiveness and distrust.
Facilitative Question: How would you know if it were time to reconsider your hairstyle?
This leads your CP

into a Witness state,
beyond their resistance and reaction,
outside of their normal unconscious reactions,
to notice the exact criteria they need to consider change and
to open the possibility for new choices that match their own Beliefs.

By using this type of question we offer a route for the CP to discover their own best answer that aligns with their Beliefs and engenders trust. No push, no need for a specific response. Serving another by helping them discover their own Excellence.

I designed these questions as part of my Buying Facilitation® model, a generic change facilitation model (often used in sales) that enables congruent change. Sounds a bit wonky, I know, and it’s certainly not conventional. But worth researching. I’ve trained large numbers of sales folks and coaches over the past 40 years against control groups and consistently have a 40% success rate. When we facilitate our CPs down their path to conscious choice, we

help them discover their incongruencies,
help them understand the areas at risk,
help them develop their own route to managing risk (i.e. change) and where they can’t do it themselves,
enable buy-in from the elements that will be effected.

Until your audience is able to accomplish this in their own way, using their own Beliefs, they will hear you through biased ears, maintain their barriers, and engender trust only with those who they feel aligned with – omitting a large audience of those who may need you.

Stop using your own biases to engender trust: facilitate your CPs in changing themselves. Then the choice of the best solution becomes a consequence of a system that is ready, willing, and able to adopt excellence. And they’ll trust you because you helped them help themselves.

____________

Sharon Drew Morgen June 2nd, 2025

Posted In: Change Management, Listening

« Previous Page — Next Page »

Unconscious Listening Biases: how influencers unwittingly restrict possibilities, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

‘Send me an email’ indicates rejection, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

Reduce Resistance and Optimize Buy-in: Systems Management can ensure risk-free cultural change, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

It’s the Same Only Different: the risks of AI generated content, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

Implementation is a How: the Why and What of Sales, System Dynamics, OD, and healthcare don’t help clients execute, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

Resolving Unconscious Bias: why training may not eliminate intolerance, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

Building A Truly Inclusive And Accountable Workplace, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

Influencers vs. Facilitators: essay on enabling change congruently, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

Seeking Appointments is Costing You Sales, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

Trust: what it is, and how to initiate it