Change Management – What? Did You Really Say What I Think I Heard?

I recently got a call from a noted venture capitalist of healthcare apps.

DH: I heard you have a model that facilitates permanent behavior change. I wonder if it would work with any of the 15 healthcare apps I’ve invested in.

SD: I do have a model that does that. And it certainly could be used as a front end to conventional behavior change apps to enable users to develop permanent habits by developing neural circuits. What are you using now to help folks change behaviors permanently?

DH. Behavior Modification, but it doesn’t work. There’s no scientific evidence that it works and our analysis concurs. But there’s nothing else to use. Can you help?

It’s a known fact that Behavior Modification has a 3% success rate over time. Sure, people initially lose weight with a behavior-based plan to eat differently. Certainly people stop smoking or get to the gym for a few weeks. But because these new behaviors haven’t been accepted by, or made permanent in, the brain, they cannot succeed over time. And repeating the new in hopes that THIS time it will stick obviously doesn’t work.

Stay tuned for my new book: HOW? Generating new neural circuits for learning, behavior change, and decision making.

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Permanent change is a very achievable goal. But we’re approaching the problem from the wrong angle. In this essay I will explain what a behavior is, what change is, how our brain governs them both, and introduce the steps needed to form habits. Believe it or not, it’s mechanical.

THE PROBLEM WITH BEHAVIOR MODIFICATION

Lately I’ve heard several Behavioral Scientists on the radio, all offering Behavior Modification techniques to habituate new behaviors by, well, habituating new behaviors. They ‘remove barriers’, suggest ‘momentum’, offer ‘promoting forces/restraining forces’, and propose ‘behavioral interventions’ such as keeping weights at your desk so you can ‘lift’ during Zoom calls. All meant to motivate behavior change – through behavior change. I suspect Einstein might have something to say about that.

The problem is the premise. Behavior Mod’s core assumptions are actually contrary to brain science. It assumes that by merely repeating (and repeating and repeating) new ways to accomplish something that’s been problematic, permanent change will result that can be maintained over time. But it doesn’t. And it can’t.

Certainly we’ve all tried. We’ve learned the hard way that we can’t lose weight permanently by trying to lose weight. Or stop smoking by trying to stop smoking. We promise ourselves we’ll be disciplined ‘this time’. But our discipline isn’t the problem. We have no circuits to translate our wishes into actions automatically. Our brain makes us fail.

DIFFERENT THINKING REQUIRED

The reason we fail is simple: we’re not making the necessary adjustments to the neural pathways that prompt behaviors to begin with.

I’ll start with an analogy. Let’s say you purchase a forward-moving robot, use it for a while, then decide you want it to move backward. You tell it why a ‘backwards’ functionality would enhance it, show it slides and presentations of other robots that move backwards, and attempt to push, cajole, and offer rewards. Nope. It won’t move backward. But if you program it differently, it will.

What about changing a chair into a table. You put red plastic into a machine that is programmed to spit out a red plastic chair. Once the chair is produced, you can’t make it a table. But you can create a table if you program the machine appropriately at the start.

Changing habits by trying to change habits is merely attempting to change the outcome – the output, the habit, the behavior, the robot, the chair – but failing to reprogram the brain with different instructions to create something new.

Sounds obvious. But that’s not what behaviorists do: the Behavior Mod approach suggests we get the robot to move backward by pushing it (and pushing it and pushing it) assuming the repetition will cause permanent change. As you know, it doesn’t work.

WHAT IS A BEHAVIOR?

To understand the full scope of the problem it’s helpful to understand what, exactly, a behavior is. They don’t just arise because we want them to. Behaviors are the output of our brain’s signaling system, the response to input instructions that travel as electrochemical signals down a fixed neural pathway and hook up with a set of circuits that translates the signals into something tangible.

Where do behaviors originate? Behaviors are Beliefs in action, physical representations of our core identity factors. Our politics represent our Beliefs. The way we dress, talk; the professions we choose; where we travel and who we marry. Everything we do represents who we are.

As the foundational factor in what we do and think, Beliefs must be factored in when considering change or forming a new habit. Current Behavior Mod approaches circumvent Beliefs and therein lie the problem.

There is actual science on how behaviors get generated and why we automatically repeat behaviors even when we don’t want to. Here’s a quote from noted Harvard neuroscientist Richard Masland in We Know It When We See It to set the stage:

Our brain has trillions of cell assemblies that fire together automatically. When anything incoming bears even some of the characteristics [of operational circuits], the brain automatically fires the same set of synapses [triggering the same behavior]. (pg 143).

Here’s a simplified version of how to convince the brain to make the changes that lead to new habits. It explains how behaviors occur and where change comes from. For a more complete explanation and tools to actually create new brain circuitry for change, watch for my new book HOW? coming out soon.

NEUROLOGICAL PATHWAY FROM INPUT TO OUTPUT

Generally, each behavior starts off as an input – an idea or command, thought or story – that enters our brain as a meaningless puff of air, an electrochemical vibration (a ‘message’). To keep us congruent, the input gets evaluated against our Mental Models and Beliefs before going further. Is this input a risk? Is it congruent with our values?

If the idea goes against who we are, it gets rejected or resisted. If the vibration is accepted, it gets turned into signals that then seek out (among our 100 trillion synapses) similar-enough circuits that translate them into action or output – a behavior. Specifically, our brains:

1. receive input vibrations (from conversations, thoughts, reading, ideas, internal commands) and
2. compare/test these against foundational Beliefs, norms, and history, after which they
3. get turned into signals that get
4. matched with the closest, ‘similar enough’ neural circuits
5. that translate them into output/action/behavior.

As you can see, whichever neural circuits receive the signals are the translators that determine what we hear, see, know, and do. Simply stated it looks like this:

Input -> Risk check -> Signal creation and Dispatch -> Output

The time it takes a message to go from an input to an output takes 5 one-hundredths of a second. It’s pretty automatic. And obviously, once an output, it can’t be changed. Change begins when initiated from the input.

THE NEED FOR VALUES-BASED CONGRUENCY

The next important piece is why repetition won’t cause new (permanent) habits. When a wholly new input enters, it requires a new relevancy check. Sadly – and the reason new activity fails when Behavior Mod is attempted – if anything tries to change the status quo without being checked for relevance, our brain discards the new input because it may carry risk! The new isn’t sustainable without new circuitry.

When we try to create new habits by merely ‘doing’ new behaviors without sending new and different input instructions we cannot generate permanent change because there are no new circuits to administer it!

The good news is that the brain is always willing to create new circuits for new behaviors. It’s called Neurogenesis.

CREATING NEW PROGRAMMING, NEW SIGNALS, NEW BEHAVIORS

To change behaviors permanently, start with new input messages:

1. - create a new belief-based input/message that
  - generates new signals which
  - create or discover a different arrangement of circuits
  - which translate them into new/different behaviors.

I’ll explain with a story. A friend said, “I’ve been telling myself I’m a Fat Cow recently. That means it’s time for me to go on another diet.” Obviously this input would lead her to the same circuits (and results) that it used for past diets that she failed at. But if she changed her input signal and told herself instead:

‘I am a healthy person who will research best nutrition choices for my body type and lifestyle and have the discipline to eat the best foods for the rest of my life.’

she would end up with a different set of circuits and different output/behaviors.

Our outputs, our behaviors, are merely responses to inputs that our brain has checked out as congruent with who we are. So one way to change a behavior is to change the incoming messaging to one that is Belief-based and takes into account all the elements (Mental Models, history, norms, experience) that might cause risk to the system. Once it’s approved, it will automatically generate new circuits and new, habituated, behaviors.

My new book How? Generating new neural pathways for learning, behavior change, and decision making, will teach you several models to formulate the neural circuits you need to help you change habits permanently.

I am passionately interested in enabling people to consciously design new signaling instructions for their brains to output any new habits they seek. My wish is to work with healthcare providers and apps for exercise, healthy eating, meditation and decision making to aid folks seeking to achieve greater health and success.

If you want to collaborate, or have questions, contact me to discuss ways we can engage those seeking permanent change. sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.

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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 September 8th, 2025

Posted In: Change Management, Communication

As a preamble to a discussion about failing consciously, I’d like to retell a story. Many years ago Xerox was beta testing a then new-type digital printer. The testers sent back complaints: it was hard to figure out how to work the damn thing, and the user guide was confusing. Obviously, User Error, the designers concluded. Yup. More stupid users. So an internal focus group was set up by senior management to test what exactly was happening.

Three middle managers were brought in and put into a room with the new printer and user guide. Mayhem ensued. The designers watched from behind a one-way mirror while the managers got confused by the directions, spent hours arguing amongst themselves, pressed the wrong buttons, and finally gave up – never getting it to work.

User Error, they again said. Obviously, went the thinking, the managers weren’t smart or savvy enough to understand simple directions. Except they didn’t know a trick had been played on them: the testers were actually PhD computer scientists. Oops. It wasn’t User Error at all. The designers had failed to develop an intelligible user guide. So while the printer itself might have been a marvel of machinery for its day, it couldn’t be used. It was a failure. Or was it?

WHAT IS FAILURE

I contend that until every ‘failed’ step was taken, and every ‘failed’ assumption made, there was no way to know exactly what problems needed to be fixed or if indeed their printer was a success. The failure was part of the march to success.

We call it failure when we don’t achieve a goal whether it’s starting up a company, reaching a job goal, learning something new, or starting a new diet.

I think that as humans we strive to succeed, to be seen as competent, to be ‘better than’, even if we’re only in competition with ourselves. It’s natural to want our products, our teams, our families, our competitive activities, to reap success. To be The Best. And we plot and envision how to make it happen.

But the road to success isn’t straight; sometimes we face disappointment, shame, and self-judgment. We get annoyed with ourselves when results don’t seem to comply with our mental images, and tell ourselves maybe we didn’t follow the original plan, or didn’t plan well enough, or maybe we’re self-sabotaging. We blame teammates or vendors, spouses or neighbors.

I’m here to tell you that failure is a necessary part of success. It’s built in to learning and succeeding, actually a natural part of the process of change and accomplishment. Before we win we gotta fail. Tiger Woods didn’t wake up the best in the world. Neither did Pavarotti or Steve Jobs.

For anyone to get to the top, to achieve success in any industry, any endeavor, any sport, it’s necessary to fail over and over. How surprising that no one teaches us how to fail consciously. I suggest we develop conscious failing strategies that become built in to our success procedures.

WHAT IS OUR STATUS QUO? AND WHY IS IT SO STUBBORN?

Getting to success is a sequential process that includes trial and error – i.e. winning and losing are both part of the same process, and each adding a piece of the puzzle. Of course there’s no way to know what we don’t know before we start – no way to even be curious, or ask the right questions because we don’t know what we don’t know. And unfortunately, part of the process is internal, unconscious, and systemic.

Change – and all success and failure is really a form of changing our status quo – has a large unconscious component, and when you only try to add new behaviors you miss the automatic, habituated, and unconscious elements that will rear their ugly heads as you move toward hitting your goals: you can’t change a behavior by trying to change a behavior. It just doesn’t work that way.

Let me explain a few things about how your brain works in the area of change. To begin, all change is systemic. Anything new you want to do, anything new that requires, ultimately, new behaviors, or added beliefs or life changes, requires buy-in from what already exists in your make up – your status quo.

Indeed, as the repository of your history, values, and norms, your status quo won’t change a thing without congruency. Indeed it will reject anything new, regardless of how necessary it is, unless the new has been properly vetted by the originating system.

Setting a goal that’s behavior-based without agreement from the system, without incorporating steps for buy in, assures resistance. Sure, we lay out the trajectory, attempt to make one good decision at a time, and use every feeling, hope, data point, guess, to take next steps. But when we don’t take into account the way our brains unconsciously process, it may not turn out like we envision. Lucky there’s a way to manage our activities to take into account what a brain needs for congruent change and a successful outcome.

THE STEPS TO FAILING CONSCIOUSLY

In my work on how brains facilitate change and make decisions to shift what’s already there (my The How of Change program teaches how to generate new neural routes) I offer ways to create new synapses and neural pathways that lead to new behaviors. Take a look at the Change Model chart I developed, with a careful look at The Trial Loop – the steps we each take to learn, to add/trial something new:

The Trial Loop is where the brain learning occurs. It’s here we iterate through several touch points: new data acquisition, buy-in, trial behaviors, and the stop/go/stop action (double-arrowed line between Beliefs (CEN) and red Stop) as each new element is tried and considered before new behaviors are formed.

It’s important to understand that no change will occur until these elements are addressed; merely hearing something new – a directive, an interesting piece of information, an internal decision to change a behavior – doesn’t insure something different will happen. Unless our system buys in, until there’s a specific circuit created for the new, no change will occur. You can’t change a behavior by trying to change a behavior.

So as we try out new stuff, our personal mental models of rules, beliefs, norms, history, etc., go through iterations of trial, acceptance, rejection, confusion, trial, acceptance, rejection, etc. until the new is congruent with the norms of the system, something we cannot know before we go through this process. So let’s call our disappointments part of the iteration process that precedes success. Here is a closer look at my chart:

An initial goal/idea/thought enters (through the CUE),
then gets sorted through an acceptance/rejection process for beliefs and systems congruence (the CEN), which
darts around the brain seeking a match for an existing neural pathway for earlier incidence of achieving this goal.
If no existing pathway is found, a new synapse/neural pathway must be formed.
The brain goes through an iterative process to form a new path to a new action with agreement (buy in) needed at each step (notice the iterative arrows in the chart).
Iterative process includes: gathering data, trialing new activity, getting internal buy in, testing for Systems Congruence (All systems must be in a congruent state. Individually and personally, we’re all a system.)
Process of Stop/New choice-data acquisition-action/Stop etc. as each new thing is tried.
Final success when there’s congruency and new is adopted without resistance as a final Behavior. (And note: the Behavior is the FINAL activity. You cannot change a behavior by trying to change a behavior.)

Now you know the steps to conscious change. Should you want to learn more here’s a one-hour sample of me laying out the foundation of the How of Change course and explaining how change occurs in the brain.

THE STEPS TO CONSCIOUS FAILING

Now let’s plot out the steps to conscious failure to avoid large-scale malfunction.

The Beginning: to start the process toward succeeding at a goal, you need:

Include all (all) stakeholders (including Joe in accounting) and all who will touch the final solution;
Agree upon the wording for the final goal, including specifics of new behavioral elements, rules, politics, outcomes – i.e. what, exactly, will be different;
Write up a ‘guess list’ of problems that might occur (failures) to the status quo as a result: what they might look like, as well as possible workarounds;
An agreement clause from all stakeholders to act when something is going off course. Note: listening without bias is urgently needed here;
Consider possible ways your starting goals may shift the status quo and make sure it’s tenable;
Know how the new outcome will be maintained over time (including the people, rules, norms, changes, that will be involved) and what else has to buy in to maintenance;
State potential, detailed steps toward achievement that are agreeable to all stakeholders;
Agreement to reconsider all previous steps if the problems that show up cause new considerations.

The Middle: to make changes, add new knowledge to trial, get continuous buy in, you need:

Re write the original goals, with delineated outcomes for each;
Notice how the new is disrupting the status quo. Is it necessary to amend the new plans to ensure Systems Congruence? Is the cost of the new lower than the cost of the original? There must be a cost-effective decision made;
Find ways to acquire the right knowledge to learn from;
Check on the ways you’re failing. Were they expected? Do they conform to your goals? Do you need to shift anything?
Agreement to develop new choices where current ones aren’t working as per plan.

The End: making sure the outcome is congruent with the original goal:

Go through the Beginning steps and check they’ve been accomplished;
Compare end result with original goal;
Make sure there is congruent integration with the thinking, beliefs, values of the original;
Make sure the status quo is functioning without disruption and the system ends up congruent with its mental models and belief systems.

Here are more specifics to help you integrate the necessary failure, and avoid guesswork and reactions to what might seem inconsistent with your goals:

Lay out specifics for each step you’re considering to your goal. Include timelines, parameters, and consequences of results, specific elements of what success for that step should look like, and what possible failure might look like. Of course, you can’t truly know the answers until they occur, but make your best guess. It’s important to notice something new happening when it’s happening.
If something unplanned or feared occurs (i.e. failure), annotate the details. What exactly is happening? What elements worked and what didn’t, and how did they work or not work – what/who was involved, how did the result differ from the expectations? What does the failure tell you – what IS succeeding instead of what you wish for? How does the remedy for the problem influence the next step? How long should you allot for each occurrence before determining whether it’s failure, or just part of the success trajectory you weren’t aware of?
Are all stakeholders involved and shared their input? Do you need to bring in more stakeholders?
Notice the consequences of the outcomes for each: employees, clients, hiring, firing, quitting, vendors, competition, state of the industry and your place in it. What comes into play with these factors when considering if you want to continue down one trajectory rather than designing a new one? What will it look like to decide to change course? How will your decisions effect your vision of an outcome? How are the stakeholders affected by each choice?
How much failure are you willing to risk before you determine that either your outcome is untenable, or you need to make structural changes? What part does ego and denial play? Does everyone agree what constitutes failure? Success?
What will you notice when your trajectory to success is negatively effecting your baseline givens? What are you willing to change, or accept, to reach your goal?
What will it look like, specifically, when you’ve concluded your efforts? Will parts of the failure be factored in as success? Do all stakeholders buy in to the end result? If not, what remains unresolved? And how will you bring this forward?

Of course there’s no way to know before you start what any specific stage will look like. But using the steps, the thinking, above, you’ll be able to get a handle on it. And by including the failure, you’ll have a far better chance of succeeding.

For some reason, as leaders or individuals, companies or small businesses, we shame ourselves when we don’t achieve what we set out to achieve during our change processes. I contend we must think of each step as an integral part of the process of getting where we want to be. As they say in NLP, there’s no failure, only feedback.

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Sharon Drew Morgen August 18th, 2025

Posted In: Change Management, Communication

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?

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Sharon Drew Morgen July 14th, 2025

Posted In: Change Management

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

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.

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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.

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Sharon Drew Morgen June 2nd, 2025

Posted In: Change Management, Listening

Do you know where your ideas, behaviors, and choices come from? Every thought we have comes from existing neural circuitry, as does everything we do or hear or are curious about. What we hear others say is a potentially inaccurate translation from our existing neural circuitry; everything we ‘know’, every opinion we believe comes from – you guessed it – our history.

In other words, we live in subjective worlds biased by how our brain stores, translates, and generates our history electrochemically. While this is a known fact in neuroscience, we forget how it restricts our lives. The way we naturally hear, see, feel, act, think limits new thinking, new ideas, curiosity.

But it’s possible to develop wholly new circuitry to add new choices and behaviors consciously to get beyond the restrictions. In fact, I’ve developed models that do so. They traverse the mind -> brain connection to trigger conscious choice and generate permanent behavior change.

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HOW BRAINS EXPERIENCE EVERYTHING

In this essay, I’ve pulled out sections from HOW? that point out the elements involved in how brains bias our reality. Due to the complexity of the material and the limits of an essay, I offer no skills here to make changes. If you’re interested in learning how to address these, please read HOW?

We construct our reality: What we notice, think, feel, experience, hear, do are outputs – automatic responses to electrochemical signals that our brains interpret to represent our beliefs, norms, mental models, and history. We live in subjective and biased worlds.

Unfortunately, we are at the mercy of how our brain interprets incoming data. Our conscious self is out of control. What we experience is based on what our brain perceives from our historic circuits, not from what is actually going on. As an example: what we see contains no color per se, only light vibrations that get translated into color by the rods and cones in our eyes; what we hear is constructed by our brain seeking a match with our history and biases.

Every minute of every day we construct our ‘reality’, limited by the circuitry, the knowledge, beliefs, experiences, etc. Our brains are automatic mechanisms that merely do what they’re electrochemically told.

The meaning derived from any situation, what causes us to ‘know’ something or accept something as ‘real’, or ‘hear’ something ‘accurately’ comes from our existing, historic circuits. In other words, what we know and think and hear, what we consider reality, is subjective and biased.

Our brains cause us to be stuck in old patterns and behaviors, limiting what we hear to what we’ve heard before, what we do to what we’ve done before. It’s habituated, automated, and normalized, causing us to keep doing what we’ve always done regardless of ‘reality’, discipline, or goals.

LISTENING

Listening is a physiological, neurological, electrochemical, and mechanical process, devoid of meaning. Words are merely ‘puffs of air’ until they’re translated by existing (subjective, biased) circuits.

As incoming puffs of air, words (as sound vibrations) enter our ears and get turned into electrochemical signals which then get dispatched (with distortions and deletions) to ‘similar-enough’ circuits before being turned into meaning via our existing neural circuitry. (My book What? explains this thoroughly.) What we think we hear is merely some fraction of what was intended and rarely fully accurate – what our existing circuits translate for us, not necessarily what a Speaker intends. We can’t understand what our brains don’t have circuits to translate. This is a problem when hearing and learning new material.

Since it’s quite difficult to accurately hear what’s said, our communication partners, trainers, coaches assume what they hear and say is heard as intended. It is not. We all ‘hear’ each other when our brain circuits send sound vibrations from spoken words to ‘similar enough’ circuits that often don’t have the appropriate circuitry to translate incoming, intended messages accurately.

CHANGE

Change is a process of creating wholly new neural circuits by: inputting precise (new) beliefs and mental models; gathering information from all elements that caused the status quo; understanding, and getting buy-in, for the risk of change.

Resistance occurs when people are asked to do something outside their beliefs or historic circuits and their brains identify the incoming as risky. It can be avoided if we include a full representation of people in data gathering, goal setting, risk management, and the solution design.

Information doesn’t teach anyone how to make a decision since incoming information will always be translated by the listener’s brain subjectively.

Our curiosity is limited to what’s already been programmed in our brain. Otherwise we’ve got no way to notice something or think it.

No outsider can ever understand someone else’s brain configurations. Leaders, coaches, therapists, sellers, pose biased questions and interpret what’s been said subjectively.

Our opinions have everything to do with our beliefs and nothing to do with reality. Even with strong evidence to the contrary, we will believe nothing that goes against them unless we were seeking divergent ideas.

QUESTIONS

Conventional questions are formulated by the words, intent, and goals of the Asker and pull biased, often partial, data from a Responder. The data gathered has some unknown degree of accuracy. I invented brain-change directed Facilitative Questions to solve the problem.

Standard questions

ignore the listener’s underlying personal systems (beliefs, mental models, historic circuitry, etc.) and have a good chance of missing important data stored beyond the parameters of the question.
are problematic when used to gather information as they restrict the scope of the search and bias the outcome.
lead to conscious, automatic, habituated responses from well-worn superhighways that may not offer accurate responses.
have a high probability of overlooking the full set of unconscious criteria that created and maintain the problem to be solved.
get translated by Responders according to their existing circuitry which may delete, misconstrue, or resist incoming requests as they’re translated uniquely, outside the scope of the Asker’s question.

BEHAVIOR CHANGE

Behaviors are expressions of a system (i.e. the underlying beliefs, norms, etc.). As such, the main component in behavior change is new neural circuitry. You can’t change a behavior by trying to change a behavior.

Because brains operate automatically and are electrochemically organized to choose – in five one-hundredths of a second – the nearest and most-used ‘similar-enough’ pathway to execute an incoming request (regardless of the level of compatibility), behaviors arise from existing circuits. Brand new behaviors don’t occur merely because we want them to or practice them.

When learning something new, several activities are required for our brain to create new circuitry to generate it. They include beliefs (check for congruence); stop/fail trials; knowledge acquisition (reading, videos, etc.); and buy-in. Watch my video on a new learning model I invented that generates new neural circuits for new learning.

A behavior is a belief in action, an outward manifestation – a representation, a translation, an expression, an output – of our systemic world views.

Regardless of how extensive or important the need to change, NO CHANGE will occur if the system believes it will face major disruption. And NO CHANGE will occur unless the system recognizes an incongruence.

If the cost of change is greater than staying the same, the system will resist.

Change is more complex than merely adding new data: because brains generate action from existing knowledge and circuitry, new content doesn’t cause new action unless there are circuits in place to accept and translate it.In other words, people cannot understand ideas that fall outside their habitual circuits, and their brain will translate the ‘new’ incorrectly, causing misunderstanding.

Because we each have unique brain configurations and ways of translating incoming content, an outsider (coach, parent, seller, doctor, etc.) can never understand the full extent what’s going on in the unconscious of another. Yet to facilitate change, the Other must get into their unconscious circuits where their answers are stored.

Making a new decision, creating new habits, or even getting rid of long-held biases has little to do with the rationality, need, or behaviors we seek to change.

When we try to change a behavior by trying to change a behavior, (i.e. Behavior Modification), we’re hindered by

our natural biases and subjectivity,
the absence of neural circuitry to translate what we want into action,
how our brain instigates behaviors, actions, choices, or thoughts automatically, mechanically, physiologically, neuro-chemically and electrochemically (i.e. outside of conscious awareness).

Permanent change begins by developing wholly new circuits that contain new beliefs and new behaviors emerge automatically. See my course on the HOW of Change.

All change is systemic and must include

buy-in from the system
acceptance of risk
notice of an incongruence
norms that match the values of the system (systems congruence).

Systems don’t like incongruence; it’s only when a system fully recognizes it cannot solve a problem by doing what it’s always done and recognizes an incongruence, that there’s a willingness to change. But it will only consider change so long as the change won’t compromise the system.

If we try to change in a way that goes outside our beliefs or mental models, our brain will resist as there are no circuits set up to generate the change.

Brains and systems are happy to change, to create new cell assemblies, so long as the proposed change is congruent with the rules of the system. When you try to get different results using the same structure that caused the problem to begin with, you’re actually causing the problem to continue as the underlying system will reject/resist anything new.

For those wishing to learn new skills to modify our unconscious brain outputs, please read HOW? or contact me: Sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

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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 May 26th, 2025

Posted In: Change Management

When Dale Carnegie published How to Win Friends and Influence People in 1937 he laid the foundation for sales thinking that continues today: find folks with a need, get into a relationship, and tell them about the features, functions, and benefits of your solution in a way that induces them to buy it. But it’s no longer relevant. The industry faces a less-then 5% close rate, a 55% turnover of sales professionals, and 75% of people prefer not to engage sales people at all.

What’s changed? Well for starters, it’s no longer 1937: When Carnegie was king there was no direct way to meaningfully connect with a prospect unless they lived nearby. Phones were party line; travel was with Model T Fords. And the main marketing vehicles were Look magazine and the Sears Catalogue. Your neighbors were your customers and you were a necessary element in their decision: people relied on sales professionals to understand features, functions and benefits of products that could help them.

Those days are gone, but the sales industry continues to apply the same story:

just find people (the new art of finding names is a billion-dollar industry)
with needs that match what we’re selling (seemingly evident from the biased questions we pose to ‘expose a need’) and
provide well-composed (another billion-dollar industry) content using our charming personalities
to push solutions (people can find online) onto those we’ve found and they’ll buy.

But they don’t. Yet the industry continues to seek out people with ‘needs that match what we’re selling.’ When they don’t buy we say they’re stupid, ill-informed, seeking a lower price, or….

We’re merely finding the people who were going to buy anyway, the low hanging fruit, at the end of their decision cycle. No one’s noticed the foundational premises we’ve used for close to a century, techniques designed for a different time, are no longer relevant:

Folks with a seeming ‘need’ are now dispersed teams, making it difficult for them to understand their full problem set, let alone agree to something they need;
Getting into ‘relationship’ with, or gathering information from ‘a prospect’ is moot as there is no longer ‘a prospect’;
The features, functions, and benefits of our solutions are posted online, well outside the need for a human to introduce them.

With fewer and fewer buyers, less and less income, and more and more frustration, sellers are leaving their jobs to play musical chairs for jobs with higher earning potential (and commission guarantees) that don’t procure them higher income beyond the guarantee. Because people aren’t buying.

Why aren’t alarm bells ringing? We continue doing what we’ve always done when all rational indicators tell us we’re doing something wrong. The sales industry is suffering from ‘Problem Blindness’: assuming our failures are just ‘the way it is’ as we build more and more tools to fix the very problems they create rather admit failure and change the system altogether.

In this article I will lay out the reasons sales as we’ve known it has become irrelevant, the current struggles of the Buying Decision Journey (a term I coined in 1985), and how sales can reposition itself to become a highly respected and relevant profession. Again.

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PART ONE: Why our standard sales thinking no longer works

OUTDATED ASSUMPTIONS

There are several stories here:

Sellers are leaving jobs for similar ones in the hopes they’ll close more sales and earn more money. But without changing the core skills and premises of sales, fewer and fewer people need sellers and close rates will continue to fall. We need a new vision of sales.
Sellers are no longer needed to place solutions; details can be found online. We need a new function that prospects need us for.
Buying decisions involve complex environments and ever-changing norms to be managed. Problem solving is confusing and time-consuming. People need help making their change-related decisions that won’t reverberate back to leadership, job descriptions or the bottom line. These are change management issues that must be resolved before they can consider buying anything.
We treat failure in the industry as if it were inevitable and aren’t attempting to fix it at the source, using the same thinking that cause the very problems they’ve created.

First we must acknowledge there’s a problem: we haven’t progressed beyond using sales as a needs/solution placement tool and face decreasing, and costly, results. Then we must redefine our jobs beyond finding and instigating people to buy and add new tools at the front end to facilitate people through their decision factors.

Right now we’re stuck in a cycle that perpetuates the problem.

Here’s an analogy: Let’s say you open a clothing store with the best cash registers available for efficient transactions, and you’ve overlooked installing fitting rooms, depriving customers of help where they really need help in making a choice. Hmmmmm. Sales keep decreasing! You decide to fix the situation by adding new capability to the cash registers: robots to make transactions even MORE efficient by finding folks in the aisles as they shop. But now, prospective customers feel pursued! Robbed of a way to make their best choice and pursued, they stop shopping in the store altogether. And it’s never occurred to you to bring in fitting rooms.

Sales continues to use the same baseline thinking used since 1937, but now prospects no longer live next door and don’t need anyone explaining features and functions. Yet we continue using what worked for Carnegie, but with sophisticated technology and more manipulation tools, doing the same things over and over again, hoping for different results. All assuming if we can find-em they’ll buy.

We continue thinking of sales tactically. But that’s not how people buy: they buy relationally, and they’re resolving their problems without us. And we’re not helping them where they need help.

I have a question: Do you want to sell? Or have someone buy? I assume most sellers would respond ‘Have someone buy’. But that doesn’t seem to be true: using any rational standard, what you’re doing now is failing. Your answer, it would seem, is you’d prefer to sell, regardless of whether or not anyone is buying – which is indeed what’s happening.

Indeed, we haven’t defined the real problem we face as sellers, making it impossible to resolve: instead of finding and providing real support for prospective buyers where they really need our help, we expect them to be where we are looking for them – and blaming them for not being there! Like the joke of the man looking for the lost lug nuts under the lights because he can see better, instead of searching where he lost them.

I have proven out-of-the-box ideas and models that I’ve been teaching in the sales industry for 35 years. They truly serve employees and prospects, find real buyers efficiently, and increase closing rates dramatically in far less time. But they’re not sales! And they don’t equate with anything you’re now doing, so could potentially be rejected. Yet they solve the problems you face. Are you willing to consider doing anything differently?

Before I even introduce you to my new information, the industry must first resolve the core issue: we must stop denying there’s a problem. And then we must stop using sales for prospecting. It was never meant for that.

WHY IS A 5% SUCCESS RATE OK?

When I ran my first Helping Buyers Buy program to KLM in 1987 close rates were 10%. They’re now less than 5% and dropping, an indication that the original thinking is no longer relevant. Yet we accept ‘failure’ as normal for the sales industry. “It’s just the way it is.” But failure is not inevitable. We’re just using the wrong tools for this time in history and bringing on the failure ourselves.

Failure (a 5% close rate is a 95% fail rate) has been accepted as a ‘given’ that’s been normalized and built into the cost of doing business. Sales directors understand this, hire more sellers to make up for the lower closing rates, and do some creative accounting that ignores the real cost of a sale. A sales director recently told me he closes 30%. Thirty percent of what? I asked. Of folks we meet with. What’s the percentage from first prospecting call? Less than 2%. It goes without saying that the prospecting group is listed as a cost center and closed sales are in the profit center.

Let’s get real: Would you go to a dentist with a 95% fail rate? Or get on a plane with a 5% chance of getting you to your destination? You wouldn’t even go to a hairdresser with a 95% fail rate.

Why do we condone and maintain the thinking that leads to a 95% fail rate? Why do we accept the cost of hiring 8x more sales folks who waste most of their work hours chasing people they can’t reach, putting invalid prospects into the pipeline who disappear and won’t take calls, or seeking appointments they can’t get or which don’t end in a sale? Why is it ok to have low close rates and high turnover rates? Why?

Why aren’t these factors a sign that something is wrong? What does the industry need to believe differently so failure is not a ‘given’ and can be rectified?

We are using the sales model for tasks it wasn’t designed to do. It’s a solution placement model, evolved by necessity to include prospecting and qualifying, seeking appointments, and sharing content details – all in the name of making a sale. And for a long time, it worked. But now, in the 21st Century, it’s relevant only in the final stages of a buying decision once people have self-identified as prospects.

REASONS FOR FAILURE

All rational indicators broadcast that what you’ve been doing isn’t working. But until you admit your current practices don’t capture the clients, the revenue, the numbers you seek (i.e. until you admit failure), you will continue selling less, wasting more time, earning less money, having more turnover, and helping fewer people than you deserve.

All the new apps, the new companies that promise to help you close more by finding you names of ‘real’ prospects, are the only ones making money. I recently asked a noted Lead Gen group what the close rate was for the leads they handed over. “I have no idea. That’s not our job. We only send names and have nothing to do with what our clients do with them.”

It doesn’t need to be this way. The sales model as we’ve known it is no longer relevant as the sole tool to make sales. Designed for different times, the originating assumptions capture a tiny subset of people:

those who have figured out that making a purchase is the only way to resolve a problem and worth the risk of change;
those situations in which the full set of stakeholders are involved, bought in, and are ready NOW;
those who carry the cultural- and values-centric criteria of the full stakeholder team.

Even with a real need, a great solution, and a trusting relationship with a vendor, no purchase occurs until everyone buys into the risk of change; the cost of disruption is too high. And sales just keeps trying to push solutions and determine need before folks are actually buyers, before they’ve assembled the complete Buying Decision Team, before they’ve understood their risk of change.

Sample

Sales overlooks the change issues that must be addressed before people decide to bring in an external solution (i.e. buy). It’s here we can add a new tool kit and become relevant.

By breaking a buying decision into two segments – the Buy Side change management process AND the Sell Side solution placement process – we 1. begin by finding those on route to becoming buyers and facilitate their change management process as they morph into buyers extremely quickly, then 2. sell. By then they’re ready, willing, and able to buy, already know they need us and are in relationship with us. Right now we have one tool kit: we rely on our solutions as bait.

By recognizing the two legs of the Buying Decision Journey and save the sales element until the first leg is complete, it’s possible to find real prospects on the first call and reduce the sales cycle by at least half. But it gets better: it’s possible to make sellers a sought-after group who can provide real help during the decision process.

But as I’ve said, first you’d need to acknowledge what you’ve been doing is failing and look at the problem from a different angle.

PART TWO: How Buyers Buy

WHY ISN’T SALES RELEVANT NOW?

Let’s begin at the beginning: Buying is not the first thing anyone does. If your car doesn’t start you don’t go straight to a dealership and buy a new one. If your team isn’t communicating skillfully your first action is not to hire a consultant. No. Before you recognize you need to bring in an external solution you’ve got work to do, things to consider, people to assemble to understand the full scope of the problem and brainstorm with, workarounds to trial.

When people first notice a problem they’ve got internal issues to resolve that carry far-reaching consequences if not delicately handled. And while they might eventually require a purchase – eventually being the operative word – these early steps are not based on buying anything. Hence, the sales model doesn’t work here.

Sales overlooks what people must do anyway: the change management piece. In fact until everyone involved buys-in to any changes caused by fixing/reconfiguring the status quo, folks cannot make a purchase regardless of their need or the value of the solution.

Need and solution value are no longer buying motives: risk avoidance is. And because each prospective buyer lives in unique cultures, they face singular, often hidden, and hard-to-discern risks; the goals, apps, and thinking used for selling don’t apply! In fact, until the risks of change are addressed and managed, people aren’t in the market to buy anything and, again, don’t even self-identify as buyers.

Here is a Truth that must be the foundation of sales thinking:

People don’t want to buy anything, merely fix a problem with the least risk to their system. And the time it takes folks to figure all this out is the length of the sales cycle.

Making a purchase is the last – the last – thing people do, and only then when everyone has bought-in and the cost of disruption is manageable. This is what they’re doing when we sit and wait! And we’re not helping them:

figure out how to assemble the right stakeholders (not always obvious and always unique),
find the right workarounds that avoid disruption,
weigh the disruption/change a new solution will generate,
facilitate their journey as they figure out how to inspire buy-in within their culture.

Until these are resolved, folks don’t even self-identify as buyers and will not heed your well-considered content, your charming personality or your great solution.

By avoiding facilitating the journey people must handle on the Buy Side, we’re only finding/closing folks who have determined the cost of change is less than the cost of the status quo and have gotten buy-in for change. Until then they won’t notice, or heed, your efforts as they don’t consider themselves buyers.

PROVIDE THE HELP FOLKS REALLY NEED

A buying decision is a change management problem before it’s a solution choice issue. And this change management process is a conundrum, filled with confusion, false starts, and unfamiliar options – the reason the sales cycle is so long. Sellers sit and wait, push and lower the price, and refer to this as ‘no decision’. But it’s not ‘no decision’, it’s just ‘no purchase’.

The tasks people must complete are cultural, idiosyncratic, and unique to each group. Using the needs-based, solution-placement sales model, there’s no way to connect until they’ve completed their objectives. Until then what they need is different from what we’re offering. This is why they won’t take an appointment, call us back, or read our marketing materials. They’re not ready.

But it’s here that 40% more real prospects reside, people who WILL buy once they’ve completed their change management steps. And it’s here we can become relevant: we can first help them manage change as a precursor to selling.

But we need different assumptions, goals, and skills: we begin by seeking those on route to change and help them traverse the confusing bits that are risk- and change-oriented. Instead of pushing and hoping they’ll close, we can put on a ‘facilitation’ hat and help them do what they must do anyway.

MY JOURNEY TO THINKING DIFFERENTLY

I learned the differences between the Buy Side decision process and the Sell Side solution-placement process when I went from being a highly successful sales professional to starting up a tech company in London. As a new ‘buyer’ who had just left the sales profession, I now realized why many prospects hadn’t closed: I needed to consider my staff, my investors, the market, our strategies and goals, before we considered (together) the most effective routes to problem resolutions. As a seller I had thought because I could see a need that they were buyers. They weren’t.

As I worked at resolving our problems I took 13 very specific steps. I didn’t even fully understand the ‘need’ until step 7, or realize we needed to go ‘outside’ to buy anything until step 9 when I realized we couldn’t fix the problem inhouse and we all understood the risk, the cost, of change. We finally considered ourselves buyers at step 10 – where the sales model is needed to clearly define how the solution would fit our need. (I describe the steps in my book Dirty Little Secrets).

Here’s a summary of what my team (all teams!) considered on route to fixing our problems with the least risk:

All stakeholders must be assembled. This isn’t always easy. Sometimes HR needs to come aboard. Sometimes there’s a hidden influencer (Joe in accounting) who needs to join the decision team. But unless the full complement of folks are onboard, the full fact pattern of the problem cannot be understood. This fact alone takes quite a bit of time. And speaking with one person and assuming a need is just silly.
All possible workarounds must be tried: known vendors, other teams.
The ‘cost’, the risk, of doing something different must be fully understood as less than the ‘cost’ of the status quo. If the cost is too high – if they must fire people, reorganize, go against policy, etc. – they will continue doing what they’re doing.
Once the cost is understood – the new job descriptions and responsibilities, the habits they’d need to change, the new norms – everyone must buy-in.

It’s ONLY when everything plausible to fix a problem has been tried AND the ‘cost’ is manageable that people consider seeking an external solution. And the time it takes to complete this process is the length of the sales cycle. I’m sure you also noticed that none of these steps include a desire to buy anything.

Why not use different thinking and new tools to help? We’ve overlooked serving people where they really could use expert help. It’s here you’re needed now and would be welcomed, so long as you refrain from pushing your solution until they become buyers.

PART THREE: How Sales Can Be Relevant

FACILITATE CHANGE MANAGEMENT FIRST

We must modernize sales by adding new goals and tools to facilitate the Pre-Sales, non-solution-oriented journey people must traverse BEFORE self-identifying as buyers and find – and serve – people during their change management process and on route to buying instead of using our solutions as bait.

During my experience as a buyer, I developed a model that facilitates the change management portion of the Buying Decision Journey. I named it Buying Facilitation®. I trained it to my own staff and we tripled our sales in months. Then I trained it to my tech folks who used it to understand a client’s full problem set upfront and lead them through to their best decisions before they even began programming, and halved their time to complete. And then I trained it to 100,000 sales folks globally with 8x results over the control groups.

Buying Facilitation® finds those people on route to becoming buyers (the 40% actively trying to resolve a problem but haven’t yet self-identified as buyers), helps them assemble real decision makers and define their needs from many viewpoints, figure out the best workarounds to consider, and sanctions the risk. By then sellers are in real relationships with real buyers, with a real need, eager to buy. And as true servant leaders we will rise above the competition.

But it’s predicated on sellers beginning with a wholly different goal: find and serve folks actively involved in resolving a problem in the area your solution can provide support, then lead them through their change management steps to the point they’re ready – and asking! – for a pitch.

Yes, during your facilitation process a percentage of them will discover ways to fix their own problems; these weren’t prospects anyway and you’ll both realize this in ten minutes on your first call. And yes, because of the way you enter a call, with a goal to serve not sell, more people will take your calls.

Once you recognize your real buyer population you’ll sell faster, with no objections and no price issues. The KPMG Partners I trained went from a three year sales cycle to a four month sales cycle for a $50,000,000 solution; working with phone sales at IBM they began making one-call closes that originally took three months. Remember: people are happy to resolve their problems quickly; they just don’t know how.

Here’s one more thought: we must – and this might be difficult for sellers accustomed to having all the answers – trust that each client has their own unique, culturally-appropriate answers. While we are well-versed on product details for our solutions, we truly have no idea what people are going through in their own environments – a boss that won’t approve funds for training, a newly hired director who’s not up to speed.

Let’s help people use their knowledge of their own unique environments as they go through their problem resolution discovery. With our knowledge in our fields that gives us an understanding of the types of change required, we will be recognized as real assets and become a part of the Buying Decision Team. It’s a perfect way to serve, be competitive, and close more sales.

Btw I’m not overlooking the selling function. By the time the facilitation process is complete, the sales process is used for what it was originally intended to do: sell solutions to those who know exactly what they need and are already bought-in to buying. It’s SO much easier! And sales becomes a needed service and relevant again.

DIFFERENT THINKING; DIFFERENT GOAL

It’s possible to make sellers a sought-after group who can provide real help during the decision process. But given the new function and new prospect base, different thinking and assumptions are needed:

1. Instead of seeking folks with ‘need’ seek out folks in the process of resolving a problem in the area you can potentially provide a solution. This is where folks really need help.

a. They don’t always know the right folks to involve, and until all relevant stakeholders are involved they can’t fully understand the problem to be fixed. Plus, with everyone on board they think, create, decide quicker.

b. They need to be assured they cannot fix the problem themselves and need help determining relevant workarounds.

c. Folks don’t self-identify as ‘buyers’ until they’ve recognized that they can manage the risk of disruption when something new enters (i.e. hypothetically, if they must fire 8 people to buy a new CRM system, the ‘cost’ may be too high.) Sometimes, the status quo is their best option.

2. Instead of assuming the person you’re speaking with has answers, assume they are part of a decision team in the middle of discovery and don’t represent the full fact pattern.

a. You can help this person assemble all the right people who must be on board to assist in decision making, information sharing, and buy in.

3. Instead of listening to make a pitch, listen for where they need help determining their risk of change.

4. Instead of trying to make an appointment, use your first call to discover who is actively seeking change, help them assemble the full Buying Decision Team, then lead them through their change issues. (Again, read Dirty Little Secrets where I lay out the decision/change steps.)

5. Instead of a purchase being the goal, help people recognize the ‘cost’ – the risk to their culture – of bringing in something new.

6. Instead of posing curiosity-based questions to discover a need, use Facilitative Questions to help them through their unique discovery.

7. Instead of entering with a goal to place a solution, make your first goal to facilitate change.

This thinking will find people on route to buying – a much higher probability of buying than random names chosen with a mythical ‘needs’ criteria. The hard part will be to make sure you don’t try to slip in a pitch or biased question as you facilitate change. Because if you do, you won’t be trusted and prospects will feel manipulated.

NEW MEASUREMENTS OF SUCCESS

Buying Facilitation® is a Pre-Sales skill set. It’s

NOT sales, although it works with sales;
NOT based on selling a product, although 8x more products will be sold;
NOT ‘needs’ based, although our solution has a high likelihood of handling needs;
NOT based on understanding a problem but based on facilitating folks through their change management problems that only they can understand as insiders.

Buying Facilitation® employs an entirely new form of decision-detection question (took me 10 years to invent Facilitative Questions), a new form of listening (not for need!) and facilitates people through their 13 steps of change. And there are different measurements of success:

A much higher close rate – 40% of would-be buyers can be found on the first call using a relevant list.
Minimal turnover as sellers make more commission and face less rejection and frustration.
Uncovers people who are real prospects but haven’t yet self-identified as buyers.
An accurate pipeline.
Fewer price issues.
Prospects request appointments; all stakeholders are present.
Competition shifts to recognize sellers who best facilitate change.
Maintain the client base.
No time wasted following people who will never buy (and sellers know the difference).

Success will be measured by closed sales (I know companies that now pay sellers per visit, assuming if you get an appointment you can make a sale!); by brevity of the sales cycle; by accuracy of the pipeline; number of referrals; ratio of active prospects to closed sales. Even Lead Gen would bring in prospects with a 40% close rate and not merely uncover names of people who agree to hear a pitch.

To make sales relevant again, the sales profession needs to help people where they need help: add a front end to facilitate the Buying Decision Journey. Then prospective buyers will recognize sellers as professionals who can truly serve them and then everyone wins: clients get their problems resolved sooner, you get to close more sales, and everyone is happy. Win/Win. Worth a try, no?

For those wishing more information on Buying Facilitation®, go to: www.sharon-drew.com. Read the section: Helping Buyers Buy. There are several articles linked, plus hundreds more in the blog section. Or contact me with questions: sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

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Sharon Drew Morgen April 28th, 2025

Posted In: Change Management

I’m a dancer. When I studied the Argentine Tango there was a foundational metaphor that I believe is true for all leaders: The leader opens the door for the follower to pass through using her own unique style; the leader then follows. If anyone notices the leader, he’s not doing his job. The goal is to showcase the follower.

Much of what is written about leadership falls into the category I call ‘trait-centered leadership’: someone deemed ‘at the top’ who uses their personality, influence, motivational skills and charisma to inspire and give followers a convincing reason to follow an agenda set by the leader or the leader’s boss – a mixture of Jack Welch, Oprah, and Moses.

But what if the leader’s goal overrides the mental models, beliefs or historic experiences of the followers? Or the change is pushed against the follower’s values, and resistance ensues? What happens when the leader uses their personality as the fulcrum to cause change? What if the leader has a great message and incongruent skills? Or charisma and no integrity? Adolf Hitler, after all, was the most charismatic leader in the 20th Century.

WHAT IS A LEADER?

Whether it’s for a group that needs to perform a new task, or for someone seeking heightened outcomes, the role of leadership is to

facilitate congruent change and choice by
enabling followers to discover their optimal behaviors
in accordance with their own values, beliefs, and ability,
to match agreed-upon requirements
without resistance.

In other words, enable them to employ their best skills in service of an agreed-upon outcome. It demands humility and authenticity of the leader to let go of their own concept of success and enable Others to bring their ideas, skills, values, and commitment to the project to meet agreed-upon outcomes uniquely. This way, the followers share their best ideas, creativity multiplies, and resistance is avoided as everyone buys-in to the project they own.

This type of leadership is other-centered and devoid of ego, similar to a flashlight that merely illuminates the most harmonious path, enabling followers to discover their own excellence within the context of the change sought.

And remember: change is an inside job. Leaders are outsiders.

YOU CAN’T LEAD IF YOU CAN’T FOLLOW

Too often leaders use their own assumptions and goals to influence and persuade others to comply with their vision. They begin with something they want to accomplish and work hard at inspiring their followers to make the fixes they believe necessary, using their passion and motivational skills to encourage buy-in, later wondering why they’re not on target, or work is falling through the cracks.

But being inspirational, or a good influencer with presence and empathy, or a great storyteller that seeks to motivate, or even being a ‘nice guy’ that staff generally likes following, merely enlists those whose beliefs and unconscious mental models are already predisposed to the change. It omits, or gets resistance from, those who should be part of the change but whose mental models don’t align.

When we try to change others, we only reach those who have a conscious ability to comply, bypassing those who could use what we have to say but aren’t ready to change. I call this trait-centered leadership: using our own skills as influencing strategies.

Sample

SERVANT LEADERSHIP

What if our jobs were to serve? What if we trusted that Others had good skills, and by agreeing on a course of action that met everyone’s values and the ultimate requirements, help them figure out how to get there their own way?

If we enter our leadership situations as Servant Leaders we are guiding Others through to their own best actions in the area we seek to shift, facilitating them through their own ability to change according to their own beliefs and norms. This form of leadership has pluses and minuses.

Minuses: the final outcome may look different than originally envisaged because the followers set the route according to their values and mental models.
Pluses: everyone will be enthusiastically, creatively involved in designing what will show up as their own mission – meeting the vision of the leaders (although it might look different), and owning it with no resistance.

Do you want to lead through influence, presence, charisma, rationality? Or facilitate Another through their own unique path to congruent change and ownership? Do you want people to see you as a charismatic chief? Or teach them how to congruently move beyond their status quo and discover their own route to excellence – with you as the GPS? Do you want to push your agenda using your own ideas? Or enable followers to discover their own route to systemic change? They are opposite constructs.

POWER VS. FORCE

Here are some differences in beliefs between trait-centered leadership and more the more facilitative leadership that I call Servant Leadership:

Trait-centered: Top down; behavior change and goal-driven; dependent on power, charisma, and persuasion skills of a leader and may not be congruent with foundational values of followers.

Facilitation-centered: Inclusive (everyone buys-in and agrees to goals, direction, change); core belief-change and excellence-driven; dependent on facilitating route to excellence rather than developing and strategizing the route to enable systemic buy-in and adoption of new behaviors.

Remember that real change happens at the unconscious belief level. Attempting to change behaviors without helping people change their beliefs first meets with resistance regardless of the efficacy of the solution or the need for the change.

New skills are necessary for the facilitation-centered, Servant Leadership style I suggest:

1. Listen for systems. This enables leaders to hear the elements that created and maintain the status quo and would need to transform from the inside before any lasting change occurs. Typical listening is biased and restricts possibility.

Sample

2. Facilitative Questions. Conventional questions are biased by the beliefs and needs of the Questioner, and restrict answers and possibility.

3. Code the route to systemic change. Before asking folks to buy-in, facilitate them down the 13 steps of change to build consensus and collaborate to define, agree on, and set strategy for, the necessary changes thereby avoiding resistance.

Sometimes Leaders assume that their job is to assign tasks and get shit down. From what I’ve learned with clients, that only gets them mediocre results, resistance and time wastage. Worse, it fails to capture the passion and creativity of the followers. Be the Servant Leaders who open the door and follow your followers.

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Sharon Drew Morgen September 30th, 2024

Posted In: Change Management, Listening

During a day we make innumerable decisions. What should I eat for lunch? When should I go to the store? Should I complete this paperwork now? Or wait until after the meeting? We make these simple decisions quickly, effortlessly, using top-of- mind answers. But sometimes we must make consequential decisions that need some pondering.

Whatever we go through to get to our final end point, the process is often fraught with confusion, time delays, and unknown risk. To help you minimize these downsides when making important decisions, here are a few foundational elements:

Perspective: Have you collected the full data set necessary for resolution?
Criteria: What are the norms and values you must consider?
Goal: What is the specific goal you seek to achieve?
Risks: What are the threats to specific choices?
Steps: A replicable route to practical decision making.

I’ll take them one at a time.

PERSPECTIVE

One of the problems with decision making is the way your brain presents you with habituated responses. Like when you decide to go on a diet and unconsciously duplicate the patterns you used in previous (failed) diets, or when you stop at the same point when trying to learn a new hobby – again. So much of how we decide is ruled by our brain’s historic biases and restrictions.

To have as broad a range of options as possible with a minimum of bias and restriction, it’s necessary to consider the problem from different perspectives.

Ordinarily we automatically think our standard, familiar thoughts and unconsciously pose our standard, familiar questions to ourselves. I call this perspective Self. Self is our natural state, a largely unconscious idiosyncratic mix of physical, mental, emotional, unconscious and comfortable reactions and ideas. In Self we are the fish in the water.

From Self your decisions are based on your immediate world view – restricted by your momentary feelings, what’s going on in your life, and your history of managing similar issues.This is perfect for daily living. But for making consequential decisions it’s good to have as broad, and unbiased viewpoint as possible. For this you’ll need an expansive perspective that I call Observer/Witness.

Being in Observer offers more a conscious choice with a broader perspective and far less bias. You already do this, albeit unconsciously: the quick intake of breath telling you to be more alert and consider a new choice; that it’s time to go beyond your natural reaction, your standard thoughts and feelings.

You use Observer when raising children, like when your 2-year-old so creatively crayons the wall and you gently guide her to the coloring book but really want to scream ‘I JUST PAINTED THAT WALL!!!’. It’s when you’re fighting with a partner and take a step back to say, ‘Wait a minute. Let’s chill.’

In Observer, you notice a broader range of choices that weren’t visible from Self. They were always there, but not habituated like the more-used options. My book HOW? teaches how to do this.

Rule #1: Make important decisions from Observer to perceive a broad range of choices.

Sample

CRITERIA

Values and Beliefs – the basis of any decision making criteria – are the primary determinants for making important decisions as they defend and maintain who you are and what you stand for. Indeed, people often delay making a decision because they fear they’ll overlook something significant, because they don’t know the full set of risks involved.

From Observer you can consider the underlying values that must be maintained in the new decision. They’re often personal, although in team decision making the group must collaboratively agree to the values they want to maintain.

Here’s a personal tale of how my switch from Self to Observer converted my criteria to more authentic, less reactive values and a positive outcome.

A mythic row with a dear friend ended our relationship. He betrayed me! He lied! He broke my values-based criteria of honesty, of my ‘right to be respected!’ But as time passed I began to get a different perspective: I must love with ‘Ands’ not ‘Buts’. That meant (to me) I had to find a way to be in relationship. So I shifted my criteria (and Self perspective) from honesty and ‘right to be respected’ to my Observer perspective: ‘How do we love each other AND be respectful and honest?’ With this new criteria our relationship had a way forward.

Rule #2: Know the criteria you want to meet for your decision and write down some thoughts on what it will look like when it’s met.

GOALS

Goals often include specific target actions and a time limit for completion, and require a well-worded goal. So “I want to go on a diet to lose weight” becomes “I will do the research to find the best foods for my body to find and maintain its best weight.”

Goals must include details that can be evaluated or you run the risk of failure. The more specificity, the higher the possibility of success.

Rule #3: Set a goal using very specific words and expected results.

RISKS

All decisions carry some sort of risk. What risk are you willing to take? Are you willing to switch values? Are you willing to let go of people in your life? Relationships? Money?

Before making a final decision it’s important to know the risks involved in the change caused by the final outcome. Ask the people in any way involved in the final decision what the upsides/downsides are for them. Make sure you pose questions from Observer so you instill as little bias as possible. I’ve invented Facilitative Questions™ that lead to unconscious circuits where decision criteria are stored. Again, I teach them in HOW?.

Your final decision may not be able to address all risks but knowing them in advance is valuable for goal setting. Where there’s a chance the risks won’t be fully addressed, do as much advance work as possible to reduce the fallout.

Rule #4: before making a final decision, know the risks involved for the people, policies, values, etc.

STEPS

Often people begin seeking information too soon. I suggest you wait until you’ve determined the goals, risks, and criteria so you’ll have a more accurate foundation. Then:

Assemble all the elements involved: Know the goals, criteria, people and fall-out from each. Include gathering data (from Observer, to minimize bias) from the people who will be touched by your decision. While you might not be able to meet their criteria, you’ll at least have an idea of the risks.
Determine and manage the risks: Fully understand the distance between where you are now and where you will be once the decision is made. Will the same values prevail? Will jobs or situations be changed? How will this affect the status quo? How will you deal with any fallout?
Gather data: Once you know the risks, goals and criteria involved, gather supporting data (both internal and external) that ensures you’ve got the important elements covered and the risks managed best you can.
Weight the options: You’ll now have the information you need to understand the types of choices and risks. Go back to the drawing board. Get into Observer. Write down a hierarchy of criteria to meet and see how/where they match the options. Weight them according to risks and values. Know precisely the fallout.
Carry out the decision: make sure to personally manage any fallout.

And good luck! Should you require some team coaching to facilitate an important decision, please contact me: sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

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Sharon Drew Morgen September 2nd, 2024

Posted In: Change Management, Communication

Change gets a bad rap. Confusion, time delays, resistance, goal resets. We keep trying new approaches to change management, but none of them seem to work. The reason? We’re not addressing the underlying, systemic issues that create and maintain them. Once we know and execute the steps to congruent change, the problems fall away.

My orientation around change originates in my profession: I invent systemic brain change models for sales, leadership, coaching, change management, and training, all presuming that change is systemic, with lots of moving parts that must collaborate for a successful outcome.

Currently, change agents merely attempt to change the outcomes, the activities they want fixed. But behaviors are outputs, end results. It seems obvious to me that you can’t change anything by starting at the end. Change must be initiated from the source, by reprogramming the input.

Trying to change a behavior by merely trying to change a behavior is like trying to change a table (output) into a chair (output) without going back to the initial programming that generated the chair to begin with.

Sample

My latest book lays out specifically HOW to get into the unconscious to find the right circuits for change and decision making and HOW to generate new circuits for learning and change.

THE STEPS OF CHANGE

Both the change process and decision making have specific steps that must be addressed sequentially (and this can be iterative), starting at the very beginning.

1. Full data set: to understand, quantify and assess the problem, to end up with congruent, systemic change, it’s necessary to assemble and analyze the full set of ‘givens’. This sounds easier than it is. Since change is systemic it’s necessary that all elements that have caused and maintained the problem be included from the very beginning. Without the complete data set it’s impossible to fully grasp the problem, let alone understand the needs or goals change would address.

Obviously you can’t know the full data set of a problem until you’ve assembled and gotten feedback from the people and job descriptions who touch the current problem and will be involved in the ultimate solution. I’m always surprised when I hear leaders say they’ve omitted gathering data from front line workers or middle managers. This fact alone causes resistance and time delays!

Rule: to understand or define a problem and design a specific outcome, wait until you have the full data set of how it was created and maintained.

2. Workarounds: Once the problem is fully defined and all who touch the problem and solution are engaged, it’s necessary to ascertain if it’s possible to fix it by trialing solutions that are available and familiar. Often this involves brainstorming and taking time away to ponder. I have my clients tell their folks to go away for a week, have small group meetings in which they think and brainstorm before coming back with the group’s thoughts.

To maintain Systems Congruence, any change must be congruent with the beliefs, rules and norms of the system. Again, this means the full complement of job descriptions, etc. must be involved. Overlooking them means resistance.

A good way to avoid this is to first try known resources (familiar consultants, expanded versions of current software, etc.) that adhere to the same beliefs, norms and rules.

Rule: Once a problem is correctly defined, first trial solutions among known/familiar resources.

3. Risk Management: If there are no available known resources, the next step involves the biggest issue: risk. Until the risk of change is understood and found manageable by the folks who will be affected by it, there will be no decision to change (or at least major resistance).

Rule: if the risk of change is higher than maintaining the status quo, no change will be made. Any proposed change must carry the same or a lower risk than the initial problem.

4. Buy-in for change: If there’s no known solution that will resolve the problem, and everyone agrees the risk is manageable, an external solution – a consultant, a piece of software, a training program, a product purchase – can be sought with everyone’s approval.

Rule: whatever is brought in must match the norms, beliefs, rules of the system, and everyone who will touch the new solution must buy-in.

Sample

Here’s my book that details the 13 steps of change. While seeming to be a book for sales, it’s a deep dive into the specific steps people make during decision making.

LEADERSHIP MUST FACILITATE

From what I’ve experienced with my clients, change is too often approached as merely a behavior change activity with leaders defining the problem with less-than accurate, or incomplete, data, assumptions, and almost always without the right complement of people included.

In other words, the problem gets mis-defined, people’s beliefs and egos get out of whack, a full complement of creative and needed suggestions get overlooked, and resistance rears its ugly head.

I’ve got some questions to help you think this through:

What would you need to know or believe differently to be willing to give up the control you prefer and not determine any outcomes or make any assumptions until you’ve assembled the full complement of people to provide the full data set?
How will you all know to assess the risk? Whose voices must be included? What does risk look like?
What will you need to do differently to step back from any control you’re accustomed to having during a project?

I hope this has helped you create change management projects devoid of problems. If you need to talk the issues through or need help designing a project with no resistance and less time wastage, I’d be glad to help. Sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

_______________________

Sharon Drew Morgen August 19th, 2024

Posted In: Change Management

You Can’t Change a Behavior by Trying to Change a Behavior, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

Conscious Failing, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

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

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

Trust: what it is, and how to initiate it

Our Brains Determine Our Reality

Let’s Make Sales Relevant Again: it’s time for innovation, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

Trait-centered Leadership vs. Servant Leadership, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

Making Important Decisions, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

Change Isn’t as Hard as You Think, by Sharon-Drew Morgen