Communication – What? Did You Really Say What I Think I Heard?

Decades ago I had an idea that questions could be vehicles to facilitate change in addition to eliciting answers. Convention went against me: the accepted use of questions as information gathering devices is built into our culture. But overlooked is their ability, if used differently, to facilitate congruent change.

WHAT IS A QUESTION?

Standard questions gather information at the behest of an Asker and as such are biased by their words, goals, and intent. As such, they actually restrict our Communication Partner’s responses:

Need to Know Askers pose questions as per their own ‘need to know’, data collection, or curiosity.

These questions risk overlooking more relevant, accurate, and criteria-based answers that are stored in a Responder’s brain beyond the parameters of the question posed.

Why did you do X? vs How did you decide that X was your best option?

Manipulate agreement/response Questions that direct the Responder to respond in a way that fits the needs and expectations of the Asker.

These questions restrict possibility, cause resistance, create distrust, and encourage lying.

Can you see how doing Y would have been better? vs What would you need to consider to broaden your scope of consideration next time?

Doubt Directive These questions, sometimes called ‘leading questions’ are designed to cause Responders to doubt their own effectiveness, in order to create an opening for the Asker.

These narrow the range of possible responses, often creating some form of resistance or defensive lies; they certainly cause defensiveness and distrust.

Don’t you think you should consider doing X? vs Have you ever thought of alternate ways of achieving X?

Data gathering When worded badly, these questions limit the possible answers and overlook more accurate data.

What were the results of your search for Z? vs How did you choose the range of items to search for, and what results did you get?

Standard questions restrict responses to the Asker’s parameters, regardless of their intent or the influencer’s level of professionalism, care, or knowledge. Potentially important, accurate data – not to mention the real possibility of facilitating change – is left on the table and instead may promote distrust, bad data collection, and delayed success.

Decision Scientists end up gathering incomplete data that creates implementation issues; leaders and coaches push clients toward the change they perceive is needed and often miss the real change needed. The fields of sales and coaching are particularly egregious. The cost of bias and restriction is unimaginable.

Sharon-Drew’s new book came out 9/16/2023

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WHAT IS AN ANSWER?

Used to elicit or push data, the very formulation of conventional questions restricts answers. If I ask ‘What did you have for breakfast?’ you cannot reply ‘I went to the gym yesterday.’ Every answer is restricted by the biases within the question.

Because we enter conversations with an agenda, intuition, directive, etc., the answers we receive are partial at best, inaccurate at worst, and potentially cause resistance, sabotage, and disregard.
There are unknown facts, feelings, historic data, goals, etc. that lie within the Responder’s unconscious that hold real answers and cannot be found using merely the Asker’s curiosity.
By approaching situations with the natural biases inherent in standard questions, Askers only obtain good data from Responder’s with similar backgrounds and thought processes.
Because influencers are unaware of how their particular bias restricts an answer, how much they are leaving ‘on the table’, or how their questions have skewered potential, they have no concept if there are different answers possible, and often move forward with bad data.

So why does it matter if we’re biasing our questions? It matters because we don’t get accurate answers; it matters because our questions instill resistance; it matters because we’re missing opportunities to serve and support change.

Imagine if we could reconfigure questions to elicit accurate data for researchers or marcom folks; or enable buyers to take quick action from ads, cold calls or large purchases; or help coaching clients change behaviors congruently, permanently, and quickly; or encourage buy-in during software implementations. I’m suggesting questions can facilitate real change.

WHAT IS CHANGE?

Our brain stores data rather haphazardly in our brain making it difficult sometimes to find the right answer when we need it, especially relevant when we want to make new choices.

Over the last decades, I have mapped the sequence of systemic change and designed a way to use questions as directional devices to pull relevant data in the proper sequence so influencers can lead Responders through their own change process without resistance.

This decision facilitation process enables quicker decisions and buy-in – not to mention truly offer a Servant Leader, win/win communication. Let’s look at how questions can enable change.

All of us are a ‘system’ of subjectivity collected during our lifetime: unique rules, values, habits, history, goals, experience, etc. that operates consensually to create and maintain us. It resides in our unconscious and defines us. Without it, we wouldn’t have criteria for any choices, or actions, or habits whatsoever. Our system is hard wired to keep us who we are.

To learn something new, to do something different or learn a new behavior, to buy something, to take vitamins or get a divorce or use new software or be willing to forgive a friend, change must come from within or it will be resisted.

People hear each other through their own biases. You ask biased questions, receive biased answers, and hit pay dirt only when your biases match. Everyone else will ignore, resist, misunderstand, mishear, act out, sabotage, forget, ignore, etc.
Due to their biased and restricting nature, standard questions won’t facilitate another’s change process regardless of the wisdom of your comments.
Without the Responder being ready, willing, and able to change according to their own criteria, they cannot buy, accept, adopt, or change in any way.

To manage congruent change, and enable the steps to achieve buy-in, I’ve developed Facilitative Questions™ that work comfortably with conventional questions and lead Responders to

find their own answers hidden within their unconscious,
retrieve complete, relevant, accurate answers at the right time, in the right order to
traverse the sequenced steps to congruent, systemic change/excellence, while
avoiding restriction and resistance and
include their own values and subjective experience.

It’s possible to help folks make internal changes and find their own brand of excellence.

FACILITATIVE QUESTIONS™

Facilitative Questions™ (FQs) use a new skill set – listening for systems – that is built upon systems thinking and facilitating folks through their unconscious to discover their own answers.

Using specific words, in a very specific sequence, it’s possible to pose questions that are free of bias, need or manipulation and guide congruent change. And it requires trust that Responders have their own answers.

Facilitative Question™ Not information gathering, pull, or manipulative, FQs are guiding/directional tools, like a GPS system. Using specific words in specific sequences they lead Responders congruently, without any bias, down their unique steps of change to Excellence. How would you know if it were time to reconsider your hairstyle? Or What has stopped you from adding ‘x’ to your current skill set until now?

When used with coaching clients, buyers, negotiation partners, advertisements, or even teenagers, these questions create action within the Responder, causing them to recognize internal incongruences and deficiencies, and be guided through their own options. (Because these questions aren’t natural to us, I’ve designed a tool and program to teach the ‘How’ of formulating them.).

The responses to FQs are quite different from conventional questions. By word sequencing, word choice, and placement they cause the Responder to expand their perspective and recognize a broad swath of possible answers. A well-formed FQ would be one we formulated for Wachovia Bank to open a cold call:

How would you know when it’s time to consider adding new banking partners for those times your current bank can’t give you what you need?

This question shifted the response from 100 prospecting calls from 10 appointments and 2 closes over 11 months to 37 meetings and 29 closes over 3 months. FQs found the right prospects and garnered engagement immediately.

Instead of pulling data, you’re directing the Responder’s unconscious to where their answers are stored. It’s possible Responders will ultimately get to their answers without Facilitative Questions, but using them, it’s possible to help Responders organize their change criteria very quickly accurately. Using Facilitative Questions, we must

Enter with a blank brain, as a neutral navigator, servant leader, with a goal to facilitate change.
Trust our Communication Partners have their own answers.
Stay away from information gathering or data sharing/gathering until they are needed at the end.
Focus on helping the Other define, recognize, and understand their system so they can discover where it’s broken.
Put aside ego, intuition, assumptions, and ‘need to know.’ We’ll never understand another’s subjective experience; we can later add our knowledge.
Listen for systems, not content.

FQs enable congruent, systemic, change. I recognize this is not the conventional use of questions, but we have a choice: we can either facilitate a Responder’s path down their own unique route and travel with them as Change Facilitators – ready with our ideas, solutions, directions as they discover a need we can support – or use conventional, biased questions that limit possibility.

For change to occur, people must go through these change steps anyway; we’re just making it more efficient for them as we connect through our desire to truly Serve. We can assist, or wait to find those who have already completed the journey. They must do it anyway: it might as well be with us.

I welcome opportunities to put Facilitative Questions into the world. Formulating them requires a new skill set that avoids any bias (Listening for Systems, for example). But they add an extra dimension to helping us all serve each other.

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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 December 9th, 2024

Posted In: Communication, Listening

7 Comments

As instructors you’re committed to collaborating with your students, inspiring their creativity and sparking their original ideas. You pose interesting questions to enthuse them and work hard at offering knowledge in a way that inspires their learning.

But are they hearing what you intend to convey?

When I heard two highly intelligent people having a conversation in which neither were directly responding to each other (“Where should my friends pick me up?” “There’s parking near the bottom of the hill.”) I became curious. Were they hearing different things that caused disparate responses?

I spent the next 3 years studying how brains listen and writing a book on it (WHAT? Did you really say what I think I heard?). I ended up learning far more than I ever wanted to: like most people, I had assumed that when I listened I accurately heard someone’s intended message. I was wrong.

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HOW BRAINS LISTEN

Turns out there’s no absolute correlation between what a Speaker says and what a Listener hears – a very unsatisfactory reality when our professions are based on offering content that is meant to be understood and retained. Sadly there’s a probability that students are not taking away what we’re paid to teach them.

To give you a better idea of how this happens and how automatic and mechanical this process is, here are the steps brains perform when hearing spoken words.

1. A message (words, as puffs of air, initially without meaning) gets spoken and received as sound vibrations.

2. Dopamine processes incoming sound vibrations, deleting and filtering out some of them according to relevance to the Listener’s mental models.

3. What’s left gets sent to a CUE which turns the remaining vibrations into electrochemical signals.

4. The signals then get sent to the Central Executive Network (CEN) where they are dispatched to a ‘similar-enough’ neural circuit for translation into meaning.

Note: The preferred neural circuits that receive the signals are those most often used by the Listener, regardless of their relevance to what was said.

5. Upon arrival at these ‘similar-enough’ circuits, the brain discards any overage between the existing circuit and the incoming one and fills in any perceived holes with ‘other’ signals from neighboring circuits.

What we ‘hear’ is what remains. So: several deletions, a few additions, and translation into meaning by circuits that already exist.

In other words, what we think we hear, what our brain tells us was said, is some rendition of what a Speaker intends to convey biased by our own history. And when applying these concepts to training and instruction, neither the instructor nor the student knows the distance between what was said and what was heard.

I lost a business partner who believed I said something I would never have said. He not only didn’t believe me when I told him what I’d actually said, but he didn’t believe his wife who was standing with us at the time. “You’re both lying to me! I heard it with my own ears!” and he stomped out of the room, never to speak to me again.

HOW TO CONFIRM STUDENTS HEAR US

What does that mean for instructors? It means we have no idea if some/all/few of the students hear precisely what we are trying to convey. Or they might hear something similar, or something that offends them. They may hear something quite comfortable or something vastly different. They may misinterpret a homework assignment or a classroom instruction. It means they may not retain what we’re offering.

To make sure students understand what we intend to share, we must take an extra step when we instruct. Instead of merely assuming we’re presenting good content or asking creativity-building questions, we must assume we don’t know what the students have heard, regardless of how carefully we’ve worded our message.

In smaller classrooms I suggest we ask:

Can you each tell me what you heard me say?

Or, with a large class, say the same thing in several different ways: you can begin by explaining –

Because of the way brains hear incoming words, you’ll each translate what I’m saying differently. To make sure we’re all doing the same assignment, I’m going to tell you the homework assignment in several different ways:

Write a 3-page paper on [how your creativity is inspired]. Let me repeat this in a different way:

In 3 pages, explain what’s stopping you from [being as creative as you can be]. Or maybe this is clearer for you:

How do you ‘do’ your [creativity to end up with a new concept]? Explain in a 3 page paper. Or:

Hand in a 3 page paper that explains [your thinking process that triggers new ideas].

It might sound like extra work but the learners will:

understand what you intend for them to do (in their own way, but they’ll get the meaning);
promote uniform topic discussions;
eschew confusion and inspire original ideas;
circumvent regurgitation.

Since students sometimes fear offering original thoughts as they don’t want to hand in a ‘wrong’ answer, this type of exposition ensures they’ll all hear your intent and be willing to share their authentic responses. And, they’ll understand that if they don’t precisely grasp what their instructor is offering, it’s their brain’s fault.

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Sharon Drew Morgen November 25th, 2024

Posted In: Communication, Listening

Our viewpoints, interpretations and assumptions are so unconsciously biased that we unwittingly restrict our ability to accurately understand, or act on, incoming information. Our brains are the culprit, as they construct the way we make sense of the world; we don’t question what our brains tell us.

Responding from historic personal norms and beliefs, we instinctively assume our perceptions, actions, interpretations, are based on reality. But we invent our own reality. As David Eagleman says in The Brain,

“Each of us has our own narrative and we have no reason not to believe it. Our brains are built on electrochemical signals that we interpret as our lives and experience… there’s no single version of reality. Each brain carries its own truth via billions of signals triggering chemical pulses and trillions of connections between neurons.” [pg 73-74]

Our brains actually restrict us to seeing, noticing, hearing, understanding, and learning what we already have circuits to translate – what’s comfortable and acceptable – causing deep seated biases. Our subjectivity maintains us.

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In this article I will explain how our brain biases us and what we can do to override the patterns.

SUBJECTIVITY VS OBJECTIVITY

We live our lives subjectively, based on the way our brains code and retrieve our personal, unique, and idiosyncratic beliefs, assumptions, history and norms. We think we’re making good choices when we choose or consider one thing vs another, when we easily reject something because it makes no sense or annoys us. Or worse, when it’s ‘obvious’ to us that one thing should be valued differently than another.

We like to think we’re objective. But we’re not.

The Wikipedia definition of objectivity is “… the elimination of subjective perspectives and … purely based on hard facts.” And “a lack of bias, judgment, or prejudice.” But is this possible? What are ‘hard facts’ when our brain rejects them as faulty? When our brains determine what ‘reality’ is? I suggest that objectivity is only slightly less biased than subjectivity.

Indeed, it’s pretty impossible to experience or interpret most anything without bias. We act, make decisions and choices, communicate with others, raise children and have friends, all from a small range of favored, habitual mental models and neural circuits that come from oft-used superhighways in our brains that we’ve spent a lifetime culling and assume are accurate.

Regardless of how ‘factual’ it is, when incoming data doesn’t jive with our existing beliefs, our brains ‘do us a favor’ and resist and re-interpret whatever falls outside of what we ‘know’ to be true. Obviously, anything new has a good chance of not being understood accurately. Bias is just cooked in; we don’t even think twice about trusting our intuition or natural reasoning when there’s a good chance we shouldn’t.
Whether we’re in a conversation, listening to media, or even reading, we listen through biased filters, and hear what our brains tell us was said – likely to be X% different from the intended message. Unless we develop new neural pathways for the new incoming data, we will only hear what our brains are already comfortable with.

Indeed, our worlds are very tightly controlled by our unconscious, habituated, and brain-based biases, making it quite difficult to objectively hear or understand anything that is different. It takes quite a bit of work to act beyond our perceptions.

WHY CAN’T WE BE OBJECTIVE?

Each of us interpret incoming messages uniquely. Indeed, objectivity is not, well, objective. Here’s what happens: Sometimes

the way the new information comes in to us – the words used, the setting, the history between the communication partners, the distance between what’s being said and our current beliefs – cause us to unconsciously misinterpret bits of data;
we have no natural way of recognizing an incongruity between the incoming information and our unconscious thoughts;
our brain deletes some of the signals from incoming messages when they are discordant with what we already accept as true, without telling us what we missed (My book What? Did you really say what I think I heard? explains and corrects this problem.);
our beliefs are so strong we react automatically without having enough detachment to notice;
what we think is objective is often merely a habitual choice.

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We each live in worlds of our own making. We choose friends and neighborhoods according to our beliefs and how our ears interpret ‘facts’, choose professions according to our likes and predispositions, raise our kids with the same norms and beliefs that we hold. In other words, we’ve created rather stable – certainly comfortable – worlds for ourselves that we fight to maintain regardless of how our biases may distort.

When communicating with others, ‘objective facts’ might get lost in subjectivity. In business we connect with different viewpoints and attempt to convince other’s of our ‘rightness’, and either they don’t believe us or they feel we’ve made them ‘wrong’. Our children learn stuff in school that we might find objectionable regardless of its veracity, or we might disagree with teachers who have different interpretations of our child’s behavior.

And of course, most scientific facts we deem ‘objective truth’ may just be opinions. Folks like Curie, Einstein, Hawking, and Tesla were considered to be cranks because their ideas flew in the face of objective science that turned out to be nothing more than decades and centuries of perceived wisdom/opinions.

The problem shows up in every aspect of our lives. Sometimes there’s no way to separate out objective fact from subjective belief, regardless of the veracity.

I remember when my teenage son came home with blue hair one day. Thinking of what his teachers would say (This was in 1985!) or his friend’s parents, I wanted to scream. Instead I requested that next time he wanted to do something like that to please discuss it with me first, and then told him it looked great (It actually was a terrific color!). But his father went nuts when he came to pick him up, screaming at both of us (“What kind of a mother lets her son dye his hair blue!!!”), and taking him directly to the barber to shave his head. For me, it was merely hair. We both had different ‘objective realities.’

CASE STUDY IN OBJECTIVITY VS SUBJECTIVITY

I once visited a friend in the hospital where I began a light conversations with the elderly orderly helping her sit up and eat. During our chat, the orderly asked me if I could mentor him. Um… Well, I was busy. Please! he begged. Not knowing what I could add to his life and having a bias that folks who asked me to mentor them just wanted me to give them money, I reluctantly, doubtfully, said ok.

He emailed me and invited me to dinner. Um… well, ok. I’d donate one night. He lived in a tiny room in a senior living center, on the ‘wrong’ side of the tracks. It was very clean and neat, and he had gone out of his way to prepare the best healthy dinner he knew how to offer. Shrimp cocktail. Nice salad. Hamburger and beans. Ice cream. During dinner he played some lovely music. Just lovely. I was transfixed. Who is that playing, I asked.

“It’s me. I wrote that piece, and I’m playing all the instruments. I have several CDs of music I’ve composed and self-produced. Can you help me find someone who might want to hear it and do something with it? I’ve never met anyone who could help me.” I helped him find folks who helped him professionally record at least two of his compositions.

By any ‘objective’ measure, using my own subjective biases and ignoring the objective truth that we’re all equal and everyone is capable of having talent, I didn’t initially consider that someone ‘like that’ (old, black, poor, uneducated) had the enormous talent this man possessed, regardless of my advocacy of non-bias and gender/race equality.

Unwittingly, we seriously restrict our worlds the way we process incoming data. We live subjective lives that restrict us. And as a result, we end up having arguments, misunderstandings, failed initiatives; we end up having a smaller pool of ideas to think with and don’t see a need for further research or checking; we make faulty assumptions about people and ideas that could bring benefits to our lives. I personally believe it’s necessary for us to remove as many restrictions as possible to our pool of knowledge and beliefs.

HOW TO COMPENSATE

To recognize bias and have a new choice, we must first recognize the necessity of noticing when something we believe may not be true, regardless of how strong our conviction otherwise. It’s quite difficult to do using the same biases that caused us to unconsciously bias in the first place.

Here’s a tip to help expand your normalized perception and notice a much broader range of givens, or ‘reality,’ to view an expanded array of options from a Witness or Coach or Observer position on the ceiling:

Sit quietly. Think of a situation that ended with you misinterpreting something and the outcome wasn’t pretty. Replay it through your mind’s eye. Pay particular attention to your feelings as you relive each aspect of the situation. Replay it again.
Notice where your body has pain, discomfort, or annoyance points.
As soon as you notice, intensify the feeling at the site of the discomfort. Then impart a color on it. Make the color throb.
Mentally move that color inside your body to the outer edges of your eyeballs and make the color vibrate in your eyes.
When you mentally notice the color vibration, make sure you sit back in your chair or stand up. Then move your awareness up to the ceiling (i.e. in Witness or Observer position) and look down at yourself. From above you’ll notice an expanded range of data points and options outside your standard ones, causing you to physiologically evade your subjective choices.

Since the difference between subjectivity and objectivity is one of perception, and in general our brains make our determinations unconsciously, we must go to the place in our brains that cause us to perceive, and make it conscious. Only then can we have any objective choice. And next time we think we’re being objective, maybe rethink the situation to consider whether new choices are needed.

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Sharon Drew Morgen November 18th, 2024

Posted In: Communication, Listening, Sales

I recently heard yet another excuse as to why a buyer didn’t buy: seller/buyer misalignment. Seriously? Because the seller didn’t close a sale (That was expected by the seller? In the mythical pipeline? According to the expectation of the seller?) there was a relationship problem? No. The problem stems from sellers not understanding what a buyer is, and what a buyer must know before self-identifying as a buyer. In this case, there was no buyer to be ‘misaligned’ with.

The fact is, selling doesn’t cause buying.

FROM PERSON TO BUYER

A decision not to purchase has very little to do with the seller, the solution, the relationship, or the need. In fact, making a purchase is the very last thing a buyer does. Just because a situation seems like a perfect fit with your solution does not make it a buying/ selling opportunity; just because someone really needs your solution does not mean they are ready, willing, or able to buy.

Let me begin by defining ‘Buyer’: a person (or group) who has

assembled all people, causes, and elements that created their problem and agreed to a problem definition AND
recognized they cannot fix the problem with familiar resources, usual vendors, or workarounds, AND
determined the risk of change and found it palatable, AND
gotten buy-in from everyone/everything involved with the changes a fix would affect, AND
decided that the cost of a fix is lower than maintaining the status quo,

and decides that purchasing an external solution is their best option.

As the thought-leader behind how buyers buy (programs, books, models, steps, terms, since 1985) , the author of the NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity, and the person who coined the terms Buy Cycle, Buying Patterns, Buying Journey, Buying Decision Team, and How Buyers Buy, I’d like to offer some thoughts:

1. A buyer isn’t a buyer until they’ve bought something. Until then they are people with a problem who may, if they can’t resolve the issue themselves and the risk is manageable, seek an external solution.

2. Solving a problem never begins as a decision to buy anything (unless a small personal item), regardless of ‘need’. People don’t want to buy anything; they merely want to resolve a problem in the most efficient way with the least risk. Hence, they won’t respond to or read your marketing or sales content based on ‘need’.

3. People prefer to resolve their own problems. Workarounds are always the first option, a purchase the last.

4. Unless the risk of making a purchase is lower than the risk of staying the same, there will be no purchase regardless of the need or the efficacy of your solution. By seeking folks with ‘need’, sellers only find the low-hanging fruit and reduce their potential prospect audience by 80%.

5. A purchase occurs only when the stakeholder group has found the risk of change manageable and buys-in to something new. It’s only when there’s agreement from all elements that created the problem that

it can’t be fixed with known resources or workarounds,
the cost in resources/change is lower than the cost of the fallout of bringing in something new,
a path forward is defined by everyone who will touch the final solution,

that the full scope of a bringing in a new solution (i.e. buy something) is understood. Until then ‘need’ isn’t fully defined, people haven’t yet self-identified as ‘buyers’, they won’t read your content or take a meeting (unless to pick your brain), and no external solution is required. Here is where sellers often get caught thinking there’s a ‘need’ before the folks with the problem think there is one.

‘Need’ is NOT the criteria people use to buy. Until they are convinced they cannot solve their own problem and change without much disruption, until the understand and can accept the risk of change, they are not buyers and won’t heed pitches or appointment attempts.

6. There is a defined series of 13 (generic) steps that determine if, when, why, how, what to buy. A buying decision is a risk/change management problem before it’s a solution choice issue. Until the full set of stakeholders have agreed they can’t fix the problem with familiar resources AND have developed a plan for congruent change with minimal risk, there is no willingness to seek an external solution. In other words, before people become buyers they’re merely people trying to fix a problem themselves.

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7. People don’t need you to sell to them. They can get all the data they need from your site. They really need your help in traversing their decision steps: the time it takes them to figure this out (non-buying, cultural, systems/ rules based) is the length of the sales cycle, and sales overlooks this entirely.

8. Making a purchase is a risk/change management issue before it’s a solution choice problem. The first question people consider is how they can achieve Excellence with the least ‘cost/risk’ to the system; the last question they consider is what solution they’d need from ‘outside’. With a focus on placing solutions, there is no element of the sales model that facilitates systemic change. Sales overlooks the largest portion of the buyer’s journey – how to manage the change a fix will cost to the system.

9. Until any disruption caused by a purchase (i.e. all purchases are ‘foreign’ to the system) is understood, planned for, and agreed to, no purchase will take place. The existing environment is sacrosanct; keeping it running smoothly is more important to them than fixing a problem that’s already been baked into the system, especially if it would cost unwanted internal disruption.

10. Everyone and everything who created the current problem and would potentially touch a new solution must agree to any modification (purchase). This is why pitches, marketing, presentation will only be noticed by those who have completed their decision path.

11. The time it takes people/buyers to discover their own answers and know how to manage change in the least disruptive way, is the length of the sales cycle. It has nothing to do with selling, buying, need, relationship, content, or solutions until the route to congruent change is defined and agreed to. It’s a risk/change management issue before it’s a solution choice issue. And the sales model ignores this, causing 5% close rates instead of 40%.

12. The last thing people want is to buy something. With their criteria of ‘solution placement’, sellers often enter at the wrong time, ask the wrong questions, and offer the wrong data – and end up selling only to the low-hanging fruit (the 5% who have planned their route to change already).

13. Buyers buy using their own buying patterns, not a seller’s selling patterns. Using a specific type of sales effort further restricts the population of those who will buy. We don’t necessarily object to the products Robocalls promote. It’s the invasive selling patterns we object to.

14. There is a difference in goals, capability of changing, and level of buy-in between those who CAN/WILL buy vs those who sellers think SHOULD buy. By entering to seek folks in the process of solving a problem your solution can resolve, we can find and capture 40% of those on route to become buyers.

15. The time it takes people to come up with their complete set of buy-in and change-based answers is the time it takes them to seek an external solution – i.e. become a buyer. Let me say this again: Buying has nothing whatsoever to do with their need, your solution, or your relationship.

By only listening for clues that lead you to assume a ‘need’ for your solution, by entering into ‘relationships’ based on what you’re selling, by only asking questions to ‘prove’ a need/solution match (too often with only one or two members of the full Buying Decision Team), you’re not only biasing the interaction, but limiting your sales to closing those who have gotten to the point when they’re ready, willing, able to change – the low hanging fruit; you’re missing the opportunity to enter earlier, develop a real relationship, and facilitate the path that people who CAN buy must take before they are buyers.

The current sales model ignores the possibility of facilitative buying, or becoming real relationship managers and true consultants and Servant Leaders.

In other words, the sales model enters too early in the buying decision journey to reach or serve the maximum number of prospects.

BUYING FACILITATION®

Potential buyers need your help figuring out how to figure it all out much more than they need a product pitch, or more biased questions, that attempt to uncover a ‘need’ they don’t yet know they have.

I’ve developed a model (Buying Facilitation®) that uses wholly unique skills (Listening for Systems, Facilitative Questions, etc.) to facilitate a prospective buyer’s route to Excellence.

A generic model used for coaching, management, leadership, healthcare, Buying Facilitation® finds folks trying to solve a problem in the area of your solution, then leads them down their decision path and turns them into buyers in one-eighth the time it would take them to close.

I’ve been quite successful teaching it to global corporations ( i.e. 100,00 sales professionals at companies such as IBM, Kaiser, Wachovia, P&G, KPMG, etc.) to increase their sales. In fact, over 30 decades, my client’s pilot training groups close 8x more sales on average over the control groups, regardless of product or price.

Currently you’re now wasting 95% of your time running after those few who have finally arrived at step 10 – the low hanging fruit – ignoring the much larger pool of those who are on route, and fighting for a competitive advantage.

By adding new functionality to the front end of your sales model, you can enter earlier, be a Servant Leader, and facilitate congruent change and THEN be on board as a provider as they go through their buying decision process.

Buying Facilitation® is NOT sales; it’s NOT selling/purchase-based; it IS change- and decision-based. Right now you’re waiting while buyers do this anyway (or merely running after those you THINK have a need but end up fixing the problem in other ways) because all people must manage their change before they are buyers. Why not add a skill set, stop wasting time/effort, and close more. Then you’ll never be ‘misaligned.’

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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 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.sharondrewmorgen.com She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

Sharon Drew Morgen October 14th, 2024

Posted In: Communication

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

Is your team communicating effectively? Do you reach goals on time and without resistance? Are all voices included during brainstorming to assure the full fact pattern is collected that will inspire a set of agreeable possibilities? How are communication breakdowns handled?

I thought of these questions during a recent client chat that prompted me to remember a situation I had with Los Alamos Labs in New Mexico some years back. While the tale is a bit outdated, it will serve as a starting point for my belief that team miscommunication is costly for both productivity and people, and happening more often these days with new-forming teams, remote relationships, and distance meetings.

Here’s my Los Alamos Labs case study that might provide a few thoughts. I’ll follow it with ideas and suggestions.

LOS ALAMOS LABS

Case study

In the 1990s, Los Alamos Labs had a mailroom [Yes! We used snail mail in those days!] that sorted and delivered incoming mail – contracts, client letters, invoices, etc. It took them 6 days (6 days!) to distribute it; leadership wanted it done in one.

After months of failing to shorten the time line, leadership decided to contract out the work and fire the 26-person mailroom team. Before they took that drastic step, they brought me in to see if I could solve the problem with a team-building training program.

Speaking only to the client who hired me (Big mistake, it turned out) I created a nifty program. I arrived at the client site an hour early to observe the team in action before delivering the training. I immediately noticed much larger problems than merely team issues.

To begin with, the racial disparity was glaring: as the company was in New Mexico (a largely Hispanic population), there were 24 Hispanic (LatinX) people and two Anglos (White); it was quite obvious they didn’t speak to or listen to each other. The two Anglos stayed to themselves, never connecting in any way with the other 24 in the hour I watched them.

Next, there were cliques that operated in sort of a ballet, speaking, connecting, moving within their small groups with none of them going outside their cliques for questions, discussions, or sharing. So either their jobs were unique to each person, or there was massive inefficiency.

Didn’t seem like my team building program was an answer. I promptly threw away the program, went into the assigned training room down the hall, and put two facing chairs in the middle of the room with the rest of the chairs in a circle facing the two middle ones.

When the group came in, I told them I noticed some communication issues that I found disturbing, so before we did the real ‘training’ I wanted any personal issues resolved.

I invited whoever was having a personal issue – a grudge, an annoyance, a distrust – to sit in one of the middle chairs and invite their colleague to sit in the other and discuss the problem. I sat on the floor between the two chairs as the interpreter.

Nothing happened for 15 minutes. Silence. Then I stood up and announced I’d sit there all day if need be, but maybe the manager should begin. Surely he was annoyed with someone!

Roberto reluctantly came and sat on one of the chairs and said that instead of sharing his annoyances, he invited anyone annoyed with him to sit across from him and share their feelings.

After a few minutes, a young Hispanic woman came and sat down.

Theresa: I thought so hard about the delivery problems we were having and came up with what I thought was a great idea. But you gave me five minutes and basically didn’t listen. This has happened before when I’ve brought you new ideas. I’ll never bring in any new ideas again. And now we might all get fired because nothing has changed. I tried.

Roberto: I was annoyed too because I thought you were complaining about…

I stopped him so I could translate what she was actually saying:

SD: I heard Theresa say she’s having trust issues because she spent time and care presenting ways to try to resolve the problem and felt you ignored her. As the manager your job is not only to make sure your folks trust you but acquire as many ideas from your team as possible. Try a different response.

Roberto: OK! Um. Theresa: I’m so sorry I didn’t hear you as you deserved to be heard. And I’m sad I’ve not heard your ideas. I’m sure all of your ideas are certainly worth discussing. I sometimes am focused on other issues and don’t listen properly. What can I do to regain your trust? And can we set a time later this week to discuss any ideas you have that might help the group be more efficient?

After Theresa came one of the two Anglo people saying he felt the group had a racial bias against him. (Note: racial bias in New Mexico was a long-term cultural issue that affected everyone. I lived in Taos for 11 years and bear the scars.) Again, Roberto started off defending himself, but with my intervention opened up a race-based dialogue that continued within the group most of the day.

Turned out, most of the team members had grievances they shared. By the time everyone was finished discussing angers, annoyances and biases, it was 11:30 at night.

To their credit, there was great authenticity, honesty, and quite a few tears and hugs. Ideas were shared, brainstormed, listened to by all. When there were misunderstandings people were asked to clarify. Ideas seemed to have wings, flying around the room. Everyone was listening attentively and respectfully. We even had a few laughs (A few in-jokes of course, but mostly I was the ‘butt’ of the jokes for sitting so long on the floor. No idea why I didn’t sit on a chair for god’s sakes!).

On Day Two, I led the newly-formed collaboratory through ideas and plans for better communication, more productivity, sharing, and task efficiency. Within days after our time together they brought the 6-day delivery time down to one day and kept their jobs. Problem solved.

Sample

One more thing: following our program, the team took those 2 chairs and put them outside their manager’s office. Every time there was a confusion or disagreement, the people involved went to the chairs: “Let’s discuss this. Meet you at the chairs at 2:00.” The next year they sent me a photo of all of them next to the chairs. On one of the chairs sat a Malcolm Baldrige Excellence Award. They were holding a banner that said, “THANK YOU SHARON-DREW!”

Ahhhhh. I love my job. Although next time I used that strategy I did sit on a chair. 😊

Take Aways

I’d like to think that the skills involved with the final excellence were ones any team could adopt.

Willingness to be honest and authentic regardless of the ‘politically correct’ rules of social conversation.
Willingness to be vulnerable, admit wrong-doing and apologize.
Willingness to be honest about racial issues and hold Truth above feelings or fears.
Willingness to look at the problem and recognize what was working, what responsibilities they had to take to make it right, and willingness to fix it.
The necessity of the whole team being present as witness and judge, through discomfort and exhaustion. There was no place to hide – everyone knew the truth, and it had to be spoken for the greater good, separate from roles or personalities.
Patience to sit for whatever time it takes to resolve all the issues.

The role I played as translator was also vital. Not only did I provide safety and listen from a Witness (i.e. non-judgmental) place, safety, but it took the sting out of any blame and played a role in a meta understanding, away from unconscious human/racial biases or personal traits. Because I didn’t know any of these folks, I was not tangled in any past relationship, role, or status issues. I suspect that another outsider, from another department maybe, could have done the job. But bringing in a consultant isn’t a bad idea when an impartial eye/ear is needed.

SELF-CORRECTING TEAMS

This team was so comfortable with their long-standing cultural norms that their communication problems were endemic and led to ineffective work habits.

How many companies face the same problem? How many groups just keep on keepin’ on in ignorance or denial, making excuses and playing the blame-game with their resultant failures? How many groups only collect data from a chosen few and omit the entire population that would yield imaginative ideas that conventional leadership seems to ignore? How many important, creative, and valid ideas get ignored because of gender or race or sexual preference issues?

The cost of doing nothing is high:

1. A minimization of good ideas. Client-facing employees are often omitted from company change and problem-solving because they’re not ‘on the leadership team.’ Yet they have great ideas that leadership doesn’t think of. Use these folks. You hired them each for a reason. Put their ideas into action. Your employees are your competitive edge.
2. A minimization of collaboration and job effectiveness. With cliques, lack of diversity, teams bound by job descriptions and hierarchies, there’s no opportunity to pollinate new ideas, try new actions, make new norms. And without these, the company dies from its core.
3. A continuation and exacerbation of problems. Accepted communication practices get factored in to the culture and become built in forever, taking failure along for the ride and causing fall-out to become normative. A well-known global software company I worked with saw no problem with treating staff and clients from a win/lose position. “I need to have control and make people do what I want. I was told to do this on my first day here.” It was endemic. Brought in to get the leadership team to work from integrity, I mentioned that Win/Win was the goal. They were confused when I said Win/Lose equaled Lose/Lose, which cost them trust and creativity and ultimately business. “But what do I need Win/Win for? I’m the one in control. They have to do what I say regardless”. Hmm. How’s that working for you?
4. A colossal time waste. I recently went through a State Tax Review that prompted an enormous overcharging due to a glitch in the system from 1994. There were 6 departments involved, and none of them spoke to the others. If I didn’t call the other 5 when something occurred, I got caught up in the lag between departments, dates, paperwork. By the time we were done we all hated each other. They asked what the rush was, that it usually took 6 months not 6 weeks (I bet!) and I just didn’t understand their system. Nope. I did not. Talk to each other! Make sure there are systems set up so everyone has the same data at the same time. In 2022 that’s simple, no?
5. Unnecessary resistance: Without everyone’s buy-in, without everyone who touches the proposed solution having a say in the outcome, there will be resistance that costs unknown time, money, personal fallout. With proper communication up front, everyone is on board and has a stake in the success of the project. There is absolutely no need for resistance. If you’re getting resistance, you’re doing it wrong.
6. Dimished results. Until or unless
7. the full set of facts are known and gathered from the full spectrum of resources,
8. the full complement of possible ideas are tried,
9. the downsides are factored in before completion,

a project will not be successful. Nothing else to say.

THE TOOLS YOU NEED

Here are the necessary skill sets for effective team communication:

Unbiased Listening. This sounds much easier to do than it is. Let me start by saying that nothing has meaning – no words, no dialogues, no sounds – until our brains translate it. Like the earth has no color – color is a function of the rods and cones in our eyes translating incoming vibrations – words have no meaning until the incoming sound vibrations get translated within our neural circuitry (I wrote a book on this: What? Did you really say what I think I heard?).

In other words, we only understand what someone says according to our existing brain circuits. Listening is a neural/brain thing: we can’t hear others without bias.

For those who are curious, sound enters our ears as vibrations without meaning (i.e. not words!). They become signals that seek out ‘close enough’ circuits already existing in our brains from some prior experience and get translated accordingly.

In other words, everything we hear gets translated by our subjective experience. Sad but true. And we think we listen attentively, but can only hear/understand what our brains listen for. Obviously this is where misunderstanding and miscommunication come from. People DO listen. They just hear what their brains interpret for them according to their historic, subjective beliefs.

The easiest way to fix this problem is to say during a conversation:

I want to make sure I understood what you said. I will say what I think I heard, and ask that you please correct me so I can get it right.

This way you can take away an accurate understanding without guesswork, even if you initially thought what you heard was accurate.

Gather data from every person or you’ll not have the full fact pattern. Too often we gather data from the folks we consider ‘obvious’. not necessarily the full set of stakeholders who are part of the problem and hold some very necessary data.

So many customer service initiatives are developed without the input of the customer facing folks and omit addressing real customer needs. How many times are HR folks omitted because, well, why use HR (except that the initiative will transfer, fire, reorganize people)? Think of everyone who will be touched by the final solution and bring them in at the start.

Ask the right questions. This one is a head scratcher because conventional questions are meant to gather data biased by the needs, language choices, and goals of the Asker and which subsequently gather very restricted data from the Receiver. Obviously, the odds are good that the question will be misinterpreted. So using conventional questions will only discover some percentage of an answer.

To manage this problem, I’ve invented a new form of question (took me 10 years!) I call a Facilitative Question. Different from a conventional question that seeks answers for the Asker, FQs lead Others into their brains to discover a much, much broader set of possibilities beyond the biases of the Asker. After all, retrieving good data is a mind-brain issue. It takes a while to learn to formulate as specific words in specific sequences are used so the brain peruses its unconscious. But once you learn how it changes the arc of all conversations.

Do a congruence check. Are all team members contributing? If not, there’s a reason. Are they feeling unheard, that their ideas aren’t ‘big’ enough? Do they feel powerless? Do they feel any gender, race, or ability bias?

All voices are necessary. Bring them in or you risk restricting all that’s possible, not to mention setting up the initiative for failure and resistance.

Only hold meetings if ALL members are present! Do not hold a meeting if someone is ill or can’t make it. It biases the outcome, causes resistance, and leaves out important ideas.

IS YOUR COMMUNICATION WORKING?

I have some questions for teams to consider:

1. - Is your team is functioning optimally? What would suboptimal communication look/sound/act like?
  - Do you have any vehicle in place to take a meta stance and discover problems without biases or defense?
  - What do you have in place to ensure you’re not operating with any racial, gender, or ability prejudice? It’s inherent and unconscious. How do you test it?
  - Do you regularly get resistance – either from your own team or during client initiatives? What are you willing to do to develop strategies that enable group buy-in from the full set of stakeholders (i.e. including ‘Joe in accounting’)?
  - If you regularly notice dysfunction, during an initiative or with less-than-steller results, what are you doing about it?

I believe this is a problem that needs focus, especially with so much change occurring in our organizations now. Make it a priority. Your productivity, creativity, stability and integrity depend on it. And if you’re seeking a consultant or coach to facilitate your meetings, please contact me at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.

____________________________________

Sharon Drew Morgen August 5th, 2024

Posted In: Communication

I recently heard a coach pose a Why? question to help his client notice the negative results she achieved, hoping she’d recognize the need to make other choices going forward. Her response merely defended and denied her actions. Why? was the wrong question to lead her to her internal deliberations.

Aside from universal questions, like ‘Why is the sky blue?’, Why? is a common tool used by curious coaches, managers, healthcare providers and parents seeking an explanation for an undesirable behavior; to discover the root cause of something; to find an opening to offer ‘better’ choices.

Whatever the reason, Why? is posed when someone – an Asker – gets triggered by an outcome (something said or done) that runs counter to their expectations. In other words, biased and subjective, likely not getting to the specific neural circuit that caused the queried action.

Due to the way brains listen and how they store information and trigger choice, Why? merely finds a top of mind response, potentially overlooking the specific criteria-based neural synapse (out of 100+ trillion) that triggered it. I’ll explain the process in as simple terms as I can, starting with my definition of a question.

Note: this essay explains how behaviors get triggered in brains, which I’ve been unpacking for decades. For folks not wanting the detail I offer, just note because of the way brains ‘listen’ and how questions are formulated, Why? questions usually do not get to the specific neural circuits where authentic answers are stored.

TEST THE INTENT OF YOUR QUESTION

A question is a group of words chosen, and biased, by an Asker to elicit a response to meet their curiosity, goals and needs.

The problem begins when the Asker assumes Responders will hear/understand/respond to the question as intended (Bad odds). As you’ll see, as per the way brains ‘listen’, there’s a probability the Responder isn’t accurately hearing the intent behind the question. As an Asker do you know:

if the answer you get is accurate? Does the Responder know if it’s accurate?
if there’s a different, or better, answer that might have been uncovered with a differently worded question?
if your choice of words triggered unspoken resistance or unconscious defense?
what you’ll do with the answer you get? How will this response help you or the Responder fix the problem?

When you pose a Why? question, are you aware

you’re using your own curiosity, words, intent, challenges, assumptions and goals, ensuring bias in a question that compares an expected outcome against what actually occurred?
you can’t know how the wording in your query biases the Responder’s answer. And you likely have no idea what the Responder heard you say.
the response obtained is automatic, habitual and mechanical, and doesn’t get to the belief-based root of the problem.
you’ve put the Responder into an automatic, out-of-choice perspective (i.e. a Self reference rather than a more neutral Witness/Coach/Observer viewpoint) where they will automatically defend themselves.

Net net, Askers have no idea how a Responder is hearing them, and Responders have no idea if what they think they’ve heard is accurate. And the Responder’s brain will automatically seek out whatever existing circuitry corresponds to what it translated – not necessarily the circuit that prompted the original action.

But there’s one more piece: standard, and Why?, questions miss an opportunity to lead folks to their real answers or helpful insight. You see, behaviors and actions are triggered by neural circuits that have been assembled from different parts of our brain and body. There is a specific circuit that prompts an action, and since it’s physiological and unconscious, it’s difficult to get to.

Hence, finding the ‘right’ answer is a brain problem: both a brain problem and a word problem with the right type of question, the brain will find the original circuit that caused the action, and, where there’s a problem, notice an incongruence and either find an accurate answer or handle change itself.

IT’S OUR BRAIN’S FAULT – THE SCIENCE OF WHAT WE HEAR

The issues that make Why? questions less than useful originate in our neural circuits. Brains neither listen accurately nor store information logically. Your question

enters (an ear) as a sound vibration that,
after some deletions,
gets turned into electrochemical (meaningless) signals
that get dispatched to a ‘similar-enough’ neural circuit
where the signals undergo more deletions
before they’re translated into meaning – what we think we hear.

The odds of a listener accurately understanding the intent behind incoming words (or puffs of air, as Neuroscience calls them) are slim. Indeed, brains, lazy as they are, send incoming words/vibrations/ signals to the ‘closest’ circuits (superhighways), offering relatively superficial responses as translations.

It becomes pernicious: our lives are ruled by the way our existing neural circuits translate incoming data. All that we hear, see, feel, notice, etc. is converted into meaning via our existing circuits.

In other words, our lives are restricted, i.e. biased, by what’s already in there that represents our histories, mental models, and beliefs. We don’t even notice things around us that have no neural circuitry to translate!

So if a Why? question is posed according to some criteria not recognized by the Responder, there’s no way to get an accurate answer. And sadly, neither the Asker or the Responder can notice what’s missing: when our brain tells us X was said, we have no reason to question it, even though Y was intended. For those interested in understanding more of how brains translate information and generate new circuits, read my book HOW?.

Sample

Since there’s no way to know exactly how a Responder has translated the Asker’s words into meaning, there’s a chance a Responder will interpret the Why? query beyond the intent of the question and won’t recognize a disparity. (Note: see my book WHAT? Did you really say what I think I heard?)

Sample

To find an accurate answer to any personal question it’s necessary to discover the neural circuit that holds the underlying criteria that triggered the action. But Why? makes it difficult as it sets up an automatic defense: a standard response often begins with “Because…”

ANOTHER FORM OF QUESTION

Given my lifelong dedication to discovering how to make the unconscious conscious, I spent 10 years developing a question that would reach the specific neural circuit in the brain where the correct answer was stored. My personal query: How could a question be posed that would be devoid of bias and lead a Responder to the specific neural circuit to find their own criteria-based answer? Here are a few of the rules I came up with:

A Responder must have maximum access to as much of their unconscious neural set-up as possible. To do this a question must instigate a Witness/Observer/Coach perspective, outside of their automatic, habituated modality to see a broader view with less bias and less attachment to a specific response.
The wording of the question must capture criteria from several existing neural circuits.
The questions must be posed in specific sequences, following the steps of how brains change and decide.
Questions should avoid an Asker’s needs or curiosity, but enable Responders to find the elements within their neural circuitry that triggered their own behaviors.

In other words, I took the personal curiosity out and added in the elements that lead the Responder’s brain to their criteria-based answers.

FACILITATIVE QUESTIONS TO REPLACE ‘WHY?’

Ultimately I invented Facilitative Questions that are worded to prompt Responders into Observer modality, lead them down a specific sequence to specific circuits that hold the underlying beliefs and mental models that triggered their queried actions, then down their steps of discovery. So:

How would you know it were time to reconsider your hairstyle? instead of Why do you wear your hair like that?

Great for coaches to lead clients to permanent change, for sellers to lead prospects through their buying decision journey, for healthcare providers to lead patients through to permanent habit change. No bias.

Since Facilitative Questions take a few weeks to learn to formulate – learning them requires

a discovery of several neural circuit,
a knowledge of the different elements of the question and what’s within each segment,
invoking an Observer mindset/perspective with words,
the sequences involved,
an understanding of how brains are set up to receive/trigger output.

In other words, just hearing a few of them will not provide the knowledge to formulate them. Here is a link to a learning accelerator I offer: Or my book HOW? includes a 100 page chapter on Facilitative Questions.

Whichever you choose, consider using Why? questions for everyday things, like Why are we having spaghetti again tonight? To enable decision making, change, habit formation, or to fix a problem, Why? is not your best question.

__________________

Sharon Drew Morgen July 1st, 2024

Posted In: Communication, News

Imagine being in a strange country where you don’t understand the mores – and aren’t aware you don’t understand them. Say, waiting for scrambled eggs to show up for breakfast in Tel Aviv (They eat salad for breakfast), or saying a friendly “Hi” to young indigenous men in the jungles of Ecuador, wondering why they then followed you in a pack (Looking into a man’s eyes means a woman is ready for sex.).

The events can be interpreted by both cultures. But in the case of Aspies, we’re sort of stuck: you NeuroTypicals (NTs) make the rules. And they are crazy.

DIFFERENT STROKES FOR DIFFERENT FOLKS

As an Aspie, my internal rules, my assumptions, my responses, and my perceptions are different from a NTs. I hear metamessages primarily, content secondarily, and I respond according to what the Speaker intended rather than what (biased) ears interpret. I think in systems and experience the world in patterns of entirety, not segments of sequences.

In other words, my world is comprised of wholes, whereas NTs seem to speak in progressions of thoughts, and I have difficulty understanding meaning without the underlying system included. Without a view of the full picture, I end up making assumptions that can be inaccurate. I wonder if NTs make flawed assumptions also, based on the pieces they perceive or omit.

From my vantage point, NTs – largely thinking in a horizontal world that compares everything against a standard norm – make rules that fit a norm I cannot fathom. Yet somehow, with the majority of humans on the NT scale, there’s agreement that those rules make sense. In my mind, they don’t.

Why should I reply “Fine, thanks. How are you?” when someone asks how I am? It’s a real question that should be answered with how I’m faring, right? If they don’t want to know how I am, why did they ask? And how did it get agreed that a meaningless exchange is an authentic greeting? I’ll never understand.

Why am I labeled inappropriate when I respond to something differently than ‘expected’? Who says NTs are the ones who understand accurately? Maybe my references and responses are the correct way of seeing. Maybe my references and responses are a great ‘add’ to a conversation that expands the scope of the subject.

Why am I the one being too direct? Why aren’t NTs more honest?

Why am I the one who’s deemed too intense? Why are NTs so superficial?

I recently watched my 7 year old friend throw a small toy across the room where his four younger sibs played on the floor. Stop throwing that, said Dad, afraid the little ones might get hurt. My friend again threw the toy. Stop, or I’ll take it away, said Dad. Again, the toy went across the room. Give me that. No more toy.

I said to my young friend, “Your dad was afraid the toy might hurt your brothers and sister. What were you hoping to accomplish by throwing that toy?”

“I wanted to understand how it was spinning.”

“So next time, tell Dad what you want to do and he’ll let you go outside to throw it.” Why didn’t Dad get curious? Why was removing the toy without understanding the reasoning the only option?

THINKING IN SYSTEMS LEADS TO MORE CREATIVITY

My Aspie brain perceives a wholly different culture from the world of NTs, with different expectations, referents, assumptions, thinking systems, rules, and interpretations. My systems thinking and different understanding of what’s happening has enabled me to develop new models for conscious choice, different from the long-held biases and assumptions built into conventional business, personal, and healthcare models. Indeed, I have devoted my life to unraveling, (de)coding, and inventing models for, each step of unconscious systems and brain configurations so everyone can make congruent choices.

I recognized that the sales model merely places solutions, overlooking the Pre-Sales change /risk management issues involved when anyone seeks to resolve a problem but faces the challenges of the status quo. I invented Buying Facilitation® 35 years ago to enable sellers to lead people through the decisions necessary to fix a problem (13 stages), changing the process from a ‘needs’, solution-placing focus to entering first by seeking would-be buyers early in their decision making and facilitating their change/risk management process. (Note: I realized that selling doesn’t cause buying.) Buying Facilitation® closes 8x more sales in 1/8 the time while using values of Servant Leadership.
Because of the way I listen I clearly recognize the gap between what’s said and what’s heard. I developed a road map so people can hear each other without bias and wrote a book on it. Conventional communication specialists continue pushing Active Listening which hears words and overlooks the deletion and distortion problems our brains cause during the listening process.

Sample

People make decisions via their unconscious mental models and habitual neural pathways. Yet influencers merely lead Others to where the influencers think they should look, rather than where in their brains Others hold their own answers. To resolve this – a bias/assumption problem coaches, sellers, doctors, parents, etc. face – I developed a new form of question (Facilitative Questions) that facilitates others through to the neural circuits where their own values-based answers are stored.
I noticed that people seeking to change behaviors and end habits effecting their health had trouble keeping their changes because real change involves generating wholly new synapses/pathways. I’ve successfully trained many thousands of people to change habits and behaviors permanently via discovering, and consciously managing their unconscious brain circuitry.
The training model offers content, assuming that learners will accurately hear, understand, and store the incoming knowledge. Yet the words, information, intent, and goals of the trainer may not match the way a learner’s brain is set up, causing misunderstanding and a lack of retention. I designed Learning Facilitation, an addition to standard training that first generates new circuits to house, retain, and understand the new knowledge.
I noticed how change agents, healthcare providers, coaches and leaders posed biased questions to promote change and modify behaviors but ignored the systems involved in neural circuit change and generation. I developed a way to avoid trying to change behaviors by trying to change behaviors and enable Others to change habits and behaviors permanently, directly from their brains. Healthcare providers and OD change folks continue to assume their leadership will cause habit change and wonder why their clients resist!
Recognizing that current AI models generate content and doesn’t manage personal issues, I am currently developing a FacilitationAI model to generate sequences of user-prompted Facilitative Questions for folks seeking to solve personal problems based on their own criteria.

Thinking in systems has made my life rich and creative. I have the ability to translate, develop models to scale, and write books on, how brains make decisions and how systemic change occurs. And while I’ve trained my models to sales folks and leaders in global corporations for decades with highly successful results, I continue to be judged negatively against the norms of the NT world. One noted neuroscientist said my thinking, my models are not possible, although he never asked what they’re comprised of. Somehow, ‘different’ goes with ‘aberrant’ or ‘eccentric.’

How, I wonder, does the world change unless the outliers like me instigate radical change? You can’t do that from the middle. And if more NTs were willing to be curious, look through a different lens, it wouldn’t take people like me decades to instill productive ideas.

RIGHT VS WRONG

So that brings me to my question: How do Aspies end up being the ones who are wrong or on the wrong side of normal? I’ve been shunned at invitation-only conferences of author-colleagues (when I was the only one with a New York Times bestseller), ignored at parties, thrown out of events (by very, very famous people), not invited to an event every other person at the table was invited to – and invited in front of me, while I was the one person obviously, meticulously, excluded.

Why? Because my ideas, my speaking patterns, are different? Because they challenge the norm? Why isn’t that exciting? Or fun? Or interesting?

Geesh – I show up in nice clothes, I’ve got a respected professional reputation, I speak well, wrote a bunch of books and train global corporations in my original models. So I guess I’m a bit smart. I don’t harm anyone, have a decent personality, am generous and supportive. I’m even funny.

And yet. And yet, I say ‘wrong’ stuff, and tell unseemly stories when my brain references something that others don’t reference. And instead of going ‘Cool Beans!’ ‘That was interesting!’ Or ‘That was weird, SD. Where did your brain go on that?’ My work gets overlooked, although it can make an important difference in several fields – sales, healthcare, coaching, management, leadership. What rules am I breaking that aren’t worthy of curiosity? Or kind acceptance? Or humor? Or excitement?

I heard a comic once ask why men were the ones in the wrong for leaving the toilet seat up. Why wasn’t the woman wrong for leaving it down? Same toilet seat. Up. Down. What makes one wrong?

The good news about Aspies is that we’re often pretty smart. Because we think in systems and can see all aspects of something (NTs think sequentially and miss whole swathes of real data – the reason Aspies often think NTs are dumb.), we often are the innovators, the visionaries, who notice, invent, code stuff decades before academics or scientists. Yet folks like Tesla, and Cezanne die without their work having relevance. I read that the only painting Cezanne ever sold was to Matisse who wanted to study the painting to learn how Cezanne did what he did. Why didn’t others recognize Cezanne was to be learned from rather than derided? Why is the easiest route the one that ignores, avoids, derides?

I was running programs for internal sales folks at Bethlehem Steel. After a year of working successfully with Dan at their Sparrows Point, MD group, I was being handed over to the Burns Harbor MI group. Dan invited the new manager to lunch to meet me as a hand over. We all spoke for a bit of time, and as I got up to go to the restroom, I heard the Burns Harbor manager say to Dan, “Is she always like this??” to which he replied, “Oh yes! And you’ll learn to love her.”

In these days of more openness and a real desire to accept minorities, to communicate and live without bias, maybe it’s time that Aspies are acknowledged as well. Maybe when NTs hear someone say something that’s a bit off the mark, or rattle on about a topic that’s interesting albeit a bit long winded (We get SO excited by our topics!), maybe they can just say, ‘Hm. Sounds like an Aspie. I wonder what I can learn here. I wonder if I can be curious about something new.’ Then we, too, can have a voice. And just maybe we can become a welcome addition, add our two cents, and maybe make the world a better place because of our differences. Just sayin’.

_____________________________________

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 June 24th, 2024

Posted In: Communication, News

Super Question Alexa, Siri, Google, AI, and all programs that answer questions have mechanisms that determine the answers. If you’re like me, you largely assume they’re accurate, without knowing the reference material or checking further.

This sort of assumption is a normal reaction: in our daily lives we regularly pose questions to friends, colleagues, and clients about stuff we’re curious about, and receive responses we don’t check for accuracy or congruence.

But what is it, precisely, we’re assuming? I’d like to take a few moments and delve into the larger idea here: Have you ever wondered what a question actually is?

Conventionally, questions are posed to elicit a response, to gather data from a Responder, like “How many children do you have?” or “Why are you doing that?” Parents and spouses sometimes use questions to point out insufficiencies or annoyances, as in “Didn’t you notice the dishes haven’t been done?”

Sometimes we use them rhetorically to demand fairness in the world, like in “Why is this happening to me??” Sometimes questions are posed to elicit a specific response so the Asker can cause the Responder to admit something, like “Don’t you think there are better ways to do that?” Sometimes questions are deemed ‘closed’, like in, “What time is dinner?” Sometimes they’re ‘open’, like in, “What do you want to eat?”

But there is a unifying feature to all standard questions: they’re biased by the needs, words, and goals of the Asker. More specifically, questions:

are posed according to the curiosity, goals, assumptions, and intent of the Asker;
use words that limit responses to narrow interpretation;
get interpreted uniquely, according to a Responder’s historic, unconscious, world views and mental models;
potentially ignore more important and accurate information.

Of course, most of the time, conventional questions work just fine. How else could we find out how many acres there are at Machu Picchu, or which movie our spouse wants to see?

But I believe we are underutilizing questions. I believe it’s possible for questions to serve a higher purpose – to collect accurate data, of course, but also to help others discover their own answers and path to decision making and change.

What if it were possible to use questions to actually lead people through their unconscious discovery process to uncover their own best answers – without any bias from the Asker?

WHAT QUESTIONS DO

There’s a reason questions don’t necessarily unearth accurate data. Using words uniquely chosen to represent the needs and curiosity – the bias – of the Asker, standard questions extract only a portion of the available responses stored unconsciously in a Responder’s brain. Indeed, standard questions can end up being misunderstood or interpreted badly. There are several reasons for this.

1. 1. Information: because information is elicited as per the requirements of the Asker, a Responder’s real answers may not be captured. The wording, the request, the topic, the intent, the underlying assumptions, and/or the vocabulary may unwittingly offend, confuse, or annoy causing partial or inaccurate responses.
  2. Listening: words and meaning are merely our brain’s interpretations of sound waves that enter our ears through our historic neural pathways, guaranteeing we assign meaning according to our unconscious biases and history. Obviously, we might miss the intent of the question entirely. I wrote an entire book on this (What? Did you really say what I think I heard?). Given these natural biases, it’s likely that what we think we’ve heard is some degree different from the Asker’s intent.

Sample

3. Biased question formulation: Askers use words meant to elicit good data for a specific goal and outcome, but may not obtain the best, accurate, or truthful, responses. Sadly, it’s possible that higher quality answers could have been retrieved with a different wording or intent.

4. Restriction: questions restrict answers to the boundaries of the question. We cannot uncover data we never asked for, even if it’s available. We cannot elicit accurate data if the question is heard differently than intended.

Are you getting the point here? Questions have so many in-built biases, get translated as so mysteriously within a Responder’s brain, that it’s a miracle people communicate at all.

This is especially disturbing in coaching, healthcare, and leadership situations. Well-meaning professionals believe the ‘right’ question will uncover a truth from a Responder. Every coach and leader I’ve met deeply believes in their own knack – ‘intuition’ – for posing the ‘right’ question because they have a history of similar situations.

Yet we all have examples where these assumptions have proven false. Sometimes the Influencer doesn’t trust the Other to have the ‘right’ opinions or ideas; sometimes they pose questions that elicit incorrect data, or worded in a way that unwittingly creates resistance.

Sadly, when Responders share answers that prove unhelpful or inaccurate, Influencers blame them for being non-compliant. And worse, patients end up keeping bad habits, clients end up not making needed changes, buyers end up not getting what they need.

A NEW FORM OF QUESTION

As someone who has thought deeply, and written, about the physiology of change and the neurology of decision making for decades, I began pondering this conundrum in the 1980s. I wondered if questions could be posed with no bias, no ego, no personal needs for a particular solution – only the trust that Others had their own answers and merely had to discover them inside themselves.

What if healthcare professionals asked questions that triggered patients to positive, immediate habit change, or coaches knew the exact questions that enabled new habit formation and behavior generation? What if scientists and consultants could elicit the most accurate information? And imagine if it were possible for questions to help sellers and advertisers actually inspire action to generate Buyer Readiness.

What if a question could be worded in a specific way to act as a GPS to lead a Responder through a sequence in their brain to make it possible to discover the full set of criteria to make a decision from and a permanent change without resistance?

FACILITATIVE QUESTIONS

I’ve invented a new form of question that addresses the above problems. But before I introduce it I’d like you to consider your own willingness to do go beyond your habitual questioning patterns: What would you need to know or believe differently to be willing to add a new skill to your toolkit? Because the hardest bit is to change the mindset of the questioner.

To achieve more consistent, helpful, and permanent results, Askers must begin by changing their criteria from having answers to being facilitators and trust that the Other has their own answers and not assume they possessed the solutions.

I actually thought about this for 10 years as I tried to figure out how words could uncover exactly where in the brain answers reside. I eventually came up with a new form of question I labeled a Facilitative Question. With a goal of helping Others consciously enter their unconscious brains, they use

1. - specific words, in a specific order to go to the most appropriate memory channel to enable discovery without resistance;
  - no bias from an Asker’s curiosity or need;
  - a very specific route to specific memory storage circuits that avoid sparking defense or resistance.

Facilitative Questions (FQs) help Responders uncover their own criteria, beliefs, and mental models to find their own unique answers within their existing neural circuitry – great for permanent behavior change and decision making. With these questions, prospective buyers can be led through change and buying stages; coaching clients can discover their own path to resistance-free change; doctors can elicit behavior change in patients rather than push to try to cause change; and advertisers can trigger interactive responses to normally one-sided push messages.

Conventional questions keep Responders in a very small, idiosyncratic, and personal response range. And while the Asker is most likely attempting to elicit a response, they are out of control. FQs actually define the parameters and give Askers real control.

USES

Here’s a few industries that could benefit from FQs.

1. 1. Healthcare: Intake forms that create an interactive doc/patient experience from the start: What would you need to see from us to know we’re on your team and ready to serve you? [This FQ automatically creates a WE space between patient and provider.] Doctors could lead people to how they’d create new habits for health: What has stopped you from being able to exercise regularly until now? What would you need to know or believe differently to be able to add regular walking to your weekly schedule?
  2. Advertising, for an ad for a Porsche, for example: How would you know when it was time to buy yourself a luxury car? [This FQ makes the ad interactive and gives a reader time to reflect on personal change.]
  3. Sales: What has stopped you until now from resolving your issue using your own resources? [This FQ enables potential buyers to look at how they’ve gone about solving a problem on their own – necessary before realizing they can’t fix the problem themselves and might need to buy something.]
  4. Coaching: What would you need to see or believe differently to be willing to consider new choices in the places where your habitual choices are more limited? [This FQ gives clients an observer viewpoint, thus circumventing blame, to notice old habits/patterns, and limits viewing to the exact historic behaviors that may not be effective.]

These can be used in advertising and marketing campaigns; healthcare apps that sit on top of Behavior Mod apps and facilitate new habit formation; AI where apps or robots need to understand the route to change and decision making. I’ve been teaching it in sales with my Buying Facilitation® model for 40 years and companies such as DuPont teach how to use them with farmers; Senior Partners at KPMG use it with client consulting; Safelight Auto Glass uses it to compete against other distributors; and Kaiser Permanente uses it to engage seniors needed supplemental insurance, to name a few.

If anyone would like to learn the HOW of formulating Facilitative Questions, I developed a primer in a FQ learning accelerator. Or we can work together to develop or test a new initiative. Given how broadly my own clients have used these questions, I’m eager to work with folks who seek to truly serve their client base.

By enabling Others to discover their own unconscious path we not only help them find their own best answers but act as Servant Leaders to decision making.

1. - What would you need to know or believe differently to be willing to add a new questioning technique to your already superb questioning skills?
  - How would you know that adding a new skill set would be worth the time/effort/cost to make you – and your clients – even more successful?

Should you wish to add the ability to use questions as a way to truly serve others, let me know.

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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 27th, 2024

Posted In: Communication

With untold millions of sales professionals in the world, sellers play a role in any economy. As the intermediary between clients and providers, sales can be a spiritual practice, with sellers becoming true facilitators and Servant Leaders (and close more sales).

The current sales model, directed at placing solutions and seeking folks with ‘need’, closes 5% – only those ready to buy at point of contact. Sadly, this ignores the possibility of facilitating and serving the 80% of folks on route to becoming buyers and not yet ready.

Until people have tried, and failed, to fix their problem themselves, understood and managed the risk and disruption that a new solution might cause their environment, they aren’t buyers. It’s only when they:

know how to manage the risk of bringing in something new,
can’t fix the problem themselves,
get buy-in from whomever will touch the final solution,
understand that the cost of bringing in something new is lower than the cost of maintaining the status quo,

will they self-identify as buyers and be ready to buy.

Indeed: buying is a risk/change management problem before it’s a solution choice issue, regardless of the need or the efficacy of the solution. All potential buyers must go through this process anyway – and the sales model doesn’t help.

WHY PEOPLE BUY

People don’t want to buy anything; they merely seek to resolve a problem at the least ‘cost’ (risk) to their system. Even if folks eventually need a seller’s solution, until they understand how to manage the change a new solution would generate, they won’t heed our outreach, regardless of their need or the efficacy of the solution. As a result, sellers with worthwhile solutions end up wasting a helluva lot of time being ignored and rejected.

Selling doesn’t cause buying. Sales focuses on only the final steps of a buying decision and overlooks the high percentage of would-be prospects who WILL become buyers once they’ve addressed their possible risk issues. After all, until they’ve recognized that the risk of the new is less than the risk of staying the same they won’t do anything different.

It’s not the solution being sold that’s the problem, it’s the process of pushing solutions before first helping those who will become buyers facilitate their necessary change process. Instead of a transactional process, sales can be an expansive, collaborative experience between seller and buyer.

Sample

As a result, sellers end up seeking and closing only those ready to buy at the point of contact – unwittingly ignoring others who aren’t ready yet, may need our solutions, and just need to get their ducks in a row before they’re prepared to make a decision.

Imagine having a product-needs discussion about moving an iceberg and discussing only the tip. That’s sales; it doesn’t facilitate the entire range of hidden, unique change issues buyers must consider – having nothing to do with solutions – before they could buy anything. Failure is built in.

But when sellers redirect their focus from seeking folks with ‘need’ to those considering change and lead them through their change management process before selling, they can facilitate them through the issues they must resolve (politics, relationships, resource, budget, time), help them assemble the right stakeholders from the start, and help them figure out how to address the disruption of bringing in a new solution. Then sellers become true servant leaders, inspire trust, and close more sales.

WHY SALES FAILS

Seller’s restricted focus on placing solutions, and listening for needs (which cannot be fully known until the change management process is complete) all but insures a one-sided communication based on the needs of the seller:

Prospecting/cold calling – sellers pose biased questions as an excuse to offer solution details omitting those who will buy – real buyers! – once they’re ready. Wholly seller-centric.
Content marketing – driven by the seller to push the ‘right’ data but really only a push into the unknown and a hope for action. Wholly seller-centric.
Deals, cold-call pushes, negotiation, objection-handling, closing techniques, getting to ‘the’ decision maker, price-reductions – all assuming buyers would buy if they understood their need/the solution/their problem, all overlooking the real connection and service capability of addressing the person’s most pressing change issues. Wholly seller-centric.

To become a spiritual practice, sellers must use their expertise to become true facilitators that become necessary components in all buying decisions. Indeed, the job of ‘sales’ as merely a solution-placement vehicle is short-sighted.

Buyers can find products online. They don’t need sellers to understand the features and benefits.
Choosing a solution isn’t the problem. It’s the time it takes to manage the risk. – it’s the buyer’s behind-the-scenes timing, buy-in from those who will touch the solution, and change management process that gums up the works.
The lion’s share of the buying decision (9 out of a 13 step decision path) involves buyers traversing internal change with no thoughts of buying. They don’t even self-identify as buyers until they understand their risk of change.

Since the 1980s, I’ve been an author, seller, trainer, consultant, and sales coach of the Buying Facilitation® model. And though I’ve trained 100,000 sales professionals, and wrote the NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity, sales continues to be solution-placement driven. By ignoring a large population of potential buyers who merely aren’t ready, sales unwittingly ignores the real problem: it’s in the buying, not the selling.

SERVE PROSPECTS, CLOSE MORE SALES

It’s possible to truly serve clients AND close more sales.

Aspiring to a win-win

Win-win means both sides get what they need. Sellers believe that placing product that resolves a problem offers an automatic win-win. But that’s not wholly accurate. Buying isn’t as simple as choosing a solution. The very last thing people want is to buy anything, regardless of their apparent need.

As outsiders sellers can’t know the tangles of people and policies that hold a problem/need in place. The time it takes them to design a congruent solution that includes buy-in and change management is the length of their sales cycle. Buyers need to do this anyway; it’s the length of the sales cycle.

If sellers begin by finding those on route to buying and help them efficiently traverse their internal struggles, sellers can help them get to the ‘need/purchase’ decision more quickly and be part of the solution – win-win. No more chasing those who will never close; no more turning off those who will eventually seek our solution; no more gathering incomplete data from one person with partial answers.

Sellers can find and enable those who can/should buy to buy in half the time and sell more product – and very quickly know the difference between them and those who can never buy.

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts

There are several pieces to the puzzle here.

The buyer and the environment the prospect lives in, including people, policies, job titles, egos, relationships, politics, layers of management, rules, etc. that no one on the outside will ever understand. It’s never as simple as just changing out the problem for a new product; they will buy only when they’re certain they can’t fix their own problem.
Resolving the problem needs full internal buy-in before being willing to change (i.e. buy) regardless of the efficacy of the fix. A purchase is not necessarily their best solution even if it looks like a fit to a seller.
The ability of the buyer to manage the disruption that a new purchase would incur on the system, people, and policies. A fix, or purchase, might be worse than the problem.
The seller and the seller’s product may/may not fit in the buyer’s environment due to idiosyncratic, political, or rules-based issues, regardless of the need.
The purchase and implementation and follow up that includes buy-in from all who will experience a potentially disruptive change if a new solution enters and shifts their job routines.

There is no right answer

Sellers often believe that buyers are idiots for not making speedy decisions, or for not buying an ‘obvious’ solution. But sales offers no skills to enter earlier with a different skill set to facilitate change or manage risk.

Once buyers figure out their congruent route to change, they won’t have objections, will close themselves, and there’s no competition: sellers facilitate change management first and then sell once everything is in place. No call backs and follow up and ignored calls. And trust is immediate: a seller becomes a necessary partner to the buying decision process.

No one has anyone else’s answer

By adding Buying Facilitation®, collaborative decisions get made that will serve everyone.

Let’s change the focus: instead relegating sales to merely a product/solution placement endeavor, let’s add the job of facilitation to first find people en route to becoming buyers, lead them through to their internal change process first, and then using the sales model when they’ve become buyers.

We can help people self-identify as buyers quickly, with fewer tire-kickers, better differentiation, no competition, and sales close in half the time.

BUYING FACILITATION®

As a seller and an entrepreneur (I founded a tech company in London, Hamburg, and Stuttgart in 1983), I realized that sales ignored the buying decision problem and developed Buying Facilitation® to add to sales as a Pre-Sales tool.

Buyers get to their answers eventually; the time this takes is the length of the sales cycle, and selling doesn’t cause buying. Once I developed this model for my sellers to use, we made their process far more efficient with an 8x increase in sales – a number consistently reproduced against control groups with my global training clients over the following decades.

Buying Facilitation® adds a new capability and level of expertise and becomes a part of the decision process from the first call. Make money and make nice.

Sellers no longer need to lose prospects because they’re not ready, or cognizant of their need. They can become intermediaries between their clients and their companies; use their positions to efficiently help buyers manage internal change congruently, without manipulation; use their time to serve those who WILL buy – and know this on the first contact – and stop wasting time on those who will never buy. It’s time for sellers to use their knowledge and care to serve buyers and their companies in a win-win. Let’s make sales a spiritual practice.

____________

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 13th, 2024

Posted In: Communication, Listening, Sales

Questioning Questions

Are Your Students Hearing You? by Sharon-Drew Morgen

The Noise of Subjectivity: how our personal biases shape and restrict our worlds

How, Why, and When Buyers Buy, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

Making Important Decisions, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

What’s the Cost of Team Miscommunication?

Why? May Be the Wrong Question

How Aspies Think, Why We Do Weird Stuff, and Why We’re Important

Questions: the new superpower, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

Sales as a Spiritual Practice