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

Where does ‘common knowledge’ come from? I began wondering when writing my book on the gap between what’s said and what’s heard. I had thought I was an attentive listener and heard everything perfectly because, well, obviously, we all hear precisely what a speaker shares! Nope. Turns out we only accurately ‘hear’ 10-35% of what’s been said! My goodness! If that bit of common knowledge was wrong, what else was wrong?

With my new awareness I began keeping a list and found many common assumptions that we’ve all perpetuated. I’d like to share some – by no means a complete list – that we take for granted that have been proven untrue or at least face reasonable doubt as fail rates prevail in habit change, weight loss, implementations, selling, coaching, etc.

Sample

WHY NOT USE FAILURE AS A REASON TO CHANGE?

These erroneous norms (below) have been handed down for decades and built into many of our (business) practices. Sadly, due to their ubiquitous nature, they continue without even casting doubt (i.e. false assumptions like ‘people will buy once sellers find prospects with need’ – 95% failure; ‘habits can change permanently with behavior modification’ – 97% failure.).

Why is failure merely built-into the bottom line (hire 9x more sellers, i.e.) rather than changing assumptions? If we realize that change models achieve resistance in almost all projects, and over 70% of project fail, why not do something different and alleviate it by ensuring and managing buy-in before a project commences?

As you read these and find yourself resisting, remember: your assumptions are the norms through which you translate what’s been said and restrict your curiosity, your behaviors, your choices. We are all hampered by their universal repetition and imbedded use, following us into daily life: scientific research, college programs; healthcare, behavior change….

This article will hopefully broaden your world view, inspire further thought, or at least cause you to do some research. Or maybe just make you angry.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Behaviors are standalone events and pop up as needed.

Resistance is a natural element during change.

Selling causes buying.

People don’t consider the risk when making choices.

You can change a behavior with habit change and behavior modification.

People who are homeless got that way through mistakes they’ve made.

A reduced calorie intake maintains weight loss.

Good information will produce a new decision, cause learners to learn, people to buy, and patients to change their behaviors.

Statins are the only way to reduce cholesterol and there are no natural remedies that are more effective (Hint: Red Yeast Rice).

The toilet seat should be down.

I am speaking with the decision maker.

Choice comes from conscious decision making.

Sellers can understand what buyers need; meetings are important to the sales process.

Implementation occurs when clients are given a good solution.

Learning occurs when new information is presented.

Neuroplasticity occurs when the brain experiences new inputs.

Doctors have the answers. We will heal if we follow their suggestions.

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.

The only remedy for a bad, painful hip is a hip replacement.

Agave is healthy. Butter, ice cream, and fats are bad for you. Eggs have too much cholesterol.

Mick Jagger is the leader of the Rolling Stones.

Castor oil makes you healthy.

If we listen intentionally/carefully/attentively, we will accurately understand what’s been said.

Eye blinks are so short they don’t affect our vision.

Everyone interprets specific words the same way.

There’s such a thing as objectively rational.

The role of a coach is to impart knowledge/wisdom.

Leaders understand enough about a problem to set the goal for a project.

We can figure out what’s really going on by noticing behavioral problems.

Mind and Brain are interchangeable.

Our curiosity is infinite.

We can learn and retain new knowledge when we hear it.

Good questions elicit good, accurate answers.

Permanent, resistance-free change is possible when good information is known and practiced.

When we believe/recognize an idea/answer to be a good one, it probably is.

Intuition is not restricted.

People over 70 aren’t horny anymore.

We interpret words according to their meaning.

People will buy when they’ve understood how a specific solution will fix their problem; an appropriate solution will generate a buying decision.

If you hunch over and raise your shoulders you’ll get warm.

Voice bots and virtual receptionists can take care of customers as well as live receptionists.

Memories are accurate renditions of what occurred.

It’s possible to accurately hear what Others say.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

I hope these cliches prompted some thoughts! And for being so supportive and reading this far, here two gems: a present: the amount of time football players actually physically play is 11 minutes; If you add up the time you’re functionally blind when you blink, you’ve been unsighted for 23 minutes a day. SD

__________________________

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 January 23rd, 2026

Posted In: News

Leave a Comment

I wonder why I rarely hear the word Dignity used in business. Not only do we each seek to do work and have relationships that encourage and include dignity, we aspire to promote products and have client connections in ways that maintain the self-worth and self-respect of all.

But I’m certain we could all do a lot more to achieve it. Let me share a personal story that first alerted me to the importance of dignity.

In the 1980s I moved to London to start up a tech company and simultaneously started up a non-profit to support folks with the neurological disease my son suffers from (We just had our 40th year anniversary!). The woman I partnered with (Joan) was a long-time sufferer of the illness and had great difficulty opening her eyelids or lifting her neck. But she worked hard to type notes (just a few typos!) to other sufferers sending resources, and setting up ‘meet and greets’ with doctors and medical schools around the UK where we’d travel to share the latest treatment information.

Every Wednesday night Joan and I went to dinner prior to getting down to work. And every Wednesday night I picked up the check, knowing Joan – age 75 at the time and obviously disabled – was living on state assistance. But one Wednesday as I reached for the check, Joan’s hand came down onto mine.

Joan: I’ll pay tonight.

SD: That’s okay. I’m working and have more available cash than you have.

Joan: I said I’ll pay. I may not have money, but I have dignity. Don’t take away my dignity.

I then realized that by always paying I was taking away her agency, her dignity as an equal partner. Seems it wasn’t about the money at all. In fact, my decision to pay for each meal suddenly seemed like a power thing. How many times had I substituted money and power for dignity?

PROMOTING DIGNITY IN THE WORKPLACE

Dignity is a private, personal consideration we each hold that matches our beliefs about who we are; we gravitate toward people who honor it. Through our personal dignity we show up authentically and remove ourselves from people and situations that threaten it.

In our personal lives we observe the dignity of our friends and family. But I am unaware of this term being applied in the workplace with specific actions that will ensure we provide dignity to those we touch. This article discusses how to impart dignity and what to do to achieve it.

As entrepreneurs and business owners we must

build dignity into our norms, policies, communications and conventions,
make sure we treat each other, our employees and our clients, with respect at meetings, interactions, emails, etc.,
act in ways that respect each other’s self-worth,
minimize the stress our employees feel when being disrespected.

But how do we ‘do’ dignity?

1. Fair pay: I can’t say this strongly enough. Paying people fairly enables them to feel respected and valued, and take care of their families and their health. Without fair pay, the rest of this article is moot.

2. A culture of diversity: Diversity is a word thrown around a lot, but what does it really mean? Sure, it means racial and gender diversity in hiring and advancement practices. But what about neurodivergent folks who get ignored because their ideas don’t seem to fit in? What about folks who think or act differently? Each difference expands possibilities and enables a broader range of ideas and promise.

As someone with Asperger’s and highly out-of-the-box ideas, I spent years being ignored and denigrated when in fact my concepts would have prevented many situations, facilitated successful projects without resistance, and closed a lot more sales. How do we create and maintain a culture of real diversity in which everyone’s voice gets appreciated and no one faces indignity?

3. Transparent communication: Too often management omits making the full data set available, making it impossible to gather the full fact pattern or inspire creativity. Worse, good ideas get dismissed or go unheard and employees end up being disincentivized. The cost is incalculable to companies, employees, and clients: not only does creativity falter, but people lose trust in their employers.

4. Work-life balance: When we expect our folks to work weekends, long hours, lots of overtime, we take away their dignity as human beings, not to mention their time to destress, think, relax so they can return to work invigorated and creative. We not only harm them, we harm our own productivity and success.

If there’s a frequent problem causing staff to work excessive hours, it becomes a stress/health issue. We need to either hire additional staff or allow the problem a lengthier solution process that doesn’t require employees to regularly give up their private time.

When we exploit our employee’s dignity, we cause folks to go home crying, face sleepless nights, feel disrespected. I know this from the countless interviews I’ve had with unhappy employees: They may not tell us, but their work will fall off and eventually they’ll leave for a job that will respect them.

Sample

PROMOTING DIGNITY WITH CLIENTS

Promoting dignity must extend to clients and customers. Here are a few factors to consider:

Communication: Too often we fail to let our clients and customers know if there’s a problem from our end: delivery/time issues; delivering the solutions promised with the same people they’ve become accustomed to. When I ran my tech support company, I checked in with each client for 15 minutes every month. That went a long way to resolving brewing issues. And when some companies find a flaw in their product or service, it’s vital they formally announce the issue and resolution so clients aren’t left in the dark.
Value our promises: As per above, our clients and customers must be notified if there are disruptions in service or quality. It’s respectful and maintains the dignity of our promise as suppliers.
Respect clients/customers as partners: There are plenty of other providers our clients/customers can go to when/if they feel we’re not respecting them. In other words, no overly long hold times; delivery as promised; follow up to ensure quality as promised; no pushy sales practices.

Remember: without addressing and maintaining our client’s dignity, we wouldn’t even be in business.

DIGNITY IS A PRIMARY BUSINESS PRACTICE

It’s necessary to add dignity as a necessary element for creating and maintaining integrous business practices for our staff and customer base. Here are some Facilitative Questions™ to help you think through any changes you might need to make and inspire compliance:

How will you know when/if your current business practices need upgrading?
What criteria will you and your team need to meet to decide on what practices might need improvement?
What skills/tools will you use to let your clients/customers know of changes or problems, to insure your communication enhances their dignity?
What skills/tools do you and your team need to learn to ensure you consider Dignity as a standard business practice?

Should you wish to enhance your skill set to include Dignity in your staff training as a soft skill, marketing, promotions, decision making practices and projects, please contact me to discuss: sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

______________

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 January 5th, 2026

Posted In: News

Have you ever wondered why folks who get trained don’t retain the new knowledge? According to Harvard studies, there’s a 90% failure-to-retain in instructor-led classrooms. Surely students want to learn, trainers are dedicated professionals, and the content is important. But the problem goes beyond the students, the motivation, the trainer, or the material being trained.

I suggest it’s a brain change issue: current training models, while certainly dedicated to imparting knowledge in creative, constructive, and tested ways, may not develop the necessary neural circuitry for Learners to fully comprehend, retain, or retrieve the new information. You see, learners may not naturally have the proper pathways to understand or retain the new knowledge.

The primary problem is how brains ‘hear’. Due to the nature of how brains handle incoming words (puffs of air that face distortions and deletions before being translated by neural circuits to meaning), an instructor’s content may be mistranslated, misunderstood, or misappropriated. Certainly there is no way to retain it as intended unless the learner has precise circuitry that matches the instructor’s content.

Trainers assume their content will be heard accurately. But it’s not, due to the automatic, habituated, physiological, neurological, electrochemical, biological set up of how brains listen. But it can be mitigated by helping students generate new circuits specifically for the new knowledge.

For those interested in learning how brains ‘listen’, my book WHAT? explains it all (with lots of funny stories and learning exercises) and offers workarounds.

Sample

As an original thinker who’s been inventing systemic brain change models for decades, I’ve developed a Learning Facilitation™ model that first trains the brain before presenting the core content.

When training begins by first generating new neural circuits, students can accurately translate, understand and retain the new knowledge and avoid any misunderstanding or failure-to-retain.

I presented my Learning Facilitation™ model at the Learning Ideas Conference in June 2024. Here is a link to the full one-hour presentation. Enjoy.

If you have questions, please get in touch: sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

____________________

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 22nd, 2025

Posted In: Communication, News

A friend of mine delivers leadership training in police departments. On the first morning he has the partners dance with each other, taking turns for an hour at a time as Leader and Follower. As most of them are men, they start off very uncomfortable when they must be the ‘follower’. But follow they must; he tells them if they can’t follow, they can’t lead.

As Leaders with specific goals we’re responsible for, we operate from the assumption we’re in charge. But what, exactly, are we in charge of? I believe our job as Leaders is to be the sentries, to facilitate our Followers to discover their best outcomes and help them set a path to a successful goal. But to do so we must experience the issues our Followers are experiencing. As they say in Argentine Tango, if you notice the leader, he’s not doing his job.

WHAT IS OUR JOB

The most commonly accepted job of Leaders is to begin with a plan to achieve an outcome, and then work at creating and driving the path to execute it. But this strategy faces several problems:

We have no way of knowing beforehand if it could succeed.
If we don’t gather ideas from everyone, we can’t know if we have the full fact pattern, or if any of the Follower’s ideas would make the outcome even better.
Advocating our own ideas, with our own beliefs and assumptions, we have no way of knowing how our Followers will interpret our plan given their beliefs, experiences and assumptions, or how our suggestions would match their system, their culture, their norms.
We can’t know the perceived risks our Followers face.
We run the risk of pushback and resistance when we work from our own ideas and try to get buy-in from folks who will touch the final solution but haven’t been included in the planning.

Even with an aim to be inclusive, we too often try to persuade Follwers to adopt the path we imagine. Due to the unknown risks to those involved with executing the solution, this outside-in approach might yield resistance at best; at worst, it not only restricts the full range of possible outcomes, but runs the risk of causing resistance, hostility and sabotage.

LEADING AND FOLLOWING ARE INTERDEPENDENT

During the 2020 election I heard Presidential Candidate and Senator Amy Klobuchar say: “I haven’t gone on TV for interviews much before now. But my team told me I needed the exposure. So here I am.” Obviously, she’s the Leader AND the Follower.

When Leaders rely on their own assumptions, ideas, and expertise, to generate client solutions, it’s difficult to achieve an optimal result: until Followers are included in developing their own vision from the start using their ideas, knowledge, values and voices; until the group works collaboratively to develop creative outcomes that they can all buy into, the outcome will be restricted and potentially not implemented.

So here’s the question: do you want to facilitate Followers through a route through to their own best result? Or drive the path to the result you’ve imagined? You can’t do both.

What would you need to believe differently to trust you can achieve the best outcome if it’s driven by the Followers?
What is a Leader’s role if the Followers are in charge of the route to a successful outcome?

I believe that leading and following are two sides of the same coin. And I believe it must be not only an interdependent process, but a systemic one based on the foundational norms, beliefs, and history of the Follower’s system.

CONTROL

I once trained a group of executive Leaders at a company with a reputation of having values. They were the most manipulative group I’ve ever trained. Getting them to consider any form of leadership that didn’t involve them having total control was a herculean task. Seeing my frustration one of them said: “But our message is values-based. Of COURSE it’s our job to convince them to do it our way! It’s the RIGHT way.” Having a great outcome does not give license to push our agendas to get it done OUR way.

I suggest that Leaders must help Others discover their own goals and facilitate them through to execution.

But to do so requires we give up our egos, our needs for control, our perceived value of being ‘right’, of being The One to exert power and influence. We obviously need to have some sort of control given we’ve got a job to do. But control over what?

To work collaboratively with Followers to formulate a goal, help define their process of getting there, then oversee the 13 steps of change that result in implementation, a Leader

leads Followers through their risks of change,
controls the space that enables all voices to be heard, giving rise to a complete data set, creativity, buy-in, collaboration, and mutual responsibility for planning and delivery;
leads the group through forming, failure, discovery and confusion, trials and success;
guides the group through the route they designed and helps them maintain equilibrium.

Here I’m reminded of another great Argentine Tango expression: The Leader opens the door; the Follower dances through using her own unique steps; the leader follows.

STRUCTURE VS CONTENT; CONTEXT VS COMPONENTS

I contend that as Leaders we must assure results and hand over the behavior changes, the goal setting, the risk management, the buy-in, the creation of new rules and norms to the Followers.

Let’s look at the two components, the goal and the route, from a systems perspective.

Sample

If leading a team through an initiative to enhance customer service, for example, the Leader is responsible for ending up with happier customers and supervising the journey to get there, while the Followers are responsible for

the route taken to get there,
the choice of the components of the new services,
what these services will do, the planning during the change and ultimate buy-in, and the rules that will maintain them,
ensuring buy-in and collaboration from the team,
what each team member will do,
how it will be delivered.

Unfortunately, leaders too often try to control both the goal and the journey. But I suggest we separate the functions. When Followers control the journey they create a collaboration amongst themselves, develop behaviors and outcomes, understand and manage their risks, and take ownership of the journey to success. The Leader then maintains what the Followers created.

STARTING UP A COMPANY AS A LEADER/FOLLOWER

I’d like to share a story of my own journey as an entrepreneur of a tech start up in London in 1983. I began with no knowledge of business and even less of technology (Those were early days, remember?). I was smart enough to know my range of content knowledge – nil. So I wrote an outline of what I wanted to achieve:

a company that would take great care of the needs of customers in the area of 4^th Generation Languages (Really early days!) with integrity, honesty, and win/win values;
be seen as a premier provider by charging high prices and great service expertise;
hire folks who will create out-of-the-box services that enhance what’s considered possible.
have staff be as happy and cared for as clients;
make money and have fun.

That was my goal. I had no idea what data I needed or what the journey would be. I did my best to research, speak with people, read a few books. Then I realized that it would be best if I hired good people who designed their own jobs.

My hiring process included asking applicants to bring in a P&L that included their salary and their vision of how they’d do the job. I hired those with the most creative ideas, and we ended up providing very unique and customer-driven programming, training, and consulting services, making us the most innovative company in our market.

The applicant for the job of receptionist was quite creative. Ann Marie wanted a small salary and a percentage of the gross income. For this, she would make sure the company ran efficiently and staff and clients would be thoroughly taken care of to the point they wouldn’t want to go anywhere else. Wow. I hired her. And she did exactly what she said.

She made us write these daily TOADs – I don’t remember what the acronym stood for…something like Take what you want And Destroy the rest… but it took us an extra hour each night to write them up (No computers in daily use in the early 80s, remember?). Each morning we had to read the full set of everyone’s TOADS on our desks when we arrived. They involved current initiatives, our frustrations, any good/bad issues with clients and prospects, any good/bad issues we had with each other.

As a result, all of us knew ‘everything’. If a phone would ring and the person wasn’t there to answer, anyone could answer it and be able to help. As the receptionist, Ann Marie would make every caller feel cared for and comfortable. Office squabbles and gossip didn’t have a way to fester. Team members became familiar with problems faced by colleagues and came up with creative solutions. We had the knowledge to introduce clients to each other for follow-on partnerships.

Frankly, Ann Marie terrified me. Tall, officious, unsmiling, we all did what she told us to do (Talk about leaders!). And she walked away with pockets full of money as she helped the business double each year.

I hired John as a ‘Make Nice Guy’ to bridge the divide between technical and people skills. He wanted a $100,000 salary (in 1985!) to make sure techies, their code, and how our contractors maintained relationships with the teams they worked with, all ran smoothly. That was a no brainer. And another role I hadn’t known I needed to hire for.

With John taking care of all outside stuff, I had no fires, no problems, no crashes, no personality issues, no client problems, and I could grow my business. He even found out when a client was buying new software that we could support well before it arrived on site; when the vendor came to install it, my folks were there waiting, well before the vendor tried to sell their services.

The team worked hard to get me to say “We’re doing WHAT??” I was once walking down the hall and ran into my Training Manager. When I asked where he’d been hiding since I hadn’t seen him in days, he told me he was busy scouting out extra office space for the new training programs being developed. “We’re doing WHAT??”

And fill the seats he did, bringing in new clients and new programs. Including me as a trainer. Apparently, the team believed I supervised techies so well as a non-techie that I should teach other non-techie managers how to supervise their techie staff. I would never have thought of that myself. So they got me to run monthly programs which were always packed.

As part of my commitment to creativity and growth, I told the management team to take risks but to let me know if a disaster was imminent at least three feet before they fell off the edge (If they waited until they were already off the cliff there wouldn’t be a thing I could do but wave). And they did. As a result they took risks, created out-of-the-box programs, processes, and initiatives that I could never have dreamed of. And they mostly got it right.

By setting a tone of authenticity, I regularly discussed my failures and got input from the team as to how to make things better. This obviously opened the door for us all to discuss failures as part of our job. Also by maintaining control of the values and integrity of communication and relationships, by trusting the staff and enabling them to be Leaders and innovators, I was able to double the company income every year.

As a start-up in a new field, with no computers, no internet, no email, no websites, we had a $5,000,000 revenue (and 42% net profit) within four years. Everyone made money, loved coming to work, and grew individually. We controlled 11% of the market (the other 26 competitors shared the other 89%), had loads of fun, and we changed the landscape of what was possible.

TRUST

I could never, ever have been that successful if I hadn’t trusted my Followers to create their jobs in a way that met my values. I controlled the goal. They controlled the journey. Win/win. Interdependent. Trust. Respect. Their joke was that they were the ones with the brains, and I was the one with the mouth. Cool beans. I opened the door, they danced through it, and I followed.

Leadership is an interdependent process with Followers and Leaders working together from the inside and outside simultaneously to inspire trust and reach the best possible outcome. Here are the givens:

The process is always transforming and dynamic, rendering pockets of success, confusion and failure, creativity;
There’s no way to know until the end what the trip will include so it’s necessary to build in trust, collaboration, and openness;
The result will be what everyone wants. The process of getting there will be different from what the Leader envisaged;
The process will proceed according to the values, creativity, and needs of the Followers;
The Leader will be respected so long as s/he uses her/his power to shepherd the process;
Failure is part of the process and can be used to inspire creativity;
Resistance will be visible early and managed by group with no fallout;
The result will be the best amalgam of everyone involved bringing their values and hearts.

A real Leader enables their Followers to operate interdependently, using their own values, their own creativity, their own vision. As Leaders we must stop trying to exert influence over the entire process and begin trusting Followers to lead us.

For companies seeking additional training to enable their Leaders to facilitate true change, please let me know. I’ve developed ways to listen and question that avert bias and indeed facilitate transformation and expanded possibility. Sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

____________________________

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, https://sharondrew1.substack.com/, and https://medium.com/@sharondrew_9898/. She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.

Sharon Drew Morgen November 10th, 2025

Posted In: News

During my decades running training programs in companies, I’ve run across a fair share of coaches, consultants, and fields of study that believe the client is responsible for implementing their solution suggestions regardless of whether they’re prepared to execute or not. As a result, clients aren’t always able to apply the solutions offered.

I believe clients pay practitioners to solve a problem, not merely provide the components of a solution. But any solution suggestions have a good chance of being resisted, regardless of how necessary or suitable they are, if clients aren’t change-ready at the start of a project.

In this paper I’ll describe the elements involved in facilitating Change Readiness. For a more detailed discussion, read my book HOW?.

WHAT/WHY CANNOT RESOLVE A PROBLEM

Standard change models are tactical, giving practitioners the job of creating solutions by:

‘understanding’ a problem by gathering ‘good’ data (too often from only a subset of the stakeholders needed to fully represent the problem);
attempting to obtain buy-in (often from folks not involved in goal setting or change management);
developing and delivering a solution (to groups often not change-ready).

But these points face obstacles because…

Questions: Questions are biased by the needs, words, intent, and verbiage of the questioner. As such they may gather specious, incomplete information making ‘understanding’ difficult, risk a possibility, and leading to flawed or incomplete suggestions.
Listening: we can only accurately understand 10-35% of what a speaker is saying due to the way brains delete and distort incoming content. In other words, neither Speaker nor Listener are able to hear each other accurately leading to false assumptions and inaccurate data gathering.
Baseline Assumptions: current models in coaching, leadership, System Dynamics, and sales believe the practitioner is the one that ‘needs to know’. But because of the biases involved, this leads to flawed data gathering, suggestions based on a practitioner’s assumptions, and resistance.

…and make the following assumptions:

The right questions are posed to the right people without bias;
The full set of correct data is extracted and accurately assessed;
Good information will trigger behavior change;
Outsiders (consultants, practitioners, coaches, leaders) are the ones responsible for understanding the facts underlying client change;
The correct assumptions are made and generate the right solutions;
Buy-in can be achieved and resistance can be avoided via ‘good’, ‘rational’ data and leadership;
Clients are change-ready at the start of a project so they can utilize the suggested solutions.

Lots of assumptions and biases, making it difficult, if not impossible, for outsiders to fully understand what’s really going on or generate appropriate solutions. The sticking point is the difficulty for either practitioners or clients to understand or fix a problem given its origination point is largely unconscious and can only be unwrapped at the source.

Permanent change is systemic: trying to fix a problem by focusing on changing behaviors creates resistance because making changes without buy-in; without matching the goals, norms and beliefs of the originating system; and without an execution plan that the full complement of stakeholders have agreed to puts the underlying system at risk.

WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR LEADING CHANGE?

Given the complexity and unconscious unknowns, a problem is hard for anyone to resolve, certainly an outsider using a content- and problem-focused approach (WHAT/WHY).

Certainly, external practitioners get hired to facilitate problem solving and change. But that doesn’t mean doing it for them or trying to lead them to a solution the practitioner culls from their flawed assumptions and data gathering.

When practitioners (coaches, System Dynamics practitioners, OD consultants, sellers, etc.) try to understand a problem or develop solutions, they’re using their own biases that take away the client’s agency – disrespecting their ability to generate their own solutions based on their own norms. Not to mention, as per Einstein, all change must emanate from the system that generated the problem.

I believe it’s a practitioner’s job to facilitate clients to generate their own solutions. But this requires listening without bias, formulating brain-directional (not information gathering) questions, and a goal to lead clients to where in their unconscious system the problem was generated and maintained.

With the goal to facilitate discovery and congruent systemic change, practitioners can help clients get to the system that expressed the problem, make the appropriate modifications to achieve the outcomes they desire, and become change-ready… not merely do things differently. I call this process Change Facilitation, and it’s a HOW.

Sample

To understand Change Facilitation, it’s necessary to view change as systemic. We forget that problems are merely the expressions of the flawed system that expressed them, not isolated events.

Trying to change just the output – the problematic activity, the behaviors – causes the system to be at risk and will trigger resistance, regardless of the efficacy of the proposed solution.

CHANGE IS A ‘HOW’ DRIVEN BY SYSTEMS

Since you can’t change a behavior by trying to change a behavior, any solution must not only reconfigure the norms, beliefs, and rules of the system that triggered the problem but get buy-in from the stakeholders who will touch the solution and who must understand/accept the risks of change.

In other words, starting by attempting to gather information or ‘understand’ a problem cannot get to the full set of systemic, and largely unconscious, elements that triggered the faulty outputs.

It’s much more successful and congruent to first enable clients to get to their own unconscious triggers and help them generate new outputs that will fit congruently within their system. Unless

a client is set up for change;
a suggested change matches the core beliefs and identity of the prevalent system;
everyone involved has been included in goal setting and change management iterations;
everyone involved understands and agrees to the risks of making changes;

the underlying system will feel violated and resist any change suggestions.

CHANGE READINESS

Before any information gathering or solution design, I suggest practitioners first ascertain the client’s level of Change Readiness. If they’re not change-ready, practitioners must begin a project by facilitating the client to

get agreement from representations of all stakeholders on the goals, rules, beliefs, and values (the structure of the system) before any change practices take place;
understand the risk of change before they agree to it;
identify new goals and underlying values to be met;
develop solutions from ideas and buy-in from all who will touch it;
generate a plan to regularly evaluate the change once implemented with a multidisciplinary team to assess and offer suggestions through time.

This ensures accuracy of problem definition, buy-in, implementation, and avoids resistance. Concurrently all clients/ customers must add ‘Full Implementation’ as deliverables to their contracts.

Facilitating Change Readiness requires different types of questions and unbiased listening. Using systems thinking, Gregory Bateson’s Logical Levels, NeuroLinguistic Programming (NLP), the System Dynamic work of Dana Meadows’ 1-5 Leverage Points, and systemic tools I’ve spent decades inventing – Facilitative Questions™, Systems Listening, the 13 Steps of Change, Implementation Facilitation, Buying Facilitation® – it’s possible to enable Change Readiness.

KPMG CASE STUDY

When working with KPMG years ago, they received their first RFP from a global multinational who had been known to work with now-defunct consulting group Arthur Anderson (AA). My clients began developing their proposal – in those days a million dollar ‘dog and pony’ show – with excitement. Finally! They were going to get this company’s business. But what’s stopping them from using AA again? I asked.

My client Dave called them and asked. Their response: “We are going to use AA again, but we needed a second bid.” Oops!

When Dave sent me the RFP I noticed none of the HOWs were included – just data points of what they wanted to achieve without including pre-change work, stakeholder buy-in, or risk management. I wrote a letter for KPMG to send to the prospect, explaining that since they were going to use AA anyway they didn’t need a proposal from ‘us’ (KPMG) but we’d offer them points that we found missing in the RFP that had to be included to fully resolve their problem.

I then wrote up two pages of Facilitative Questions™ that would lead them through Change Readiness. Dave sent the packet and heard nothing for 6 weeks. He then got a call from his prospect who said that the Facilitative Questions™ made them realize they had prework to do that AA hadn’t addressed. They hired KPMG for the multimillion dollar job – with no proposal.

CONCLUSION

When the goal of practitioners is to facilitate behavior-based change, and clients aren’t change-ready, suggestions won’t be executed regardless of their efficacy.

For real change, and before trying to understand a problem or design a new solution, help clients facilitate Change Readiness so they’re prepared to implement your solution without resistance.

Once they’ve managed the systems issues – the full set of stakeholders are identified and involved, the risk is agreeable, and they gotten buy-in for change – it’s then time to gather information (it will be accurate!), pitch your ideas (based on what you now know about the client’s needs and ability to accept) and generate a new solution based on their system. Obviously there won’t be any resistance as all will have been included and the system will not be at risk.

If you’re interested in learning Implementation Facilitation to help clients with Change Readiness before you begin your project, please contact me: sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

_________________________

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, https://sharondrew1.substack.com/, and https://medium.com/@sharondrew_9898/. She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.

Sharon Drew Morgen November 3rd, 2025

Posted In: News

This is Part 2 of an essay on curiosity. Part 1 published 10/20 discusses how we’re set up to only notice what we’ve noticed before, obviously restricting our curiosity.

WHY ARE WE CURIOUS?

There are several different reasons for curiosity. I’ve included questions under each category to help you consider each:

Need to know something we don’t know. Sometimes we need to know something we have no, or skimpy, knowledge about. How do we know the difference between the ‘right’ or the ‘wrong’ answer? How do we know the most effective resources? How do we pose our query to lead to the broadest range of answers? How do we know that what our brain translates for us is an accurate rendition of new content?
Desire to expand current knowledge. We need more data than we possess. How will we recognize when the available, additional data is the appropriate data set? How do we pose an inquiry that offers the broadest range of relevant knowledge? How can we keep from resisting new data if it runs counter to our long-held beliefs (given that new data gets compared against our existing, unconscious judgments)? How can we be certain that we will accurately understand new content?
Achieving a goal. We’re missing data to achieve a goal. How can we know the extent of what we’re missing, or know to accept new content if our existing data has been our go-to knowledge and it now might be incomplete?
Interest in another person’s knowledge. We suspect someone has knowledge we need, but don’t know how to judge what might be accurate. How can we adopt/adapt new content so we can avoid internal resistance, so we ensure what we think we’ve heard is an accurate portrayal of what was said? How can we language our inquiry to avoid limiting any possibilities?
Complete internal reference points. Influencers (coaches, leaders, consultants, sellers) seek to understand the Other’s Status Quo to formulate action points. How can we know if our ‘intuition’ (biased judgment) is broad enough to encompass all possibilities – and be able to go beyond it when necessary – to match the Other’s mental models and existing/historic brain circuits? How can we know for certain that what was said to them was understood accurately?
Comparator. We want to know if our current knowledge is accurate, or we’re ‘right’. But we unconsciously compare our query and hear responses against our subjective experiences, running the risk of acquiring partial knowledge, misunderstanding what was said, or blocking important data.

Unfortunately, it’s pretty impossible to seek, find, or receive what we don’t know what we don’t know. When we hear content that doesn’t fit our existing circuitry – regardless of the efficacy of the information – we face:

Resistance: By the time we’re adults, our subjective beliefs are pretty much built in and determine how we organize our worlds. When we hear something that goes against our beliefs – whether or not it’s accurate, conscious, or unconscious – we resist. That means new knowledge will be accepted in relation to what we already know and believe, potentially omitting important data and making real change difficult.
Restricting data: What we’re curious about is automatically biased, mistranslated, and limited by our subjective experience, ego needs, history, and current data set. We have no way to know if we accurately understand what’s been said, or if we’re posing our search query in a way that will include the full range of possible answers.
Restricting knowledge. Because our subjectivity limits the acceptance of new knowledge to what fits with our current knowledge (we’re only curious about stuff that is tangential to current knowledge), our brains automatically defend against anything that threatens what we know. So we unconsciously choose answers according to comfort or habit rather than according to accuracy or need.
Intuitive ‘Red Flag’. When our egos and professional identity are curious about something we have assumptions and expectations about, we limit possibility by our unconscious biases. How do we know if there aren’t a broader range of solutions that we’re not noticing or eliciting?

If you’re interested in learning how to consciously generate wholly new circuits to permanently change habits and behaviors I’ve developed a How of Change™ program. Here’s a one-hour sample video.

HOW TO EXPAND YOUR CURIOSITY

In order to broaden our curiosity and allow our unconscious to accept the full data set available, we must evolve beyond our biases. Here’s how to have a full range of choice:

Frame the query: Create a generic series of questions to pose for yourself about your curiosity. Ask yourself:

- how you’ll know your tolerance for non-expected, surprising answers,
- what a full range of knowledge could include,
- if your answers need to be within the range of what you already know or something wildly different,
- if you’re willing/able to put aside your ‘intuition’, bias, and annoyance and seek and consider all possible answers regardless of comfort,
- if you need to stay within a specific set of criteria and what the consequences are if you don’t.

2. Frame the parameters: Do some Google research. Before spending time accumulating data, recognize the parameters of possibility whether or not they match your comfortable criteria.

3. Recognize your foundational beliefs: Understand what you believe to be true, and consider how important it is for you to maintain that data set regardless of potentially conflicting, new information.

4. Be willing to change: Understand your willingness to adopt challenging data if it doesn’t fit within your current data set or beliefs.

5. Make your unconscious conscious: Put your conscious mind onto the ceiling and look down on yourself from the Observer/Witness/meta position. This provides neutral data, sams your biases and resistence.

6. Listen analytically: Listen to your self-talk. Compare it with the questions above. Note restrictions and decide if they can be overlooked. And recognizing your brain may play tricks on you, be sure to ask if what you think you heard and learned is accurate.

7. Analyze: Should you shift your parameters? Search options? What do you need to shift internally?

Curiosity effects every element of our lives. It can enhance, or restrict, growth, change, and professional skills. It limits and expands health, relationships, lifestyles and relationships. Without challenging our curiosity or intuition, we limit ourselves to maintaining our current assumptions.

What do you need to believe differently to be willing to forego comfort and ego-identity for the pursuit of the broadest range of possible answers? How will you know when, specifically, it would be important to have greater choice? We’ll never have all the answers, but we certainly can expand our choices.

If you’d like some coaching on how to use your conscious mind to get into your unconscious neural circuits, I’d love to help. sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

_______________

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, https://sharondrew1.substack.com/, and https://medium.com/@sharondrew_9898/. She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.

Sharon Drew Morgen October 27th, 2025

Posted In: News

A few years ago I had an incident that illustrated the restrictions of my own curiosity. I’d begun attending life drawing classes as an exercise to broaden my observation skills. In one session I had a horrific time trying to draw a model’s shoulder. I asked the man next to me – a real artist – for help. Here was our conversation:

SDM: Hey, Ron. Can you help me please? Can you tell me how to think about drawing his shoulder?

Ron: Sure. Let’s see…. So what is it about your current sketch that you like?

SDM: Nothing.

Ron: If I put a gun to your head, what part would you like?

SDM: Nothing.

Ron: You’ve done a great job here, on his lower leg. Good line. Good proportion. That means you know how to do a lot of what you need on the shoulder.

SDM: I do? I didn’t know what I was doing. So how can I duplicate what I did unconsciously? I’m having an eye-hand-translation problem.

Ron: Let’s figure out how you drew that leg. Then we’ll break that down to mini actions, and see what you can use from what you already know. And I’ll teach you whatever you’re missing.

Ron’s brand of curiosity enabled me to make some unconscious skills conscious, and add new expertise where I was missing it in places I wouldn’t have looked. His curiosity had different biases from mine. He:

entered our discussion assuming I already had all of the answers I needed;
only added information specifically where I was missing some;
helped me find my own answers and be available to add knowledge in the exact place I was missing it.

My own curiosity would have gotten me nowhere. Here was my internal dialogue:

How the hell do I draw a twisted shoulder? This sucks. Is this an eye/hand problem? Should I be looking differently? I need an anatomy class. Should I be holding my charcoal differently? Is it too big a piece? I can’t see a shadow near his shoulder. Should I put in a false shadow to help me get the proportions right?

Ron’s curiosity – based on me already possessing the skills I needed – opened a wide range of possibilities for me. I never, ever would have found that solution on my own because my automatic assumptions would have limited my curiosity to little more than an extension of my current knowledge and beliefs.

WHAT IS CURIOSITY?

Curiosity is a good thing, right? As you can see from my story, it’s far more restricted than we imagine it would be. But what is it? Wikipedia defines curiosity thus: a quality related to inquisitive thinking such as exploration, investigation, and learning, evident by observation in human and animal species.

What, exactly, does this mean? What’s ‘inquisitive thinking’? Does it matter that everyone’s inquisitiveness is subjective, unique, and limited by their biases? ‘Evident by observation’? Evident to whom? And by what/whose standards? And ‘observation’? Really?

In this article, I’ll explore what stops us from being curious (and why it’s so difficult to recognize or learn from the data we find), offer loads of questions that will take you beyond assumptions, and steps to follow to enhance our curiosity.

Sample

IT’S A BRAIN THING

We all see, hear, feel the world through our subjectivity. Our assumptions, what we notice, what we’re curious about, is largely automatic mostly outside our control. Even worse, adding new ideas when we seek out answers to what we’re curious about is not so simple as, well, adding new ideas; it’s a listening problem and a brain problem.

Listening: It’s hard for us to take in new information when it goes against what we take for granted. Because of the way our brain filters incoming words, we end up (unwittingly) restricting what we think we hear Others say according to our own beliefs and history, i.e. subjectively. As a result we may not readily accept new ideas that are different from what we currently believe because we ‘hear’ them through our own biases, even if they offer relevant data on what we’re curious about.

Neural Circuits (brains): We can only be as curious as our existing neural circuits allow. Said another way our curiosity is restricted to what we have stored in memory, and we can’t notice, think, etc. anything we don’t have representative circuitry for. Try as we might, our subjectivity rules our lives.

Since our exploration involves some unconscious ‘givens’, here are some questions to inspire a broader curiosity:

How can we know that the information we retrieve is accurate, complete, or the most useful data available?
Can we be certain that our data gathering was sufficiently broad?
How do we know that a new piece of learning is important, even though it feels uncomfortable and we want to dismiss it?
Can we supersede our biases that we judge all incoming data against?

Hence, I pose the question: can we really ever be entirely curious?

Part 2 will be published next Monday, 10/27/25. It explains how we’re curious and offers suggestions to enhance our curiosity.

_________________

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, https://sharondrew1.substack.com/, and https://medium.com/@sharondrew_9898/. She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.

Sharon Drew Morgen October 20th, 2025

Posted In: News

Problems are incongruent behaviors that have arisen from the system that triggered them. To solve problems permanently and without resistance it’s necessary to take corrective measures at the source, in the neural circuits where the problem was initiated. Unfortunately, we attempt to solve them by trying to change the incongruent behavior.

Until now, behavior change has been the preferred approach to problem solving. Folks trying to effect change in others – coaches, leaders, managers, sellers, docs – pose the ‘right’ questions and listen attentively to better understand the problem, assuming once they understand they’ll lead the Other to their answers.

But questions aren’t what they seem, and brains cause deficient listening, causing a fail rate for behavior change at over 90%:

Questions: Standard questions are biased by the words, phrasing, goals, assumptions, and needs of the Asker. As such they may not obtain ‘good’ or complete information. This problem is compounded by brains that can’t ‘listen’, making it likely that neither Speaker or Listener accurately understand each other.
Listening: Sadly, there’s only a 10-35% chance we accurately hear each other. The way brains listen is filled with distortions and deletions causing misunderstandings, mistranslations, and false assumptions. (My book WHAT? explains this). I know we all assume that listeners accurately hear what we say. They cannot, even when we attempt to speak in ways we’ll get heard.
Curiosity/understanding: We can only be curious about what we notice or think – both of which are restricted by what we already know. All that we think, hear, see, feel, know is triggered from neural circuits in our brain. There’s no way to notice anything unless it’s already there, making it impossible to be curious about anything that our brains don’t recognize. In other words, even our curiosity is biased.
Risk: for some reason, influencers and change agents forget to factor in risk. If the risk of change is greater than the risk of staying the same, no change will take place. Obviously an outsider can never understand another person’s risk.

Since the data we gather is potentially biased by our questions and restricted to what Askers think they need to understand; and what we each hear is potentially inaccurate due to the way brains listen; there’s a high probability that information collected will be biased, insufficient, inaccurate and will lead to potentially flawed suggestions.

ELEMENTS IN PROBLEM SOLVING

Decades ago, when I begin my career, I couldn’t understand why permanent change was so difficult. Surely, with accurate, rational reasons, behaviors should change. But they didn’t. Trying a different approach I began studying brains: where decisions get made within the brain’s neural circuitry; and the interplay between the unconscious electrochemical brain and the conscious, action-oriented mind.

What I discovered goes against standard practice: to generate new, permanent behavior, change must originate at the source, in the neural circuits that triggered the original, problematic behaviors so they can generate new ones. I’ve since developed Change Facilitation models for several industries, trained 100,000 people and written extensively.

Below I offer a primer to my thinking, ideas and skills for those coaches, System Dynamics practitioners, Change Management consultants, OD professionals and leaders willing to work beyond the standard change models to lead clients through to permanent, integrous change – without resistance, and with buy-in.

I’ll begin with the fundamental question: when helping Others make needed changes, why do we need to understand anything? The actual task of facilitating permanent change is a neural circuit/systems issue within the Other’s brain before it’s an understanding or comprehension issue for an influencer.

While the specific act of understanding is a What/Why, change itself is a How issue – How to get to the specific neural circuits where the change is implemented: What/Why is tactical; How is systemic and strategic.

Too often influencers assume their important advice will lead to permanent change and omit this important element. Without knowing how to get to the originating source where the problem was triggered, a client can’t implement the guidance and it will be resisted.

Sample

Different from information gathering or understanding the story and details of a problem, the skills needed to enable clients to get to specific circuits and make necessary changes is a How, and precedes What/Why. Here are the elements involved:

All activity, all behaviors – all that we see, hear, do, think – emerge from neural circuits in our brains that are formed by systems. Any change must include new or reconfigured circuits so new choices will be triggered at the source.
A behavior is merely the expression, the representation, of the system that triggered it. For permanent behavior change, the originating system and the circuits trigger different behaviors.
Our brains have 100+trillion neural pathways, each one expressing a unique system, each one triggering specific activity and behaviors. These are where all behaviors and decisions emerge from and which send signals to the mind to take the action.
Change must not put the system at risk or it will be rejected, made possible when the change emerges directly from the neural circuits.

Current behavior change models focus on the influencer understanding the problem then leading the client to change via the influencer’s assumptions rather than enabling clients to discover their own, and is responsible for the low success rate (97% by some estimates). Turns out this is a systems problem: to better understand change it’s necessary to understand the role systems play in creating a new solution.

SYSTEMS

A system is any group of ‘things’ that agree to the same rules, beliefs, values. You’re a system. Your family is a system. Each country has a system. They are the bedrock of all cultures and create/maintain the status quo, with behaviors the expression. Here are some facts about systems that must be incorporated into any change process:

A solution must embody the underlying system that has dispatched the offending behaviors. The system itself must be changed so it emits different behaviors. Change the system and new behaviors emerge. Gathering data and providing answers does not change a system, merely gets mistranslated and seen as a risk.
The rules of the system must be maintained in any change, or it will be resisted. The rules of the system define the solution. For change, help Others discover the rules, norms, beliefs of their system.
It’s not possible to change a behavior by trying to change a behavior. Behaviors are the expressions, the physical output of a system and as such are meaningless on their own; they don’t arise from the sea like Venus.
Problems are features, not flaws. Because the ‘problematic’ actions are merely expressions of the underlying system, whatever shows up has been triggered by the system it’s expressing. Again, providing ‘good’ information will not change a system.
Change must come from, and follow the norms/rules of, the circuits that initiated the perceived problem.
When influencers try to merely change behaviors, they’re working from their own biased assumptions and potentially discounting the norms and rules of the system. This causes resistance, sabotage and opposition.
If the risk of change is greater than the risk of staying the same, no change will occur. The job of the influencer is to help clients understand their risk of change, and all stakeholders must have a say in any proposed change or they will resist at the point of implementation.
Implementation and execution will be problematic unless

a. All stakeholders who will be involved in the bought into the change;

b. The risk of change is acceptable to the stakeholders;

c. The rules of the system have been maintained.

Without addressing these points, any attempts at change are driven by the biases of the practitioner and may miss the underlying system that generated them. This is especially relevant for System Dynamics, Change Management, Coaching, Leadership, Management, Healthcare, and Sales.

To enable permanent change requires wholly new thinking and new skills based on facilitating folks to the original circuits that expressed the problematic behavior so they can make their own change. No information gathering. No guidelines for change. Just impartial skills that lead Others to the specific neural circuits where the problem was initiated. This includes: Facilitative Questions™, Meta Listening, the 13 Steps of Change. And the biggest one of all: assuming Others have their own answers instead of trying to provide them what you believe to be answers.

I’ve invented change facilitation models that facilitate change at the source and am happy to teach them to you. Visit www.sharon-drew.com to read some of my articles. sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

If you had the skills to lead your clients to their own unconscious place to make their own necessary changes, would you be willing to give up the control you think you have?

_____________________________

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, https://sharondrew1.substack.com/, and https://medium.com/@sharondrew_9898/. She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.

Sharon Drew Morgen October 6th, 2025

Posted In: News

In 1996 my sister called to say she’d made an online purchase. I was surprised: in those early days it was not only difficult to search for anything on the new internet, there wasn’t much to search for. Certainly, purchasing anything seemed illogical – we had no way of knowing if ‘secure lines’ were, well, secure. Curious, I asked my sister to explain her decision process.

J: I needed a simple Y connector, and decided to see what online purchasing was all about. This was my test case. I found three companies with the exact same product at the same price.

SD: How did you choose which company to buy from?

J: Since the price and products were identical, I decided I’d trust the company with the best customer service so I’d be cared for if I had a problem. Because none of the websites mentioned customer service, I decided to call them and ask. The first company kept me on hold for 23 minutes before I hung up. The second call put me straight through to a voice message. A sales rep answered my call in the third company, asking me if I had questions. So it was an obvious choice. There was only one company that took care of me.

I then realized there were three problems with the current (1996) search capability:

Site visitors had only a haphazard method of finding what they wanted;
People had no way to identify their unconscious criteria for resolving their query, even if they could find what they initially thought they wanted;
Sites could only meet the search criteria imagined by the site designers, sometimes overlooking criteria sought by visitors.

In other words, if people were happy with the information they were able to find on a site, they were satisfied. For those folks not entirely clear what they needed, couldn’t find the page matching their search criteria, or had needs outside the obvious, there was a probability they couldn’t find what they really needed and would leave the site.

MY SEARCH INVENTION DEFIED THE NORM

I decided to create a tool to help site visitors become aware of the unconscious criteria (i.e. not just the information, but the intuitive essential criteria they needed met) they needed and be led directly to the page(s) that offered the exact answers they sought. And in 1996, no one else was thinking this way.

Enter Hobbes. With a few sequenced Facilitated Questions (a new form of question I invented that helps people find their unconscious criteria where they make decisions), a simple backend tree, and carefully culled choices of criteria-based options, my search tool Hobbes would help site visitors discover their real decision making criteria and lead them directly to the one or two site pages that met their needs.

For those who chose to use Hobbes, this would keep them on the site and help them become buyers or satisfied visitors. It would also cause companies to do their homework to learn what visitors truly needed and add those responses to their sites.

Of course, this was way outside of conventional practice, especially almost 30 years ago – 3 years before Google search came out. Yet 54% of site visitors on my site used it.

I tried to get funding for it and was offered $15,000,000 by the only woman VC in Silicon Valley IF I could find $1,000,000 from someone else (a man). Nope. Only 0.25% of women were receiving funding in those days. (Today, 30 years later, it’s ballooned up to 2% but who’s counting.)

Sadly, I kept hearing that no one needed a search tool for ‘criteria’. Silly idea, I was told countless times, no one makes decisions from criteria. And yet, as we now know, we all do. In fact, the time it takes us all to discover our criteria is the length time it takes to make a decision.

The concept died. No one wanted a search capability that enabled a site visitor to directly find what they needed on a site.

PERCEIVED WISDOM REIGNS

You all know what happened next. Google search entered and the rest is history. But in 2010 one of the leaders at Bing called saying they’d heard about Hobbes and could they buy it. I shared the original site design. Yay! ‘Love it. We could start using this immediately! What a great idea to help people uncover their unconscious criteria and help them find what they need quicker.’

But he called back the next day: the team hated the concept. ‘Why would anyone want to use a search tool that doesn’t seek out information like Google does?’ It was the accepted norm and ‘no one would want to do anything different’.

And so the perceived wisdom has prevailed through decades. Imagine if we had choices.

WHO AM I? AND WHY DOES CRITERIA MATTER?

I invent systemic brain change models that enable people to get to the specific circuits in their brain that holds their decision making criteria, used to help people buy(Buying Facilitation®), learn (Learning Facilitation), Change (Change Facilitation), etc. And as with Hobbes, because they go against perceived wisdom, most folks are unwilling to adopt them even when they prove, in controlled studies with major corporations, in following the 100,000 folks I’ve trained them to, to be more successful than the standard models.

Success, it seems, is not the criteria. Innovations – as wonderful as they’re made out to be – are not accepted readily: they buck the system, go against the norm.

WHAT IS PERCEIVED WISDOM AND WHY DOES IT MATTER?

My Hobbes story provides a background for my grumble about innovation: normalized thinking limits our worlds, rules our assumptions and restricts creativity.

I’ll begin with my definition of perceived wisdom (PW). PW is another way of saying ‘the norm’, the accepted myths, practices, ideas that constitute the immediate assumptions we make without questioning them. It’s the accepted convention, the ideas we’ve used to set up our lives, our thinking, our work environment and expected behaviors.

PW is perpetuated in every sphere of our lives; it permeates our education, cultures, religions, what we buy and wear, who we marry and where we live.

Our thinking, our behaviors are often based on accepted norms that have become ubiquitous: * Do you avoid white after Labor Day? (Silly) * Do you feed a cold and starve a fever? (Wrong) * Calories-in determines weight (proven false). * Behavior Modification works to help you lose weight, exercise, change habits, yadayada. (There’s no scientific evidence anywhere that it does, it has a 97% fail rate, and you can’t change a behavior by trying to change a behavior). I once asked my mother if she nursed me. ‘I would have, but everyone said it would harm you. And now I’m sad about it.’

PW meets our foundational criteria of belonging: it offers comfort, safety, absence of uncertainty, and no risk of encountering scorn or derision. And because PW is aimed toward the middle of the road (where, according to the late, great, Molly Ivins, only yellow stripes and dead armadillos exist), we spend our lives unwittingly maintaining and recreating a specious status quo that causes us to lose our uniqueness. Our language, our conventional assumptions, keep us like gerbils, going round and round the same ideas and conventions regardless of their success or failure. So

in sales, a 5% success rate is acceptable, and the matching 95% failure rate is not even mentioned – folded in to the costs as a ‘given’ because the model itself is flawed and hasn’t been reconceived in a century;
in leadership and coaching, the assumption that the person ‘in charge’ has the knowledge that Others must conform to, and their resistance is something to be managed, resulting in a 97% failure rate;
in training, the information-in approach doesn’t integrate with brains and causes a 90% fail-to-retain rate (here’s my Learning Facilitation model that enables permanent retention).

Even great Harvard thinkers like Chris Argyris and Howard Gardner have written books on managing resistance, using the baseline PW assumption that all change involves resistance. Nonsense. Another faulty fact we’ve normalized and have cost us dearly. It’s certainly possible to enable people to change from their core criteria instead of the biased questions and rules created by leadership.

While we think our personal beliefs are specific to us, they are invaded by the PW in the customs we live in. It’s where we get our racial biases, our assumptions about education, class, age, history. We’re so hamstrung by PW we’ve become tribes, where our politics and beliefs keep our ‘team’ on the good side and we hate everyone else, like sports fans.

And since it’s endemic we find no reason to reject it, even going so far as passing down these baseless concepts through generations and unquestioningly resisting anything that’s different.

But worst of all, it restricts our creativity. Indeed, from health, to sex, to climate change and politics and relationships, almost every area of life is circumscribed by PW. It’s pernicious.

THE PERCEIVED WISDOM OF CURRENT SEARCH CAPABILITY

How PW restricts our worlds is a huge topic, involving our health and healthcare system, our financial system, the environment, education, privacy – the list goes on. But because the topic is so important, I’m going to show you how limited we are in one sector – internet search – and how our worlds get shoved into tiny vessels of biased, restricted information as a result.

It didn’t start out that way, but we don’t even notice. Most of our online interactions are now suspect: even simple searches lead us to knowledge selected by algorithms that restrict us to the demographic we’ve been thrust into, causing facts to seem like fake news.

Our use of Google as a search engine is ubiquitous. This company determines what we read and the information we have access to. Even scientific facts are suspect as they’re fed to us according to where we live, who we vote for, what we read.

And here’s the worst part. Google’s standard monetizing procedures, as to all search capabilities, tag us into a demographic and sells our personal data to thousands of advertisers who spam us. Rarely do we find the full range of possible solutions, answers, or ideas. I recently was led to a site that seemingly had the data I needed only to receive a phone call WHILE I WAS STILL LOOKING AT THE SITE from a sales person FROM THAT SITE who wanted to sell me something!

Surely we should care about accurately nourishing our curiosity without fear of spam and Robo calls.

THE MISSING VOICE ON THE INTERNET

One other aspect of PW bugs the hell out of me, and that might supply answers to my ‘whys’: Have you realized that men – the male human of our species – designed, developed, and generated the internet and social media – and continue to do so? The PW is the male view of the internet; we use it (and it abuses us) by the requirements, the criteria, of men. And we all buy into it.

How different would it be if women’s voices and ideas – currently a tiny fraction of the design of the internet – had been involved in the creation of our technology? Has the male viewpoint become so much a part of our culture that we all just assume that’s the way it is and should be (PW), and never stop to consider the results if women played their representative percentage in designing it?

Seriously: how would the internet or social media be different if it had been designed by women? Or designed by 50% women? Or designed in equal measure by people of color, people from different cultures, people of different levels of education. We’ll never know. What we do know is that the internet is the Perceived Wisdom of White Men in Silicon Valley. And we’ve normalized it as being The Way It Is.

WHY GO BEYOND PERCEIVED WISDOM?

Of course, going outside the box is hazardous. But disputing PW is vital:

Obviously, there’s nothing in the middle of the road except yellow lines and dead armadillos. Who would want to be there anyway?
New ideas can’t come from the middle. New ideas always come from the ends.
There’s no debate, curiosity, creativity, free expression in Perceived Wisdom.
Things change. Time, ideas, technology culture. Wisdom must change too or we stagnate.
Perceived wisdom is linear. Real life occurs in systems.
Perceived wisdom is what u get when everything is thrown into the middle and becomes moderate enough to please most. Vanilla.

New ideas come from that small percent outside the mainstream, with innovative ideas that are loud enough, insistent enough, and interesting enough to push into the middle, eventually change, and become part of, the PW. But getting there – the journey – is the creative part. And those of us willing to take on the job must have very tough skins. Instead of our criteria being comfort, we must shift our criteria to truth and integrity, collaboration and serving.

What, exactly, is so powerful about perceived wisdom that whole industries (healthcare, sales, coaching, leadership) prefer to suffer failed strategies rather than add anything new to ensure success? What would we need to believe differently to be willing to question our long held assumptions? How can we tell if a long held assumption is wrong, or incomplete, or could be expanded, or worth thinking of something different? And how would each of us need to be different to be willing to hear fresh ideas and new voices that seemingly conflict with all we think we hold dear?

The good bit is that going against the norm is fabulous. As an inventor of systemic change models that work with criteria instead of information, I’ve been doing it for many decades, and the rewards make up for the pitfalls. I urge anyone with original ideas, passion for truth, and a hunger for diversity, creativity, and integrity, to shout that the perceived wisdom is wrong, and put forth

Diversity of ideas,
Fresh ideas from different cultures, ethnicity, countries, educational backgrounds,
True creative thinking that pushes industries (sales, coaching, leadership, listening, change) to new vocabulary and (slowly slowly) new thinking,
Expanded possibilities for innovation,
Ideas that inspire other ideas that wouldn’t have otherwise been stimulated.

If our criteria is for better, more authentic ideas, for equality and integrity, we must go outside PW where innovation comes from. PW is merely the group/tribe acceptance of the status quo that has been standardized by the masses. Let’s all be innovators; let’s all shout out new truths and challenge the norm. And let’s all listen to the dissenters because they may be shedding light on new truths.

Our perceived wisdom is faulty. And until we begin thinking differently and stop acting as if PW is true, it cannot change and we will not readily accept innovation.

Let’s discuss this. I’m happy to discuss should anyone want to contact me. Sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com or 512 771 1117.

______________________________________

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

Sharon Drew Morgen September 29th, 2025

Posted In: Communication, News

Common Knowledge and Perceived Wisdom are Often Inaccurate: a list of common, incorrect assumptions we all unwittingly perpetuate, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

It’s Never About the Money: a case study on facilitating (buying) decisions

Dignity: the necessary element to ensure happy clients and employees, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

To Retain Learning, Train the Brain First, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

You Can’t Lead If You Can’t Follow: a systems approach to generating change, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

Change Readiness: helping clients prepare for change and implementation is systemic, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

Sadly, We’re Not As Curious As We’d Like To Be, Part 2 by Sharon-Drew Morgen

Sadly, We’re Not As Curious As We’d Like To Be, Part 1 by Sharon-Drew Morgen

Solving a Problem is Systemic: avoiding resistance and ensuring permanent change is more complex than changing behaviors, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

The Cost of Perceived Wisdom: why we really don’t like innovation