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

When my son George was born in 1972 I was determined to give him attributes I found compelling in men: kindness, respect and an awareness of others, creativity, a willingness to listen and to collaborate. To accomplish this, I kept TV out of the house, ensured he had creative toys like blocks, Legos, and art supplies like paints and pipe cleaners. I brought him to theater and galleries as was age appropriate. I began teaching him colors at the Picasso exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum when he was 18 months old in a backpack. I began a storytelling routine so I could instill in him the skills to listen. Yup. I was raising a creative, kind leader.

By the time he was 2, George was making guns with his pipe cleaners, drawing pictures of rocket ships and army tanks. Where did he gain an affinity to guns? How did he know about army tanks? No idea. But it wasn’t from me.

Eventually he turned into a professional jock (Ok. I’m a proud. He’s a silver-medal Olympian.). But he’s not creative, certainly listens with very biased and judgmental ears, and only kind under a gruff exterior. How did I not raise the person I tried to raise? Sure, it was ‘nature’. But where did the ‘nurture’ go?

DO MEN WANT THE SKILLS TO CONNECT?

I have come to believe that not only do most men not have the communication and connection skills women have but are content without them as per this funny story. Friends recently did construction on their house. When they showed me around, one of the new rooms had 5 comfy leather chairs lined up side by side facing a huge TV screen. It was obviously a Man Cave. I started to laugh.

Peter: What’s so funny?
SD: This is obviously your man cave.
Peter: Why is it so obvious?
SD: Women would never line chairs up like that. They’d be in a semi-circle.
Peter: Why would you do that?
SD: So we could engage with each other, communicate, see and hear each other.
Peter: But why would I want to do that?

Right. Why.

THE REPRESENTATION OF WOMEN IN LEADERSHIP

I was the second woman on a public BOD in the UK in 1986. I quickly learned to keep quiet during our Board meetings: men would over-talk me when I spoke; they’d seize and spout my ideas to broad approval with no attribution; fail to invite me to meetings (“Oops! Sorry. My bad.”) even though my group was bringing in 142% of the net profit of the company. I was once so furious tears of rage seeped out of one eye. “Awwww. Let’s give Sharon-Drew a moment to compose herself,” said the Chairman. “I have no need to compose myself. I’m just enraged at all of you.” Funny, but the next meeting one of the other Board members cried. As women have done for centuries, I had given them permission.

Times have changed a bit. But why, why, has it been such a struggle? And why, why are women in leadership still uncommon? 35% of leadership positions go to women, even though 60% of the workforce are women; 20% of companies have at least one woman on their Board, and there are 53 women CEOs – 10% – in the Fortune 500.

There are lots of reasons offered as to why the numbers are so low: women have babies and aren’t represented in the workplace; women aren’t accepted into the Boys Club and don’t have the mentors to provide them a leg-up; men don’t respect women and won’t listen to them; women don’t play by the rules. Obviously these are all silly. And yet.

Much has been written about the differences between men’s and women’s leadership styles. And yes, it’s been proven that working for a woman leader offers more success – staff are happier, there’s less turnover, more profit is generated, teams work better with a more creative output. For sure more women are being hired in leadership roles. But it’s not enough and it’s not representational.

WOMEN HAVE GREAT SKILLS

With so many excuses as to why women aren’t promoted to leadership positions, maybe it’s time to explain precisely why women make great leaders.

We care. That’s right. We not only care about the bottom line, our place in the market, our regard among competitors. We care about people – staff, teams, creativity, well-being. In my company I gave staff one week and $2,000 a year (in the mid-1980s) to take some type of program that wasn’t work-related to boost their creativity and expand their thinking. They had to take one day off a month to do volunteer work in the community. They weren’t given vacation days but told to take off whatever time they needed to maintain their clarity, so long as they covered the work )I literally had to push them out the door to take vacations).
We listen. Women not only listen for details, but we closely attend to differences in speaking patterns so we can ascertain shifts, problems, feelings. Our listening enables us to bond with another’s humanity, not for what they’re doing but who they’re being.
We’re curious. When women notice a problem, we get curious. Instead of going straight into action, we wonder about its origination, how to fix it from inside, how to assemble the right people to design a fix. And then we trial different approaches, get team agreement for different outcomes.
We’re problem solvers. And not in conventional ways, but often out-of-the-box thinking.
We’re risk takers. We have less fear of failure then men, with a greater understanding of possibilities. Since we’ve had to go-it alone, we’re willing to offend the status quo.
We communicate. We inspire discussions, ask questions, pose hypotheticals. We start conversations where there is too much silence. We don’t do denial.
We collaborate. Working in groups is natural. If you’ve ever done an exercise where everyone in the room is given 6 pipe cleaners and told to make a ‘reporting’ structure, all the men attach each to the ones above and below. Women make a daisy chain, in a circle. It’s endemic.
We work to the future. Instead of taking steps sequentially with a perfect forward-moving plan, we think in systems, in circles. We see the aggregate and try different actions to cause change as a whole.

I will never understand the full set of reasons given why women are kept out of leadership positions. But I do know that by leaving us out, our companies suffer, lose market share and profit and have diminished creativity and kindness.

It seems that in today’s workplace, change is afoot. I look forward to there being an equal number of men and women leaders someday. And just maybe we can all raise our sons in an environment where kindness doesn’t have to be hidden, and equality and respect is the norm.

______________________

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 October 9th, 2023

Posted In: News

Note: Sharon Drew now has available a 5-session How of Change™ program for folks interested in brain-based, permanent behavior change. Watch the one-hour video introduction.

Why does it seem so hard to change a habit or a behavior? Why do we drag our feet when buying a replacement appliance or car? Why do our teams go through disruption when going through a merger? Why do we resist changing our diets or adding exercise to our day when we know it’s good for us?

The oft-repeated myth claims people hate change, that change is hard. But that’s not true. People like the results of change; they just fear the process, the disruption and disorientation that change seems to cause. But the problem isn’t the change; it’s the way we’re approaching it.

The very skills we use to instigate change cause the resistance, struggle, failure to change, and conflict that occur when we initiate doing anything outside of our habituated norm. With a different skill set we can not only avoid resistance altogether, but change in a way that’s pain free, creative and expansive. In fact, change can be a pleasure.

Sample

In this article I’ll briefly discuss the topics necessary to consider painless change, and link to five 30-minute podcasts I taped a while ago with Nathan Ives of Strategy Driven Magazine. Since I recorded these podcasts, I’ve since developed a How of Change program and written a new book (How? Generating new neural pathways for learning, behavior change, and decision making) that actually teach how to isolate the exact elements in the brain to consciously generate new neural pathways to stimulate easy change. As always, I’m here to discuss.

WHAT IS CHANGE?

Change means doing/thinking something different than our status quo – our internal system that has been accepted, habituated, standardized, and normalized through time – potentially replacing it with something unknown, untried, and therefore risky.

And therein lie the problem: because our change methods don’t take systems into account, anything we do to effect change potentially causes a destabilizing effect and puts our system at risk. This fact alone causes disruption, pain and confusion. We’re trying to push an as-yet unaccepted element into a fully/long-functioning stable system that hasn’t agreed to alter itself, and it’s defending itself.

To do anything different, we need approval and a route forward from our unconscious system; to change congruently, we must consciously facilitate our normalized, unconscious internal structure to design new and acceptable rules for any additions.

Once the ‘new’ is acceptable, seen to be nonthreatening, recognized as having the same rules, norms, values as the status quo, it will be easily adopted. Note: regardless of the efficacy of the new, or the problems inherent in the status quo, change is not acceptable until the status quo, the system, the group of norms and beliefs that have been good-enough, recognizes a way to normalize itself with the new included.

#1 What is Change? and Why is Change so Hard?

WE IGNORE THE SYSTEM: HOW BIAS AND INFORMATION PUSH CAUSE RESISTANCE

Historically, we have approached change through information sharing, traditional problem-solving methods, personal discipline and behavior modification, and strong leadership, assuming by pushing new information – new activities, new ideas, new rationale, requests for different behaviors – into the status quo it will be sufficient. But it’s not. We’re ignoring the system, causing it to resist to maintain itself.

Why are systems so important? Systems are our glue. Our lives are run by systems – families, teams, companies, relationships. Each of us individually is a system. Systems are made up of rules and norms that everything/everyone buys in to and that maintain the beliefs and values, history and experience, that make each system unique and against which everything is judged against.

And each system holds tightly to its uniqueness as the organizing force behind the activities, goals, and output of our behaviors. Change any of the elements and we change the system; try to push something new into the system, and it will defend itself. We learned in 6th grade that systems seek homeostasis (balance), making it unlikely we can pull one thing out of a system and shove something else back in without the system resisting.

Currently, our attempts at change (sellers, coaches, negotiators, or diets, exercise programs, etc.) are little more than pushing a new agenda in from the outside and assuming compliance will follow because the new is ‘better’ or ‘rational’. But because the new most likely doesn’t match the unique, internal norms already in residence, we get implementation problems in teams, closing delays in sales, resistance to changing eating and exercise habits, modification problems in healthcare and coaching. Indeed, all implementations, all buying decisions, all negotiations, all new behavior generation, are change management problems.

It’s possible to introduce change in a way that does not cause resistance – from the inside out, by teaching the system how to reorganize along different lines, in accordance with its own rules and values.

For lasting change, it’s necessary to enlist buy-in from the system. Any reasoning or validation for needed change will be resisted because the system fears disruption. Hear how systems are the organizing principle around change – and what to do about it.

#2 What are Systems and How Do They Influence Change

WHAT IS RESISTANCE?

The universally held concept is that resistance is ubiquitous, that any change, any new idea, will engender resistance. University programs teach it how to manage resistance; Harvard professors such as Chris Argyris and Howard Gardner have made their reputations and written books on it; consultants make their livings managing it. Yet there is absolutely no reason for resistance: we actually create the resistance we get, by the very models we use to implement change.

The underlying problem is, again, systems. As per homeostasis, a system will fight to continue functioning as it has always functioned, regardless of how impractical or non-efficient it is or how compelling the new change might be. And by attempting change without an agreement from the system, without designing any implementation of the new around the inherent beliefs, values, and norms of the status quo, we’re causing imbalance.

Systems just are. They wake up every day maintaining the same elements, behaviors, beliefs, they had yesterday, and the day before. They don’t notice anything as a problem – the problems are built in and, well, part of the givens. When anything new attempts to enter a system and the system has not reorganized itself to maintain systems congruence, it is threatened (Indeed, we are threatening the status quo!) and will defend itself by resisting. Hence, we always define and create our own resistance.

It’s possible to avoid resistance by beginning a change process by first facilitating the system to re-think, re-organize, re-consider its rules, relationships, and expectations, and garner buy-in from all of the elements that will touch the final solution, while matching the introduction of the new accordingly. Believe it or not, it’s not difficult. But we do need a new skill set to accomplish this.

#3 If Decisions Are Always Rational, Why Are Changes Resisting?

WHY BUY-IN IS NECESSARY AND HOW TO ACHIEVE IT

As sellers, change agents, coaches, doctors, parents, and managers, we seek to motivate change. Whether it involves a purchase, a new idea, a different set of behaviors, or a team project, all successful change requires

matching the new with the values and norms of the status quo,
shifting the status quo to adapt to something new,
facilitating buy-in from everyone who will touch the new addition,
working from inside out by aligning with the core values and norms of the system.

[Note: I teach this change process as Buying Facilitation® to sellers to facilitate Pre-Sales buying decisions, and coaches as a tool to generate permanent change.] Until this is accomplished, resistance will result as the system attempts to defend itself.

#4 Why is Buy-in Necessary and How to Achieve It

HOW TO AVOID RESISTANCE, DISRUPTION, AND FAILURE

Until now, we have approached change by starting with a specific goal and implementation plan and seeking buy-in to move forward successfully. While we take meticulous steps to bring aboard the right people, have numerous meetings to discuss and manage any change or disruption possibilities, our efforts are basically top-down and outside-in and end up causing resistance and disruption.

Starting from the inside begins with an explicit goal that everyone agrees to, but leaving the specifics – the Hows – up to the people working with the new initiative, an inside-out, bottom-up/top-down collaboration. While the result may not end up exactly like imagined, it will certainly meet the objectives sought, and include far more creativity and buy-in, promote leadership, continue through time, and avoid resistance and disruption – and potential failure.

#5 A Radical Approach to Change Management, Real Leadership

Change need not be difficult if we approach it as a systems problem. I’ve developed models for sales, leadership, coaching, and healthcare that facilitate systemic, congruent, values-based change. I’m happy to help you think this through or implement it. To learn more about systemic models for decision making, change, and sales, go to http://sharondrewmorgen.com/ or contact Sharon Drew at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

Here’s a link if you wish to have copies of the entire series Making Change Work.

_______________________________

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.sharon-drew.com She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.

Sharon Drew Morgen October 2nd, 2023

Posted In: News

Do you know how much of what you hear is accurate? Why you can’t maintain your weight loss, or why you overlook a good choice and make a ‘bad’ decision? Do you know why you can’t change a bad habit even though you really (really really) try?

Perceived wisdom says we hear others accurately, that we’re undisciplined dieters, bad decision makers, and unmotivated to change. But none of that is true. And it’s not our fault.

We’re at the mercy of our unconscious brains. They determine what and how we see, hear, notice, feel, behave and think. Electrochemical signals zip around our 100 trillion synapses causing our conscious and unconscious activities, making our choices for us. It’s all automatic and mechanical. And meaningless.

Until now, science has not found a direct route to the unconscious to affect permanent behavior change. They say it’s a black box. It was. Until now.

Sample

HOW? makes it possible to get into the brain circuitry for conscious choice. It provides the precise skill sets – the how – to:

hear, notice, behave precisely as you wish;
permanently remove unwanted habits and behaviors and generate new ones;
learn new skills efficiently;
make effective decisions based on unconscious beliefs and values;
facilitate clients, patients, friends through to their best, congruent choices.

Beyond conventional Behavior Modification and disciplined habit-change processes, beyond decision weighting and learning theories, HOW? includes innovative thinking on

how brains convert incoming messages to action; how to intervene for change;
questions to direct people to long term memory to find unconscious answers;
the specific steps of decision making and change management;
creating new neural circuitry for behavior and habit change.

Using detailed explanations, fun exercises and examples, HOW? provides tools for personal and professional use, to generate new answers and permanent skills for conscious choice. It also includes the specific steps to Sharon-Drew’s signature Facilitative Questions, as well as the Buying Facilitation® and How of Change™ models.

Now, finally, you can connect directly with your brain to lose weight permanently, listen without bias, and have conscious choice.

Purchase book

Bio: As an original thinker, author Sharon-Drew Morgen has spent her life developing mind–>brain choice and decision making models, tested over 40 years in corporations with 100,000 people in sales (Buying Facilitation®), coaching (Change Facilitation), leadership, and folks seeking habit change (The How of Change™) that unpack the mind–>brain route to intentionally reprogram neural circuitry for choice and change. She has written several books, including: WHAT? Did you really say what I think I heard?, the steps involved in change and decision making (Dirty Little Secrets), and one New York Times Business Bestseller, Selling with Integrity. Sharon-Drew consults, trains, speaks, and coaches. She currently lives on a floating home in Portland OR.

Sharon Drew Morgen September 18th, 2023

Posted In: News

If you are a therapist or coach, manager or consultant, you’ve been schooled to be a guide, a mentor, to help people find solutions they couldn’t find on their own.

During a recent conversation with a coach who prides himself on Always Being Right! (Clients who don’t heed him are told to go elsewhere.) and wondering who would choose him as their coach, I began thinking about how Helpers go about helping, and why clients often ignore their suggestions.

I believe there’s an ‘accepted practice’ problem here: Helping professionals use questions and ‘active listening’ to ‘understand’ the identified problem so they can then ‘help’ them find solutions. But – and I know this is an unusual thing to say – conventional questions are so biased by the goals of the Helper that they may not uncover accurate data, causing Helpers to sometimes offer unhelpful answers.

To add insult to injury, the way our brains ‘listen’ is biased by our history, regardless of what’s been said. In other words, through no fault of our own, neither client or Helper hear each other accurately! But none of it is purposeful: It’s our brain’s fault.

BEYOND THE BRAIN

So many of us – healthcare providers, sellers, coaches, leaders – truly want to help Others achieve their best outcomes. In this article, I’ll provide a much-simplified explanation of how brains cause our choices, explain where conventional skills fall short, and introduce you to new skills that can facilitate permanent change without resistance.

I’ll begin with the ‘big picture’ and explain how our brains cause us to do what we do, based on my decades developing systemic brain change models.

Simply, our brain is an enormous database that captures and organizes the data from our lives, stores it in circuits, and uses our mental models and history as the foundation from which to act.

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

Sample

Each of us operates from historic, unconscious, and unique neural configurations, stored as memory in 86 billion brain neurons that hold our history, our ideas, our values and from which our decisions and behaviors arise. Obviously, we each think and act uniquely. Obviously, no one else has access to our brain circuitry; no one else has our life story or history; no one else can ‘get in there’.

Technically, change occurs when brain components get reconfigured or new ones get formed. Behavior change is a brain issue.

HOW BRAINS STORE INFORMATION

I’ve spent decades unpacking how brains are organized and have developed several facilitation models that enable real choice (See How?), models that make it possible for Helpers to enable clients locate the neural circuits that initiated their problem and, by triggering and generating new synapses, reconfigure them.

And herein lie the problem Helpers face now: standard questions and usual listening practices steer the Other to where the Helper, using their own unconscious assumptions and curiosity thinks the answers should be and possibly miss where actual answers reside.

Once I realized this I began developing questioning and listening models that make it possible to get directly into the neural circuits and use brain change as their foundation. I also discarded my role as a Helper and became a Decision Facilitator, to facilitate Others to their own circuits easily develop new behaviors with no resistance.

WHAT IS CHANGE? NO, REALLY?

Change is systemic, not as simple as merely doing something different. Since behaviors are outputs from instructions sent by existing circuits, new behaviors need new neural circuits to send out new instructions for new outputs. Too often, Helpers merely try to change behaviors without changing where in the brain the new instructions will come from.

You see, any change request represents a difference, a threat to the existing system and as such, will cause resistance unless it’s been accepted first. This is the problem with noted change management models – they merely attempt behavior change.

It’s like trying to get a backward moving robot to move forward by explaining, questioning, and showing videos; the robot must be reprogrammed. Without taking this into account, by trying to change a behavior by trying to change a behavior without changing the neural circuits, people will resist, or not maintain, the change.

QUESTIONS AND LISTENING

Here are the reasons people have difficulty finding internal answers and making decisions.

Brains: The time it takes to figure out all the criteria needed to make a decision is the time it takes to act on it. No, they’re not dragging their feet; they’re trying to change congruently.

See, the brain’s 86 billion neurons are stored and labeled in ways that may be difficult to consciously access. In fact, words or ideas even enter brains as meaningless sound vibrations (Neuroscience actually calls words ‘puffs of air.’) which ultimately get turned into the signals that then get translated into meaning.

Let me explain the brain stuff that goes on. Hang in with me as it explains why we mishear and misunderstand. To begin with, our brain doesn’t accept spoken words accurately, as intended. It takes the sound vibrations, turns them into signals, and then finds existing ‘similar enough’ (historic, biased) circuits to translate the signals into meaning – a very inexact process.

To make the process fast (It takes five one hundredths of a second for the entire process.) our brain chooses the quickest route to translation circuits, almost always an oft-used superhighway that may only have a tangential connection to the original meaning and intent. In other words: all incoming words get translated without any regard to accuracy!

Most of us aren’t aware that our thoughts, realizations, understandings, are merely versions of what our brains have already translated for us.

Unfortunately, questions meant to ‘gather data’, are restricted by the Helper’s assumptions. Sometimes Others uncover the exact data we need in order to help them. But sometimes our questions direct the client’s brain to an unhelpful answer, and something more valuable remains unretrieved.

To help Others find precisely where the necessary data is stored, Helpers must have NO assumptions, NO biases, and NO belief that we have anyone’s answers. All we need is to send Others to the right circuits where their answers are stored. And for this, conventional skills don’t work. If you want to better understand exactly what goes on, read my new book How?

Listening: Given we all have a ‘brain circuit translation’ problem making it near impossible for anyone to listen without bias regardless of how well they ‘listen’.

To avoid biases and misinterpretations, to help Others discover where their answers are stored, Helpers must listen differently and don’t assume they ‘understand’ what’s been said. I actually developed a process called Listening for Systems, which bypasses our assumptions and hears what’s intended.

If you’d like to learn more I wrote a book on the subject: What? Did you really say what I think I heard?.

Questions: This one is the most uncomfortable for Helpers. Conventional questions are formulated to elicit data as per the needs, intent, languaging, curiosity of the Asker.

To this end, I spent 10 years inventing a new form of question (Facilitative Question) that foregoes data gathering per se and instead leads Others to the brain circuits and memory channels to precisely where the appropriate data is stored. If you go to my site I explain how I invented them and provide descriptions and articles.

By posing unbiased, systemic questions that lead brains to appropriate circuits, by listening without assumptions, by trusting everyone has their own answers, we can truly serve Others beyond any natural biases we might have.

The new job of Helpers is to begin with the assumption that clients may actually have perfectly good answers stored in some place where their brain isn’t looking.

HELPERS AREN’T HELPING

Unfortunately, these skills are not taught in coaching schools or MBA programs which continue to teach to ‘be aware’, be ‘open minded’, take a ‘different perspective’, do ‘active listening’, ask ‘probing’ questions to ‘give the Helper the information’ they need to ‘help’. But as you now know, neither standard questions or conventional listening will always collect accurate information.

When Helpers try to have answers for Others, our track record is spotty: clients use some of our suggestions and ignore others because they may not have gotten to the core (and unconscious) factors that caused the problem to begin with.

And because our advice ultimately brings Others up against their own inabilities, they push the Helper away regardless of the length or success of the relationship. Inadvertently, because no other way has been developed to professionally help Others, we infantilize our clients.

I know that most coaches, leaders, managers, and Helpers truly want to serve Others. Please consider shifting your goal and learn new tools. I’m happy to help. I’ve developed new skills for Helpers (coaches, sellers, managers, healthcare providers, therapists) to enable folks to discover and create their own answers while reducing the power imbalance and bias, as well as learning tools to teach you how to listen without bias and pose Facilitative Questions. Please contact me in case you’re interested in learning how to do this, and we can all Help as true Servant Leaders. 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 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 11th, 2023

Posted In: News

I’ve trained many coaches, all of them passionate about serving their clients and helping them be their best selves. And yet sometimes they miss the mark. It’s their brain’s fault. Let me explain.

A client seeks a coach when they seek change, often after trying to make the change themselves. One of the main skills coaches use is listening to best identify the problem. But sometimes, through no fault of their own, coaches don’t accurately hear what their clients tell them.

EARS DON’T HEAR WHAT’S SAID

The problem is that our ears don’t actually hear words. To make it worse, words don’t get translated according to the Speaker’s meaning but according to the Listener’s existing neural circuits. In other words, sometimes neither the coach nor the client hear exactly what’s been said.

The problem occurs in our unconscious listening filters. As I write in my book What? Did you really say what I think I heard? the problem lies in our brains.

Here’s what happens. Words enter our ears as meaningless sound vibrations. After these are filtered (and some discarded!), our brain then sends them on to become signals that eventually get dispatched to a ‘similar enough’ (the term used in neuroscience) circuits that have translated similar signals before. And – this part is the most disturbing – where the signals don’t match up, our brains kindly discard the differences!

In other words, incoming thoughts and meanings get translated in our brains according to our current biases and knowledge, often missing the real intent, nuance, patterns, and comprehensive contextual framework and implications.

SHARON-DREW’S NEW BOOK COMING OUT 9/16/2023

Sample

When we think we’re listening carefully, we naturally assume we’ve accurately heard what clients want to tell us. But given how unreliably our brain translates incoming words, there’s a good chance we won’t fully understand.

Bias. By listening specifically for details, motivation, or story line, a coach’s brain will merely hear what it has a history of hearing. This causes a problem for a client. If:

there are unspoken or omitted bits,
there are meta patterns that should be noticed,
there are unstated historic – or subconscious – reasons behind the current situation that aren’t obvious,

the coach may believe something different was meant and might make the wrong assumptions, potentially offering inappropriate suggestions or comments.

Assumptions. If a coach has had somewhat similar discussions with other clients, or historic, unconscious, beliefs are touched that bring to mind questions or solutions they’ve used with others, coaches might offer clients flawed or inadequate suggestions.

Habits. If a coach has a client base in one area – say, real estate, or leadership – s/he may unconsciously enter the conversation with automatic habits from handling similar situations and miss the unique issues, patterns, and unspoken foundation that may hold the key to success.

WAYS TO HEAR MORE ACCURATELY

Disassociate

One way to avoid unwittingly misunderstanding or mishearing is to disassociate – go up on the ceiling and look down. This goes a long way to minimizing our personal biases, assumptions, triggers or habits, enabling us to hear what’s meant (spoken or not).

For those unfamiliar with disassociation, try this: during a phone chat, put your legs up on the desk and push your body back against the chair, or stand up. For in-person discussions, stand up and/or walk around. [I have walked around rooms during Board meetings while consulting for Fortune 100 companies. They wanted excellence regardless of my physical comportment.] Both of those physical perspectives offer the physiology of choice and the ability to move outside of our instincts. Try it.

For those wanting more information on disassociation, I explain in What? how to trigger ourselves to new choices the moment there is a potential incongruence.

Phrase to use

Given the possibility that you may not be ‘hearing’ accurately, the best way I know to get it right is to say this:

“In case there is a chance I didn’t accurately understand what you’re saying, I’m going to tell you what I heard. Please correct me where I’m wrong.”

That way you both end up on the same page. And to help you enter calls with fewer assumptions.

For those times it’s important for you to hear accurately, here are some questions for you to consider:

What would you need to believe differently to assume every speaker, every call, is a mystery you’re entering into? One you’ve never experienced before? To start each call with Beginner’s Mind?
What can you do to trigger yourself beyond your natural assumptions, and use them to pose a follow up question to yourself: What am I missing here?
What will you hear from your client to let you know that you’ve made an assumption that may not be accurate?
How can you stay on track during a call to make sure you’ve helped them discover their own unconscious drivers and aren’t biased by previous calls?

It’s possible to help your brain go beyond its natural, automatic translation processes. I can help you do this one-day program on listening if you’re interested. Or read W hat?. The most important take-away is to recognize your brain’s unconscious activity, and learn how to override it.

_____________________________

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.sharon-drew.com She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.

Sharon Drew Morgen August 21st, 2023

Posted In: Listening, News

Did you ever wonder what happens behind the scenes with prospects after you’ve made a connection, given a great pitch, or delivered an engaging presentation? Why they don’t return your calls or call with an order?

The silence has nothing to do with your solution.

Indeed, after you’ve pitched, the prospects return to the team to share your ideas. Some might like it. But maybe some don’t like what they’re hearing (or the way your pitch has been interpreted), or argue about using your solution instead of a different one, or discuss a new workaround to try. Some might think it’s not time.

Without group consensus for what criteria a solution must include, they do nothing because the risk of disturbing what’s working is too great. It’s the difference between selling and buying: You’re using the sales process to place your solution; they’re using their (buying) decision process to figure out how to resolve their problem with the least disruption.

Selling and buying are two different things. The sales model too often introduces solutions before the prospect has gotten buy-in for change and they’re just not ready to buy.

Unfortunately for sellers, you’ve got no control over what buyers are doing because the change they must consider is idiosyncratic to their environment and beyond the purpose of sales. It’s possible to facilitate them through their change decisions, but not with the sales model as it is now.

THE CART BEFORE THE HORSE

When sellers start off with a goal to sell a solution (and yes, ‘gathering information’ merely poses biased questions that give you a platform to pitch), it’s a solution looking for a problem. Obviously this narrows the buyer pool to only those who seek THAT solution at THAT moment, those who have already

understood exactly what something New should do that they can’t do for themselves;
assembled the full set of stakeholders who have already agreed and bought-into what something New should look and act like and their roles in managing implementation;
tried several workarounds that don’t work out and an external solution is the only option;
recognized the ‘cost’ of bringing in something New and know how to manage it;
have figured out how to manage the change with the least disruption.

Buying occurs only after a prospect has tried everything else and there is wide-spread agreement for change.

Since every environment is a system and includes the history, rules, goals, norms, relationships and Beliefs held within that culture, bringing in anything New must match or the system will be compromised. Nothing, nothing is ever purchased in isolation; a system will ignore, procrastinate, deny, defend, and resist if something is pushed in beforehand.

If you think you want a new car, getting a pitch about a Tesla will only be welcome if you’ve decided on an electric car in a specific price range. Rejecting a Tesla pitch isn’t a testament to the car, merely a commentary on the buying (or buy-in) decision criteria.

BUYERS BUY IF THE ‘COST’ OF CHANGE IS LESS THAN MAINTAINING THE STATUS QUO

Let’s think more about the buy side. People don’t want to buy anything, merely solve a problem with the least ‘cost’ to their system. Sometimes they sound like they have a need but are merely in their research phase; sometimes they are seeking workarounds when they connect with you and are comparing alternatives; sometimes they take an appointment to learn more from you so they can develop their own solution; sometimes they want to bring back new ideas to the team.

When you’re speaking with someone who seems like a ‘prospect’, you may be right and they have a need. But until they understand and address the full set of internal issues involved with solving their problem, they can’t fully define the best route to a fix.

Until or unless the criteria for change is known and a plan in place to manage it effectively, people aren’t buyers; the ‘cost’ of any potential disruption is just too high and the status quo has been good-enough. One more thing. Before people are buyers, they must be absolutely certain they can’t fix the problem themselves.

All of these issues explain why you’re closing only 5% – the low hanging fruit actually ready, willing, and able to buy.

SELLING IS TACTICAL, BUYING IS STRATEGIC

A purchase is systemic and strategic – a change management issue before it’s a solution choice issue, regardless of the need or the efficacy of the solution. Sales is tactical, solution-placement driven, and doesn’t address the complexities and criteria of the hidden buying environment or their specific buying patterns.

I got a cold call once in which the salesman began by telling me he had a great way for me to save money on a phone provider.

A View from the Buy Side, by Sharon Drew Morgen

Selling and buying are two different things. The sales model too often introduces solutions before the prospect has gotten buy-in for change and they’re just not ready to buy.

THE CART BEFORE THE HORSE

understood exactly what something New should do that they can’t do for themselves;
assembled the full set of stakeholders who have already agreed and bought-into what something New should look and act like and their roles in managing implementation;
tried several workarounds that don’t work out and an external solution is the only option;
recognized the ‘cost’ of bringing in something New and know how to manage it;
have figured out how to manage the change with the least disruption.

Buying occurs only after a prospect has tried everything else and there is wide-spread agreement for change.

BUYERS BUY IF THE ‘COST’ OF CHANGE IS LESS THAN MAINTAINING THE STATUS QUO

All of these issues explain why you’re closing only 5% – the low hanging fruit actually ready, willing, and able to buy.

SELLING IS TACTICAL, BUYING IS STRATEGIC

I got a cold call once in which the salesman began by telling me he had a great way for me to save money on a phone provider.

SD: But saving money isn’t one of my buying criteria!

Rep: Well, it should be. [Wait, he’s telling me I should buy using his selling criteria?]

SD: Great. Then you buy it.

Until people know the rules, roles, and relationships they must maintain, the specifics of your solution are moot. When you’re pitching before people have all their ducks in row, they can’t even hear the details you proudly offer.

You’ve got nothing to sell if they have nothing to buy, regardless of the need or the efficacy of your solution. And unfortunately, because their internal considerations are so idiosyncratic, you can’t ever understand them. But you can know the areas they must handle so you can facilitate them through their uncertainty.

WHAT BUYERS MUST KNOW

Here is a list of what folks must figure out before they can buy anything, regardless of how well your solution matches or how great their need. And the time it takes them to do this is the length of the sales cycle. Indeed, they can’t define what they need until this is completed:

Stakeholders: Have all stakeholders who have been part of maintaining the status quo been assembled? Have those who will be part of the solution been included and driving the initiative? Have they reached agreement on the specific modifications needed? Do they know, and have agreed to, their roles within the processes of the New? Are they aware how their responsibilities will change? Is there supervision or leadership in place to facilitate them through change? Do they all – all – believe the New will maintain the team’s values and goals and offer more efficiency? Have the stakeholders had a say in any transition and had their voices and ideas added?
Workarounds: Have all possible workarounds been tried so it’s obvious to everyone something New is necessary?
Users: Have the users asked for this and have a say in the specifics they need? If not, how will management help them buy-in to using something they didn’t ask for or won’t do what they want it to do? Will they need training for the New? Will their habituated use behaviors need to change? How will the adoption of the New affect their workload or jobs? Have they agreed to a learning curve and to less-than-optimal output when they won’t be so efficient?
Old vs New: How will something New fit with the old? Must the old be removed or is a ‘both/and’ possible? Must the old be retrofitted to work with the New? How? Who will do this?How many of the old practices are needed to maintain work flow? What’s a plausible time frame on this?
Implementation: Does everyone understand the downsides – the labor, costs, time, output issues – of the New and how to mitigate them? Are all – all – on board with New procedures and willing to take on the new activities without resistance? Who is responsible for managing the overall implementation and downsides?
Creativity: Does the team have the opportunity to add ideas? Will they be able to add what they need so they’re part of the solution and won’t resist?
Brand: Will the New change the brand and require different kinds of marketing? Will the new potentially change the finances? The audience? Is it worth it? How will they know before they try?

Bringing in something New or different requires group buy-in, discussion, debating, questioning and idea-sharing. Imagine coming home for dinner and announcing to your family that you just purchased a new house and moving next week! The fact that last night your spouse mentioned s/he’d love an extra room is not the point.

No one buys anything unless workarounds have been tried, research has been done, possibilities are discussed, options are considered, and stakeholders have bought into, and added to, the process of change.

Because sales focuses on ‘need’ and placing solutions, it only closes those at the tail end of their change management process and expends far too much resource trying to drive a decision with folks who aren’t yet real buyers.

Why not begin selling by seeking those going through the change process at that moment and help them facilitate the change first then leading them through their systemic decisions and selling to those who are ready? It will take far less time, and if you’re like the large numbers of sales reps I’ve trained globally, you’ll close 40% instead of 5%.

DO YOU WANT TO SELL? OR HAVE SOMEONE BUY?

Selling and buying are two different activities. Start on the buy side, discover those who WILL be buyers and then facilitate buying. Then you can sell because they’re ready to buy. By then you’re on the Buying Decision Team, can target your pitches and presentations, be a real trusted advisor, and your price discussions will be minimal. You will also have saved a lot of time, closed a lot more sales, and have real relationships.

For those of you wanting to learn how to do this, I invented a model called Buying Facilitation® that uses the 13 steps all people go through on route to buying. It involves a wholly different facilitation skill set: Facilitative Questions, Presumptive Summaries, and Systems Listening. I suggest you visit www.sharondrewmorgen.com and read the articles I put up on change, buying, and decision making. And if you’re committed to helping buyers buy, read Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell. Or just contact me and we can chat. www.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 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 August 14th, 2023

Posted In: News

As an original thinker, I think in systems or, as some systems thinkers call it, ‘thinking in circles’. The main difference between systems thinkers and serial thinkers is the scope of what we notice.

Standard thinking is sequential. One idea follows the next and appears logical as per the person’s knowledge of the situation and similar experiences. It 1. restricts possible choices to the person’s assumptions, history and beliefs; 2. notices what’s deemed relevant; 3. may overlook factors that might enhance understanding or outcomes. Sequential thinkers have a relatively straight path to their outcomes.

Many leaders are sequential (transactional) thinkers. When resolving a problem they speak to other leaders; consider actions to resolve it; invite other leaders to create and deploy a solution. They often make decisions based on intuition and available information.

Systems thinking is circular. Systems thinkers hear, think, notice a broad range of factors on many levels simultaneously, making it possible to compile an expansive data set from a broad array of sources. With more good data to weigh, there’s a high probably of more creativity, more choice, less risk, less resistance, more collaboration, more efficiency and a greater possibility of attaining excellence.

A systems thinking (relational) leader seeks out a broad scope of ideas and people to ensure inclusion and maximum creativity. To assure there’s collaboration, agreement, and acceptance, and to gather the full fact pattern, they assemble (representatives of) all job descriptions touching the problem and the solution; trial several workarounds; lead the group to discern if the risk of change is manageable; promote group buy-in to integrate the new solution. I’ve developed a 13 Step model that facilitates systemic change.

WHAT SYSTEMS THINKERS DO

Top people in their fields are generally systems thinkers. Steve Jobs, Nikolai Tesla, Cezanne. In modern sports, Roger Federer, Tiger Woods, and LeBron James become one with the ball, their implement (racket, club), the court/course, their hands, their legs, their grip, etc. and continually (re)adjust their position according to their opponents. It’s all one system. When Federer, Woods, James are not ‘one’ with all, they miss the shot. My son, a medaled Olympian at 3 Olympics (Nagano, Salt Lake, and Vancouver), excels when he’s ‘one’ with his system: his skis, the snow, the poles, his knees and boots, his arms, the gates, the run, the turns. When he’s not ‘one’ with all, he falls.

Here’s a breakdown of the systems artists think in while making a painting. They simultaneously:

see the paint, the canvas, the brush, the stroke, the color, the mental vision of what they’re painting, the emerging patterns and a shifting minds-eye visual as the picture emerges.
feel the emergence of the vision from their mental picture, the brush, the hardness of softness of how the brush meets the canvas, their hand/arm as they apply color to the canvas.
hear the whisk of the brush on the canvas, the creak of the floor or chair as they move toward and away from the canvas.

I believe that adding systems thinking to transactional activities will make them more efficient and their outcomes more successful, collaborative, and creative. For those of you who’d like to add more systems to your thinking, here are some ideas to consider.

HOW DO BRAINS THINK?

Everyone naturally thinks in both systems and sequences at different times and for different reasons. Here’s a simplistic explanation of how we end up doing and thinking as we do.

Sample

Everything we see, hear, feel is a translation from our existing neural circuitry and, by nature, subjective. We’re all restricted by how our brain stores our history. We understand, act on, notice, and even hear what we already know; we do what we’ve always done. While true, it’s not the whole story. We actually know – and sense, and understand, and intuit – a lot more than we use due to the way our brain stores stuff.

Fun fact: our brains collect millions of bits of information PER SECOND and sends them whizzing around our 100 trillion synapses as we make decisions, write reports, and turn on the dishwasher before going to bed!

Our conscious thoughts are a fraction of the full data set we’ve got stored in our unconscious. Sequential thinkers will likely access more of the automatic superhighways – those neural circuits triggering ideas and behaviors that have become habituated – that carry our historic (biased, subjective) expressions. Systems thinkers are less direct and make decisions from a broader fact pattern; their brains access more of the data stored in various circuits around the brain and not automatically accessible, providing more elements and less bias in each decision.

Here’s the problem when we need to make a choice: due to our brain’s laziness, our standard thinking automatically triggers our assumptions and biases. Obviously we’d prefer the broadest range of data for decisions making. How, then, do we access our unconscious to retrieve more of what we’ve got stored?

Note: I’ve got a new book coming out soon that provides ways to accomplish this. (HOW? Generating new neural circuits for learning, behavior change, and decision making)

Here’s how I access data beyond my brain’s automatic choices. Maybe you do some of this naturally?

HOW I THINK

During conversations or when helping someone resolve a problem, several layers of data show up simultaneously as I listen:

I am detached (in Observer/witness/coach) from any outcome, making it possible to notice more and gather a broader scope of data with a minimally-biased brain.
I detect the underlying intent. A speaker initially offers a simplified version of a goal or problem, often unaware of the complete fact pattern. The ultimate goal is often unspoken, unknown, and unconscious until it’s fully uncovered. Too often sequential thinkers assume the initial disclosure is accurate; it’s where I begin accessing patterns.
I hear the underlying message which I call a metamessage. Again, this is largely unspoken – a belief, or bias that isn’t specifically mentioned but rules the entire interaction.
I can detect disparities, incongruences, between the metamessage and the stated (but often incomplete and possibly incongruent) intent. Too often, sequential thinkers only notice incongruences after they’ve become a problem.
I notice patterns, what occurs repeatedly. So if I see someone regularly taking action on a subset of data before uncovering the full data set (i.e. FIRE, excluding the ‘Ready, Aim…’), I assume that’s a typical behavior.
I can hear the underlying systems and assumptions that influence the goal. How did X become the ‘logical’ conclusion? Why is Y the response to Z?
The person’s tone, tempo, pitch, and affect point me to congruence or incongruence in their goal.
I notice word choices. How the chosen words correlate with the stated goals and problems lead me to underlying assumptions and where something’s missing.
I only attend to what’s relevant to understand the system. Neither details nor story line are relevant at the beginning.
I notice if a problem can be fixed from previous successful fixes. Note: among a brain’s 100 trillion synapses there are often existing neural circuits that were used successfully before. I always ask: ‘Have you successfully resolved this before? If so, what’s stopping you from using the same methods now?’ Otherwise I help them generate new neural circuits for a new solution.

Thinking in circles, I hear/notice all this simultaneously. When one of the factors doesn’t match the goal or intent, it lights up in my head telling me there’s an unresolved issue, or a systems problem.

Unfortunately, sequential thinkers often resolve problems in ‘logical’ steps and are surprised when they later discover the goal, as stated, is wrong, or they’ve gathered an incomplete set of problem factors, or not included all necessary stakeholders, or missed vital factors that conclude with failure or resistance.

I believe that anyone can add systems thinking to their standard thinking.

USE YOUR SYSTEMS THINKING

Thinking in systems provides a broader scope with which to think and plan. Beneficial for inspiration, resourcefulness, accuracy, unbiased responses, and creativity, for writers, artists, musicians, inventors and original thinkers to name a few. I also believe that corporate management, healthcare providers, coaches and trainers would benefit from an unbiased, broad, inclusive understanding of the entire scope of a situation. Of course listening without bias and posing non-biased questions are skill sets everyone needs.

For those times you need a bit of inspiration or seek a more complete outcome, it’s possible to add some systems thinking practices. Here’s an exercise to express your systems-thinking brain.

EXERCISE

Remember a time you considered making/creating something. Painting, knitting, whittling, woodworking. Let’s see if you can capture what you did in creation mode to see if any of your actions are worth adding to your current way of thinking. And grab a sheet of paper to write down your answers to the questions below.

To begin your project, you might have had pictures in your mind’s eye as you played with ideas. Maybe you made some sketches. Or just trialed different things knowing you’d fail a few times. You probably sat quietly to think and let your mind explore possibilities from all sides. Is this the right angle? What will adding this color do?

Notice how you’re thinking, how the ideas are emerging. Are they similar to things you’ve done before? Wholly new? Do they have sound? Colors? Can you feel any of them? How many different versions are showing up? How do you know which ideas are ‘good’ or relevant, which won’t work? How many different things did you come up with? How many of these did you try? How did you choose which ones were ‘good’ and which were ‘bad’? How did you notice what you needed to alter – did you feel it? See it? When did you decide you needed some additional research? How did you know you were finished? Did you complete? Why? Why not?

Now, what’s different about the way you thought of those things vs the way you go about resolving a problem? Is there anything you can add to your daily choices that would expand what you notice? What you consider? What you do?

I believe that all of us could benefit from systems thinking for activities that demand we show up with minimal bias. Listening to strangers, or people not in our general life path (i.e. unhoused people; elderly people; disabled people) without bias or judgment. Recognizing a problem that needs resolution. Making life decisions that affect others.

Try it. You’ll expand your world.

____________________

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.sharon-drew.com She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

Sharon Drew Morgen July 31st, 2023

Posted In: News

When I begin an on-site training program I start by saying:

“Hi everyone. I’ll begin with a warning: I use confusion as a teaching tool. Confusion is merely your brain attempting to input new information and not finding circuits to translate it. Stuff you already know goes down familiar circuits and it’s comfortable. Your confusion is merely your brain telling you it has no circuits to translate the new data – and you’re learning! And it makes me SO happy!”

The participants laugh uncomfortably. But then it becomes a sort of gentle contest – who can be the MOST confused. Invariably someone says

“Sharon-Drew, you’ll be SO proud of me! I’m SOOOO confused!”

And everyone laughs together and claps in knowing agreement.

WHY IS CONFUSION DEEMED BAD?

I wonder why confusion is something to be avoided. Why do we all have to ‘know’ everything? Why can’t we delight in the mystery, the jumble, the dark moving spaces that bring that slight bit of discomfort, a touch of fear and dollop of curiosity?

When we think we ‘know’ something, it’s because we’re using circuits that already exist in our brains. Sadly, we assume what we ‘know’ is accurate, even if it ends up being inaccurate or biased, even if it means we end up dismissing new content that might be more accurate, even if it means we restrict learning anything new.

Old beliefs, previous knowledge, habits and assumptions become concretized over time, and new ideas become suspect because there’s no precedent for them even if the new ideas are more cogent. Our brains just love our status quo. Simple. Stable. Quick. Reality? No such thing.

How do new ideas get into the world when they’re contrary to existing myths and norms? Why isn’t ok to be confused and then curious to research, think, debate new ideas?

Entire fields remain committed to researching within the confines of perceived wisdom, even when they suspect, or know, it’s not working. How does something new enter if confusion, or the ‘unknown’, isn’t considered?

Remember flat earthers? What about radio waves? Did you know only one painting of Cezanne’s was purchased during his life? Or that it took 40 years after the invention of the telephone to begin broad use – using Morse Code instead? Are you aware that initially Bill Gates told his team that he wasn’t convinced the internet had value? Seriously.

LISTENING IS PART OF THE PROBLEM

One of the initiators of our confusion is the way words enter our brains and get translated. You see, when we hear someone speak, our brains don’t accurately translate what the speaker intends to communicate!

Sound – in this case, words – enter as vibrations, get turned into signals after being filtered by our beliefs, then get dispatched to ‘similar-enough’ existing circuits that were formed from similar – but not the same – words. And any meaning, any vibrations, that don’t match our existing (and comfortable, accepted) circuits, get discarded or resisted.

When I learned this (see my book on the subject – What?), I created a ‘curiosity’ trigger as an override in my brain when I experience resistance or disbelief, and now go straight to confusion instead so I can potentially learn something new.

I adore confusion. It means I’m creating new circuits. It means I’m learning!

WE COULD ALL USE A BIT OF CONFUSION

Our brains are the problem. Indeed, because of the way we subjectively interpret new ideas we end up restricting our lives. The thing is, everything, regardless of what science thinks, or what our spouses or bosses want us to believe is true, is a subjective interpretation that we live our lives committed to!

What we read or enjoy; the colors we see and the words we hear; the friends and jobs and neighborhoods we choose; are restricted to the circuits that already exist in our brains – what we agree with and the worlds our brain circuits have created for us – obviously a carefully calibrated world view; obviously restricting a whole lotta world out there we don’t recognize or enjoy or share. We could all use a little confusion now and again.

To allow ourselves to be confused, we’d have to ignore, override or at least hide from view, some of our biases. So rather than guess what your biases are, I’ll pose some questions of you, because I’m sure confused why you’d rather keep doing what you’re doing rather than face confusion and learn, change, and be enriched:

What would you need to believe differently to be willing to rid yourself from some of your biases? Do you know which ones you’d be willing to part with? How do you know your answer isn’t biased?
How would you know that any confusion is worth the cost of ‘not knowing’ and being uncomfortable?
What issues come up for you when you face the prospect of being confused in an area you’re expert in?
Are there any areas of your life or work knowledge that you protect, that you prefer not to feel confusion around because you believe you have all the knowledge you need – and it’s accurate? Would you be willing to examine these to see if there is anything new to learn? Any areas for you to rethink?
Think of a topic, an idea that runs counter to your beliefs and spend time with it. No, really. Spend enough time to understand it, and know precisely how it differs from your beliefs. See if you can find any fragment in there that confuses you that you’d be willing to think about for a day or two.

We live our lives, work our jobs, vote and go to neighborhood meetings, accustomed to having an automatic answer, knowledge at the ready that has been vetted by our brains, accepted and comfortable. But to gain new knowledge, reconsider old opinions, mature your beliefs and self-asessments, you can create new circuits, and then have a whole new knowledge set.

All you need is some curiosity and the willingness to be confused for a bit of time. You’re worth it, no?

__________________________________________

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.sharon-drew.com She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

Sharon Drew Morgen July 10th, 2023

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 occasionally didn’t recognize 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 subconscious, 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 directs brains to specific circuits that hold their unconscious criteria), a simple backend tree, and carefully culled choices of criteria-based options, my search tool Hobbes helped site visitors discover their real criteria and led them 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 normal, especially for 24 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 1% of women were receiving funding in those days.

Not to mention 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 the concept died.

PERCEIVED WISDOM REIGNS

You all know what happened next. Google search entered and the rest is history. But about 15 years later, the folks at Bing called, saying they’d heard about Hobbes and could they buy it. I shared the original site design. Yay! Loved it. ‘We could start using this immediately! What a great idea to help people uncover their unconscious criteria and help them make decisions quicker.’

But then I got a call back the next day: the team hated the concept. ‘Why would anyone want to use a search tool that didn’t seek out information the way Google did?’ It was the accepted norm and ‘no one would want to do anything different’.

And so the perceived wisdom has prevailed, and now the whole world accepts the one way we’ve been offered to search the net. Imagine if we had choices.

WHO AM I? AND WHY DOES CRITERIA MATTER?

Before I continue my story, let me stop for just a moment to give you a thumbnail sketch of who I am.

When I was age 11 I recognized that I think differently than others (I was diagnosed with Asperger’s when I was 61, explaining why my way of making sense of the world – in systems – provided me a more holistic understanding than folks with standard brains who think sequentially.). By experiencing several ‘strands’ of awareness simultaneously, it was obvious that to make a decision on anything required a prioritization of my brain’s hierarchy of values, my criteria.

Wanting to show up as normal, I began what would become my life’s work: coding the systems involved with how brains cause us to make choices; I figured out how to sequence the sequence steps of decision making that match our unconscious belief-based criteria, and cause us to do what we do and think what we think.

Since then, I’ve used my understanding of brains, systems, and decision making to develop several original models that fac ilitate systemic brain change:

I invented (and wrote the NYTimes Bestseller Selling with Integrity on) a wholly new model Buying Facilitation® for sellers to use to facilitate the Pre-Sales, change management end of buying decisions that closes 8x more than using sales alone;
a new way to listen that avoids bias;
a new form of question that leads brains to unconscious criteria for efficient decision making;
a model for coaches and leaders that leads people through the steps their sequenced steps of decision making to make change efficient;
a way for folks seeking permanent behavior change to change their brain circuits.

All of my models are outside the box, outside of mainstream, and provide innovations in several fields. And as with Hobbes, because they go against perceived wisdom, I’ve often struggled to find folks willing to adopt them even when they prove, in controlled studies with major corporations, 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 newest grumble about innovation and how normalized thinking limits our worlds, rules our assumptions and restricts creativity.

I’ll begin with my definition of perceived wisdom. 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 – our internal, idiosyncratic systems or rules and history and expected behaviors.

PW is perpetuated in every sphere of our lives. We learn it as infants and 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, plus you can’t change a behavior by trying to change a behavior) * Do you fail to display a contact number on your site to collect names for marketing outreach – assuming people will fill out your form and accept your spam? (Thereby turning away folks with real interest who refuse to fill out those things.) Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. 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.

PW keeps us locked in. 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, that continues to use information-in – a model that doesn’t integrate with brains and causes an 80% failure rate.

Even great Harvard thinkers like Chris Argyris and Howard Gardner have written books on managing resistance, using the baseline assumption that all change involves resistance. Nonsense. Another faulty fact we’ve normalized and have cost us dearly.

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 as a result.

To begin, PW has kept our search use hamstrung, a vehicle to monetize our use and restrict data. PW assumes, even expects, our personal data will be extracted to send spam.

It didn’t start out that way, but as monetization and demographic compartments became ubiquitous, we don’t even notice. Most of our online interactions are now suspect: even simple searches lead us to knowledge selected by algorithms that contain 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, more than any, determines what we read, the information we have access to (the full range of data available only after dedicated search and rescue), the news in other countries. Even scientific facts are 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 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.

WHAT COULD BE DIFFERENT

We’d like to believe that the internet and social media are the glue that stimulates the flow of information around the world. Yet we don’t have full access to it and it’s vulnerable to manipulation. Why have we come to accept this? Why is it ok to have our curiosity monetized? Why is PW so deep-seated that we sit back and allow it? Where are the voices that scream in the empty space where new ideas and creativity and innovation once lived? Are we all that lazy? Or don’t we care?

I can’t believe that people with terrific ideas – innovators! – aren’t grousing as I am. Yet none of us are doing anything about it. Why do we put up with this? Is our criteria for belonging so fierce that we’re willing to give up our personal criteria to be all we can be?

I wonder how search would have been different if Hobbes (or something like it) were one of the search tools we all had at our disposal – the ability to freely search for what we wanted to know, plus the ability to make sure our criteria were being met on each site we visited.

And I wonder why companies aren’t putting service, putting people, before data extraction. Site designers are now inundated with requests to add ‘questions’ to their sites that allow them to grab data to send out god-knows-what. Always trying to push, to sell, to influence; always outside-in, using the criteria of the sites about pushing data enough times to instigate a buy.

The internet and search are now normalized, locked in place by our groupthink, maintained by the needs of Silicon Valley. But there must be a way we can find solutions that are both ethical AND make money. The internet, search, can be used for problem solving, not divisive rhetoric or monetization, for collaboration instead of discord. And yet we shame people who tell the truth because they don’t follow PW.

What if our companies shifted their criteria toward excellence, and sought to make money the old way, by offering great solutions and service. Why wouldn’t sites want to spend their time/energy proving to site visitors they’re trustworthy, creating companies people want to engage with – facilitating user service instead of data extraction? What if the company criteria were integrity: to help visitors be served. I, for one, immediately disengage from sites trying to pull data from me.

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.

WHY GO BEYOND PERCEIVED WISDOM?

Of course, going outside the box is hazardous. After recognizing the craziness of PW in several industries, I find myself writing articles yelling “But seriously! You have no clothes on!” and getting beat-up on, ridiculed, ignored and made stupid. 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 the ends – ends 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 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. 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.

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

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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.sharon-drew.com She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.

Sharon Drew Morgen June 26th, 2023

Posted In: Communication, News

Remember the intake form you were asked to complete at a new doctor’s office? Questions like Do you smoke? How often do you exercise? Transactional queries that gather data but inspire no self-reflection; queries asked of everyone, regardless of needs; indifferent questions devoid of care or concern. Mechanical. Transactional.

But imagine if the first question was:

We are committed to serving you to facilitate you in reaching your optimal health. What would you need to see from us to make sure we provide the type of care you deserve?

This not only tells you you’re going to be taken care of, but causes you consider your goals. You automatically trust this group; you feel safe and cared for even before you meet the healthcare provider. Collaborative. Inclusive. Relational.

I believe a relational approach enables a collaboration in which WE generate an outcome that works for everyone and inspires loyalty and creativity. The transactional approach leaves me feeling like a number, like I’m interchangeable with others and need to meet some sort of hidden criteria to get what I deserve.

While there are arguments to be made for each, I personally find the relational approach more effective, kinder, ethical, and more profitable. For those of you who are considering transitioning to a more people-centric style, I’ve got a few ideas. But let me start with personal examples.

HOME DEPOT SUCKS

I recently had to make several home-improvement purchases. Home Depot and Lowe’s are my local choices. Having had negative experiences with Home Depot before, I decided to call them first to see if they might have changed. My first interaction was with the blasted answering ‘voice’ that kept offering me options they wanted me to choose from but I didn’t want. I ended up screaming at ‘him’ as he wasn’t hearing what I needed (Surely, if you’re going to have a machine pick up the phone make it easy for me!) I finally hung up, called back and said ‘Screen Door’ on the 4^th question although ‘he’ kept trying to get a more specific response (I didn’t have one! That’s why I was calling!). Finally he said he’d connect me. I was kept on hold for 10 minutes and finally hung up. I had wasted 20 minutes, become frustrated, and never got what I wanted. I guess they didn’t want my business.

When I called Lowe’s, I got a lovely voice message: “How can I help you today?” When I said I wanted information, it said “Sure. Let me find someone to help you!” A difference already: I felt heard (even by a machine!). When the phone didn’t pick up after just a few unanswered rings I got a message that said, “Sorry for the delay. We’re trying to find someone to help you.” I was connected shortly after that. A woman answered (a real person!): “Hi. This is customer service. I’m Susan. How can I help?” then heard my issues and said, “I’m going to put you through to Amanda. She’s my best person and she’ll take good care of you. Otherwise, call me back. I want to make it work for you.” Ah. She really took care of me. When I later told my contractor I’d prefer buying from Lowe’s he said: “I was going to ask you if you minded that I use them! They’re great. I hate Home Depot. They don’t care about people.” I wonder how much business Home Depot loses because of their transactional practices.

Home Depot made me into a transaction, a faceless number whose needs had to fit into their assumptions. Lowe’s’ people-centric structure – even their automatic messaging – treated me with respect. So simple to make a customer feel like they matter.

Let’s look at the differences within companies.

TRANSACTIONAL STRUCTURE

Working with a large global client recently we discovered two teams solving the same complex problem separately. One hired a consultant to fix the problem; the other took team members off an important project. I suspect they’ll end up with different outcomes and costs, not to mention put disparate systems into the corporation that other departments would have to manage. What’s the cost of the duplication? And what’s the cost of the differences in solutions over time? Hard to be successful when the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.

Here’s another sad story. A friend of mine was on Google’s leadership team. He returned from his vacation to find his entire team (75 people) had been redeployed, and he was put on a wholly different project. He was furious: what happened to all the work he and his team were creating? Why wasn’t he given notice so he could prepare his folks and tie up loose ends of the long-term project they’d been working on? What was he to do with the calls from old team members, angry and confused as to why the group was disbanded? Transactional. The DOing first at all costs. Literally. Oh. And my friend quit. A smart 10-year veteran who created many of the search apps we all use.

Transactional environments are uncompromising: people quickly learn to make no decisions that go outside the lines, then procrastinate when given a deadline due to leadership’s habit of shifting requirements without warning, oblivious to people’s time or workload.

Transactional management too often sees people as disposable ‘things’, merely cogs in a wheel. It leads to

a decrease in creativity and problem ownership
inefficiency
increased cost
lost business
reduced creativity
minimal cooperation, collaboration, or company-wide coherence
decreased customer loyalty
decreased employee loyalty.

With cost, revenue, and time as the criteria, people are left out. Motivation is by rewards and punishment as management controls and monitors output via numbers. People aren’t invited to share their creativity and ideas as they’re not part of a solution except as operatives. Yet these same people are responsible for carrying the burden of the errors made by leadership. Customers end up fighting for services that prove unsuccessful or incomplete; service reps are not available when customers need help; customers end up leaving and buying from the relational competitors. There’s no win here.

Thirty years ago I was doing Buying Facilitation® training at Bethlehem Steel. There was obviously something wrong going on: the participants were tired, complaining. Seems they’d been given two months to move house and family from major cities around the U.S. to either Burns Harbor, MI, or Sparrows Point, MD, at the time both tiny (and smelly, smoky, loud) steel towns. Two months to sell their homes and buy new ones (and remember: there was no Zillow or Google then to do research), get their kids enrolled in new schools, arrange for pets, pack up their lives, and move. With so little time, the Reps moved on their own. They bought houses with no family approval; they traveled back and forth for months to help get their houses sold, pack up and move, see their families. They were angry: lots of sick time, breakdowns, lateness. Few quotas were met. One man actually became physiologically blind. Four months in and many still lived on their own or had left behind teenagers with neighbors to complete their school year.

I finally told my client he had to meet with the team, listen to their needs and anger, and apologize. My client at first resisted: “But I gave them $5,000 to move! What’s their problem!?” Note: he finally apologized and they all – grown men (mostly) – cried together. But it cost Beth Steel time, money, and attrition as long-standing members quit. Not to mention months of unhappiness, upended lives, and reduced profits.

RELATIONAL STRUCTURE

When I was hired to train Buying Facilitation® throughout the global California Closets franchises, I spent my first day sitting in prospects’ closets with different designers. I returned to find my client leaning against the wall waiting for me as I exited the elevator. “How can one little woman cause so much disruption in 5 hours? (Note: I merely asked designers: “How will your prospects choose you over the competition?” and otherwise remained a silent observer.) Let’s go figure this out.” We went into the training room where five members of the leadership team and I posed questions, played with ideas, and eventually came up with some solutions that would potentially diminish the disruption of bringing in a wholly different sales model.

Ultimately the franchises adopted my material and changed their routines. One of our new ideas was to publish an in-house ‘zine as a vehicle to create a franchise-wide WE Space to share new ideas and success stories as the new facilitation model was introduced. It went a long way toward global adoption. Disruption was just a hitch to be managed and used as a reason to create new processes. And their profits rose by 26% annually.

Relational management has different objectives and skill sets. With a focus on people it employs a collaborative approach; ideas get generated from representative groups; all outputs are considered from the human angle and take into account needs, feelings, egos, work-life balance, opportunity. The output represents

happy employees and customers;
more sales;
more efficiency;
more creativity;
more trust;
greater shared understanding/clear communication
more loyalty,
easier implementations
more ownership.

Relational management fosters care and respect for both employees and customers. Goals are met efficiently, with less time wastage, fewer resources, less fall out. When I hear doubters say relational leadership ‘takes more time’ I get curious: with all voices included in planning and decision-making, there are fewer problems, quicker resolutions, less attrition, easy buy-in, more creativity and more accurate data from which to make decisions. Seems to me it ultimately saves time. And makes more money.

DIFFERENCES ON A DAILY BASIS

Transactional businesses believe the DOing is of higher value than the BEing without fully understanding the broad implications of what happens when people become numbers.

When working with a transactional company as a consultant, I’ve been left out of important meetings with critical ramifications; had agendas and dates and team members shifted without discussion causing delays and redos; necessary suggestions get overlooked even when the fallout effects their bottom line. Jobs always take longer as everyone must shift gears due to sudden (unreasonable) changes, or to get everyone on the same page. My frustration and stress level is almost as high as the folks I work with as we all deal with the fallout from seemingly erratic decisions. Time, care and suggestions go unnoticed. And I often end up having to deal with getting paid – checks are late, for the wrong amount, await signatures of people on holiday.

The relational companies I’ve worked with take their commitment to people seriously. There are opportunities for learning and taking on greater responsibility; more flexible work hours to account for childcare or eldercare; excitement over new ideas, regardless of the job description of the people who offer them; respect for customers is shown through the entire customer lifecycle, from voice messages to quick problem resolution. As a consultant my time is respected and my ideas appreciated; I get included in decision making and problem resolution. They even pay me on time and with exuberant appreciation. And several have given me ‘Thank You’ gifts! Working with a relational company brings out the very best of me.

It’s obvious that relational management is far superior. I have some thoughts on how to bring transactional companies into the 21^st century.

A STAGED APPROACH TO CREATE A RELATIONAL ENVIRONMENT

Let’s say the leadership team, or maybe one group within the organization, seeks to become relational. What’s a good way to go about it to avoid resistance and manage any disruption?

Changing from transactional to relational is an enormous undertaking: the identity and beliefs of the entire company or group must shift from power/force/control/action to collaboration/compassion/trust/respect; management must change from top-down control, reward and punishment (win/lose), to mutual decision making (win/win); client outreach must shift from treating them as numbers to servant leadership (from Home Depot to Lowe’s); even hiring choices go from results-oriented folks to those seeking to serve. Obviously it’s not possible to change thinking and leadership styles immediately, but it can be done in stages.

The biggest issue is how to get buy-in for the disruption that will ensue. To encourage ownership, loyalty, idea creation and problem solving, start with a core team – representing all levels of responsibility and job titles – to identify areas of disruption, brainstorm possible goals and resource requirements, and address issues the prevailing transactional process has caused. In other words, this initial group will recognize the problems to be solved, generate ideas for consideration, and begin to lay out possible routes forward for the larger group. And no, the usual leadership team cannot do it as they are the purveyors of the problem.

Here are some ideas to get you started:

Build a representative team: It’s vital to assemble a core team that represents all levels of responsibility for each business sector – i.e. sales, finance, marketing, tech, etc. If it’s a large organization, start with a representational group for each sector, then eventually create a core team that represents the full company. Make sure to include front-line workers. These folks carry the direct knowledge of the customer and the folks who carry the corporate identity daily.
Set the parameters: Decide on rules: how the meeting will be led, who is responsible for what, frequency of meetings, etc. Consider rotating leadership.
Define problem to be solved: Including, but not limited to brainstorming new ideas and gathering data to capture people’s experiences and challenges. Make sure every voice gets heard and included. Check if additional people are needed.
Manage disruption: Determine the types of disruption most likely to occur: in what areas, what management levels, and potentially how it would show up. potential differences in employee rules and customer outputs; and sales models and customer contact. Start with a very specific set of agreed-upon steps and stages and brainstorm ideas to manage the disruption and encourage buy-in.
Research: Prior to the next meeting, do research on different types of relational approaches to discuss.
Formulate approach: Using ideas from the research, cobble together ideas and vote to choose the favorites. Take back to your colleagues to discuss. Take this feedback to the next group meeting.
Feedback and approach formulation: Consider feedback from constituents and incorporate feedback into a new approach. Begin to choose action items to formulate approach and assign tasks.

These steps will create a representational, dedicated team to take responsibility for beginning a change initiative. I suggest you follow my 13 Steps of Change process that encourages ideas and commitment from all; provides the foundation for buy-in and continuous improvement; and avoids resistance. I’d be happy to discuss this with any groups seeking to change

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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.sharon-drew.com She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.

Sharon Drew Morgen June 19th, 2023

Posted In: News

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What Should Coaches Be Listening For?

A View from the Buy Side

Thinking in Systems: the difference between sequential thinking and systems thinking

The Importance of Confusion

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

Beyond Transactional Management: how and why to convert to Relational Leadership