Singapore Facilitators Conference - Day one report

A quick post and greetings from Singapore, where I presented a session yesterday at the Singapore Facilitators Conference on "Facilitation with the brain in mind". After an overview of the NeuroLimbic and NeuroRational types, (as developed by author and strategist Peter Burow in his book, NeuroPower) a lively discussion ensued which featured shared stories and experiences. I find these conferences invaluable because there is always such a wealth of knowledge and experience in the room, so many talented practitioners in diverse fields willing to share what they know and hungry to learn more from each other.


Are you going up?

A useful exercise looked at creating your elevator pitch - the 20 second summary of your offering that you would be able to reel off in the course of an elevator ride with a prospective client. The pitch should be a brief description of what you do and how you offer value, benefit and quality to your client.

Most of all, it needs to be structured so that the client cannot simply say, “Oh yeah, we already do that kind of work with another company," or “we already do/have that in-house,” or “We don’t need/use that.” Worst of all, if you give your pitch and the client simply says, "so what?" then you have yet to deliver the information that's needed to start a useful conversation.

A pitch is not simply saying your name and what you do: "Hi I'm Frank and I'm a consultant," or "I'm Debbie and I work with XYZ company." That practically begs the "so what?" response.

A great pitch needs to:

• show how you help your clients achieve their goals
  
• describe in detail where you add value and the benefits of your offer
• stimulate a conversation, so the person will keep talking after you leave the "elevator"

Working together with about a dozen other conference attendees, we came up with the following pitch:

We are all storytellers. Everything that happens in our life, we tell ourselves a story about it, to make some meaning of it and explain it to ourselves and others. If you spilled coffee on yourself this morning, you automatically told yourself a story about what just happened. It might have been "oh, I'm so clumsy!! I always drop things..." or you might have said "well, I guess I'll know for next time not to put my mug on the edge of the table like that!"

People act the same way in organizations. They tell themselves and others stories about their day-to-day existence and experiences. As with the spilled coffee example, those stories can be positive, negative or somewhere in between.

If you are a leader or manager, how useful would it be for you to know what stories your team members and direct reports are telling? To know whether they are hopeful stories or fearful ones? Are people able to share their stories and gain comfort from that fact that they're not the only one who feels the way they do, that they're not alone? Or do their stories not line up with each other, which is why there is miscommunication, tension and conflict in the office?

Most of all, you probably want to know whether the stories they're telling match the story that you, their leader, want them to be telling! That they are aligned with the goals and expectations of the organization.

If that is something that would be of use to you, we have processes for getting those stories into the open and talking openly and honestly about what they mean - for the individuals, the team, the organization, and for you as a leader. If it's of interest to you, I'm happy to talk further with you about how that would work...

Looking forward to another day at the conference today, will report more news tomorrow!
TM

Great Expectations = Great Results

Most of us are familiar in broad terms with the placebo effect, a case of mind- over-matter whereby pills or treatments with no medicinal value produce results that are experienced by the patient as real.

Is it the pill, or the person? Medicine...or mind?

A recent New Scientist article, “The power of belief,” (23 Aug 2008) described some recent research on the placebo effect that I believe effectively points up the power of the mind to produce results based on the power of expectation.

The article outlines the role that expectation and the mind play in the physiological processes that have traditionally been the exclusive domain of evidence-based (and fairly mechanistic models of) medical and pharmacological practice.

“The very act of administering a drug activates a complex cascade of biochemical events in the patient’s brain,” states the article, whereby a drug interacts with “expectation-activated molecules.”

In one case a painkiller was administered without the patients’ knowledge and actually had no effect – the speculation being that the administration of the drug actually requires a reaction whereby the mind stimulates the production of the body’s own natural painkilling endorphins.

Even with drugs that do have direct effects independently of patients’ expectations, the strength of these effects can be similarly influenced by expectations. For example, if you do not tell people they are getting an injection of morphine, you need to inject at least 12 mg to get a painkilling effect, compared to a much lower dose if you tell them what they are getting.

And in an experiment based on reported experiences of pain sensations along a spectrum from mild to severe, the subject had been conditioned to expect that all shocks administered in conjunction with a flash of green light would be mild while shocks with a red light would be severe.

At the end of the experiment, he reported all shocks – even those at the severe end of the spectrum, to be mild because they were accompanied by the green light. His expectation had been set by the positive suggestion and in the end produced results that he experienced as real. Bear in mind: this effect took place even though the subject knew that the experiment concerned the placebo effect.



In a scenario closer to home, my brother Trent in Canada told me today that he had tried something new with his son. Before his son’s recent hockey tournament, Trent told his son that he believed in him, that he knew he would do a great job and would play his absolute best, and that no matter what the outcome, he was proud of him for being in the tournament.




His son Mitch went on to play his best games ever during a series in which his team was undefeated. A coach remarked that Mitch should have had the tournament puck and been MVP for the calibre of play he exhibited – like nothing he’d ever seen Mitch do before.

Contrast this with the dads you see screaming at their kids from the side of the football pitch, telling them everything they’re doing wrong and how they should change. I can tell you which dad most kids would rather have at their games – and I think most of us would feel the same.

The lesson seems clear: focusing on what people do well and providing an expectation of a positive outcome engages people’s brains and minds in the task at hand, helping them tap into their full potential to produce great results.

TM