Needs-based communication can save your life

This past weekend I attended a workshop on “needs-based communication” (a.k.a. NVC) which encourages people to get clear on the difference between needs, thoughts and feelings and learn how to formulate strategies to get needs met, typically through clear requests of oneself and/or of others.

What I noticed in particular was the importance of accurately distinguishing between feelings and thoughts. In everyday English usage people frequently say things like “I feel you’re being disrespectful” or “I feel this is unfair” or “I feel that you’re not listening to me.” Strictly speaking, these are judgements and evaluative thoughts, not actual feelings (which tend to fall into the broad categories of mad, sad, glad or afraid) and you ought to be saying “I think you’re being disrespectful, this is unfair, you’re not listening to me.”

So is all this just wordplay? What possible difference could it make?

Well…learning these communication skills might just save your life.

Brain function and stress chemicals

Brain research has shown that there are dedicated areas of the brain that serve different functions. The limbic system, for example, figures highly in emotional reactions and their associated feelings. Stressful emotions trigger the body to pump out cortisol and epinephrine (a.k.a. adrenaline) in a fight-or-flight reaction. In small doses, these hormones and neurotransmitters saved your ancestors’ lives by helping them to avoid danger and/or defeat enemies. They’re part of the reason they survived and that you are here today.

Now the kind of energy needed to outrun a tiger or defeat a club-wielding aggressor is not really required anymore in most of our daily lives. Yet when ongoing stress and anxiety or anger reactions in our lives cause our bodies to be continually flooded with these chemicals the result can be damage to internal organs and wearing out the body’s tissues.

What all this means in simplest terms is that when you use sloppy language to mislabel your feelings and then wallow in anger and negativity, your brain releases chemicals that wear your out body and that can even lead to chronic illnesses like cancer.

An effective way to moderate the limbic function that governs fears, anxieties and anger (that is, the knee-jerk, emotional part of the brain) is to engage the frontal and prefrontal lobes of the brain – the higher “rational brain” functions that are more developed in humans than in any other animal and that enable second-order thinking.

Using your NeuroLimbic/NeuroRational Types

In NeuroPower terms (the framework developed by author and strategist Peter Burow), each individual’s behaviour will be influenced by interplay of your NeuroLimbic Type (NLT) and your NeuroRational Type (NRT). Your NLT is indicative of how your particular brain’s limbic system engages the emotional fight-or-flight-or-freeze reactions to external stimuli, while your NRT is the type of rational response you are capable of choosing when you are able to engage your higher intelligence centres and tap into your particular gift and noble qualities.

Needs-based communication theory tells us that no one is able to give empathy to others when their own emotional needs for empathy remain unmet. This makes sense: when a person is highly emotional and reactive it’s impossible for them to engage the higher thought processes required to imagine what another person may be experiencing, which is the hallmark of empathy.

The ultimate goal, then, is to use your NeuroRational Type to govern your NeuroLimbic Type, and to do so as often and as swiftly as possible. Put another way, you want to be in control of your emotions rather than your emotions being in control of you.

When you are able to engage the higher rational brain to creatively solve problems, create meaning, choose different ways of reacting to stimuli, and empathize with others, there’s a payoff: dopamine. This powerful neurotransmitter and hormone rewards positive behaviour, enhances motivation and can counteract the effects of harmful stress hormones.

There’s good news here: you’re not “broken.” You have everything you need to be happy and to get your needs met. The trick is to identify what those needs are and tap into your NeuroRational Type’s gift to develop a strategy that gets your needs met. So if it’s that simple, why don’t more people do it?

Stay on the surface, or enter the depths…?

Cheers to Sonny Navaratnam for the following useful metaphor: people are like the ocean.

On the surface of the water it may be sunny and calm, windy and blustery, or stormy with huge waves. Conditions can change in an instant and unleash tremendous energy and destructive force. This is the realm of emotions: volatile, unpredictable, intense.

At a deeper level there are movements and currents but these are more enduring and less changeable and momentary than what is at the surface. At base, all people have the same basic needs and when we plumb the depths of ourselves we can identify what it is we need. To do so, however, we need to go beyond the emotional turmoil at the surface. And it can often be a journey into the unknown, a place where >cue pirate’s voice< “Thar be monsters…!!”

Many people avoid grappling with these depths for fear of what they might find; because the surface is stormy and difficult they may assume that’s all that life has to offer and rather than seeking to understand the source and nature of their needs they try to avoid and outrun every storm that’s blown up at the surface. As a result their lives are tossed around like ships on the open sea. Only when people do the work of self-awareness to accurately identify their feelings and underlying needs will they be better placed to get those needs met, as captain of their own ship.

Observation - Feeling - Need - Request

The needs-based communication approach is simple, yet challenging to do effectively.

1) Observation: this involves making an objective statement about a behaviour or event, one that is separate from the associated emotions, feelings, evaluations or judgements.

2) Feeling: identifying the feeling that was evoked. Again, as a rule of thumb, feelings tend to fall into the category of mad, sad, glad or afraid.

3) Need: feelings are simply expressions of unmet needs; in this step, identify that unmet need.

4) Request: make a request that gives the opportunity to get that need met.

An example might look like this:

O: “When I heard you say, That presentation was really pretty average.

F: “I felt irritated and anxious…

N: “because I need to be competent and respected by my peers…

R: “so would you be willing to provide feedback about both what you liked and what you thought I could do differently next time?”

While it has offered a fairly rudimentary overview of the needs-based communication method, my hope is that this post has highlighted the value of effective communication by putting it in the context of brain function.

When you are emotionally reactive and operating only from your NeuroLimbic Type your body is flooded with stress hormones that prevent you from getting your own needs met, let alone being of help to others.

On the other hand, when you access your NeuroRational Type to accurately identify your feelings and needs, make clear requests and connect empathically with others, your body is bathed in positive and motivating chemicals that might not only save your life, but will improve the quality of relationships you have in that life.

So take the plunge…there are some truly beautiful things beneath the waves if only you have the courage to integrate them into your worldview.

(Hat-tip to Sakyakumara as sounding board for this article.)
TM

Group Genius and the genesis of ideas

To continue the Book Review post below of Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration, here are the 10 factors that Sawyer suggests enable Group Flow:

1) Group has a well-understood goal

2) They engage in close listening

3) People have complete concentration

4) Being in control – having a sense of autonomy, competence and relatedness

5) Blending egos – working collaboratively not competitively

6) Equal participation, informed by comparable skill levels

7) Familiarity with performance styles of other group members

8) Communication that’s spontaneous and ongoing (i.e. café/lunchroom talks)

9) Use “Yes, and…” thinking to accept offers and extend and build on them

10) The potential for failure and the value of rehearsals

And in answer to the question, “what is the best balance of planning and improvisation?” Sawyer devotes a chapter to “Organizing for Improvisation,” where he offers another top-ten list of the secrets of collaborative organizations:

1) Keep many irons in the fire – innovative companies experiment with lots of low-cost projects on the go, responding to what emerges

2) Create a Department of Surprise – look for ways to repurpose apparently failed experiments by finding them a home elsewhere in the organization

3) Build space for creative conversation – more on this below

4) Allow time for ideas to emerge – deadlines amp up stress and kill creativity; you can’t rush creativity because it needs incubation time

5) Manage the risks of improvisation – define the right amount of time taken away from other projects, the sheer number of ideas generated and balance with the need for structure and planning

6) Improvise at the edge of chaos – not too rigid to prevent creative emergence, not too loose as to results in complete chaos

7) Manage knowledge for innovation – capture the innovations that emerge improvisationally and make sure other parts of the organization can benefit from the creative sparks

8) Build dense networks – keep groups small enough to effectively interact, ca. 150-200 people (the size of the earliest human societies, and still the ideal size of group to effectively manage changes, including those required in creative processes)

9) Ditch the org chart – break down the silos and get people working across business units to cross-pollinate ideas and discover latent creative forces

10) Measure the right things – instead of spend on R&D or number of patents registered, measure the health of your social networks in the organization to find out just how well people are interacting and how well information is diffused.

I would flesh out a couple of these points in particular as follows. On point #3 (building space for creative conversation), it’s absolutely crucial if you expect people to be creative that you give them an environment that says to the brain: “it’s OK to be creative here”. As an example, Google got this right in their Zurich office design. As the waggish final slide suggests, creativity rarely emerges from cubicle farms.

One other idea that I think is worth highlighting from the list is a combination of points 2, 7, 8, 9 and 10 – the concept that innovative solutions created in one part of an organization can have unexpected and novel applications in other areas to solve problems that would otherwise go unsolved. To put it in a wider context: When I interviewed the Dutch cross-cultural business thinker Fons Trompenaars he pointed out that a surprisingly large number of innovations come from other countries and only appear new because no one ever thought to view things quite that way before. One of the best examples I've seen lately of this kind of innovation came from author Dan Pink, who's understood the lesson well with his latest book, Johnny Bunko published in the manga format popularized in Japan, a first in the English-speaking world and a product perfectly pitched for a the meaning-hungry Gen-Y market:

Johnny Bunko trailer from Daniel Pink on Vimeo.

Book Review: "Group Genius" by Keith Sawyer

In Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration, Keith Sawyer has woven together a range of disparate threads of thought into an enjoyable and practical book on the creative process. He’s debunked several myths regarding creativity and synthesized ideas from several different worlds in a way that left me thinking, “Yes, I recognize everything you’re saying and I’ve seen much of this before, but never so well organized and neatly presented in one place.”

The book has received many reviews since its publication last year and a two awards as well so I won’t offer an overview. Instead I’d like to draw out one thread in particular that informs the majority of Sawyer’s book: the idea of improvisation.

First, some background. For some years I’ve been involved with the Applied Improvisation Network (AIN), whose aim is to “spread the transforming power of improvisation.” The AIN is a collaborative “community of practitioners and clients who value the use of improvisation skills in organizations to improve relationships, increase authenticity, promote spontaneity, foster trust and build communities of practice.”

Improv enthusiasts have every reason to be ecstatic over Sawyer’s book, since it echoes what they have been saying for years and lends to their arguments the triple weight of his academic research (professor of psychology and education at Washington University in St. Louis, he took his Ph.D. in psychology studying creativity with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, originator of the concept of “Flow”) his practical business savvy (following his computer science degree at MIT he designed video games for Atari and then did management consulting on innovative technologies with Kenan Systems) and his artistic flair (he is himself an improviser as a jazz pianist for over 30 years, spending several of those years playing piano with Chicago improv theatre groups).

In contrast to the traditional notion of the “lone genius” being responsible for great creative breakthroughs, Sawyer’s thesis is that all creativity is actually collaborative and that improvisation is the ideal format for getting the creative juices flowing. To understand and promote successful collaboration, it pays to focus on the moment-to-moment interactional dynamics. Innovation emerges over time as team members practice deep listening, build on each others’ ideas, allow for emergent meaning creation, create room for surprising (and unanticipated) questions and allow the process the time and space it requires to unfold according to its own pace and flow.

In an organizational setting there is an clear need for structure and strategic planning. Yet he gives real-world examples to show that improvisation is often more responsive and effective than heavily scripted approaches. So what is the best balance of planning and improvisation? The answer (expanding on the concept coined by his former supervisor Csikszentmihalyi) is what he’s termed a state of Group Flow, enabled by 10 key conditions that he describes in the book.

OK this posting is a long one and I want to discuss more thoughts prompted by this book, so I’m going to extend this review over a few posts…and why not. For now it’s good night from Melbourne.
TM

What's coming up on the tmc blog

Today I'd like to give you a glimpse of some ideas I've formed during conversations and experiences over the past two weeks and give you a preview of blog posts that are coming up.

I had a conversation with my friend Sakyakumara in Cambridge, who's generously shared his thoughts with me on the subject of "MAGIC" negotiation and whose workshop rolls out next week in the UK. Our chat provided the prompt for me to explore further what happens with the brain when we're told to do something (à la command-and-control style management) vs when we're asked to be part of the decision-making that results in a decision. Watch for a post on this subject soon.

I've also spoken to Melcrum Australia , an conference organizer and publishing house working in the domain of effective internal communications. We discussed the subject of online social networks and wondered out loud: have we hit "Facebook fatigue" or are these networks still relevant today? The fruit of those discussions will, I hope, be a weeklong series of articles appearing here and possibly on their members-only blog, The Internal Comms Hub.

Working this week with a very bright bunch in the Human Capital team at Australia's largest professional services firm highlighted a couple of themes that I look forward to writing about in the weeks to come: first, what are the significant differences between the male and female brains and second, what in neuroscientific terms is the value of providing affirms and positive feedback to people?

While compiling a project proposal last week for one of Australia's top global investment banks I became familiar with Keith Sawyer's terrific book Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration. Watch this blog for a review of the book this weekend, part of a new series of book reviews.

Next week I'll be in Melbourne working with a group of senior partners, again at Australia's largest professional services firm. While I'm there I plan to connect with my mate Adrian Cropley to discuss holding a NeuroPower information session/workshop to be held in Melbourne looking at how neuroscience and brain research offer insights into the area of Change Communications. More info to come on that one, watch this space!
TM

Mintzberg’s Five (plus one) Minds of a Manager

The business website BNET recently offered a useful summary of the classic HBS article, The Five Minds of a Manager co-authored by Henry Mintzberg (management theorist and professor at my alma mater, McGill University).

The article outlines five mindsets for managers to cultivate in order to cope with the often conflicting demands of their jobs.

I noticed that these five mindsets line up with five of the six intelligence centres (ICs) of the brain as described in the NeuroPower framework (developed by author and strategist Peter Burow). To explore the parallels, I’ve therefore added to Mintzberg’s five the “clarity” mindset, which corresponds to the sixth IC and in a sense completes the set.

Six mindsets, six intelligence centres – how do they match up? Read my full article comparing the two theories.

Just to give away the ending: I think The Five Minds of a Manager theory aligns quite well with what NeuroPower has to say about brain function, which is why when we read Mintzberg’s article it is easy to say, “Yes, that all makes good sense to me, I want to start doing more of those things.”

In fact the great advantage to the NeuroPower framework is that it makes no claim to “replace” other frameworks and theories. Rather, it lays out a powerful explanatory method describing how our brains work in certain predictable ways. And because everyone's brain functions in remarkably similar ways, any other framework or theory that produces positive change and possesses real explanatory power will do so in the exact degree to which they line up with what we now know about brain function.

NeuroPower therefore provides an overarching brain research-based framework into which so many other models can be readily integrated without people needing to “un-learn” what they have previously learned. Quite simply, if it works, it is because it aligns with how our minds are working.

What is more, NeuroPower is a profoundly practical framework that can help turn the best theories from Harvard and elsewhere into real results based on a common language and explanatory system that everyone can understand – from the boiler room to the boardroom.

TM

What would you rather do: change…or grow?

Last week I posed the following question as a poll: “Imagine you are asked the following question by someone significant in your life - a loved one, girl/boyfriend, spouse, colleague, or your boss: What would you rather do, change...or grow?” With thanks to poll respondents, 80% of people said they preferred the idea of growing to that of changing. Now I’d like to offer a few of my thoughts on this subject below.

You’ve heard the old saying, “people don’t change, not really”? Well, there's good reason why it's true. In neuroscience terms, we are creatures of habit. The parts of the brain that enable us to practice discernment and make complex compare-and-contrast decisions are very energy-hungry. So to free up vital resources, the brain automates as many cognitive processes as possible.

As an example, have you ever arrived at a place you’ve driven to many times, like your workplace or girlfriend’s house, and been totally unable to recall your drive over? That’s because your brain automated the series of actions required to drive there, to the point that you can do the drive with hardly any conscious (energy-consuming) attention. If something unexpected happened of course you’d react, but otherwise you’re largely on autopilot and your brain energy is devoted to other thoughts.

Problem is, sometimes our well-established habits no longer serve us very well. Since it’s futile to do the same thing over and over and expect different results, what’s sometimes required to achieve our desired goals is behaviour that’s different from what we have habitually done.

Now, whether it’s in a relationship or business setting, asking a person to “change” can easily be understood to imply that there is something “wrong” with him or her. On this view, our resistance to change stems from a belief that we’re somehow not “good enough” as we are.

So how can people get to do things differently in order to achieve a different outcome in their lives?

Recently as I struggled with a very troublesome issue and expressed impatience with my own efforts, a friend and mentor said to me, “You know, you’re more powerful than you realize.”

This bit of frank and direct feedback stopped me in my tracks. Notice he did not say, “You know, you really need to change your approach” and proceed to give (mostly unwelcome) advice on how I might go about doing so; rather I experienced this an invitation to tap into resources that I already possessed.

I mention this because one of the central axioms behind the work that I and my associates do with the NeuroPower framework (developed by author and strategist Peter Burow), particularly as it relates to this thorny area of change, is that people aren’t “broken.” This is a profoundly solution-focused and positive view of people that focuses on strengths, resources, skills and attributes – where they are already in evidence and how to bring out more of them in individuals and groups.

With this in mind, we no longer have to insist that people change who they have been up to now. They are not “broken” and must be doing something right to have gotten as far as they have in their lives already.

The value of the “people aren’t broken” approach is that it puts the focus on growing into something that you are already capable of being and in the process learning more about yourself and your interactions.

In other words, this is not about rejecting fundamental parts of oneself, including habits that have been years in the making, in a process of soul-wrenching change; it’s about getting beyond behaviours that no longer serve us well by realizing that we are currently only expressing a small part of our full human capability.

With this I am getting into the task of integrating personality and character - subjects that I touched upon in last Friday’s post and that I’ll surely return to in future posts.

Thanks for coming by, stay tuned for more!
TM

The ability to choose how to use your two minds

With a hat-tip to Sarah Williams, who's one of the terrific people at Unique People in Cairns, here's a thoughtful piece that delves deeply into brain lateralization and our two quite distinct minds, suggesting that we make the choice of when we want to be in each.


[Transcript and full details are available here.]

Wouldn't it be great to be able to switch back and forth at will? Well that is one of the goals of the work I do: to promote integration of character and personality, to ultimately discover our individual gifts and achieve human nobility.

Somehow after you listen to Jill's story, such words don't seem so overblown, nor the goal so farfetched.

Some thoughts to take you into the weekend. Be well.
TM

How to go with the Flow and reboot your brain

To help hang on to the pleasant glow of the Easter holiday weekend, here’s a posting with a different focus. In recent months I’ve been enjoying the natural beauty of my adopted homeland Australia by splashing around in the surf here at Manly Beach.

While surfing can be a rigorous and sometimes punishing exercise, it's also very good for focusing the mind and “rebooting” my thought processes. I always come away with fresh perspective and insights. Here are a few I’d like to share:

Humility – the first time I went into the surf with a surfboard, I immediately noticed one thing: the ocean’s utter indifference to my very existence let alone what grand plans I had about "hanging ten". Any notion of my being in control of the situation vanished and was replaced by a healthy respect for the power of the natural forces at play and to which I was now subject. From what I’ve seen, the best surfers sense and work with these forces to create powerful displays of artistic athleticism. Overall, I find this insight is a hugely useful antidote to one’s own controlling tendencies and a good reality check.

Patience – a surfer with 20 years experience said to me the other day, “only about 20% of waves are really rideable, the trick is to know which ones so you have fun instead of getting pummelled!” In a busy lineup at a popular beach you can’t get on every rideable wave that does come in. That means over 80% of your time is spent sitting on your board watching the horizon. Again, this is a useful refocus on what you have control over and what you don’t; you’re not in control of the swell and when the sets come in, but you can control your positioning, location, and level of acceptable risk (as in, “Oh hell, not sure if I can make this one, but I’m going for it!”). It’s also about matching your sphere of concern to match your sphere of control, being aware of what you can and can’t influence and focusing your energy on where it’s going to make the most difference.

Determination – I can tell you now: the fitness level that surfing requires is far beyond what anyone who’s never done it can imagine, and the skill it takes could never be guessed at just by watching the guys who are out there…they make it look so easy...! The secret to success is to have a go, to just get out there and ride waves. So in parallel with patience to wait for the waves to come in, you need to resurface after a wipe-out, get back on your board and get paddling – there's no time to float around the break zone feeling sorry for yourself or cursing your luck because the next wave will be on top of you. It can be hard and frustrating learning new skills but we grow by learning and the challenge helps us to discover just how resourceful we are.

Gratitude – when I (finally) do catch a wave, it’s amazing!! Despite the frustration of being a beginner, this experience helps foster the playful attitude of “aww come on…just one more wave!” that takes me back to my childhood days at the beach when I never wanted to leave the water. It’s a curious thing: like anything worthwhile, when you have to work at it to achieve, the appreciation is greater and the activity becomes very attractive. I think there's more to it than being grateful for the fun to be had. Experiencing the powerful forces of the ocean in this way fosters an appreciation and sense of awe for the natural energy flow of the planet, for something deeper and profoundly older we are. Like the surfers have long been telling us: "Dude…just go with the flow!"

Turns out they're on to something.

The psychologist Csikszentmihalyi has written extensively about Flow. Most of us have been in a “flow state” before, where the goals are clear, feedback is immediate, there’s a balance between opportunity and capacity (i.e. your skills are pushed to their very limit of application), focus and concentration deepen, you are highly present and in the moment, sense of time is altered and the sense of one’s own ego fades as you are immersed in the environment and “become one” with the activity. It’s a good place to be for your body and mind and I find surfing’s a great way to get there.

But don’t just take my word for it: “It’s worth remembering what John Paul Getty said when he was asked in an interview what was the best thing he’d ever done in his life. He said it was when he was a teenager, when he and his friends picked up surfboards, paddled out and rode the waves. This was an old man, who’d been the richest man in the world and done whatever he wanted, and surfing was better than all of it.” [Chris Hines, quoted in High Surf by Tim Baker]

**I invite your comments on what you do to get into a "flow state". It could be a hobby or a passion, could even be something you did over the long weekend. To write your comment just click on "comments" below and a new window will open for you to enter your thoughts. I look forward to reading what you have to say!

TM

How the Human Brain works - interactive tool

I process information best visually and until now have found it a real challenge to understand the regions of the brain and how they interact. Today I found this great interactive tool online, developed by the good people at New Scientist magazine and I think it's hugely helpful.

Go here to explore what's happening between your ears!
TM

tm adds NeuroPower to consultancy model

Do you ever wonder what makes you tick?

Do you ever muse over what is going on inside your brain that gives you a sense of individuality both intellectually and emotionally?

When you see someone clearly performing at his or her personal best – a charismatic leader, a loving parent or an outstanding athlete – do you wonder: What does that person do differently from everybody else? What drives such people and how do they access resources that seem to give them an almost unlimited confidence and excellence in whatever they are doing?

Well, the good news is that we are beginning to understand the inner workings of the most mysterious organ in the body – the human brain. The application of fMRI brain imaging has provided neurobiologists with new insights into how the mind develops and operates. We are discovering NeuroPower.

NeuroPower is a paradigm-changing system which integrates recent scientific findings on the brain with the latest understanding of developmental psychology.

Intelligence centres in the brain combine to create very clear behavioural patterns associated with various manifestations of adult personality. These six intelligence centres form the basis of everything we communicate and everything we do.

NeuroPower is a profoundly simple, yet profoundly practical means of understanding of yourself and others, making it possible to improve the quality of the interactions you have in all kinds of life situations.

NeuroPower and organizations

toddmontgomery consultancy is pleased to add the NeuroPower framework (developed by author and strategist Peter Burow) to its consultancy toolkit. The NeuroPower learning development approach has practical application to creating strategically aligned high-performance teams and cultures. Broadly speaking, NeuroPower has application to any situation where people are working together and using their brains to achieve some outcome.

Its more specific applications include:

• sales training
• conflict resolution
• problem solving and creativity/innovation
• creating high performance teams
• executive coaching
• team performance coaching
• culture change
• strategic planning
• change management
• organizational transformation

TM