From: "Michael Hall" <meta@acsol.net>
To: <neurons@neurosemanticsegroups.com>
Subject:
[Neurons] 2018 Neurons #30 NON-THREATENING COLLABORATION
Message-ID:
<02b201d41d10$0d456180$27d02480$@net>
Content-Type:
text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
From: L. Michael Hall
2018 Neurons
#30
July 16,
2018
NON-THREATENING
COLLABORATION
Here's
a fact that I simple did not considered when I co-wrote the
book,
Collaborative Leadership with Ian McDermott. I did not even think that
for
most people, and especially most leaders, that collaboration could
be
threatening. That idea just never crossed my mind. Being focused on all
of
the positive benefits of collaboration and being the natural
collaborator,
the idea that collaboration could be threatening just did not
come up. Nor
did it come up in the literature or in our
modeling.
It was only recently when I was talking with some
leaders did I became aware
of this. That's when it suddenly dawned on me,
"They find collaboration
threatening!" Afterwards I decided to test the
hypothesis by asking various
people: "What do you think. Do you find the
idea of collaborating with
others threatening?" The response was immediate,
"Oh yes, of course." I
think that what amazed me even more than their answer
was that the two
persons I was talking with said it so matter-of-factly.
They said it with a
tone of incredulity, "How could you even ask such a
question, of course
there are threats to collaborating!"
At
that point I needed more information. So trying to show no shock
or
surprise, I calmly asked, "What would you say are the threatening
elements
to collaboration?" "Lots of things," one of them said. Then over
the next
twenty minutes, both of them detailed many of their
fears:
Loss of status, loss of control, loss of reputation, loss
my
distinctiveness, the risk of taking a chance on the other person not
coming
through on his responsibilities, the risk of failure, the risk of
being
judged on the basis of the other's incompetence. The list went on and
on
from there.
Eventually I got it. That's when I also
connected it to a point that we
made in the book, namely, To collaborate, you
have to get your ego out of
the way. The "ego" in the sense of our pride in
ourselves, wanting things
our way, and even demanding that we maintain
complete control of a project-
the ego in that sense can and does absolutely
prevent good healthy
collaboration. That's why people who have not completed
the human
development tasks, and are still immature and still overly focused
on
themselves, are not truly able to enter into a collaborative
partnership.
>From the Neuro-Semantic perspective, this is
the place where we distinguish
self-esteem from self-confidence. Your
confidence in what you do is about
your actions, behaviors, and performance.
It is not about your value as a
person. It is not about you having worth.
It is about skills and
competence. It is the person who confuses his sense
of value and worth with
what he does who gets his "ego" in the way. It is
that confusion that
causes him to be afraid - afraid that he will lose his
value, his position,
his esteem, etc.
Significantly, when you
separate who you are as a person, your being from
your doing, then there's no
threat in collaborating with others. You are
not living in a zero-sum game
world where the other's "value" takes anything
away from you. In fact,
healthy collaborating results in the very opposite.
With your person and
being a given and unconditional- you are free to
collaborate and every
success of your partners adds to you and enriches
you.
Unlike competition, collaboration does not involve
pitting one person
against another. Instead in collaboration you add your
uniqueness to the
others. In doing so, everyone is enriched. Everyone wins.
It is in this
way that collaboration, as a win-win arrangement, supports
everyone as a
partner in the enterprise.
Is collaboration
threatening? Is it dangerous? Yes to the insecure, the
distrusting, and to
the overly-competitive. Can that threat be ameliorated?
Yes. How? By
becoming secure in yourself with unconditional self-esteem
and by completing
your developmental tasks. Do that and you will be
increasingly able to
collaborate in healthy and productive
ways.
For the
book--- The Collaborative Leader --- click
http://www.neurosemantics.com/products/the-collaborative-leader/
For Executive Thinking ---
http://www.neurosemantics.com/products/executive-thinking/
L.
Michael Hall, Ph.D., Executive Director
Neuro-Semantics
P.O. Box
8
Clifton, CO. 81520 USA
1 970-523-7877
Dr. Hall's
email:
<mailto:meta@acsol.net\hich\af31506\dbch\af31505\loch\f31506>
meta@acsol.net
Sunday 29 July 2018
From: "Michael Hall" <meta@acsol.net>
To: <neurons@neurosemanticsegroups.com>
Subject: [Neurons] 2018 Neurons #29 CRITICAL THINKING --- RED TEAMING
Message-ID: <0f2501d4172a$9f7e0b10$de7a2130$@net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
From: L. Michael Hall
2018 Neurons #29
July 9, 2018
CRITICAL THINKING IN THE MILITARY
AS RED TEAMING
It took a lot, but it finally happened. It took the Twin Towers of the
World Trade Center in New York City to be attacked by terrorists and to
fall. Immediately those in the intelligence community identified a key
problem-there was a breakdown in communications. The information about the
attack was there, but the critical thinking about it was missing. People
were not collaborating or communicating effectively. It also took a
disappointing failure in Iraq after freeing Iraq from a dictatorship. In
both cases (and many others), it was as if someone had not thought things
through before engaging in a war.
With all of that the U.S. military finally decided to install critical
thinking as an intricate part of its planning processes. To do that it set
up what they called "red teams" who were commissioned with the task of
playing devil's advocate and looking for how the plan could go wrong or be
defeated. They called the process red teaming. At least some in the
government were beginning to intelligently use failure.
"Failure is only the opportunity to begin again, this time more
intelligently." (Henry Ford)
I didn't know about this until I read it in Bryce Hoffman's book that he
wrote last year- Red Teaming: How Your Business Can Conquer the Competition
by Challenging Everything. Here is how he defined the process of "red
teaming."
Red teaming challenges your plans and the assumptions upon which they are
based. Red teaming makes critical and contrarian thinking part of your
company's planning process. Red teams are established to challenge aspects
of an enterprise's plans, programs, and assumptions.
Red teaming is critical thinking. It is getting an organization, or even
more challenging, a bureaucracy, to question itself- to question its plans,
strategies, and processes. It is establishing within an organization the
ability to honestly look at itself, encourage bad news, reward "speaking
unpleasant truths to power," etc. All this is especially hard given that
any and every bureaucracy by its very nature encourages compliance, rewards
conformity, punishes whistle blowers, keeps status levels separate, and
suffers from several biases (e.g., not-invented-here bias, status quo bias,
etc.).
As a form of critical thinking, that is the design of red teaming? It is to
overcome the limitations of human decision making. And that's because we
are all "unduly influenced by a dizzying array of cognitive biases and
logical fallacies that skew our decision making and lead us in unintended
directions without us even being away of it." (p. 51). Hoffman sorts it out
and puts it in three phrases:
1) Use analytical tools to question arguments and assumptions.
2) Use imaginative techniques to figure out what could go wrong or right.
3) Use contrarian thinking to challenge the plan and force considering other
alternatives.
Now Hoffman was the first and only civilian to ever be allowed to attend the
Red Teaming Training on the military grounds of Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
He knew some people and got some strings pulled which enabled him to be
invited to the training. This was in part due to his previous book,
American Icon: Alan Mulally and the Fight to Save Ford Motor Company. He
noted that many had adopted the book as a manual for a new model of
leadersip- "a forward-looking, data-drive approach to management that
Mulally had used to save not only Ford but also Boeing." (p. 4).
Critical thinking is tough enough for a single person. We have so many
psychological mechanisms to protect us from it (e.g., rationalization,
cognitive distortions, cognitive biases, etc.)! It is even more
challenging when a group or team takes it on. But it is next to impossible
for a large organization and especially a bureaucracy. There are so many
group dynamics and political dynamics that go against questioning the
organization and "speaking truth to power." So to solve that problem,
Hoffman says,
"Red teaming is most effective when the red team has permission to question
the unquestionable, think the unthinkable, and challenge everything."
That's because you are bringing in critical thinking to challenge the status
quo, to raise self-awareness of one's own biases and limitations and to
become intellectually honest (p. 107). You are also bringing in critical
thinking to identify, flush-out, and challenge your assumptions. That's
sure to stir up controversy and induce people with vested interests into
states of insecurity. Doing this further means looking at the way you state
problems, solutions, resolutions, decisions, etc. Why? Because how you
frame these things determines the alternatives you consider and the way you
evaluation them (p. 125).
Critical thinking in this "red teaming" format means making sure that you
frame problems and solutions correctly. The US Army teaches red teamers
start by examining the issue under review from a variety of different
angeles. Turning a problem on its head can also yield valuable insights
and new perspectives. This is what we do in NLP via using multiple
perspectives and that's due to the flexibility premise that we operate from-
the person with the most flexibility in a system will have the most
influence.
For more, order Executive Thinking: Activating Your Highest Executive
Thinking Potentials (2018).
<http://www.neurosemantics.com/products/executive-thinking/>
http://www.neurosemantics.com/products/executive-thinking/
To: <neurons@neurosemanticsegroups.com>
Subject: [Neurons] 2018 Neurons #29 CRITICAL THINKING --- RED TEAMING
Message-ID: <0f2501d4172a$9f7e0b10$de7a2130$@net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
From: L. Michael Hall
2018 Neurons #29
July 9, 2018
CRITICAL THINKING IN THE MILITARY
AS RED TEAMING
It took a lot, but it finally happened. It took the Twin Towers of the
World Trade Center in New York City to be attacked by terrorists and to
fall. Immediately those in the intelligence community identified a key
problem-there was a breakdown in communications. The information about the
attack was there, but the critical thinking about it was missing. People
were not collaborating or communicating effectively. It also took a
disappointing failure in Iraq after freeing Iraq from a dictatorship. In
both cases (and many others), it was as if someone had not thought things
through before engaging in a war.
With all of that the U.S. military finally decided to install critical
thinking as an intricate part of its planning processes. To do that it set
up what they called "red teams" who were commissioned with the task of
playing devil's advocate and looking for how the plan could go wrong or be
defeated. They called the process red teaming. At least some in the
government were beginning to intelligently use failure.
"Failure is only the opportunity to begin again, this time more
intelligently." (Henry Ford)
I didn't know about this until I read it in Bryce Hoffman's book that he
wrote last year- Red Teaming: How Your Business Can Conquer the Competition
by Challenging Everything. Here is how he defined the process of "red
teaming."
Red teaming challenges your plans and the assumptions upon which they are
based. Red teaming makes critical and contrarian thinking part of your
company's planning process. Red teams are established to challenge aspects
of an enterprise's plans, programs, and assumptions.
Red teaming is critical thinking. It is getting an organization, or even
more challenging, a bureaucracy, to question itself- to question its plans,
strategies, and processes. It is establishing within an organization the
ability to honestly look at itself, encourage bad news, reward "speaking
unpleasant truths to power," etc. All this is especially hard given that
any and every bureaucracy by its very nature encourages compliance, rewards
conformity, punishes whistle blowers, keeps status levels separate, and
suffers from several biases (e.g., not-invented-here bias, status quo bias,
etc.).
As a form of critical thinking, that is the design of red teaming? It is to
overcome the limitations of human decision making. And that's because we
are all "unduly influenced by a dizzying array of cognitive biases and
logical fallacies that skew our decision making and lead us in unintended
directions without us even being away of it." (p. 51). Hoffman sorts it out
and puts it in three phrases:
1) Use analytical tools to question arguments and assumptions.
2) Use imaginative techniques to figure out what could go wrong or right.
3) Use contrarian thinking to challenge the plan and force considering other
alternatives.
Now Hoffman was the first and only civilian to ever be allowed to attend the
Red Teaming Training on the military grounds of Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
He knew some people and got some strings pulled which enabled him to be
invited to the training. This was in part due to his previous book,
American Icon: Alan Mulally and the Fight to Save Ford Motor Company. He
noted that many had adopted the book as a manual for a new model of
leadersip- "a forward-looking, data-drive approach to management that
Mulally had used to save not only Ford but also Boeing." (p. 4).
Critical thinking is tough enough for a single person. We have so many
psychological mechanisms to protect us from it (e.g., rationalization,
cognitive distortions, cognitive biases, etc.)! It is even more
challenging when a group or team takes it on. But it is next to impossible
for a large organization and especially a bureaucracy. There are so many
group dynamics and political dynamics that go against questioning the
organization and "speaking truth to power." So to solve that problem,
Hoffman says,
"Red teaming is most effective when the red team has permission to question
the unquestionable, think the unthinkable, and challenge everything."
That's because you are bringing in critical thinking to challenge the status
quo, to raise self-awareness of one's own biases and limitations and to
become intellectually honest (p. 107). You are also bringing in critical
thinking to identify, flush-out, and challenge your assumptions. That's
sure to stir up controversy and induce people with vested interests into
states of insecurity. Doing this further means looking at the way you state
problems, solutions, resolutions, decisions, etc. Why? Because how you
frame these things determines the alternatives you consider and the way you
evaluation them (p. 125).
Critical thinking in this "red teaming" format means making sure that you
frame problems and solutions correctly. The US Army teaches red teamers
start by examining the issue under review from a variety of different
angeles. Turning a problem on its head can also yield valuable insights
and new perspectives. This is what we do in NLP via using multiple
perspectives and that's due to the flexibility premise that we operate from-
the person with the most flexibility in a system will have the most
influence.
For more, order Executive Thinking: Activating Your Highest Executive
Thinking Potentials (2018).
<http://www.neurosemantics.com/products/executive-thinking/>
http://www.neurosemantics.com/products/executive-thinking/
From: L. Michael
Hall
2015 Meta-Coach Reflections
– #46
Nov. 18,
2015
THE TRICKIEST
COACHING CONVERSATION
When you ask a client what he
wants and he says, “Confidence,” you are in the presence of a situation that
could be the trickiest coaching conversation of all. So, a
warning—Beware! Your next words will be critical if you are to avoid getting
trapped in a dead-end exchange that will go nowhere. You’ve probably fallen
into this trap. Most of us have. You may get trapped in it during your next
coaching conversation. Many who read this article will. The distinctions that
follow are subtle and therefore require careful reading and implementation. So,
if you’re ready, here we go.
It all begins with what sounds
like a perfectly reasonable desired outcome. “I want to have more confidence.”
That’s what they say. Yet is that always helpful? Think about it. It all
depends, doesn’t it? Further the request for more confidence can mean so many
things to different clients. So you have to ask what your client is really
asking for. So inquire before you jump into coaching to it. Ask the
clarity check question. Don’t assume that you know what the person means. So
what are the range of things that confidence could mean to different
clients?
1) “Confidence” as assurance
of being able to do something. The
person wants to be sure that she can actually do something. In
other words, “confidence” to her is equal to “being sure.” The person is
saying, “I will only feel confident when I have a guarantee that I will succeed
in what I want to do. If I don’t feel sure, if I feel any slight twinges of
doubt or frustration, then I’m not ‘confident.’” Now the more risk-averse a
person is, then the more that person will be questioning his ability, doubting
his skills, and not sure. Then, with being unsure, the person feels the lack of
confidence. The focus for this person is on the feeling not being sure rather
than on developing the competence for being able to do the
skill.
Confidence literally refers to your faith (fideo) in or
with (con) yourself. It speaks about your faith that you can do
something. That’s why confidence requires evidence that you have
done it and that means it is a thing of history— you have in the past
demonstrated several or many times that you can do something. Now you can trust
yourself. That evidence convinces you that you can do it, that you are
competent in that skill. So confidence is based on competence. No
competence—no confidence. Confidence without competence is a false and
delusional trust in yourself. We call people who are confident when they can’t
demonstrate competence, fools.
Given that, do you really want
to help someone who wants to feel confidence to feel it if they are
incompetent? Isn’t that undermining their skill development? If they feel
confident, then why would they devote the energy and effort to learning or
practicing?
2) “Confidence” as
comfortable in learning and doing.
Others will use the word “confidence” to essentially mean “comfort.” In other
words, “confidence” is equal to a feeling, to feeling comfort, at ease,
no stress, no strain, no discomfort, etc. For this person, any discomfort
equates with the lack of confidence. She can therefore loss “confidence” very
quickly whenever there are any feelings of discomfort. This will be true for
almost everything new, different, and challenging. Yet because in taking on new
things, we are inevitably required to get out of our “comfort zone,” all new
learning and practicing will be uncomfortable, even unpleasant, disturbing,
etc. If this automatically equates to not having confidence, then all new
learnings and challenges equates with the lack of confidence.
3) “Confidence” as
self-efficacy for future unknown challenges. Yet another uses the word “confidence” as a synonym
for “trust in myself to be able to handle some future challenge.” This person
is “confident” if he knows that he can trust himself to figure something out,
handle any challenge that arise, and use his wits and relationship skills to
create solutions. This is what the person means by the word
“confidence.”
Actually, he is using
“confidence” for a different concept, for self-efficacy, which refers to a
future event. Most people develop this after numerous experiences of becoming
competent in something. They then learn something about their learning
experiences — “It’s just a matter of learning, practice, and eventually I will
get it.” The more times they walk the pathway from incompetence to competence,
the more likely they can jump a logical level and conclude, “I have done this
many times; this is just another instance of moving from incompetence to
competence. I know I will eventually get it.”
4) “Confidence” as a sense
of self-value and worth. Others
confuse self-esteem with self-confidence, so when they ask for confidence, they
want to have a strong sense of personal value in some context. Yet because they
frame their personal value and worth as conditional, then whenever they engage
in something new, something thewy are not all that competent and skilled at,
they then question their self-esteem and feel that their sense of self is
fragile or shaking in a given role or activity. Now they want “confidence.”
They want self-assurance that they are worthwhile.
The bottom line is that you
just never know how a person is using a word. This is especially true
when they say that “I want to more confidence.” So check it out. Find
out what they are really talking about— assurance, comfort, trust in self,
esteem of self. You’ll be glad you did; and they will be even more glad.
Meta-Coaching
News
This week --- ACMC
in Hong Kong.
Revisit as part of
your ongoing professional development
Contact: Mandy
Chai mandy@apti.com.hk
L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.
Neuro-Semantics Executive
Director
Neuro-Semantics
International
P.O. Box 8
Clifton, CO. 81520
USA
1 970-523-7877
What is Neuro-Semantic
NLP?
Neurons: Get your
free subscription to the weekly International \Post on Neuro-Semantics by Dr. L.
Michael Hall. Subscribe at: wwww.neurosemantics.com
Solutions:
Sign up for the Neuro-Semantic Newsletter ---
This is a monthly newsletter for anyone
new to Neuro-Semantics. Femke Stuut, Editor.
Coaching: For world-class Coach
Training — The Meta-Coaching System: www.meta-coaching.org and \www.metacoachfoundation.org.
Meta-Coach Reflections sent every Wednesday to the group of Licensed
Meta-Coaches.
Self-Actualization: Neuro-Semantics launched the New Human
Potential Movement in 2007, for information about this, see www.self-actualizing.org
NSP --- Neuro-Semantic Publications: Order books from Neuro-Semantic website, www.neurosemantics.com click on Products and
Services and then the Catalogue of books. Order via paypal.
_______________________________________________
Coaches mailing list
Coaches@neurosemanticsegroups.com
http://lists.neurosemanticsegroups.com/mailman/listinfo/coaches
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)