I contend that current Behavior Mod approaches are not only faulty, but seriously harmful to a large population of people who need to consider permanent change.

CAN’T CHANGE BEHAVIORS BY TRYING TO CHANGE BEHAVIORS

Behavior Modification cannot permanently change existing behaviors. In diet, smoking cessation, and exercise maintenance alone, there is a 97% failure rate for ongoing adoption of altered behaviors. You see, it’s not possible to change a behavior by trying to change a behavior.

If you’ve ever tried to keep lost weight off, or habituate a new exercise routine, or stop smoking, or… you’ve probably tried to modify your current behaviors by doing something differently without making the necessary structural changes to hold it in place.

Conventional thinking usually explains the WHAT and WHY. But permanent change needs the HOW – HOW your brain causes your behaviors, and where the inflexion points are so you can intervene and generate new ones (or lead your patients and clients through to their best choices).

This essay explains what behaviors are, where they originate from, and the elements necessary for permanent change. For this, I must take you briefly to the source – into your brain – to not only explain why you behave the way you do or resist new behaviors, but HOW to actually elicit the behaviors you want. I’ve made the brain explanations brief. But if you want to understand precisely how to facilitate permanent change from the source, it’s worth the effort. Enjoy.

BEHAVIOR

There are two major problems with Behavior Modification:

1. Behavior 2. Modification.

I suspect most people haven’t considered what a ‘behavior’ denotes. Behaviors are the way we exhibit our identity, our beliefs, our history/norms/life experience.

In short, behaviors represent us. They’re our beliefs in action – the demonstration, the expression, the external actions that portray our internal essence and morals. Like an autobiography is the written representation of a life but not THE life. Like going to church represents us practicing our faith but not FAITH. Behaviors are the visible depictions of each of us.

Behaviors don’t occur without a stimulus, some sort of input. Nor do they operate in a vacuum – they don’t arise from the sea like Venus. And they are always, always congruent with our beliefs. You know, without asking, that someone wearing a bathing suit to a wedding most likely has different beliefs than the other guests. It’s not about the bathing suit.

Behaviors are automatically and unconsciously triggered from our neural circuits – the end result of a series of automatic and meaningless chemical signals that face congruency checks before taking form into action. In other words, behaviors are the result of risk-averse neural activity – not actions that show up on their own.

Sample

Below is a greatly simplified summary of what happens in our brains that ultimately lead to behaviors. It’s here you’ll understand what’s needed to make permanent changes and why Behavior Modification isn’t able to accomplish it.

HOW TO CHANGE BEHAVIORS PERMANENTLY

Here are three of the key elements involved in how we choose to behave differently  – the modification portion of change. It’s systemic.

SYSTEMS CONGRUENCE. Systems are the glue, the conglomeration of mental, physical, emotional, physiological, neurological elements make us human. I am a system. You are a system. Your family is a system. And everything we do, think, notice, are curious about, follow the unique rules of our individual, idiosyncratic, and historic systems. And our individual systems define our status quo.

Ultimately the job of our status quo is to maintain Systems Congruence, or balance, so we can wake up every day being who we were yesterday – to know to brush our teeth each day and be kind to the colleague we don’t like.

One of the important things to know here is that systems don’t judge our behaviors. Whether we’re fat or controlling or mean, our neural systems only work with electrochemical signals and have no meaning. So it doesn’t care if you lose weight – just that it remains congruent.

All day, trillions of signals enter into our brains and trigger us to behaviors that have met our Systems Congruence criteria. Indeed, our brains check all incoming signals for incongruence before behaviors are agreed to and triggered, making sure we remain in balance. Without doing so we’d be at risk for incongruence.

Any time you try (and try and try and…) to behave in a way that unconsciously causes imbalance within you – when you push against an existing habit or action to try to get a different behavior – you’ll experience resistance or sabotage because you’d be trying to disrupt your system.

Unless we change the system that holds our problematic behavior in place, it’s not possible for permanent change to occur. For any proposed change, to maintain congruence, your system must agree, Buy In, in a way that matches your beliefs, identity, and norms. And it’s physiologic, chemical, automatic, and unconscious. Our brains do this for us every second of our lives.

Behavior Modification attempts to replace this process, trying to change the final output (like trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube) without making the changes in the system that would hold the new in place permanently and maintain Systems Congruence.

When something ‘new’ hasn’t been vetted and agreed to, your putting the system at risk and generating an imbalance. And the system will ultimately reject it.

INPUT. Any new input for change will only become a permanent behavior if it’s congruent with the person’s system. To change a behavior, it’s necessary to 1. find an existing neural circuit, or generate a new one that accepts and triggers the new request, and 2. input a message that will be acceptable.

Let me give you the simple version of how I lost weight and kept it off. My original message to myself was:

‘I want to lose weight.’

While the words requested a different behavior, they’re merely behavior-change focused and didn’t get to my specific neural circuits to trigger a change or get agreement from the rest of the system that had maintained it for some time. In other words, that input message caused me to do what I’d always done and end up maintaining the weight because there’d been no circuit change to trigger different actions.

After failing for decades (pictures of skinny women on my fridge, dozens of diet books) I changed the input message to include my identity and beliefs, precise action required, and precise goal.

Starting with a newly expanded ‘identity’, I became a ‘healthy person’ and gave myself a new rule that I had to be healthy mind, body, and spirit. With that rule, I began studying nutrition and discovered I was eating foods that were unhealthy for me and changed the way I was eating entirely. Here is the message I eventually came up with:

‘I am a healthy person who seeks to find the best nutrition and exercise protocol to get to the best weight for my body’

That did the trick, and I’ve eaten my revised food plan (and kept the weight off) for 30 years.

TRIAL LOOP. This one needs some patience. Here you’ll need to try different input messages to find the one that incorporates the right systemic elements that will cause a permanent change. But note: if at any point a risk is determined to put the system out of balance, it will reject the new behavior. Not to kick a dead horse, but Behavior Mod does not address this at all – the reason behavior change attempts fail so often.

I’ve developed a model for this to lead you through the steps if you’re interested in the entire process.

There are plenty of uses for this. Think of enabling patient Buy In for obesity or cardio clinics, to help patients design a work-out regimen for heart health. Or for diabetes sufferers to design a healthful food plan for life. Or athletes trying to change an inferior swing, or develop a new pattern to their feet differently to run faster. What about helping yourself meditate daily or organizing your life. Or to get more sleep.

We can help people alter their behaviors in a way that’s not only congruent with who they are, but helps them make their own best choices. But not with Behavior Modification alone.

If you’d like to discuss any of the ideas in this article,  please contact me at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

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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 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.

The post Why Behavior Modification Fails to Modify Behaviors and What to Do Instead, by Sharon-Drew Morgen appeared first on Sharon-Drew.

While trainers assume their content will be heard per their intended meaning, learners may be hearing something different; they might have no way to accurately translate it or retain it. Learning is a brain change issue.

Current training models, while certainly dedicated to imparting knowledge in creative, constructive, and tested ways, may not develop the necessary neural circuitry for Learners to fully comprehend, retain, or retrieve the new information.

WE CAN ONLY ‘HEAR’ WHAT WE’VE HEARD BEFORE

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

Let me say this another way: because incoming content/words (Initially meaningless sound vibrations.) face so much distortion and deletion during the brain’s automatic, habituated, physiological, neurological, electrochemical, biological listening process, and because incoming content can only be translated by existing/historic circuitry, we basically only ‘hear’ what we’ve heard before.

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

Sample

Our brains are the culprit: they construct the way we make sense of the world – without our agreement or knowledge. Unfortunately, we don’t question what shows up as our ‘reality’, but our viewpoints, interpretations and assumptions, what we believe, what we think we hear and even what we’re curious about, are unconsciously biased by our history. Indeed, our ability to accurately act on and understand incoming information is unwittingly restricted and misconstrued.

WE EACH INVENT OUR OWN REALITY

Neuroscientist David Eagleman explains how we invent our own reality in The Brain:

“Each of us has our own narrative and we have no reason not to believe it. Our brains are built on electrochemical signals that we interpret as our lives and experience… there’s no single version of reality. Each brain carries its own truth via billions of signals triggering chemical pulses and trillions of connections between neurons.” [pg 73-74]

In an NPR interview neuroscientist Stephen Macknik says:

“Most of the world is very real. You’ve just never lived there. You’ve lived a perception of that world in your mind that’s been filtered by a bunch of salt water sacks, proteins and electrochemical signals that can’t possibly be making an accurate determination of what’s actually going on. The brain actually receives very, very little accurate information.”

For the 10% of students who have been involved with similar training, or who already have circuits for similar ideas, accepting and understanding new content is easy as there’s an existing translation point.

For those who don’t have existing circuits, the brain chooses a ‘similar-enough’ circuit that, while historic, may not be similar enough, causing misunderstanding and failure to learn what’s being offered – or worse, the assumption that what’s ‘heard’ is what was intended. Following a lecture, professors who study with me ask their students what they heard, and each student hears something different.

LEARNING FACILITATION

It’s possible to design programs that help students generate new circuits specifically for the new knowledge before offering content. This ensures the information will be accurately heard and retained.

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

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

If you have questions, or want to learn the process, please get in touch: sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

____________________

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

The post Design Training Programs to Retain Learning, by Sharon-Drew Morgen appeared first on Sharon-Drew.

SELLING VS BUYING

My new role taught me the differences between selling and buying. I hadn’t realized the complexity of the Pre-Sales activity necessary to become a buyer. Indeed, there were two buying processes: the buyer’s side and the seller’s side.

As a sales professional my ultimate job was to place solutions; as a buyer, my main focus was to get buy-in and avoid risks while creating and maintaining Excellence.

As a sales professional my job was to get folks to make a purchase. Even as a successful seller I struggled to say/offer the right thing, at the right time, to the right prospects, in order to convince, persuade, and build relationships to close; as an entrepreneur and potential buyer I had to continually manage any necessary change we needed using the most efficient, integrous, and least disruptive route to success to maintain happy employees and clients, and continue to develop a great product.

As a sales professional, I sought to find and influence people who ‘needed’ my solution; as a buyer, I couldn’t fully define my needs, or recognize the best way to resolve problems until all voices (stakeholders) and impediments to change were factored in and until we were absolutely sure we couldn’t resolve our problems internally. We certainly couldn’t make any changes until we fully understood the risks that any change would generate.

Selling and buying, I quickly realized, involve two different activities: different goals, different behaviors, different communication and thinking patterns, different types of responsibility.

Before becoming a buyer myself, I hadn’t fully appreciated how severely the sales model limits who will buy by seeking only those with ‘need’ – the low hanging fruit, those who had completed their internal change management determinations and bought-in to any risks, any disruption, a new solution would bring to their environment.

In other words, folks who might eventually buy weren’t interested in speaking or reading about my solution until they managed their internal issues, regardless of their ‘need’ or the efficacy of my solution.

The act of making a purchase, I realized, was a risk/change management problem before it was a solution choice issue. Any needs I had as a potential buyer were secondary to maintaining consistency and team agreements. After all, we were doing ‘just fine’ without bringing in anything new. And because the sales model focuses on selling to ‘need’, it could only seek and close those folks who considered themselves buyers already (the low hanging fruit), overlooking those who could become buyers with some risk/change facilitation.

My book Dirty Little Secrets lays out all the steps people must take before self-identifying as a ‘buyer.’

Sample

THE JOB OF A BUYER

As a buyer, the ‘cost’ of a fix had to be lower than the ‘cost’ of maintaining the status quo. So (hypothetically) if I needed a CRM system but had to fire 8 people to buy one, I had to weigh the ‘cost’, the risk, of the change. And the time it takes to make this calculation is the length of the sales cycle. Unfortunately, the sales model does not offer tools to address this.

As a seller, I had never realized that my sales biases – biased questions (to ‘uncover needs’ of course), or listening specifically for where my solution could be pitched – were restricting my success. The sales model just didn’t offer the tools to facilitate prospects through what they must complete before they even self-identified as buyers.

As a seller, I limited my search to folks with ‘needs’ and overlooked an 8x larger audience of folks in the process of becoming buyers but not yet ready. Not to mention that my definition of ‘needs’ was often biased by my own needs to sell, and didn’t necessarily mean the person was a buyer.

As a buyer, I had more to worry about than solving a problem. I had to take into account

• the need for buy-in by all who involved in the ultimate solution,
• the risk a change would bring,
• the rules and brand of the company,
• the well-being of the employees and staff,
• how the problem got created to make sure it didn’t recur,
• the integrity of the product or service provided,
• the congruence and integrity of the status quo,
• the needs of the customers.

As a buyer, my challenge was to be better without losing what worked successfully, to ensure

– everyone involved agreed to a common solution,

– there was consensus and a route through to congruent change,

– we were all absolutely certain we couldn’t fix the problem with something familiar,

– the risk of change was less than the cost of maintaining the problem.

As the Managing Director/Founder, I had a well-oiled machine to consider – great staff, great clients, fantastic ROI – one that had a few problems, but did a lot successfully; I didn’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

WHAT I NEEDED TO KNOW BEFORE BECOMING A BUYER

Here’s what I needed to know as an entrepreneur before I began looking ‘outside’ for answers:

– Who did I need to get agreement from? And how would their combined voices inform our needs or a resolution?

– What would the ‘cost’ be to us, the downside, of bringing in something external? Was the downside worth the upside and could we recover?

– How could we fix the problem ourselves? At what point would we realize we couldn’t and needed outside help?

– How could we be certain upfront that the people, policies, rules, and goals we had in place would fit comfortably with anything new we might do, any solution we might purchase? And was it possible to know the downside in advance?

– How could I determine the risk of change before I brought in a new solution?

I had to make decisions that didn’t cause too much disruption and garnered buy-in.

Eventually, as my business grew, I began annotating the change process I was going through. Eventually I realized everyone goes through the same change management process.

13 STEPS OF CHANGE

As someone trying to solve problems without causing disruption, my decision making process had very specific activities, from understanding the elements of a problem to ultimately ending up with a resolution. Turned out there were 13 steps for change, and people didn’t self-identify as buyers until step 10!

In other words, when selling focused only on those with need, they restricted their prospects to those who had already done all their risk management and gotten buy-in – overlooking those who were on route to becoming prospects…. and sales offers no capability to help them get there.

I used these steps to design a Change Facilitation model (Buying Facilitation®) as a new sales tool kit to lead potential buyers through their risk issues. Indeed, with a Buying Facilitator hat on, I could identify folks who were on route to becoming buyers on the first call.

As a seller I ignored the personal issues people had to resolve before buying. In fact, with all my awards for being a top producer, I never realized selling didn’t cause buying!

I taught Buying Facilitation® to my sales staff so they could help people on route to becoming buyers to

• Assemble all the right people – decision makers and influencers of all types – to get consensus for any change at all. It was quite a challenge to figure out every one of the folks whose voices had to be heard.;
• Enable collaboration so all voices, all concerns, approved action by a consensus. This was a systems-change issue, not a solution-choice issue;
• Find out if there was a cheap, easy, risk-free way to fix problems with groups, policies, technology we had on hand or were familiar with;
• Discover the risks of change and how we’d handle them;
• Realize the point where there was no route to Excellence without bringing in a new/different solution;
• Manage the fallout of change when bringing something new in from outside, and determine how to congruently integrate a purchase into our status quo.

And our sales increased by 600%!

For those who want to understand the process, my book Dirty Little Secrets lays out the 13 step Buying Decision Path or go to my site www.sharon-drew.com where I not only explain it but have hundreds of articles on the subject.

The time it takes buyers to navigate these steps is the length of the sales cycle. And buyers must do this anyway – so it might as well be with us. 

BUYING FACILITATION® FACILITATES THE BUYER’S JOURNEY

Buying Facilitation® eschews trying to sell anything until or unless the buyer knows exactly how – not what – they need to buy. After all, you’ve got nothing to sell until they have something to buy.

Here’s what we don’t know as sellers:

1. Where buyers are along their decision path.
2. How many, or if, the requisite Buying Decision Team is in place, and ALL appropriate voices have been heard so a full evaluation of the upsides and downsides to change can be considered.
3. Until ALL voices have been heard, there is no way to recognize or define ‘need.’ As outsiders we can NEVER know who belongs on the Buying Decision Team because it’s so unique to the situation.
4. Who is a real buyer: only those who know how to manage change, and get consensus that they cannot fix the problem internally are buyers. Need doesn’t determine ability to buy.
5. The fallout of the risk factors, and the ability for any group to withstand change.
6. The types of change management issues that a new solution would entail.

For less time and resource, we can actually lead buyers down their own change route; and we can easily, quickly, recognize who will, or won’t, be a buyer. In one conversation we can help them discern who they need to include on their Buying Decision Team; if we wish an appointment, the entire Decision Team will be eagerly awaiting us.

And with a Change Facilitator hat on, on the first call it’s possible to find buyers at early stages along their decision path who need our solutions but aren’t yet ready to buy. We just can’t use the sales model until after it’s established who is actually a buyer.

Let’s enter earlier with a change consultant hat on, to actually facilitate buyers to the point where they could be ready to buy – and THEN sell. We will find 8x more prospects, immediately recognize those who can never buy, and be true Servant Leaders. Otherwise, with a 5% close rate, we’re merely wasting over 95% of our time and resource seeking the low hanging fruit, and missing a vital opportunity to find, and close, those who WILL buy. And more will buy, and quicker. Help people become buyers. Then sell.

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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 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.

The post The Real Buyer’s Journey: why selling doesn’t cause buying, by Sharon-Drew Morgen appeared first on Sharon-Drew.

This assumption is normal: in our daily lives we regularly pose questions to friends, colleagues, and clients about stuff we’re curious about, and receive responses we don’t check for accuracy or congruence.

But have you ever wondered what a question actually is?

Conventionally, questions are posed to elicit a response or answer a curiosity. Sometimes we use them rhetorically or posed to elicit a specific response. Sometimes questions are deemed ‘closed’, like in, “What time is dinner?” Sometimes they’re ‘open’, like in, “What do you want to eat?”

But all standard questions share the same features. They:

• assume the words within the query will extract the information needed;
• are posed according to the curiosity, goals, assumptions, and intent of the Asker;
• use words that limit responses to narrow interpretation;
• get interpreted uniquely, according to a Responder’s historic, unconscious, world views and mental models;
• potentially ignore more important and accurate information.

Of course, most of the time, conventional questions work just fine. How else could we find out how many acres there are at Machu Picchu, or which movie our spouse wants to see?

But what if you can pose a question that leads others to discover their own answers and path to decision making and change?

WHAT QUESTIONS DO

Because of their inherent biases, standard questions extract only a portion of the possible responses. Indeed, standard questions can be misunderstood or interpreted badly.

1. Information: because information is elicited in a way that represents the requirements of the Asker (even when they aim to help the Responder), a Responder’s real answers may not be captured. The wording, the request, the topic, the intent, the underlying assumptions, and/or the vocabulary may unwittingly offend, confuse, or be interpreted badly, causing partial or inaccurate responses.
2. Listening: words and meaning are merely our brain’s interpretations of sound waves that enter our ears through our historic neural pathways, guaranteeing we assign meaning according to our unconscious biases and history. Obviously, we might miss the intent of the question entirely. I wrote an entire book on this (What? Did you really say what I think I heard?). Recent research has shown that the maximum we understand from a Speaker’s intent is 35%! In other words, it’s likely that what we think we’ve heard is some degree different from the Asker’s intent.

Sample

3. Biased question formulation: Askers use words meant for a specific goal and outcome, but may not obtain the best, accurate, or truthful, responses. Sadly, it’s possible that higher quality answers could have been retrieved with a different wording or intent.

4. Restriction: questions restrict answers according to the boundaries of the question. We cannot uncover data we never asked for, even if it’s available. We cannot elicit accurate data if the question is heard differently than intended.

Are you getting the point here? Questions have so many in-built biases, get translated as so mysteriously within a Responder’s brain, that it’s a miracle people communicate at all.

This is especially disturbing in coaching, healthcare, and leadership situations. Well-meaning professionals believe the ‘right’ question will uncover a truth from a Responder. Every coach and leader I’ve met deeply believes in their own knack – ‘intuition’ – for posing the ‘right’ question because they have a history of similar situations.

Sadly, when Responders share answers that prove unhelpful or inaccurate, Influencers may not even be aware of it, or worse, blame them for being non-compliant. Hence: patients end up keeping bad habits, clients end up not making needed changes, buyers end up not getting what they need.

A NEW FORM OF QUESTION

As someone who has thought deeply, and written, about the physiology of change and the neurology of decision making for decades, I began pondering this conundrum in the 1980s.

What if healthcare professionals asked questions that triggered patients to positive, immediate habit change, or coaches knew the exact questions that enabled new habit formation and behavior generation? What if scientists and consultants could elicit the most accurate information? And imagine if it were possible for questions to help sellers and advertisers actually inspire action to generate Buyer Readiness.

What if a question could be worded in a specific way to act as a GPS to lead a Responder – a buyer, a patient, a client – through a sequence in their brain to make it possible to discover the full set of criteria to make a decision from and a permanent change without resistance?

FACILITATIVE QUESTIONS

I’ve invented a new form of question – a Facilitative Question -that addresses the above problems. With a goal of helping Others consciously enter their unconscious brains, they use

• specific words, in a specific order to go to the most appropriate memory channel to enable discovery without resistance;
• no bias from an Asker’s curiosity or need;
• a very specific route to specific, unconscious, memory storage circuits that avoid sparking defense or resistance.

Facilitative Questions (FQs) help Responders uncover their own criteria, beliefs, and mental models to find their own unique answers within their existing neural circuitry – great for permanent behavior change and decision making.

Once you learn how to formulate these questions, prospective buyers can be led through change and buying stages; coaching clients can discover their own path to resistance-free change; doctors can elicit behavior change in patients rather than push to try to cause change; and advertisers can trigger interactive responses to normally one-sided push messages.

Conventional questions keep Responders in a very small, idiosyncratic, and personal response range. And while the Asker is most likely attempting to elicit a response, they are out of control. FQs actually define the parameters and give Askers real control.

USES

Here’s a few industries that could benefit from FQs.

1. Healthcare: Intake forms that create an interactive doc/patient experience from the start: What would you need to see from us to know we’re on your team and ready to serve you? [This FQ automatically creates a WE space between patient and provider.] Doctors could lead people to how they’d create new habits for health: What has stopped you from being able to exercise regularly until now? What would you need to know or believe differently to be able to add regular walking to your weekly schedule?
2. Advertising, for an ad for a Porsche, for example: How would you know when it was time to buy yourself a luxury car? [This FQ makes the ad interactive and gives a reader time to reflect on personal change.]
3. Sales: What has stopped you until now from resolving your issue using your own resources? [This FQ enables potential buyers to look at how they’ve gone about solving a problem on their own – necessary before realizing they can’t fix the problem themselves and might need to buy something.]
4. Coaching: What would you need to see or believe differently to be willing to consider new choices in the places where your habitual choices are more limited? [This FQ gives clients an observer viewpoint, thus circumventing blame, to notice old habits/patterns, and limits viewing to the exact historic behaviors that may not be effective.]

These can be used in advertising and marketing campaigns; healthcare apps that sit on top of Behavior Mod apps and facilitate new habit formation; AI where apps or robots need to understand the route to change and decision making. I’ve been teaching it in sales with my Buying Facilitation® model for 40 years and companies such as DuPont teach how to use them with farmers; Senior Partners at KPMG use it with client consulting; Safelight Auto Glass uses it to compete against other distributors; and Kaiser Permanente uses it to engage seniors needed supplemental insurance, to name a few.

If anyone would like to learn the HOW of formulating Facilitative Questions, I developed a primer in a FQ learning accelerator. Or we can work together to develop or test a new initiative. Given how broadly my own clients have used these questions, I’m eager to work with folks who seek to truly serve their client base.

By enabling Others to discover their own unconscious path we not only help them find their own best answers but act as Servant Leaders to decision making.

• What would you need to know or believe differently to be willing to add a new questioning technique to your already superb questioning skills?
• How would you know that adding a new skill set would be worth the time/effort/cost to make you – and your clients – even more successful?

Should you wish to add the ability to use questions as a way to truly serve others, let me know. sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

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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 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.

The post Questions: the new superpower, by Sharon-Drew Morgen appeared first on Sharon-Drew.

Rationalizations make sense of the failures: it’s the buyer’s fault for not buying; the stakeholder’s fault for not wanting to change; the patient’s fault for not wanting to be healthy; the student’s fault for not being motivated to learn.

What if none of that were true? What if the models themselves were at fault and the industries merely build in their failure as the price of doing business rather than making a few small changes to achieve excellence?

DOING THE SAME THINGS EXPECTING DIFFERENT RESULTS

Each industry continues doing the same things they’ve always done regardless of the decades-long failure rates (Shouldn’t they be indicators? Isn’t that the definition of insanity?), blaming the Other rather than recognizing the inherent problems.

Globally, in learning institutions, corporations and consulting groups, people teach and apply the same problematic models and ideas that have been accepted through time and adopted as Truth, regardless of their failures.

I was horrified to learn recently that a man I dated decades ago has been teaching my original Facilitative Questions to his Harvard MBA students without license or training. I called him.

SD: But I never licensed you! Or taught you how to formulate them! They took me 10 years to invent and take days to learn!

A: I heard you use a couple of them. I figured out the rest myself.

SD: How does your interpretation get to the right neural circuits in the Listener’s brain to help them get to their source criteria for decision making?

A: WHAT? I don’t know anything about that. I just do it my way. They’re just questions.

SD: No, they do not gather information, nor are they based on curiosity. They’re brain-directed tools that make it possible to avoid automatic assumptions so people can quickly make criteria-based decisions.

A: I don’t know why you’re making such a big deal of this.

SD: Well, you’re using my IP, my coined and legally defined term to apply to a conventional practice (questions) that’s so biased there’s no way to capture good data or help anyone make a values-based decision. Not to mention you’re teaching future leaders the wrong thing!

A: They don’t know the difference.

This is how original ideas get quashed and perpetuated: stealing original ideas from the inventors, redefining and misusing them to fit standard thinking, and then propagating them regardless of the cost. And it gets normalized endlessly.

ORIGINAL IDEAS GET IGNORED

As an original thinker I invent, train, and write books on systemic change models that enable Others to discover their own, usually unconscious, answers – which they must do anyway as part of their decision making process.

My models include skills and ideas that run counter to standard thingking: Buyers don’t buy based on solutions (and selling doesn’t cause buying!); leaders overlook first-hand, accurate knowledge before goal setting when they fail to include all stakeholder’s voices, assuring resistance later. When docs forget that patients need a belief change before they modify behaviors, they’re setting up non-compliance. When training models offer content before participant’s brains can accurately translate it, they cannot retain new knowledge.

None of the current models have specific skills that enable Others to discover their own values-based answers and outputs. Rather, they’re rules- and culture-driven and fail to recognize the risks they instigate.

Change, after all, is a risk consideration: unless the risk of change is known and managed, unless the underlying values of the new match the original values, no change will occur: The risk of change must be lower than the risk of staying the same or the status quo prevails.

And standard thinking lacks the tools to guide Others – learners, buyers, clients, patients – to recognize and manage their risks, assuming instead that good information, stories, content, or explanations will provide the ‘proof’ to buy, learn, change.

WHERE STANDARD THINKING GETS IT WRONG

Standard thinking assumes ‘good’ or ‘rational’ information, delivered by someone with ‘credibility’ (a seller, a coach, a leader, a doc, a trainer) will convince and cause change. It doesn’t: information is needed only after a risk gets uncovered and managed, and after the values criteria are engaged. Otherwise there’s no way to know what information is needed.

Not only can there be no evaluation unless the risk is known, brains can’t easily understand content that doesn’t already exist within their historic brain circuitry: Due to the way brains listen, how they receive and translate incoming words/sound vibrations, what we think we hear is unwittingly translated according to what we’ve heard before – all but guaranteeing the status quo continues.

Obviously, this causes all incoming content – pitches, presentations, incentives, stories, and ‘rational’ explanations – to be misinterpreted when it goes against a listener’s history and beliefs.

Sample

CASE STUDIES

A Sales University

I had an unnerving experience in early 2000 that exemplifies how standard thinking prevails regardless of the possibility of adopting new ideas that have a better chance of success.

In the 1990s I keynoted at a sales university. Prior to my talk, I took the opportunity to listen to other speakers and sit in on workshops that taught standard sales models (how to place solutions and counter objections – the Sell Side). I never once heard mentioned the differences between selling and how buyers buy, a separate and unique values-based, risk-avoidance process all folks must go through before being willing to buy.

I must admit I was surprised. My book Selling with Integrity had been on the New York Times Business Bestseller’s list and the reason I was hired for the job. Given the number of copies the book sold I (naively) thought people were at least considering adding tools to first facilitate buying decisions to their selling activities.

Knowing I was fighting an uphill battle to change an industry that had been around since the Serpent convinced Eve to eat the apple, I carefully prepared my talk to at least inspire curiosity. I also spent my own money ($3,000, against my $5,000 pay!) to purchase hardcover books for the audience of 200 that I placed on each chair.

About 10 minutes into my talk, audience members began leaving. Because my ideas went against what they were being taught, and even though Buying Facilitation® would enhance their close rate substantially and instigate trust, they couldn’t even consider my ideas. By the end of my talk there were 9 people left in the audience. And every single one of my books was left on the chairs. Not one – not one – seller-in-training thought my book (free! a NYTimes Bestseller!) worth taking.

Dug in Leadership

Here’s another story:

I once sat next to a well-dressed young man on a flight to Seattle.

SD: You look very professional. I assume you’re going to meet a prospect?

Man: Yes. I’m hoping he likes me well enough to allow me to provide free services for two weeks in hopes they’ll hire me.

SD: So you’re using your body as a prospecting tool. What would you need to believe differently to be able to facilitate your prospect into choosing you without you working for 2 weeks without pay?

Man: You sound just like this book I just read! (My book, of course). She made a lot of sense.

SD: So why aren’t you using her suggestions?

Man: I gave my boss the book and told him I wanted to work with her to learn how to help buyers buy. He read it and told me she was crazy, that sales doesn’t work that way and not to use any of her ideas.

No, sales doesn’t work that way; facilitating buying decisions does. In both case studies, standard thinking prevailed, regardless of the cost.

The post Inconvenient Truths: how culture, assumptions, and standardization thwart change and new ideas, by Sharon-Drew Morgen appeared first on Sharon-Drew.

When I graduated from university as a journalist in 1967, before my real job as a magazine editor was to begin in September, I spent the summer in Provincetown, MA. Serving breakfast at a griddle house didn’t provide much money, so when I heard of a job opening for a cocktail waitress at a fancy hotel, I applied.

As a non-drinker I didn’t frequent bars and had no clue what were in cocktails but I figured I could I learn. Patrick gave me the tools.

GETTING THE JOB

When I arrived for my interview, I was asked to wait by the bar. There I chatted with the funny, irreverent, charming and kind bartender Patrick. In our 10 minutes together, we chatted comfortably and teased each other as if we’d known each other for years:

P: I’ve been here for 13 years. Love it. Love the owners. I take care of them, and they take care of me. And the patrons are delightful. It’s a great job. You lookin’ to get that waitress job? What’s your name – you look like a Gazelda. I’m gonna call you that. Gazelda.

SD: Gazelda? THAT’S GREAT! I love it! And yes, I need the money so I’m interviewing for the job but probably wasting everybody’s time. I have no idea what’s in a cocktail. But I’m hard working, loyal, and I can quickly learn what I need to. I’m waiting tables now, and I’m good, but never served cocktails.

P: You’ll be fine. Just be your charming self and they’ll hire you. We like nice people around here. Tell them you’ve been a waitress and you’ll work hard. Don’t worry about the rest. I’ll take care of it when you get here. When you give me your order, I’ll put the drinks on the tray in the same order you wrote them, using a clock-face pattern with the first drink on the left middle, the 9:00 place, and go around clockwise. That way you’ll only need to remember who you took the first order from and don’t need to know the drinks.

I got the job – even got to do a nightly solo dance routine with the band to Night Train (tenor sax included!) – which doubled my tips. Eventually I learned all the drinks, of course. And Patrick continued helping me throughout the summer. He warned me when difficult customers entered, put up my drinks ahead of the other waitresses, made my drinks a bit stronger, all assuring me of higher tips. We were a team.

And I, Gazelda, gave Patrick 20% of all my tips throughout the summer.

SYSTEMS ARE STRUCTURAL

Patrick taught me something important: if I know the foundational structure upon which ideas and activities are based (the norms, values, patterns, and objectives), I could fill in the details later. Of course details were necessary, but they’re easy to identify and populate once the structure is agreed-upon.

Patrick and I had matching values:

• service – we both cared about clients and customers;
• trust – immediately, it seemed, Patrick and I trusted the other to do what we said we’d do;
• collaboration – working together we could run a high functioning lounge;
• honesty – a willingness to communicate and show up authentically.

With these criteria in place (and thankfully they remained in place all summer), the details I needed to learn became obvious.

This knowledge has changed my entire career: by understanding the underlying structure of any situation, I could accept work without a full understanding of the specific details involved. I actually started up a highly successful tech company with no knowledge of technology or running a business.

STARTING UP A COMPANY USING STRUCTURE FIRST

In 1983, before computers were widely used and with no knowledge of technology or how to run a business (or hire or market or manage), I accepted funds to start up a tech company in London with just an idea thrown out to some investors at a party.

Without computers being broadly available, and with no internet invented yet – with just my understanding of the core values and the need to serve both employees and clients – we grew to be a small, 50-person international company grossing $5,000,000 (remember: no websites, no email, no zoom, no LinkedIn) in just under four years!

I began by identifying a non-negotiable structure, enhanced by new team members:

• I would run the company from a win/win, servant leader mind set.
• Everyone had to be willing to collaborate, share ideas, and be authentic, honest, and have integrity.
• Employees, as my customers, were to be treated with kindness and respect and offered any management positions that opened up first.
• There would be no lying, cheating, stealing, manipulating, ignoring. Everyone would be respected and served, and any policies had to conform.
• We’d aim to be the best and have a solid profit margin, but it had to be accomplished within all of the above restraints.
• All ideas were welcome and worth considering; innovation, creativity, and vision were integral to our growth.
• Failure is important, and part of the learning/growth process so long as it’s out in the open and discussed.

During the interview process, potential hires had to agree to the norms, offer creative ideas and exhibit a willingness to fail. To hire tech folks I used a test with an overlay of answers that my then-husband designed for me, making it possible for me to hire tech-savvy folks without bothering the team.

One of the things I noticed right away was how difficult it was for us all to hear each other accurately, so I ended up writing a book on how brains ‘listen’ (not very well).

Sample

Additionally, because, as per our team decisions, any tools we used had to meet our criteria and values, the standard sales model didn’t fit: I actually developed one that did. (Buying Facilitation®)

All of my actions met our foundational criteria:

• To make sure my employees were always ‘juicy’, I took everyone to the pub monthly while they laughed as I lost at darts, and gave them $2,000 annually to take an all-expense-paid week for a training in a different discipline (photography, archery…) to enhance their creativity. And I called the field reps monthly to keep them in the loop.
• To make sure the clients were always cared for, I called each of them monthly and had an annual dinner for them. I also hired a ‘make nice’ guy as the liaison between the coding, our team placements, and the clients. This ensured I would have no fires and could catch problems before they got big.

And except for one manager who moved to a different country, not one of my employees left, quit, or were fired. [I later learned that several of them were offered huge pay increases to leave for the competition, but not one did.] At a conference one of my competitor’s said “What are you doing over there? I offered Joe a blank check and he STILL wouldn’t leave!”]

I charged double what the rest of the field charged (It’s rarely about the money.). But our reputation as ‘the best’ served us well. We had 11% of the market, while my 25 competitors shared the rest. And we had a 40% net profit margin!

Together we learned how to run a business. We shared our successes and failures and laughed and cried together.

Values, principles, servant-leader first. Content second. Today, 44 years later, the company remains successful.

THE RISKS

Starting projects or serving clients by making choices from our core values, principles and norms, and by making decisions with the voices of all involved, has never failed me in the 60 intervening years, enabling me to take on any work, in any field.

Structure and systems before content. As a simple metaphor, think of moving in to a new house. You can’t choose a couch unless you know the size of the room you’re putting it in. Structure – then content. Too often leaders only think in content, and the structure gets lost until there’s resistance or failure.

It’s risky, I suppose. But I think it’s riskier to start with what might seem like a ‘complete’ data set (very difficult to achieve). Indeed, it’s not possible to properly identify the right data needed until the structure has been agreed on; when choosing details first you’re working from potentially flawed assumptions.

Imagine inventing a gadget without first knowing your target audience, the specifics of the market or how competitors will position themselves against it, or how the would-be buyers would choose you over competitors. I often ask new authors who they’re writing for. They stare in confusion. Yet unless the audience is specified, writing becomes a personal activity with no idea how to choose the best words, the best voice, the best story that will enthuse readers.

CONTENT VS STRUCTURE

To begin thinking about the differences between content vs structure, here are a few questions:

• What would you be willing to consider differently when approaching a project, a dissertation etc. to start by generating the foundational values or rules that will guide discovery and content creation?
• When you choose a goal without knowing the underlying structure, how do you set the best outputs without restricting them to what you assume is possible?
• What criteria do you use to recognize problems before they cause real damage? Include the right elements to measure? Understand your risk? How do you even know the full data set that you might need for success?

I’m currently mentoring a startup that made their gadget the driving motivation. They hired very competent techies and sellers familiar with the product. But soon the problems appeared: sellers were stealing clients and prospecting lists from each other; managers were pushing their own agendas onto their teams without buy-in; a large project failed when leaders used their own assumptions to reorganize rather than involve the voices of the stakeholders to set the goals and understand risks, causing huge disruption and resistance.

I recognize that the standard thinking is to have full knowledge of the necessary content before taking on a job and discuss goals with other leaders rather than setting the structure with the voices of all stakeholders. But consider first generating a structure within which content will fit. Then there will be less resistance, and an easier path to success.

________________________    

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.

The post I Learned About Systems as a Cocktail Waitress, by Sharon-Drew Morgen appeared first on Sharon-Drew.

I define trust as the awareness of Another as being safe, similar, and sane enough to connect with, and occurs when they

• have core beliefs that align and seem harmonious with mine,
• feel heard, accepted, respected, and understood by me,
• feel compatible or safe as a result of our interacting,
• believe their status quo won’t be at risk when connected to me.

Unless these criteria are satisfied, trust can’t occur no matter how kind, professional, necessary, or well-intended another person or message is. It’s a Belief issue.

BELIEFS DEFINE US

Every one of us has Beliefs unique to us. Our Beliefs are the norms and rules we live by, developed over our lifetimes to make decisions and act against. We gravitate to, and trust, folks with similar foundational Beliefs and world views that match well-enough with our own to proclaim “safety”.

Largely unconscious, illogical to others and hard to change, our Beliefs regulate us, define who we are and enable us to show up congruently in the world. We even listen through ears biased by our Beliefs.

Beliefs instigate our habits and assumptions, restricting our life choices such as our occupations, politics, values, mates – even our child rearing practices. And our Beliefs are the initiators of our behaviors – behaviors being Beliefs in action, the expressions of the values that define who we are.

Sadly, because everyone’s Belief systems are unconscious and idiosyncratic, and because we each view the world through our own Beliefs and perceptions, it’s difficult to accurately perceive Another’s internal world view. It’s here, in our Beliefs, where our world views collide.

For those folks whose jobs are to influence, there’s an immediate problem. The content they share, or even their unique delivery style, may unwittingly offend the Belief system of the Communication Partner (CP). Bad news for sellers, coaches, managers, etc. who attempt to promote change or buy-in by pushing their ideas and instead cause resistance and distrust.

DRIVERS FOR TRUST

I’d like to offer thoughts on some of the ways we fail when trying to engage trust, then provide some ideas of how to stimulate it.

Relationship Building: We’ve been led to believe that having a relationship encourages buy-in to new ideas. But it’s a conundrum: polite as an interaction appears or how necessary our message, we can’t easily build a relationship with folks with divergent Beliefs as our individual, and automatic filters react immediately. In other words, “pushing in” doesn’t work, even if our data and intent are accurate, and even if we think we have a relationship that entitles us to ‘share.’ We might have a superficial connection, but not a relationship; “making nice” does not constitute a relationship, or engender change or trust.

Information: As influencers we often attempt to “get in” with the information we assume our CPs need, without accounting for how it will be perceived. Sometimes the “right” data inadvertently tells our CP that they’re wrong (and we’re right). We fail to realize that our CPs only understand our intent to the degree it matches their Beliefs, or how their listening filters translate it for them. With the best will in the world, even with good data to help folks who need what we’ve got to share, we aren’t heeded.

In fact, information is the last thing needed to facilitate change or buy-in since people unconsciously defend their status quo. It’s our brain’s fault! Because all incoming data is translated for us automatically by our historic neural circuits, new ideas aren’t always interpreted accurately and run the risk of causing resistance. (See my book WHAT? on this topic.) So save the information sharing for when a clear path to mutual Beliefs and trust has been developed.

Sample

Think about it: ‘Right’ or ‘rational’ data won’t convince if it goes against someone’s Beliefs. It can’t even be heard accurately. If you’re an environmentalist, the “rational/ scientific” data you offer to “prove” climate change won’t persuade those who disagree; if you’re a proponent of the medical model, you won’t use alternate therapies to manage an illness no matter how strong the data for changing your nutrition.

Clear Communication: We all think we communicate clearly, yet we’re not as effective speaking in ‘Other’s language’ given our CPs unconscious, biased listening filters that prevent our “risky” data from being heard accurately. Certainly we believe we’re choosing the “right” words and approach to convey our intent. Yet our message is heard accurately only by those with similar Beliefs and resisted by the very people who need our information the most.

FACILITATE BELIEF CHANGE FIRST

Since our great ideas and eager strategies don’t engender trust in folks with different Beliefs, and without trust we can’t change minds, what should we do?

As coaches, sellers, and leaders, we must carefully initiate conversations based on them discovering their own answers, with a goal to match their Belief criteria before offering new ideas. In this way we can help our CPs open up new possibility that actually creates trust:

1. Enter each conversation with the goal of assisting your CPs in discovering how their Beliefs instigated their behaviors. Entering with the goal to offer information, or get your question answered, or extract promises of action will automatically engender distrust and resistance.
2. Ask the type of questions that facilitate and enable internal discovery; conventional questions merely pull data biased by the needs of the Asker. I designed Facilitative Questions that enable congruent change without bias by leading the CP through their unique route to discovery.
3. There is a specific series of steps that change entails. I’ve spent decades coding the steps of change for decision making and new habit generation. These promote congruent change by leading Others down their own choice points. Learn the steps, and help your CP traverse the steps to match Beliefs and encourage acceptance prior to mentioning your idea.
4. Trust that your CP has their own answers and that they’ll shift toward excellence as appropriate. It won’t show up exactly as you’d hoped; but there will be a new opening for collaboration without resistance.
5. Understand that until or unless your CP can recognize their own incongruences, there is no way they’ll welcome comments from you that sound like you’re saying they’re wrong or insufficient.

In other words, create a Beliefs-based bond that will open the possibility of you offering information later, once they’ve discovered exactly where they need it and how to use it.

When we facilitate our CPs down their path to conscious choice, we

• help them discover their incongruencies,
• help them understand the areas at risk,
• help them develop their own route to managing risk (i.e. change) and where they can’t do it themselves,
• enable buy-in from the elements that will be effected.

Until your audience is able to accomplish this in their own way, using their own Beliefs, they will hear you through biased ears, maintain their barriers, and engender trust only with those who they feel aligned with – omitting a large audience of those who may need you.

Stop using your own biases to engender trust: facilitate your CPs in changing themselves. Then the choice of the best solution becomes a consequence of a system that is ready, willing, and able to adopt excellence. And they’ll trust you because you helped them help themselves.

____________

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.

The post Trust: what it is, and how to initiate it, by Sharon-Drew Morgen appeared first on Sharon-Drew.

Whatever we go through to get to our final end point, the process is often fraught with confusion, time delays, and unknown risk. To help you minimize these downsides when making important decisions, here are a few foundational elements:

• • Perspective: Have you collected the full data set necessary for resolution?
  • Criteria: What are the norms and values you must consider?
  • Goal: What is the specific goal you seek to achieve?
  • Risks: What are the threats to specific choices?

• Steps: A replicable route to practical decision making.

I’ll take them one at a time.

PERSPECTIVE

One of the problems with decision making is the way your brain presents you with habituated responses. Like when you decide to go on a diet and unconsciously duplicate the patterns you used in previous (failed) diets, or when you stop at the same point when trying to learn a new hobby – again. So much of how we decide is ruled by our brain’s historic biases and restrictions.

To have as broad a range of options as possible with a minimum of bias and restriction, it’s necessary to consider the problem from different perspectives.

Ordinarily we automatically think our standard, familiar thoughts and unconsciously pose our standard, familiar questions to ourselves. I call this perspective Self. Self is our natural state, a largely unconscious idiosyncratic mix of physical, mental, emotional, unconscious and comfortable reactions and ideas. In Self we are the fish in the water.

From Self your decisions are based on your immediate world view – restricted by your momentary feelings, what’s going on in your life, and your history of managing similar issues.This is perfect for daily living. But for making consequential decisions it’s good to have as broad, and unbiased viewpoint as possible. For this you’ll need an expansive perspective that I call Observer/Witness.

Being in Observer offers more a conscious choice with a broader perspective and far less bias. You already do this, albeit unconsciously: the quick intake of breath telling you to be more alert and consider a new choice; that it’s time to go beyond your natural reaction, your standard thoughts and feelings.

You use Observer when raising children, like when your 2-year-old so creatively crayons the wall and you gently guide her to the coloring book but really want to scream ‘I JUST PAINTED THAT WALL!!!’. It’s when you’re fighting with a partner and take a step back to say, ‘Wait a minute. Let’s chill.’

In Observer, you notice a broader range of choices that weren’t visible from Self. They were always there, but not habituated like the more-used options. My book HOW? teaches how to do this.

Rule #1: Make important decisions from Observer to perceive a broad range of choices.

Sample

CRITERIA

Values and Beliefs – the basis of any decision making criteria – are the primary determinants for making important decisions as they defend and maintain who you are and what you stand for. Indeed, people often delay making a decision because they fear they’ll overlook something significant, because they don’t know the full set of risks involved.

From Observer you can consider the underlying values that must be maintained in the new decision. They’re often personal, although in team decision making the group must collaboratively agree to the values they want to maintain.

Here’s a personal tale of how my switch from Self to Observer converted my criteria to more authentic, less reactive values and a positive outcome.

A mythic row with a dear friend ended our relationship. He betrayed me! He lied! He broke my values-based criteria of honesty, of my ‘right to be respected!’ But as time passed I began to get a different perspective: I must love with ‘Ands’ not ‘Buts’. That meant (to me) I had to find a way to be in relationship. So I shifted my criteria (and Self perspective) from honesty and ‘right to be respected’ to my Observer perspective: ‘How do we love each other AND be respectful and honest?’ With this new criteria our relationship had a way forward.

Rule #2: Know the criteria you want to meet for your decision and write down some thoughts on what it will look like when it’s met.

GOALS

Goals often include specific target actions and a time limit for completion, and require a well-worded goal. So “I want to go on a diet to lose weight” becomes “I will do the research to find the best foods for my body to find and maintain its best weight.”

Goals must include details that can be evaluated or you run the risk of failure. The more specificity, the higher the possibility of success.

Rule #3: Set a goal using very specific words and expected results.

RISKS

All decisions carry some sort of risk. What risk are you willing to take? Are you willing to switch values? Are you willing to let go of people in your life? Relationships? Money?

Before making a final decision it’s important to know the risks involved in the change caused by the final outcome. Ask the people in any way involved in the final decision what the upsides/downsides are for them. Make sure you pose questions from Observer so you instill as little bias as possible. I’ve invented Facilitative Questions that lead to unconscious circuits where decision criteria are stored. Again, I teach them in HOW?.

Your final decision may not be able to address all risks but knowing them in advance is valuable for goal setting. Where there’s a chance the risks won’t be fully addressed, do as much advance work as possible to reduce the fallout.

Rule #4: before making a final decision, know the risks involved for the people, policies, values, etc.

STEPS

Often people begin seeking information too soon. I suggest you wait until you’ve determined the goals, risks, and criteria so you’ll have a more accurate foundation. Then:

1. Assemble all the elements involved: Know the goals, criteria, people and fall-out from each. Include gathering data (from Observer, to minimize bias) from the people who will be touched by your decision. While you might not be able to meet their criteria, you’ll at least have an idea of the risks.
2. Determine and manage the risks: Fully understand the distance between where you are now and where you will be once the decision is made. Will the same values prevail? Will jobs or situations be changed? How will this affect the status quo? How will you deal with any fallout?
3. Gather data: Once you know the risks, goals and criteria involved, gather supporting data (both internal and external) that ensures you’ve got the important elements covered and the risks managed best you can.
4. Weight the options: You’ll now have the information you need to understand the types of choices and risks. Go back to the drawing board. Get into Observer. Write down a hierarchy of criteria to meet and see how/where they match the options. Weight them according to risks and values. Know precisely the fallout.
5. Carry out the decision: make sure to personally manage any fallout.

And good luck! Should you require some team coaching to facilitate an important decision, please contact me: sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

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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 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.

The post Making Important Decisions, by Sharon-Drew Morgen appeared first on Sharon-Drew.

When calling a company these days we often get caught in one of those automated loops that lead us from one wrong person to another, from one long hold to another, ultimately landing us where we started, with no resolution, lots of frustration, and rage toward the company.

Company websites aren’t any better: no way to connect to a human except via links that either lead nowhere or never get responded to; chat bots that have no idea what you’re talking about and keep repeating perky phrases.

As a paying support customer, I once waited 13 hours for a promised ‘one-hour’ call-back from Best Buy to resolve an urgent technical problem. I went to sleep with the phone in my hand, waiting. When the call came at 3:00 A.M. (!) the tech started by asking me how I was. “I’m sleeping! It’s 3:00 in the morning and I’ve been waiting since 2:00 in the afternoon! And I still have my technical problem!” And he hung up on me. This was particularly egregious given I’d been forced to listen (for hours!) to Best Buy’s ‘hold’ jingle promoting fabulous customer service.

We’ve all learned to accept these indignities, to be ignored if we have a problem, to spend hours attempting to resolve a crisis caused by our purchase. And it’s getting worse.

CUSTOMERS DON’T SEEM TO MATTER

We’ve grown to hate our providers, and they don’t seem to care. But they should. We provide the income for their profit and salaries, certainly enough to hire employees to answer phones or help solve problems. In so many ways, hiring a human would be cheaper than the cost of the automation.

Gone are the days when customer service mattered, when three rings was the maximum number before phones had to be answered to keep customers from being frustrated.

Companies now use only two criteria to interact with customers: Time and Cost. And because these companies may be sole providers in regional sectors or global behemoths, users have no choice but to remain customers.

Sadly, there’s no regulation on this, no way to reduce our monthly payment by the number of hours we spend on hold, or the number of problems we can’t get resolved. Until we form a Citizen’s Council, or there’s some sort of regulation – neither of which are likely – we’ll just have to suck it up. Nobody cares, no one is responsible, and no one pays for the problem except us.

What happened? How did our companies go from touting stellar customer service as a competitive advantage to computerizing all human interactions? How did companies decide to stop respecting the very people who keep them successful? Why have they been so willing to cause their customers to distrust them?

POSSIBLE CAUSES

We know what companies pay their ‘C’ level people, their profit margins and how much they pay (or not) in taxes. We know they can afford to hire customer support folks. But somewhere along the way customers became secondary. What’s going on? Is greed the only motivation these days? How did it become a ‘thing’ that customers don’t matter – except for their purchases?

Frankly, I have no way to think about this in an unbiased way. I’ve spent my life developing facilitation models that enable win/win and servant leadership, to respect each individual and engender trust. Making it difficult for the very folks you depend on to get the service they require goes against all my beliefs.

It might come from the momentum of ‘cheap’. Everything seems to require a low price tag, and money becomes the main criteria for choice. We don’t consider what happens when goods are reduced to a price tag, for doing ‘whatever it takes’ for price to be the sole choice criteria. We avert our eyes when we learn that companies use children as cheap labor or when they strip the environment to create cheap products.

We seem to want cheap even when price differentials convey value differentials. Someone once asked the price of my Buying Facilitation® training, a unique model I invented that uses a Buy Side process to help buyers generate their buying decisions. When I told him the price (thousands) he told me he could get ‘almost the same’ course at ATT for $49. I told him to take it 

Are we all implicated here? Is automated customer service the fallout from the search for cheap? How did we move away from scrupulous business practices, or good customer care as a competitive advantage? Why isn’t it a simple calculation that happy customers provide more revenue?

Somewhere in the past few years automation became the accepted corporate interface regardless of the toll on customers. And I can’t imagine that focus groups would chose automation and no-human-contact as a preference over being cared for by a human.

BEST PRACTICES

I have some ideas that might stop this nonsense. My favorite is to have the CEO place a call in him/herself and notice the levels of frustration they encounter. I suspect that when company heads sit on hold for hours only to get connected to the wrong department or get disconnected, they just might fix the problems. They don’t seem to respect a customer’s wasted time; maybe they might care when it’s their own time.

Here are my ideas:

• Human beings will pick up customer service lines; site links will go to real support people who will respond within 12 hours.
• The person who picks up the phone will own the problem.
• Customer Care will be seen as a competitive advantage.
• Companies will pay bonuses to reps who keep customers happy.
• A vehicle – a YouTube Channel, for example – specifically for customers’ complaints. Their grievance gets calculated as a cost to the company, with a running tally of how much money the company owes its customers. At the end of a month the company gets sent a Grievance Bill with the proceeds going to charity.
• An advertised day a month of “no shopping” in the companies who don’t serve customers adequately.

Sadly, the very people who sell us services have become adversaries. What do we need to do or say to have our needs met, our voices heard, our time respected? What do companies need to know, believe, or do differently to be willing to provide resources to handle incoming calls, or provide websites that offer support? What can any of us do to knock some sense into their heads?

Does anyone have better ideas that might help? God knows, I don’t.

________________________

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.

The post The Cost of Automating Customer Care, by Sharon-Drew Morgen appeared first on Sharon-Drew.

But what about those that don’t demand much thought, that you’ve done so many times and assume are suitable? Do you know how they affect others? The risks involved that remain unspoken but certainly color ongoing activity and relationships?

Unless you know the consequences of your (unconscious) decisions, you can’t know the risks you face.

I’d like to share a story of how unconscious choices have consequences and offer some ideas to have more conscious choice.

CASE STUDY

I mentor a wonderful company in India (Orchvate), led admirably by two visionary women (Panchali Banderjee and Geethanjali Ganapathy) that trains, places, and supervises neurodiverse people into Indian corporations. In a world where diversity, especially neurodiversity, is still not easily accepted in corporate environments, their important work provides both people and companies terrific services and opportunities.

One of my jobs has been to assist Orchvate in building a structure that’s less dependent upon the founders and more organized around growth, supervision,  authenticity and servant-leadership.

After a recent monthly team meeting – our second, conceived to ensure all would be involved in cultivating a cohesive culture – I noticed leadership had failed to send out a ‘thanks for attending’ follow up notice.

I wrote Panchali reminding her to send a follow up with a cc to me. What I received was cut and dry – a great effort (to the point, professional, and practical) but lacked the kindness, support, acceptance and inclusion we were trying to engender.

I wondered how she decided to use those words and tone after all our discussions. Here was our conversation.

SD: How did you decide to write the note the way you did?

P: I didn’t decide.

SD: But you did. You chose the words and the tone. Everything we all do involves choosing some things over others.

P: I just wrote it. It was something I needed to do.

SD: Just because your decisions weren’t conscious didn’t mean you didn’t make decisions. You just made them unconsciously.

P: Oh! I never realized I needed different choices!

SD: Most leaders do the same thing – assume their natural choices are effective – without realizing there may be unintended consequences. Let’s figure out when you must make choices more consciously. Remember when you sat down to write this. What comes up?

P: That I needed to get it done.

SD: So this was a task, a DOing (the quantitative) rather than using it to connect authentically – a BEing (the qualitative)? Did you realize you omitted the way you usually speak from your heart that makes it so easy to connect with you?

P: I never consciously thought of it! It was a task. I realize now I tend to treat certain things as tasks to be done rather than moments of connection.

SD: So your DOing is a task orientation that excludes the BEing! Huh. Hopefully next team email will combine the two, maybe by using ‘kindness, authenticity, connection’ as your goal or task.

P: I could do that!

CONCLUSION

Choice. The essential element necessary to recognize the risks that emerge from unconscious decisions.

For those of you wanting to try generating decisions more consciously, here are some Facilitative Questions to help you going forward:

• How will I know that something deserves my time to stop and deliberately consider my full range of choices before doing what comes naturally? To include both the DOing and the BEing where it’s appropriate?
• How can I trigger myself to consider the unspoken – but real – risks that each communication from me produces, before I send anything out?
• What new skills must I learn so my communications match our beliefs, to help the teams and supervisors incorporate them into their work?
• What do I need to think of to remember to use qualitative words and include kindheartedness in my messages?

Panchali was initially unaware that her choices represented a risk to the changes we were instituting. But this problem isn’t hers alone. Most leaders respond to their tasks without conscious choice, certainly not realizing the consequences.

How will you know when you need additional choices beyond your automatic decisions to ensure you’re conveying the essential elements that will avoid risks and assure your best outcome?

______________________

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.

The post Are Your Unconscious Decisions Risking Excellence? by Sharon-Drew Morgen appeared first on Sharon-Drew.