Daryll Scott's Blog

A Deep Dive into Culture OS

Wed, 06 Aug 2025 10:06:17 GMT

A manifesto for Cohesion, Engagement and Performance

How do you tackle the really subtle, tricky stuff, like everyday rumbling conflict or quiet quitting?

How can you create enough engagement and alignment for concerted collective effort?

For more than two decades, I have assisted organisations with aspects of culture such as vision, leadership behaviour, storytelling, values, and intrinsic motivation. While all of these interventions are valuable, they don’t necessarily combine to create an aligned, cohesive, and forward-moving culture.

Based on all of my years of direct experience, and a well-established systems thinking process called schismogenesis , Culture OS helps leaders to address all of the factors affecting cultural alignment, all at once

It identifies the toxic business processes and behaviours that provoke teams and organisations to become dysfunctionally disconnected, and provides the antidote to realign people within a genuinely compelling culture.

It's a reliable methodology for increasing engagement, improving communication and driving sustainable high performance.

The solution, which is a blend of consulting, training, and coaching, is described on the web page here . This article dives a little deeper into the descriptions of the problem and the solution.

Understanding the problem

In nearly all cases, dysfunction is made possible by ignoring nuance and applying broad-brush judgements.

That may be simplistic metrics that drive tunnel visioned behaviour, generalised solutions that do not work in specific cases, polarised judgements that categorise people as good or bad, right or wrong, in-group or out-group.

People in boardrooms often try to look after most people’s best interests, but the detached, top-down nature of the thinking lacks sensitivity to actual reality, causing unwanted bottom-up behaviour.

There are three offending behaviours that are most likely to lead to cultural problems. Different versions of these three patterns play out in every level of collective behaviour, from your family or friendship group all the way up to the society you live in.

1. Metrics That Mislead

Metrics are often used to drive performance in a timely fashion, setting targets and encouraging healthy competition. Great. We need metrics. We need data. We need to balance the books. We need people to pay attention to numbers. But…

If the business is run solely in this way, people focus on achieving the target regardless of other considerations. People’s responsibilities may be broad, but they will focus on what is measured, acknowledged and rewarded.

When competition becomes the primary focus, people behave more and more aggressively to win. Eventually, paying attention solely to the competitive metric distracts us from our true objectives.

A good example would be an escalating arms race where both sides have enough weapons to destroy the world multiple times, yet continue to manufacture more. Competitive city traders make money betting on the failure of their own financial systems, when their financial minds could be put to work in more helpful ways. We also race to the bottom: Competing businesses can get locked in a price war where everyone discounts until nobody is making any money.

It’s like playing tennis and watching the scoreboard, not the ball.

Generalised metrics are also dangerous. If you are the national or global head of a function, you will make data-led decisions to achieve your overall objectives that do not work locally.

Paying focused attention to a metric without sensitivity to nuance yields unwanted behaviour at every level.

2. Polarisation in Teams

We are all different. We have different ways of working, different priorities and often different objectives. In teams and cultures, differences are a superpower; they eliminate blind spots, provoke more diverse questions, and lead to better answers, but misunderstood differences are kryptonite.

Below are examples of everyday differences in TEMPEREMENTS, which, when misunderstood, can lead to dysfunction. Each behaviour polarises the other to create a perfect storm of more and more extreme behaviours:

I worked with leadership teams that could never align because some were driven by measurement and clarity of outputs, while others were motivated by speed and effectiveness of outcomes; it was measurement versus agility. Over time, the team became increasingly unable to communicate.

Misalignment fosters adversarial perceptions, polarised opinions, and irrational reactions. What begins as minor differences becomes magnified, leading to bandwagons, echo chambers, and ingroup/outgroup behaviour . Once the schism appears, people take sides, strengthening some connections and damaging others until effective communication breaks down.

3. Quiet Quitting

Lack of a compelling vision for the immediate future leads to Quiet Quitting Behaviours.

The technical term for quiet quitting is ‘systems holdback’. It occurs when individuals withhold contributions or reduce effort because they believe others are doing so, leading to collective disengagement. It’s like the sucker principle in psychology - nobody wants to be the fool doing all the work, so everyone does less and less.

It’s how we end up in a situation where everyone looks fully utilised, but very little is achieved. Hybrid working conditions, which are great in many ways, can fuel the cultural detachment and individualism that contribute to ‘holdback’.

The cause is usually a blend of the three, but the consequence is the same: it becomes increasingly difficult to create any kind of engaged, motivated, collective effort.

The Solutions

Vision

Cultural disengagement is overcome by establishing a compelling cultural vision, a game that everyone genuinely wants to play.

Creating a compelling vision is not the same as defining a long-term business objective in management speak, and it can’t be canvassed from popular opinion. It needs to be ambitious, articulated with conviction, and described with enough emotional appeal to evoke intrinsic motivation.

For a critique of vision statements and how they work, please check out this article.

Cultural OS creates a compelling vision:

Uncovering the aspirations of leadership
Authoring a vision statement with imaginative and emotional appeal
Designing iconic actions and environmental influences
Developing leaders’ storytelling abilities

Values

When we are in a team or organisational culture that reflects our values and motives, it’s very easy to generate the energy to contribute to it.

The opposite is also true. That’s why having different cultures within the organisation cannot create the positive energy required for universal effort. We need to all feel a sense of belonging to the collective. When we are not aligned in terms of values, we feel we don't belong, and we quietly quit.

Yet, in most organisations that have an explicit list of values, most people within those organisations cannot remember them all, and even if they can, the values are some abstract words that the individuals do not link to their personal experience.

Cultural OS makes values real and sticky:

Condense values to three memorable statements
Define the extremes of each value - too much / too little
Help individuals to map values into their own motives and behaviours
Capture everyday anecdotes that demonstrate values

Perspective

The difference that can divide us can also make us stronger.

When differences are understood, embraced, and valued, connection can be maintained, enabling us to communicate effectively and share the benefits of diverse perspectives. This understanding can be initiated through explorations such as workshop activities but is sustained through ritual.

Cultural OS uses TEMPERAMENTS as the tool to overcome misunderstanding.

Organisations need to create the space for people to converse and co-create a narrative. We have all been subjected to organised fun that feels forced and inauthentic. It’s not about the mini golf, karaoke or cocktail making; it’s about the opportunity for work-related interactions without structured agendas, allowing topics to open up and cooperative relationships to develop.

Whether it's water cooler moments in the office, a fun event, or an online activity, people need space to converse and commune. Without it, culture has no oxygen.

Cultural OS increases perspective:

Develop self-awareness using diagnostics and workshop activities
Frame communication with the intention to prevent misunderstanding
Structure meetings, stand-ups and presentations to include context.

Feedback

Many cultural problems can be ‘nipped in the bud’ when individuals can deliver and receive feedback in all directions. The communication difficulties that damage working relationships are often to be found in the undaid stuff. Clear and positive communication leaves little room for misunderstanding, defensiveness or reluctance.

Feedback is the lifeblood of an aligned culture, yet many businesses handle it poorly. For the unskilled people leader, giving feedback can be interpersonally uncomfortable, leading to two possible behaviours: they may overformalize the process, making it cold and unpleasant, or they may be too informal, resulting in ambiguity and confusion.

Skilful feedback conversations are essential to maintain alignment and performance.

For a detailed overview of this ethos, please check out this article.

Cultural OS coaches:

Managing expectations and eliminating misunderstanding
Receiving feedback in a growth mindset
Collaborative approaches to problem solving, performance improvement and behaviour change

Trust

Trust is an essential ingredient for an authentically connected culture. Government research indicates that high trust environments report 76% higher engagement, 50% fewer sick days, and 74% less stress.

Trust also affects performance dramatically. McKinsey & Company reports that high-trust teams are 3.3 times more efficient and 5.1 times more likely to meet performance goals.

Trust is eroded by competition or self-interest, both of which are fuelled by individual reward systems. At the same time, team-based rewards promote trust, cohesiveness, and mutual support.

When a group focuses more on the quality of what they are actually doing, and less on broader comparisons and competitions, competitive dysfunction is less likely to spiral out of control. We all want to be competent and raise the bar, so how can people’s attention be guided toward their own development journey, rather than measuring themselves against others? Teams achieve by focusing on the collective result, and even individual competitors who achieve at the highest level do so by running their own race or playing their best game.

Culture OS consults with leaders to create trust and cohesion:

Changing metrics to reward individual and collective achievement.
Decentralising control of operational decisions.
Revising leadership dashboards to prevent micro-management by the minute.
Development journeys and succession planning.
Developmental delegation and leadership.

How To Create Psychological Safety

ds@daryllscott.com (Daryll Scott) — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 12:45:39 GMT

The opposite of psychological safety is walking on eggshells.

The most consistent feedback I receive from my group coaching activities is that I’m able to create a psychologically safe environment.

Psychological safety has become something of a Holy Grail in team performance and group dynamics since the research emerged from Google’s Project Aristotle. While not the only critical factor, it’s the biggie.

I thought it might be helpful to share my ethos, which helps people relax their shoulders within minutes of walking into my consulting room or workshop space.

It’s not anything I say; it’s a communication that I demonstrate through my actions and reactions.

We have all had the experience of wincing with discomfort as facilitators try to encourage their audience to be engaged and open by adopting the persona of an authoritarian schoolteacher and simply telling them to be engaged and open.

When working with grown-ups, telling doesn’t work. We must ask, show and invite.

Some facilitators take the same approach to psychological safety, announcing, "This is a psychologically safe space," as if stating it out loud makes it so. But safety isn’t explicit, it’s implicit. It’s not a bullet point on a flipchart; it’s a feeling.

It’s the micro-interactions, the tone, the body language, the vibe. And that vibe either tells your nervous system you’re safe to contribute freely or warns you to tread carefully.

If someone attempts to create psychological safety by imposing it as a rule, they have spectacularly missed the point.

Many people think psychological safety means a space where they are not triggered or offended, but being triggered or offended is what makes psychological safety impossible.

We all need to let go of our knee-jerk reactions if we want to foster an environment of open communication and collaboration, both for ourselves and for others.

The opposite of psychological safety isn’t conflict, it’s walking on eggshells.

Healthy disagreement requires safety. You can only push, challenge, or be provocative in a helpful way when the relationship is robust enough to hold it.

What Safety Actually Looks Like

To create a truly safe space, you must provide a genuinely non-judgemental experience.

That doesn't mean making judgments unconsciously and then consciously pretending not to judge, to retain composure and meet a specified professional competency.

It means not judging in the first place.

It requires a curious, flexible philosophy that remains inclusive and explores ideas without disrupting the feeling of connection and relationship.

People may be left, right, woke, anti-woke, eco-conscious, fiscally conservative, pro-Trump, anti-Trump, or some other opinion-splitting agenda. None of these people is a total idiot. None are completely right.

Psychological safety means staying connected regardless of differences. The cohesive group dynamic must be more important than individual opinions about the issue at hand.

Despite increasing attention to safety, we are moving further away from it with strange inclusion dynamics (thirty people on a video call with screens off), less informal, interpersonal interactions (water cooler moments), and more polarised opinions (reinforced by our online echo chambers).

There is a way back to safety under these conditions, but to achieve it, we need to remember some foundational ideas from philosophy and social psychology that we seem to have recently forgotten.

Please indulge me in my attempts to reintroduce some of the old ideas that are vital for our future…

We All Live In Different Worlds

If you study Epistemology, the study of how we know what we think we know, you quickly realise that each of us lives in our own world, a complex mental model based on our personal experiences. As Alfred Korzybski famously put it, "The map is not the territory."

Your brain doesn’t process the world directly. It constructs a working model of the world by filtering a limited amount of data through a vast network of neurological transforms and psychological schemas.

So when someone has a wildly different perspective, they are drawing conclusions from a completely different experience. Dissonance arises when your internal map of the world doesn’t match theirs.

When we clash, it’s not reality we’re fighting over. It’s our competing interpretations of reality.

Meaning-Making is Idiosyncratic and Context Dependent

Philosophers have long wrestled with the process of meaning-making. Wittgenstein's "private language argument" and the "problem of other minds" both point to the same conclusion: We can never truly know someone else's experience, so we cannot know what they are thinking of when they use a particular word.

Take the word ‘integrity’ as an example. What does that mean? Remaining composed? Telling the truth? Doing the right thing? Not compromising your values? Being discreet? Being professional? ETC… Words are extremely unreliable. That’s why two people can discuss something and walk away with utterly different interpretations.

If you think that someone is saying something terrible, it’s worth checking. You may just be tripping over the words used. Psychological safety means creating space for diverse interpretations and nuance.

Words are inaccurate and can have completely different meanings in different contexts. Understanding is always co-created, never simply exchanged.

Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE)

The Fundamental Attribution Error is our tendency to attribute other people’s actions to their character while explaining our own actions by the circumstances.

If someone cuts us off in traffic, we call them a name, and don’t consider that they could be on their way to a hospital, but if we drive badly, well, it wasn’t clearly signposted, the road layout was confusing, and the sat nav did not give us enough notice.

We observe a snippet of behaviour, make judgements, and then turn those judgements into permanent character traits. For example, when someone challenges an idea in a meeting, we might label them as difficult or confrontational, when we could see the behaviour as curious or concerned, or better still, we could refrain from labelling it with an attitude.

There have been studies that show people make character judgements about writers based on their content, even when they know the writer is not writing from their own beliefs. It’s why people in supermarkets are horrible to actors who play villains on TV. We have trouble separating the messenger from the message.

Our attributional errors from snap judgements sabotage psychological safety.

The antidote to FAE is curiosity. What might be going on in their world that I can’t see? What circumstances could be influencing them? The moment we start to ask those questions, we open the door to more flexible meaning-making and safer conditions.

In-Group / Out-Group Dynamics

Human beings are tribal creatures. Evolutionarily, it made sense. Safety came from belonging. So we instinctively sort the world into "us" and “them." But this wiring, once helpful for survival, now fuels division.

The Robbers Cave Experiment in the 1950s showed just how quickly group identity forms and how easily it turns to hostility. Two groups of boys at summer camp, given separate identities, quickly turned competitive, distrustful and then horrifically aggressive.

Even more alarming was Jane Elliott’s "Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes" classroom experiment, which exposed children to arbitrary discrimination based on eye colour. The effects were immediate and disturbing.

In professional environments, in-group/out-group dynamics show up subtly but powerfully: silos, cliques, leadership vs. staff, remote vs. office-based, the cool team vs. the boring one, and any identity politics.

For psychological safety we must dissolve these boundaries. In well-connected environments, they are not relevant (even if they are relevant in broader contexts).

Expectation Becomes Reality

In the famous “Pygmalion in the Classroom” study, psychologists Rosenthal and Jacobson told teachers that a random group of students were about to show a spurt in intellectual growth. Those students weren’t chosen based on any assessment of ability; they were picked out of a hat.

But months later, those kids outperformed their peers! Why? Because the teachers believed in them. And without realising it, they gave them more attention, more encouragement, more feedback. The students internalised those subtle cues. The teacher’s expectations became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

‘Expectancy bias’, which is the tendency for our beliefs about someone to subtly influence their behaviour, happens everywhere. In boardrooms. In performance reviews. In day-to-day conversations. We don’t just observe what happens objectively; we see it subjectively. Our ‘confirmation bias’ ensures that we see everything that reinforces our expectations and miss everything that contradicts them, and ‘belief bias’ is a mental shortcut that favours conclusions that fit our existing beliefs.

We project our expectations, confirm our beliefs and reinforce our assumptions; and then we marvel at how accurate our predictions turn out to be. I knew it!

For better outcomes, you need to be less certain about what will happen in advance. Check the lens through which you’re looking: What are you expecting? What do you believe to be true? And how are those internal stories shaping what you experience?

Leave the door open for happy accidents and surprises.

A Mindset for Safety

To conclude, here’s a practical mindset for creating psychological safety rooted in human psychology.

To embody this non-judgemental behaviour, question these mindsets until you are satisfied that they are more accurate (or less wrong) than clearer mindsets with certainties and inflexibilities.

Abandon any clear expectations in favour of a curious mindset. Cluelessly wonder what will happen…
Assume misunderstanding rather than anything negative. Nobody is trying to ruin their day.
Respect that others see the world differently. They’re not wrong. Just different.
Relinquish control. You can’t control others’ opinions, and you don’t have to react to them. Welcome all contributions, regardless of whether you agree or not.
Explore meaning to co-create narrative. Words don’t convey precise meanings, so don’t react to words on face value.
Chill out, real-world relationships matter more than memes, echo chambers or headlines. Confront issues, but never confront people. It needn’t be personal.
Remember, we’re in this together, whatever your camp. Together is the only way positive change happens.

References

Churchland, P. M. (1989). A Neurocomputational Perspective: The Nature of Mind and the Structure of Science. MIT Press. (On the ‘problem of other minds’).
Elliott, J. (1970). A Class Divided: Then and Now. Frontline (PBS Documentary on the Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes experiment).
Google (2016). Project Aristotle: Understanding team effectiveness.
Korzybski, A. (1933). Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. Institute of General Semantics.
Churchland, P. M. (1989). A Neurocomputational Perspective: The Nature of Mind and the Structure of Science. MIT Press. (On the ‘problem of other minds’).
Rosenthal, R., & Jacobson, L. (1968). Pygmalion in the Classroom: Teacher Expectation and Pupils’ Intellectual Development. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. (The original study demonstrating how teacher expectations can significantly influence student IQ and performance).
Ross, L., Amabile, T. M., & Steinmetz, J. L. (1977). Social roles, social control, and biases in social-perception processes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 35(7), 485–494. (On Fundamental Attribution Error)
Sherif, M. et al. (1961). Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation: The Robbers Cave Experiment. University Book Exchange.
Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical Investigations. Blackwell Publishing.

Do you have a VISION, or just some high-level ‘business speak’?

Mon, 11 Nov 2024 16:55:01 GMT

“To be the most (insert success criteria) company in the (insert sector) industry.” is not a vision; it’s a commercial ambition.

A vision is precisely that. You need to be able to close your eyes and imagine it.

The images in the backs of our minds and the emotions they evoke drive our everyday behaviour toward an outcome.

As you will have seen from previous articles, I think ‘bottom-up’. My consulting, consulting and behavioural design works by evaluating everything based on how it lands with an individual human nervous system.

In this article, I will introduce the overlooked, essential human element:

LinkedIn has always been my favourite social media platform. I don’t even think of it as social media; I think of it as a functional tool. Unlike other platforms that evolved based on user behaviour with the tail wagging the dog, LinkedIn has always known what it’s there to do. Their vision is: “To create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce.” We all know what that means. It is clear, coherent, purposeful, and evokes mental images and feelings if you think about it.

Most consultancies (and Chat GPT) will suggest that your vision should be customer-focused, have a global impact, be innovative and high quality, be simple and based on values. Many inspirational vision statements have those qualities, but that’s not why they work.

As with most MBA thinking, this is an accurate, rational breakdown, but the human element still needs to be added. You could book a leadership away day and follow these principles to author a statement that should work; you may even design some funky slides and select some emotive music, but the vision could still fail to catch fire when you put it out there.

Over the past two decades, I have seen so many businesses wasting time on vision and strategy that won’t work because it doesn’t connect with the individual's ambition, reality or sentiment. It may be unrealistically aspirational, incoherent, not related to the activity of the business, incongruent with how the business is run, top-down thinking that only sounds good to the board and shareholders, or based on ‘authored’ values that do not faintly resemble actual priorities and behaviour people experience on an everyday basis.

If you want to un-MBA your thinking and connect with people, I suggest you challenge your vision by empathising with the following human needs:

“I need to see what you mean”

When you hear or read IKEA ’s vision: “To create a better everyday life for the many people.” you can close your eyes and see it. I don’t know about you, but I see beautiful, practical, cheap stuff filling the homes of millions of people who would otherwise have to put up with ugly, impractical, cheap stuff. It is a congruent expression of what IKEA is here to do.

“I need to be included”

Consider this vision statement by Nike : “To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete* in the world.” (*If you have a body, you are an athlete). Reference to athletes ignites the inspiration and joy of celebrating our sports heroes, but the real genius is the last bit in brackets. It makes all the difference. For your vision to work, there must be no barrier to entry.

“It needs to make sense to me”

Check out the plain language simplicity of this vision by Google : “To provide access to the world’s information in one click.” Could it be simpler? We know what the objective is at every level. We know what every product is innovating towards. From a human perspective, it creates a clear sense of purpose in the world and clarity of mind.

“I need to believe you”

You may disagree with Elon Musk, but do you doubt him? Tesla ’s vision: “To create the most compelling car company of the 21st century by driving the world’s transition to electric vehicles.” Has been demonstrated in reality. When Tesla set out, their vision was ridiculed by the automotive industry, but now we all believe it. Their ambitious innovation and their agile speed to market have made Tesla the second most profitable car manufacturer in the world and forced other manufacturers to catch up.

“I need to feel it”

Patagonia ’s emotionally leaded vision, “We’re in business to save our home planet.” tells us what they are all about. The choice of words “Our home planet” makes all the difference. Substitute the words ‘the environment’, and the emotion diminishes. I doubt they will achieve this outcome single-handedly, but the challenge is so huge and emotively purposeful that the ultimate outcome doesn’t matter. It’s an emotive reason to choose their products or turn up for work each day, and it’s a bright guiding light to shine on every tiny decision they make.

“I need to know who to be”

When I worked with Apple a decade ago, I was blown away by the culture. Everyone I worked with had a tacit sense of what was Apple and what wasn’t. Their vision is “To make the best products on earth, and to leave the world better than we found it.” It focuses on the product, the customer experience and the company's impact on the world. If you become overly concerned about anything that isn’t in service of those things, you are not Apple.

The backfire effect:

There is only one thing worse than no vision - having a vision that provokes a negative reaction.

I find Disney ’s vision deeply disappointing. “To entertain, inform and inspire people around the globe through the power of unparalleled storytelling, reflecting the iconic brands, creative minds and innovative technologies that make ours the world’s premier entertainment company.” It’s a fair reflection of what they are here to do and how they do it, but it’s not visionary. Too many business-speak bolt-ons have taken them away from their brand essence of “Magic”. Disney tells the stories that develop the moral compasses of our children; its creativity and innovation inspire us as adults, and it creates shared experiences and a sense of belonging for families and communities. Disney influences the quality of our lives - They need to call me - I will help them lose the management speak!

I’m also disappointed when brands have a vision but lose their way. They fail to stay true to it, or it gets watered down, and it always seems to be for commercial reasons - saving money or making more.

Starbucks has a great vision: “To inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup, and one neighborhood at a time” , but when you get a mental picture of these words and compare it to your local Starbucks franchise, do they match? I’m not criticising the vision statement; it’s a really good one, I’m disappointed that the business has failed to pay enough attention to service standards and environment to keep the ‘vibe’.

The Facebook/Meta vision: “To give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” started out as true, but the algorithms designed to keep us scrolling and fuel their commercial performance create echo chambers and divide us as a society. For this reason, the vision creates a negative experience.

To summarise:

I think of a vision statement as imaginative storytelling.

I believe it should be evaluated based on the visual and emotive response it creates in the reader/listener.

It needs to be authentic, it needs to get the response you want, and then you need to stick to it.

Do you agree?

Confessions of a Hypnotist

Tue, 03 Sep 2024 15:13:28 GMT

Hypnosis debunked and influence decoded.

I get mixed reactions when I tell people that I’m an NLP expert and that one of the techniques in my personal change toolkit is hypnosis.

Some people are wary, some are fascinated, some are dismissive, and if I had a penny for every time someone said, “Don’t look into his eyes.” …

In all cases, there are huge misconceptions about what hypnotic trance is and how it happens.

I think it’s important to debunk those misunderstandings and make it as transparent as possible because when you understand how hypnosis works, you understand how influence works, and it doesn’t work the way you think…

This understanding is essential if you are a leader, coach, change agent, behavioural scientist, healthcare professional, friend, parent, or anyone who needs to positively nurture behaviour change. It will challenge your thinking about control, ethics and non-violent communication.

In his article, I will answer the questions:

Does hypnosis work?
What are the different types of hypnosis?
What conditions are required for someone to be receptive?
What makes suggestions acceptable?
How does a hypnotist maintain influence?
What’s the difference between influence and control?

I will provide practical takeaways for leaders, behavioural scientists and coaches.

Does hypnosis work?

There are a variety of hypnotic states, and most feature a combination of focused attention and deep relaxation.

There is nothing mystical or unnatural about hypnotic states. We slip into them every day: You may be transfixed by a gripping movie, mesmerised by a brilliant storyteller or find yourself awakening from a 12-yard stare in the 10-yard room. These states are not only natural; they are healthy. Without these slack-jawed moments of relaxed attention, we become a twitchy bag of nerves.

Mindfulness practices and flow states have the same qualities as a hypnotic trance.

Of course, hypnosis works; it’s a naturally occurring state. When we ask the question, ‘Does hypnosis work?’ We are really asking whether interpersonal communication can evoke these states deliberately. The answer is a big YES.

I have never met a person I cannot help get into a hypnotic state, but sometimes, I need to employ different approaches to help get them there. Not everyone is equally suggestible, but with enough skill and flexibility on the part of the hypnotist, it works for everyone.

What are the different types of hypnosis?

There are quite a few different applications of hypnosis, ranging from psycho-analytical enquiry to past-life regression, and all have slightly different delivery styles. The three applications I have experience with are Traditional Hypnosis, Rapid Induction / Stage Hypnosis, and Ericksonian Hypnosis.

Traditional Hypnosis: This clumsy and direct style of hypnosis is what most people imagine hypnosis to be. The hypnotist makes direct suggestions, and the subject obligingly does what they are told and enters a trance-like state. For this to work, there needs to be a power dynamic at play, the hypnotist is interpersonally dominant. It’s unsophisticated, only works sometimes, and you can learn little about the true nature of influence from it.

Rapid Induction / Stage Hypnosis: This is a lot of fun as a short-term parlour trick. It works by evoking a deeply unconscious pattern of behaviour and then interrupting the behaviour in a shocking or surprising way. When our experience does not play out as per our deep unconscious expectations, our brain farts, and we are unable to make sense of our experience. In that window, the hypnotist can issue a command, and, in most cases, the subject will go with it. I used to do this on stage at corporate events to show what’s possible, usually helping an audience member overcome stage fright instantly. I stopped doing this because, although the audience was entertained, they wouldn't talk to me afterwards. The helpful learning from this hypnotic technique is that when we are shocked, discombobulated or experience enormous cognitive strain, we become incapable of thinking for ourselves and look outside of ourselves for any helpful input. Beware of making important decisions when you are profoundly confused.

Ericksonian Hypnosis: This is the style of hypnosis I teach and that the rest of this article focuses on. It’s the style of hypnosis you learn on an NLP Programme, as Milton H. Erickson was one of the extraordinary people ‘modelled’ by NLP co-founders Bandler and Grinder in the early 1970s. Instead of direct commands, the hypnotist uses more permissive, creative and indirect suggestions, guiding the subject into a trance. There is no power dynamic required, and as you will discover, it is a most ethical and ecological style of communication.

What conditions are required for someone to be receptive?

Sigmund Freud dabbled with hypnosis but abandoned it because the style of communication was too intimate, preferring the very detached, analytical sofa, chair and clipboard style that you would associate with psychotherapy. I wonder how profoundly different the last hundred years would have been had Freud opted for a more connected approach.

Hypnosis is a deeply connected style of communication. The interpersonal conditions required are authentic connection and undivided attention.

As such, you don’t do hypnosis to someone; you do it with someone; it is a state that you enter into together. You cannot guide someone into relaxed and open-minded thinking if your state is tense and close-minded. You cannot create influential dynamics when you think of communication as a one-way street. It’s a vibe, a dance, an interpersonal dynamic. Real communication happens with people, not at them.

If you want the subject or your audience to connect with you, then connect with them. Read the room and match their energy. Get in sync. Get on the same page.

If you want the subject or your audience to give you their undivided attention, pay undivided attention to them. Get out of your head and into the room. Observe the live dynamic and the real-time feedback.

What makes suggestions acceptable?

Confirmation bias is the tendency to pay attention to whatever fits with our existing beliefs and to completely ignore anything that conflicts with our current thinking. We are all deeply afflicted with this pre-logical closed-mindedness. It’s an absolute stinker of a cognitive bias.

This bias is really obstructive in interpersonal communication: When we sense that we are entering a disagreement, we become completely un-influenceable. We stop listening entirely and go into our private world to think about what we will say when the other person finishes talking.

The currency of influence is agreement.

So much so that research has shown that our opinions change entirely whether we nod or shake our heads. That’s bonkers! We are not influenced by facts or cold logic; we are influenced because when the information lands, we agree; we think ‘yes’.

To communicate with influence, we must first find agreement; to do that, we must find common ground.

The skilful hypnotist usually establishes a feeling of agreement by casually throwing in statements that are so obviously true that they are impossible to disagree with.

For example, “You are reading this blog post. It has provoked some thoughts.”

This may seem a little machiavellian, saying things just for the sake of gaining agreement, but it’s not. To find agreement, we must see things from the other person’s perspective, respect their opinion, and empathise with their position.

Acknowledging the other person’s view of the world improves our understanding of our audience and adds nuance to our communication. It also means that when we communicate, they will listen.

How does a hypnotist maintain influence?

Any hypnotist will tell you their suggestions can be a bit hit or miss.

Sometimes, the subject finds the hypnotist’s suggestions agreeable, but sometimes, they fail to respond or dismiss the suggestion with a tiny shake of their head. To maintain the condition of agreement and, therefore, the connection and influence, the hypnotist must quickly endorse the subject’s resistance and make it part of the experience.

In other words, the hypnotist makes a suggestion - if the subject responds to the suggestion, great; if the subject does not respond to the suggestion, also great.

For example:

The Hypnotist says, “You are reading this blog post, and it has provoked some thoughts.”

If the subject responds with a tiny nod, the hypnotist will say, “And that’s good.” Then, the hypnotist will continue with the following suggestion.

If the subject responds with a frown or shake, the hypnotist will say, “Or maybe not, and either way, that’s a good thing.” Then, the hypnotist will continue with the following suggestion.

It’s a catch-all way of communicating that respects people will do what they want when they want, and the hypnotist’s job is to join up with that and go with whatever the subject wants.

This is the illusion that a skilful hypnotist creates:

It looks like the person being hypnotised is doing whatever the hypnotist suggests. What’s really happening is that the person being hypnotised is responding, or not, to vague suggestions, and the hypnotist is watching for the response and going with it.

That’s what creates and deepens the spell…

It seems like the hypnotist is leading, and the subject is following. In reality, the subject leading, and the hypnotist is following.

The hypnotist maintains influence by making everything that happens an intentional part of the communication, respecting the subject, and going with whatever they get. One of my hypnosis teachers told me, “Your job is to help the other person find their ideal trance experience.”

It’s far more of an investigation than an imposition.

What’s the difference between influence and control?

I hope what has begun to become apparent in reading this is that true influence is a deep human connection with bucketloads of respect and flexibility.

When we think of hypnosis, we think of ‘Mind Control’, but when it comes to the most skilful and precise form of hypnosis, there is no control at all. The spell is created with non-directive flexibility; the less controlling you are, the more influential you will be.

The highly skilled hypnotist will:

Connect genuinely with undivided attention
Get on the same page by seeing things from the subject’s perspective
Make vague and permissive positive suggestions in the hope that the subject will find the suggestion agreeable
Positively acknowledge when they do, adapt with more flexibility when they don’t
Navigate this feedback loop throughout the communication until you reach an agreeable place

Imagine if we all communicated that way.

When people attend my training courses, I tell them that t o be an amazingly influential communicator, they must let go of any desire to control.

This is sometimes counter-intuitive wisdom as, in our everyday lives, we see people being influential and getting their way because of status or power dynamics. That’s not influential communication; it’s who they are in relation to the context.

Real influential abilities do not require a job title or any other indication of status or power. They require the ability to connect human-to-human, respect differences, find common ground, make suggestions, and respond to feedback.

That’s what helps you find the win-win. The genuine partnership. The happy client/employee. The lasting agreement. The developing relationship, the ecological change.

Genuine, powerful human communication can never be one-way traffic - it’s always a loop.

If you want to capture people’s attention - pay attention to them
If you want people to feel connected to you - open yourself up to connect to them
If you want to master influence - be prepared to be influenced in the process

“You are at the end of this blog post, and there are things you are thinking, so that means it would be good to share it with your network to get them thinking, too. Thank you for reading.”

Cutting through the BS with BS (Behavioural Science)

Mon, 15 Jul 2024 10:36:34 GMT

A post from UK election day

On the day of the strangest UK election I have ever seen, with contenders clinging to a bygone world or looking to the future without a clear vision, I thought it would be fun to add some behavioural insights to prevent us from taking it all too seriously.

Exploring some well-known biases can demystify many political shambles and shenanigans.

So, let’s first explore the voting public.

We don’t really need much knowledge or experience to form our perceptions and beliefs.

The well-known Dunning-Kruger Effect occurs when our lack of knowledge and skill in a certain area causes us to overestimate our competence. The less we know, the more confident we are in our opinions!

As well as ignorance being confident bliss, we create our beliefs with bonkers biases…

We believe that our judgments are more accurate than they are (the illusion of validity)

We are more swayed by believability than a logical argument (belief bias)

We tend to believe things are true if they are easier to process (illusory truth effect).

Incredibly, statements are perceived as more truthful when they rhyme (rhyme as reason effect) - Remember. ‘Hands, space, face’

We are more convinced by things that come in threes (the power of three). Remember. ‘Stay home / save lives / protect the NHS’?

It’s no wonder elections are fought on sound bites and simplistic phrases rather than anything more carefully considered. We are suckers for over-simplified information.

Once we have created our perceptions, beliefs and reasoning, they become very sticky indeed. We irrationally cling to them, and the more irrational we become, the tighter we hold on.

The desire to employ our existing thinking rather than explore new thinking is sometimes referred to as the law of Instrument - when all we have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

When we find our beliefs on shaky ground, rather than revising them, most of us emotionally and irrationally double down and strengthen our erroneous beliefs (the backfire effect).

Even when we accept some fake news or nonsense is proven to be false, it can still continue to influence our thoughts and feelings (continued influence effect)

If we are open-minded enough to revise our beliefs, we only change them only a little bit (conservatism bias).

We all search for evidence to support our beliefs and ignore anything that contradicts (confirmation bias).

The sticky nature of our beliefs compounds the populism that prevents the government from functioning properly. If you want people to vote for you, you must tell them what they already believe. The tail wags the dog.

Elections are supposed to be fought on issues, but they are hugely influenced by the cult of personality:

The same message carries different meanings and has completely different impacts depending on who is delivering it (the messenger effect).

Voters generalise a candidate's charisma or speaking skills to overall political competence (the halo effect)

Politicians may even take advantage of the phenomenon that likability increases when they make a mistake (the pratfall effect), which Boris Johnson used to great effect, but other politicians with less charisma who attempt to humanise themselves in this way may just look like prats.

So, is that what it boils down to? Personality and agreeable sound bites?

Do politicians just pick a popular source of fear or frustration and simply pledge numbers and then argue about taxation to pay for it?

Pouring more money into a broken system does not magically fix the system, it burns the money.

These present and populist arguments keep us locked in the now with no bandwidth to focus on the future purposefully. Nobody can accurately imagine or predict the future, so future focus can easily be dismissed as speculation or fantasy. Therefore, politicians focus on recent history, and the squeakiest wheel gets the oil.

But we can’t fix tomorrow’s problems with nostalgia!

Nostalgic messages gain emotional traction in times of uncertainty. They appeal to our desire for clarity or stability. Remember ‘Take Back Control—Brexit’ and ‘Make America Great Again—Trump.’

In reality, nostalgia is not what it used to be…. Memories are not an accurate catalogue of past events. We only remember the recent, unusual, or emotionally charged stuff. We then overestimate the likelihood of available memories reoccurring (availability bias). Our memory of the past is heavily biased, so our expectations of the future are equally biased.

Any narrative that offers stability is persuasive because, in general, we don’t really like change and prefer most things to stay relatively the same (status quo bias). We are so much more comfortable with 'the devil we know' that alternatives are disparaged even at the expense of self-interest (system justification).

But don’t worry, it’s not you, it’s everyone else…

Of course, your memory is accurate, your beliefs are sound, and you are not swayed by nonsense.

It's easy to think that way because we all see ourselves as less biased than others (Objectivity illusion) and cannot see our biases (bias blind spot). We arrogantly believe that mass-communicated media messages have a greater effect on others than ourselves (the third-person effect).

Don’t think for a moment that knowing about cognitive bias is enough to overcome it (the G.I. Joe fallacy). In truth, we are all biased by our established thought processes and the limited information within our echo chambers.

Why did I write this post?

In recent years, I have been saddened by how many people have let differences of opinion divide us. We live in an age when some people prioritise ideals about social causes and politics over more important things, like family and close interpersonal relationships.

I wrote this post to champion critical thinking, respect for differences of opinion, and freedom of speech.

Whatever you choose today, remember that we are all being suckered into a very biased game.

Thanks for reading, and very best wishes

Can we talk about feedback?

Sun, 09 Jun 2024 14:13:46 GMT

Leadership Techniques for Creating a Performance Culture

Intending to be as helpful as possible, I have written a longer-than-usual post.

I’m covering this in more detail than I normally would because I believe the ability to have performance conversations, give feedback, and approach potentially difficult conversations in a supportive, challenging, and motivational way is vital for any leader or manager.

So many leaders find these essential conversations tricky, but with some changes in perspective and a slightly different approach, they can change from being the ones you dread to the ones you look forward to.

A few years ago, one of my colleagues watched me give some fast, clear, informal feedback to one of my team members. Afterwards, they said, “You just told that person clearly that what they have done is not good enough, and they left the room happy and energised. How the hell did you do that?”

Like all leaders, I have my blind spots and weaknesses, but I am consistently good at motivating, developing and leading people. I have designed workshops and coached hundreds of leaders to increase their awareness and skill in these interactions. I even wrote a book about it in 2008 with my business partner at the time.

This continues to be the most challenging and most important interpersonal leadership ability: Research by Bain & Company found that, on average, an inspired employee is 2.25 times more productive than a merely satisfied one. Can you think of anything else you could do as a leader that makes this difference to organisational performance?

Interactions that encourage and inspire should be little and often. Yet, while leaders analyse their spreadsheets, define their aspirational strategies, and polish their presentations, it’s easy to forget that it’s the everyday, on-the-job interactions that create the performance culture.

The key to mastering potentially difficult interactions and making them motivational is not evidence, preparation or professionalism, it’s authentic interpersonal communication.

In this article, I will answer the following questions:

Why is it so tricky?
What can you do to set conversations up for success?
How can you use feedback to coach change?
What if everyone wanted feedback?

Before we explore the interpersonal, a quick note on frequency:

In many organisations, the only time people get clear feedback is during the formal review process.

Ideally, feedback should be fast, frequent and welcomed so that formal performance discussions become purely about rating and progression. That’s what happens in high-performance cultures, where feedback is welcomed as part of everyday conversations and causes no drama. This is entirely achievable, I will explain how a little later.

For organisations, striking the right balance between process and quality of conversation is tricky. Too much process disrupts the human connection by making it more about following the process than the quality of the conversation. No process is often almost as bad, as people tend to avoid performance-related conversations altogether.

Processes should be designed with the natural flow of the conversation in mind and should encourage regular, informal conversations between the formal ones. If we ‘save it up’ for the formal conversation, we make it a bigger deal than it needs to be; which is unhelpful.

Why is it so tricky to give feedback?

What are we so worried about? We may feel we don’t have enough information, unsure about how to approach the feedback, or conflicted because we do not agree with the message we need to deliver.

Whatever the reason, our discomfort, trepidation or conflict is fuelled by concern for how the feedback will be received. We worry the other person will take too much to heart or respond defensively.

This is really unfortunate because any such worries or expectations of difficulty create a self-fulfilling prophecy:

You think, ‘They may not respond well to this’ .
Your behaviour changes, becoming cautious, cold or overly-professional.
They notice a difference in your behaviour, and they become anxious or defensive.
You think, ‘I knew they wouldn’t respond well’ .

You confirm your expectations without realising that your concerns or expectations corrupted your behaviour, contributing to the outcome. Conversely, If you are clear-headed and hold positive expectations, that will positively influence the conversation for both parties.

So, how do you do that?

The magical power of communicating intention

As pointed out by Stephen M.R. Covey, “We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their behaviour.” Other people’s intentions are opaque, so we can easily misjudge or misunderstand their communication or behaviour.

Worse still, we can make the ‘Fundamental Attribution Error’ (FAE) of observing an aspect of behaviour and seeing it not as circumstantial but as an indication of their entire character. For example, we subjectively judge a snippet of behaviour as inconsiderate, aggressive, or controlling, then decide it is a permanent trait, and they are an inconsiderate, aggressive, or controlling person. The truth is, nobody wakes up wondering whose day they can ruin or how they can sabotage their own career.

When we understand people’s intentions, their actions begin to make sense.

In our busy lives of back-to-back meetings, most interactions begin with a couple of social niceties, and then we crack on with the communication. The listener must then solve the puzzle of our intentions, where we are coming from and where the communication is going, which is a huge distraction.

If they guess your intentions wrongly, you will get halfway through the conversation and then begin to realise that what you are saying is not what the other person is hearing. You then have to backtrack and address the misunderstanding.

To be understood, we need to ‘frame’ our conversations by making our intentions overt. Doing so affects conversations in the following ways:

Ensures the right meaning is attributed to your communication.
Eliminates the distraction of wondering where it’s going.
Primes their attention in a helpful direction.
Clarifies what’s relevant and what isn’t.
Stops them from ‘shooting the messenger’.

Setting a frame to communicate intention or manage expectations is easier than you may think.

Remind yourself of the conversation's intention (E.g., awareness, understanding, improvement, growth)
Ask yourself, if the conversation goes really well, what the outcome will be
Simply make that intention and that desired outcome overt at the start

“The intention of this conversation is……”

“Where I hope we get to by the end is……”

Obviously, it won’t always be gushingly positive; you may need to give someone an unwelcome reality check to get them back on the path to achieving what they want, but the intention of the feedback is still positive and helpful.

Performance improvement is a mindset

I usually let people know I have some feedback for them and ask them to let me know if and when they want to discuss it. By making the feedback optional, it becomes clear who’s really responsible for personal development and who benefits from it.

All of these framing techniques are designed to get people into a receptive mindset so that feedback actually helps, rather than being a negative experience they defend themselves against.

Positive psychologist Martin Seligman et al. researched differences in ‘explanatory style’ and how those differences relate to depression, happiness and optimism. To paraphrase quickly and simply: We are hit hard by critical feedback if we make it personal (it’s all about me), permanent (it’s not changing) and pervasive (it’s all such activities).

For example, if I were to do a presentation that didn’t go well, I could think: “I’m rubbish at presentations.”

“I (personal) am rubbish (permanent) at presentations (pervasive) ”

To shift this, we need only remind ourselves that circumstances affect our performance, we have good days and bad days, and everything is changeable over time. So we could think:

“That presentation (an external event) did not go well because of (specific reason) so next time I will (completely changeable).”

In her book ‘Mindset’ Carol Dweck introduced the popular idea of growth or fixed mindset.

People with a fixed mindset avoid challenges, reject feedback, deny failure, and are threatened by others' success, whereas people with a growth mindset welcome challenges, embrace feedback, learn from failure, and are inspired by others' success.

The difference between the two mindsets is whether we perceive our abilities as changeable. If we do not see how we constantly grow and change, then we think of ourselves as a finished product and must, therefore, defend ourselves against any failure or critical feedback.

Anyone can get into a growth mindset. They simply need to shift attention to their growth, goals and aspirations and away from the need to be already right. This shift of psychological attention is the most important factor. Frame the conversations, discuss future ambitions, make a deal—whatever it takes to get into the right mindset for the conversation.

The dreaded perception gap

From coaching teams and running workshops, I have learnt that the conversation people find most difficult is the perception gap. Imagine the scene where you ask someone how they are getting on, expecting them to be aware that they are really struggling, and they tell you that they think it is going really well. Where do you go from there?

Clarity of expectation is important. We need to be able to articulate what good looks like. Feedback based on vague or subjective expectations is not helpful to anyone. Clarity is the difference between addressing a perception gap in a way that is helpful and supportive or confusing and demoralising.

However, that does not mean the conversation should be limited to KPIs or measurable outputs on a spreadsheet. Focussing only on metrics promotes self-interest and completely ignores the people who glue the culture together in ways that are not always clearly measurable (like spending time helping colleagues or solving problems). It's the quality of the conversation that allows you to understand what’s really going on, question what they are focussing on, and helpfully coach their performance.

There is also an emerging mismatch of expectations between generations, with generation Y prepared to do what it says on their contract of employment, nothing more and nothing less. In some ways, this is a healthy rebalance. Many businesses rely on constant extra work just to get by profitably, which indicates a need to address the economic model of the business. We should not be expected to give more of our life than we agreed to, but at the same time, if we lose that sense of personal responsibility to achieve outcomes and shared responsibility to help and support each other, things fall apart rapidly. For more on how this happens, check out my blog on schizmogenesis .

The way to avoid a fundamental mismatch of expectations is through clarity of culture. When you join an organisation, you should know what vibe you are signing up for.

Seek to understand

Leaders or managers with a ‘command and control’ mentality make the mistake of treating feedback conversations as an opportunity to impose and tell rather than to discuss, understand, clarify and develop.

Simply telling people how they have done and then telling them what to do is primitive line management. It worked well in factories when we needed people to do simple tasks efficiently with low decision latitude. It’s not great when we want people to think and handle complexity. Telling may get tasks done, but it does not develop people, improve broader outcomes or equip the organisation for tomorrow.

Leaders or managers who approach feedback in a ‘telling’ style equip themselves with plenty of evidence to support their points. It’s good to be aware and prepared, but if we nail our points down too firmly, we become like a lawyer preparing a case for the prosecution. To lead or manage people brilliantly, we need to create space for different expectations, perceptions, and motives. It’s never as simple as right or wrong, and many factors that we are unaware of only emerge through discourse.

The feedback we need to address may be an output, an outcome, a perception, a misunderstanding or a number, but that’s just the start of the conversation. It doesn’t become valuable until we discover how they arrived at that output, what influenced that outcome, what specific behaviour created that perception, what context fuelled the misunderstanding, and what actions or circumstances led to that number.

Feedback is not a fact that people need to accept, it’s a topic they need to explore.

To really understand feedback, get specific. Gently question the ‘what’s’ and the ‘how’s’ to provoke some reflection. What specifically did they do? How specifically did they do it?

Avoid asking ‘why?’ When we are asked ‘why?’, we can also feel like we are being asked to explain ourselves and justify our actions. This provokes us to look to the broader context for reasons and things to blame rather than focus on ourselves.

Fix the problem, not the blame.

A feedback conversation is a rare opportunity for the leader or manager to dig a little deeper and find out what’s really going on for the person, their team, and the organisation at large. The quality of a leader or manager’s decision-making is only as good as their awareness of what’s going on, but when they tell and don’t listen, people stop telling them stuff.

Behaviour change is easy

When people cling to a particular way of behaving, it’s not the behaviour itself that they are attached to; it’s what they get from doing the behaviour, the motive behind it.

Our behaviours are simple strategies for getting through our day, and we can change them easily, but only if the behaviour change aligns with what’s really important to us. Behaviour changes easily, but our intrinsic motives are much more sticky.

Fields like education and behavioural economics are waking up to the idea that it is difficult to simply stop a behaviour without any idea of what to do instead, but if you find alternatives, behaviour can be replaced.

To find replacement behaviours that are authentic and motivational, follow this process:

Qualify the feedback to identify the behaviour/action/strategy to change
Ask, “When behaving/acting/thinking that way, what’s important? What’s your positive intention? What are you trying to achieve?”
Then ask or guide, “What behaviour would satisfy your intention/motive and also helpfully address this feedback?”

The answers emerge surprisingly easily when they come from a self-awareness of motivation.

Assist the process of self-awareness

If you are fortunate enough to have had the opportunity to be self-determined, attend leadership training and spend time reflecting, it’s easy to get a strong sense of what’s really driving you: your intrinsic wants and needs.

For others, it may not be easy to be fully aware of their true values, motives, and needs because of unconscious influences, external or social pressures, and responding to changing priorities.

Utilising a diagnostic tool increases awareness and enriches the quality of conversations. Several good strength finders are available.

Understanding what truly motivates you is crucial to resolving inner conflicts and discovering a life well-lived.

Besides, it’s hugely motivational. Research shows that managing performance by uncovering motivations, needs, and strengths leads to individuals performing better in the following ways: Sustained effort, higher quality work, increased autonomy, higher levels of job satisfaction, more engagement and commitment, and greater resilience & adaptability.

Several partners are beginning to adopt my ‘temperaments’ model because it’s quick, insightful and much less expensive than employing a full psychometric. It reports on intrinsic motives, interpersonal needs, behavioural traits and core strengths.

If you are curious, visit this page , fill out the seven questions, and I will send you a personal report.

Making it cultural

The bestselling book "What Got You Here Won't Get You There” by Marshall Goldsmith features a brilliant technique for performance-related conversations called ‘feed-forward’.

Rather than being given feedback on past actions, the person working on their development asks for future-focused suggestions of positive actions they can take. This is absolute genius!

Switching from a retrospective autopsy to future-focused action makes the conversation positive, frictionless and helpful. The person receiving help is no longer being told, they are taking responsibility for their own development. They have the autonomy to focus on getting help with the things they find challenging rather than relying on someone else’s opinion or a tick-box exercise. A future-focused mindset shifts attention to what to do , not what not to do or what to stop doing.

Conversations about performance are not just about taking stock of the past; they help us move forward, grow, and perform even better tomorrow. We can learn from the past, but we can only change our performance in the future.

It’s difficult to create a performance culture if feedback is something that line managers or leaders must curate and dispense. Fast, frictionless, helpful conversations only happen when everyone has autonomy and takes responsibility for their performance.

Try it. Pick an area of activity where you are challenged or blocked, and ask a handful of your peers to make at least three helpful suggestions that are:

Just suggestions - you are not asking them to solve the problem for you
Future-focussed - there is no need to go over the past
Positive Suggestions - things to do rather than things to avoid or not do.

And see what happens. You will probably find that none of the suggestions are entirely right for you, but they will stimulate you to find a brilliant answer.

If you got this far, thanks for reading, I hope that you find it helpful.

Summary

Remind yourself of your intentions and the positive outcomes before approaching the conversation.
Frame conversations to manage expectations, sharing your positive intentions about where it’s coming from and where it’s going.
Hold feedback gently to be explored non-judgmentally and understand the actual behaviour that created the outcome.
Use awareness of intrinsic motivation to find replacement behaviours or new strategies that are positive and authentic.
The cultural utopia is to make it everyone's responsibility to seek their own feedback - after all, it’s their career.

References

The Speed of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything - Stephen M.R. Covey.
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success - Carol Dweck
What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful - Marshall Goldsmith
Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life - Martin Seligman

From 'Types' to 'Temperaments'

Tue, 24 Oct 2023 12:35:21 GMT

The psychological synthesis that underpins my diagnostics

In recent years I have developed bespoke surveys that effectively:

Describe leadership behaviour

Predict audience behaviour through empathy mapping

Make sense of workplace behaviour

Track the impact of leadership behaviour on culture

Understanding the dominant cultural traits of a team or organisation

Evaluate cultural compatibility between teams or organisations

People often ask how I do it.

I have spent twenty years synthesising a range of models and theories and digging for the underpinning processes.

I do not ‘type’ people into rigid boxes. Instead, I look at what people pay attention to and extrapolate that to make sense of behaviour.

It provides me with a template of temperaments which are consistent but changeable.

This tool is now available to coaches, consultants and organisations.

www.temperaments.co.uk

A Hope for Hopefulness

Mon, 16 Oct 2023 11:59:33 GMT

When it's dark, look for the stars

We often hope for the best.

We hope for a win, an achievement, an outcome, or things working out just fine.

In today’s world, we think of our hopes and dreams as something to achieve, and we expect to achieve them within shorter and shorter time frames.

But there is much more to hope than tactical goals, manifestation or SMART outcomes. There is a magical quality to hope that serves us beyond the immediate objective.

When Pandora opened the box, and all of the evils were released into the world, so was a shining star of hope. The star is usually depicted just outside of Pandora’s reach because hope is something to guide us even when we can’t see how it is attainable.

Short-term hope is a good thing; by all means, hope for the best outcomes (and prepare for the worst).

Long-term hope is what sustains us when immediate positive outcomes feel impossible.

But it’s not only about optimism

Long-term hope is the temperament that motivates action without immediate reward. As the ancient proverb goes:

“Blessed Are Those Who Plant Trees Under Whose Shade They Will Never Sit.”

I’m a pragmatist who has approached everything with the intention of fixing, stabilising, creating and building. My mindset and abilities have empowered me to be a catalyst for dramatic change. Have a debilitating phobia? Give me 20 minutes. Feeling stuck? give me a couple of hours. Dysfunctional team? Give me a day with them. Need to change culture and performance? Give me a few weeks to design something that will stick. Long-term hope never featured as part of my mindset. I never needed it. Everything seemed fixable and could be built upon. But fixing and building only works when foundations are solid. Whilst a pragmatic mindset is a blessing of positivity, it’s also a curse of frustration when you bump up against impenetrable, stuck thinking.

Many stuck systems are so tightly and broadly woven that attempts at systemic change hit a brick wall. I recently spoke to several people tasked with delivering change without changing anything.

Stuck systems cling to what is known (even when it’s known to be ineffective) rather than explore the unknown. We prop up things that don’t work and, in doing so, deny ourselves the opportunity to find something that would work. When interviewed about something that is clearly not working, our current Government ministers simply respond with the amounts of money they are committed to spending on it. Throwing more money at a broken system does not fix the system.

Rebellion is not the answer. There is no amount of paint you can throw to change a system. Systems cannot purposefully change until an alternative is presented. Stuck systems become unstuck by learning. Apathy is never an option: AI and blockchain technologies will not necessarily find a human answer, and the universe will not sort it out for you. Acceptance is different from surrender, and there is no amount of ayahuasca you can drink that will make a difference.

I have learned that when your short-term hope is dashed against a wall of stuck thinking, if you push through, the other side of acceptance and despondency is long-term hope.

The Hope Cycle

Can we approach long-term hope with clear action today?

Of course, we still need to look after the short-term and keep the wheels turning. I’m still a pragmatist.

Let’s make stuff better right now, but what else can we learn and change along the way? How do we keep a conscious eye on long-term ambitions as we engage in short-term necessities?

What are the pebbles we can throw to create ripples which may bounce off the harbour walls of stuck thinking today but create a tsunami tomorrow?

There are long-term hopes and dreams that I will never be prepared to let go of, even when it seems impossible, even when I accept it may not happen within this lifetime, through the gas and air of confusion and misunderstanding, I can still see my utopia, and I will hold that solid vision in my heart forever.

What is your tsunami? What are your dreams for the long-term future? What are the absolute deal breakers for you? What can you do today?

Conversations About Conversations

Mon, 18 Sep 2023 15:02:00 GMT

Building a performance culture

Over the past two decades of coaching and consulting, a recurring theme has been the effectiveness of conversations that involve feedback or relate to performance.

I think that there are a couple of reasons that this never really leaves the development agenda:

1. Some things change:

The way we lead organisations, what we ask people to pay attention to, ways of working, the nature of the job role, and the measures of success. What was considered a great contribution twenty years ago may not cut the mustard today. As what’s required changes, so does the way we discuss it.

2. Some things never change:

The ability to lead effective conversations about performance is the most advanced of communication skills. It’s a difficult activity because we are bumping up against human nature. None of us really enjoy being measured, compared, evaluated or critiqued. Just one badly positioned word or statement could easily disrupt the conversation dynamic and provoke defensiveness or resistance.

I have worked on this topic in a wide range of organisations, from SMEs to some of the UK’s biggest brands, so I thought it would be a good idea to share my experience in this blog:

Do you need a process?

Sometimes, the rigid process for feedback and appraisal can be limiting, but it would seem that there is a need for it. I remember working with a large bank that unfortunately blew up shortly after the financial crisis of 2008, (which was a shame because they were a great client and had a good culture). They discovered that the process they were using to facilitate conversations about performance was limiting the quality of the conversations; Following the prescriptive tick boxes was making interactions stilted, robotic and un-empathetic.

They decided to abandon the process altogether and instead encouraged people leaders just to have honest and positive conversations more naturally. Brilliant idea in principle, but the reality was that people stopped having conversations. Without the prompt of a process and the inflexibility of deadlines, conversations don’t happen at all.

The process may be robotic, but it serves as a ‘crutch’ to help people leaders approach and structure the conversation. Without it, approaching the conversation effectively is entirely dependent upon the communication skills of the people leader.

Receptive Mindset

Of all of the factors that affect our ability to take on board feedback, the one that has the most impact is the quality of our relationship with the person giving it.

If we know somebody is on our side or has our back, it’s far easier to engage in the process without feeling defensive. For example, which would you rather receive, challenging feedback from someone that you trust has your best interests at heart or complimentary feedback from someone you distrust?

For most of us, it is the level of trust and the ability to be open that allows us to drop the defences and fully engage.

Defending yourself against feedback of any nature is a massive waste of time. It changes nothing and deprives you of the opportunity to learn and grow. If you successfully defend your limitations, the prize is that you get to keep them! An elite performer would not defend themselves against feedback from their coach.

As a manager or leader of people, our ability to create authentic working relationships so that individuals are receptive to feedback is what makes growth and development possible.

Question Expectations

A self-fulfilling prophecy is a socio-psychological phenomenon of making a prediction that causes itself to become true due to positive reinforcement. We believe that something will happen, and our behaviour changes to fulfil the belief.

If you give feedback to someone and you are thinking, “This will be difficult.” That expectation will be awkwardly visible in your behaviour. If you have negative expectations about the feedback you are receiving, you will not be able to properly hear what is being said.

The route out of this drama is to frame conversations by beginning them by being extremely clear and overt about the positive intentions of the conversation. In doing so, you achieve three things:

1. Managing expectation

In so many activities, we just begin and hope that we communicate clearly enough for people to work out where we are coming from and where we are going. Why leave it to chance? Clear framing in advance allows you to have a conversation about the conversation that will follow. It establishes relevancy, creates an opportunity to agree on how to proceed together, and can even be used to introduce the elephant in the room if needs be.

2. Priming attention

Setting clear positive intentions for the conversation means that is what we will expect and look for evidence of. It creates a helpful confirmation bias or a positive self-fulfilling prophecy. We have much more chance of facilitating a conversation to growth and development outcomes if we have signposted that’s where we are going from the start.

3. Separating intention from the message

Without taking the time to fame the intent of the conversation, the recipient of the feedback may ‘shoot the messenger’. To avoid this you must separate your role in the conversation from the explicit points covered within it. It must be clear that your intention in delivering and exploring the message is positive, even if the message itself is challenging.

Feedback is Subjective

One of the dangers of well-documented feedback processes is that we can fall into the trap of thinking that the feedback is factual.

For the most part, feedback is a generalised conclusion. It tells us about people’s perceptions and the results of our actions. It doesn’t tell us about the complex priorities, circumstances and choices that add up to those results. To get the value out of feedback, we must dig a little deeper. If it’s an outcome, how did it happen? If it’s an output, what did you do?

For feedback to be truly helpful, whether it’s positive or negative, we must explore the reality of what specifically contributed to the feedback.

When faced with challenging feedback, the most unhelpful responses are to either take it on as an absolute truth or reject it completely. Both are overreactions that prevent you from properly exploring it.

The most helpful way to attribute meaning to feedback that you receive is to consider it to be 50% true. By thinking of it as a partial truth, there is no need to defend yourself against it or take it onboard universally.

Focus on the future

All too often, performance conversations are an autopsy of the past in order to justify a number or to have something concrete to talk about.

The consequence is that a great deal of the conversation is retrospective, leaving little time and attention for exploring the future.

Reflecting on and learning from the past is an essential part of self-development, but for managing performance, it’s less important than what you will do next. The past has happened. Whatever lessons we learn from the past, we must put into the future to make a difference.

If you don’t know exactly what you will do differently tomorrow, then the feedback is being used for justification, not for development.

Behaviour is easy to change, but intention is stickier

Most people think of behaviour change as something that’s quite tricky to achieve, but it’s really easy.

It’s not behaviour that people hold on to, it’s how the behaviour serves them.

Any given behaviour is driven by an intention, and that intention is really important to them. That’s why it’s almost impossible to stop a behaviour, but easy to replace it.

In exploring how to behave differently, we must work with our intrinsic motivations.

To do this, question the intent or motive that is driving the current behaviour, then explore different behaviours that will serve the intent/motive in a more healthy, harmonious or effective way.

You cannot stop or change behaviour, but you can shift and replace it.

Free Book

In 2009, I co-authored a book called “Feedback or Criticism?” which provides a method for having brilliant conversations about performance.

Please DM me for a complimentary copy.

Emergence

Wed, 06 Sep 2023 10:00:04 GMT

Organisational Behaviour Change

Designing solutions in advance of understanding?

Is it possible to pre-design and manage change?

If we do, is it really change, or is it just the functional implementation of something we have already decided, based on what we already have?

Is designed change a bit like planned spontaneity?

For change to become truly integrated, it needs to emerge and evolve. Pre-designing exactly what things will be like after change is like trying to pre-determine the weather for next week.

When the burning platform for change is something negative that we are attempting to overcome, we simplistically fall into immediate solution thinking: The suggested solution is simply the exact opposite of the problem, which does nothing to understand or recognise why the problem is happening in the first place.

You can’t not…

We humans cannot change behaviour by negating it. As you read this, don’t think of baked beans and don’t notice any tension in your forehead. How are you doing with that? We humans can’t do a ‘ don’t ’ behaviour.

We unlearn habits and behaviours by disrupting them and replacing them with new, more effective ones.

We must first understand how the problem is happening; otherwise, our direct, quick fixes will lead to the same problem reoccurring in different ways.

Fear of the unknown

For most organisations, entering into a genuine process of change is terrifying, because the outcome is unknown. It feels completely out of control. Working as a consultant, I proposed an open-minded discovery process at the beginning of many projects, and some of my clients genuinely asked in advance what I was going to discover!?!

We cannot find the moments of evolution and genius without letting go enough for new and broader awarenesses to emerge.

The only way around it is through it

The Transtheoretical Model, and other similar models such as the Kubler-Ross ‘change curve’ represent change as a process of necessary stages. No matter how clear we are about the desired end-point, we can’t get there in one giant leap, it simply won’t work in reality.

People move through change at different speeds and get stuck at different points. Sometimes, change is entirely welcome, so people don’t need to do the grumpy stages at all. Change can be extremely fast, but only if it is treated as an inclusive process of co-creation and feedback loops, not an end-point to be imposed.

Imposition will always provoke resistance. Not all change is good for us individually, so we need to work through it to accept it.

We do it together

Social Cognitive Theory suggests that we primarily learn and change through observing the experiences and interactions of others. We change based on evaluating the consequences of behaviour in real life.

We are wary of positive action if it could be judged negatively, and we are reined in by groupthink and the status quo. For new behaviour to emerge, it needs to be rewarded in one way or another. The Theory of planned behaviour suggests that behavioural intentions are shaped by attitude, subjective norms, and perceived behavioural control.

Whilst culture is pervasive, but we must also recognise that motivation and behaviour are individual, so even collective behaviour needs to be self-determined on the part of the individuals involved.

According to self-determination theory, for a behaviour to be healthy and sustainable, it needs to satisfy some intrinsic motivations of the individual.

Intrinsic motivation

Having spent the last decade ‘empathy mapping’ people’s real intrinsic motivations and values in relation to their careers, they seem to fall into three categories:

Contextual motivators are mainly concerned with who we are in the world. Examples are:

Recognition, Fame, Making a Difference, Leaving a Legacy, Change, Creativity, Spontaneity, Status and Purpose.

Rational motivators are getting our intentions met and avoiding failure. Examples are:

Being in Control, Learning, Growth, Mastery, Quality, Standards, Competence and Achievement.

Emotional motivators in an organisational context are mainly concerned with connection. Examples are:

Trust, Transparency, Honesty, Openness, Camaraderie, Friendship and Teamwork.

Individuals going through change will evaluate it based on whether it provides the opportunity for those intrinsic motivations to be met or denied.

If they are ignored with no agency, input or recognition,

If they could get it wrong with no control over the process,

If the change is opaque or breaks connections between trusted colleagues,

It will fail.

Positive reinforcement

We know from recent developments in Behavioural Economics that people do not make sensible, rational decisions when it comes to their behaviour. They are driven by heuristics; mental shortcuts that support instinctive decisions at that moment in time.

Behavioural economists ‘nudge’ existing behaviour in a positive direction because it is proven to be more effective than attempting to impose clear or drastic behaviour changes that typically meet resistance.

Do not pass GO

In large organisations, the biggest barrier to change (in my opinion) is exclusively focusing on the endpoint without a rich, aligned understanding of the starting point.

So why is the starting point so elusive?

Because of the rehearsed and embedded ‘scripts’ that make topics unapproachable and the agendas that make reality unacceptable.

Whether it’s hybrid working, Brexit fallout, D&I or the rise of AI, we all know what we think about the issues of the day.

We have well-rehearsed scripts based on our own individual motivations, the information we have consumed and our opinions of the changes we have observed. That’s why so many conversations are less collaborative. We are merely replaying our scripts.

The issues we face in today's organisation are tricky, talking about them is trickier.

If you want to experience a methodology that breaks scripts, allowing open-minded discovery, genuine sharing and fresh perspectives, please call me.

A proposed paradigm for the emergence of behaviour change

Based on the theories above and other practical behaviour change models from coaching and therapy, I would propose the following non-ordinal stages of discovery, design and integration for desired change:

Awareness

Asking questions that break ‘scripts’

Reaching acceptance of reality

Motivation

Creating clarity of vision/intention

Addressing intrinsic motivations

Application

Identifying and disrupting triggers

Replacing behaviours (not negating them)

Integration

Repeating, practising and eliciting feedback

Positively reinforcing with ‘nudges’

If you would like to know HOW to facilitate any of the vital processes above, please drop me a line.

The Hybrid Double Bind

Wed, 16 Aug 2023 14:31:27 GMT

Why is it so difficult to find an ideal answer?

As we move to design new ways of working in a post-pandemic, video call-enabled world, we are fighting against a fundamental personality difference, and it’s not the most obvious one.

Tendencies toward introversion and extroversion create preferences for interpersonal contact, with more extroverted people needing to think out loud and more introverted types needing more reflective time, but hybrid working can clearly work for both. As we approach the challenges of hybrid working, our differences in extraversion and introversion are not what causes the most difficulty. There is another overlooked difference that creates much more trouble.

Firstly, let’s consider the question of whether we should come into the office at all.

We could argue that working remotely is the future. It provides freedom and mobility, and it’s better for the planet. Some businesses benefitted hugely from the enforced conditions of lockdown, they filled up their piggy banks with maximum billings as they churned through tasks with minimum costs. For such businesses, there is an extremely strong argument for remote working from the perspective of effectiveness, lifestyle and environment.

We could also argue that chopping up work interactions into one-hour chunks is an inorganic way of managing time. It deprives us of the unplanned, informal, off-topic conversations that lead to vital awarenesses and discoveries, and the quality of interaction is slightly impoverished through video interactions. It may be more efficient for functional work, but connection, rapport, camaraderie, culture and teamwork are harder to achieve. The cost of missing out on these vital human aspects of work is felt longer term as the bonds between us weaken.

When you consider both of these realities, hybrid is clearly the answer, but how?

Here’s the double bind:

If you leave it for people to make their own decisions, some will demand more clarity, and some will take the opportunity to never show up in person.

If you create a clear policy, that policy will be unpopular. There is simply no one-size-fits-all solution.

As soon as you make a suggestion one way or another, you will bump into well-rehearsed ‘scripts’ about what works for people and what they need.

So, if designing a solution and imposing it will please very few people, what is the answer?

Before we get to that, notice that the problem here is not so much hybrid working, but imposing an approach to it. The conflict is with the imposition of policy. Let’s consider the typically unrecognised personality difference that creates this difficulty:

Some people are a little more left-brained, and others are a little more right-brained in their approaches.* Most learning models recognise this difference:

Left-brained thinking asks ‘why?’ or ‘what?’, favouring static, explicit or factual information, for theorising or reflecting to know something.

Right-brained thinking asks ‘how?’ or ‘what if?’ questions, favouring dynamic, process, and dependant information, so they can actively or pragmatically do something.

This difference in processing style can be seen in ways of working, leadership style, and attitude toward hybrid working policies. Individuals with these extremes of difference in personality do not see the wisdom or benefit in each other’s approach.

Faced with this mismatch, there are three available approaches:

Authoritarian - Legislate and inform, whether people agree or not

Incremental - Nudge specific behaviour to create gradually improved conditions

Transformational - Create an experience that re-wires thinking and behaviour

Authoritarian approaches work if people accept them, and the debate goes away. If they hold on to disagreement, they won’t tell you, they will vote with their feet.

Incremental change is very effective, but it’s a long game of ‘whack a mole’.

Transformational should always be the ambition but involves exploring the topic by allowing differences to co-exist. This can only be achieved by creating conditions where individuals in teams leave their rehearsed ‘script’ and co-create.

I have a method of facilitation that creates these conditions. Ironically, it’s not a hybrid activity. All participants need to be either in the room or online. If you would like to design a session for your teams, Please DM me.

I have written this as a post to encourage debate. What are your experiences? Please comment...

* Left-brained and right-brained is not an accurate neuroscience description, it’s a metaphor for a type of processing which is psychologically evident and proven to be a bit more dominant in each hemisphere but not exclusive to it.

Do Coaches Need a Hippocratic Oath?

Fri, 07 Jul 2023 16:21:12 GMT

Coaches: Beyond individual ethical dilemmas, what are your guiding principles?

As professional coaches, we spend much time debating ethical quandaries like the blurry boundary between coaching and therapy and broader contextual or systemic factors beyond the one-to-one coaching relationship.

Whilst wrestling with ethical questions one-by-one provides valuable experience and gives you plenty of fodder for reflection and supervision conversations, do they lead to useful decision-making principles, more congruent values or a clearer moral compass?

We can debate ethics all day long, but what do we learn about the principles that guide us? I rarely fall into ethical quandaries regarding coaching because I have a very clear set of deal breakers shaped by 20 years of experience.

I would like to share three of them with you, but I would also like to be clear that I am not suggesting you adopt them. These principles work for me, but I regularly turn away business and say no to people who need help if the conditions are not right. You may have different ethics and values, these are merely offered to enrich the debate:

Remember who your client really is, and never coach by proxy

I will never take on a coaching client unless they contract with me directly and personally.

Tripartite meetings are great for establishing contexts to work on, but they should never serve as a brief for coaching. From experience, directive opinion from a manager or leader can be to satisfy their own self-serving intentions, to do their job of leading or managing for them, or to pass their own development needs on to other people. Opinions and feedback are helpful to fuel the process but not the outcome.

Coaching is effective because you utilise the values, motives, abilities, experience and resources of the individual. If you corrupt that by steering the process to satisfy the organisation's needs, you are consulting and no longer coaching.

I work solely for my individual client, everybody else’s opinion is just helpful feedback.

Remember who owns the process, you can't lead a horse to water...

From training with Marshall Goldsmith, I learnt the importance of contracting the mindset you expect from your client.

Coaching is described as ‘partnering’, and for that to be true, just as you, the coach, are expected to deliver on particular mindsets and approaches, so should your client be. For the coaching process to work, the ‘coachee’ must not defend themselves against it.

Ultimately, all change is generated solely within the client. We are just facilitators who co-create conditions and provide stimulus.

Goldsmith suggests that clients must engage in leadership coaching with curiosity, humility and discipline. If the client consistently fails to approach the process with these essential mindsets, you should terminate it because the client is actively sabotaging.

This may seem a little harsh and not in the spirit of partnering and nurturing, but if you allow your client to defend their limitations successfully, the prize is that they get to keep them!

As a coach, I am happy to be held accountable for results, I’m even prepared to charge based on ROI under certain conditions, but I demand that my client hold up their end of the partnership without fail.

I partner with my client: I bring a coach's mindset, and they bring a growth mindset. I terminate ineffectual contracts and refuse to become a paid-for friend.

Always leave clients in a better state of mind than you found them

Professional coaching is described as being in a 3rd wave. Coaches are encouraged to work with the whole person, and techniques from therapeutic interventions like CBT or ACT are translated to become coaching models, but I worry that there is inadequate focus on the ability to manage and influence the emotional state of the client helpfully.

I came into coaching as a Practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) more than two decades ago, and since then have continually learned more approaches, from psychometrics and positive psychology models to more hypnotic and physiological interventions. Despite having many strings to my bow, I’m still fundamentally an NLP change agent, having been mentored by Dr. John Grinder (co-creator of NLP) between 2008 and 2012.

Many people have a negative perception of NLP, partially because of misunderstanding and partially because of the unregulated training programmes of varying quality that fuel the ridiculous inconsistency of understanding and ability amongst NLP practitioners, ranging from absolute magicians to naive novices with absolutely no idea what they are doing.

However, one thing that everyone does agree on is the huge influence that NLP has had on coaching to date. NLP initially popularised many of the techniques covered in coaching programmes. The more professionalised and academic the field becomes, the more it is turning away from the requisite clarity of process and interpersonal skills of NLP, and in doing so, something very important is getting lost. At the level of mastery, NLP is a non-directive but profoundly influential interpersonal ability.

I believe coaches should either develop some skill in interventions to manage and influence their client’s emotional state, or stay away from cognitive behavioural and other approaches that ‘open a can of worms’ we are not equipped to deal with. My personal standards and values lead me to the passionate assertion that stirring up a painful or traumatic past experience and then saying, “Maybe you should reflect on that.” Or “Perhaps you need a therapist.” Is frankly not good enough!

I don’t go down an avenue of enquiry if I do not have time to offer an effective intervention, and I take time to return my client to a balanced, settled, clear-minded state. This should be a duty of care for all coaches who dive deeply into their client’s world.

I always leave my client in a better state of mind than I found them.

If you are a coach and interested in enhancing your skill in delivering in-the-moment interventions, check out this 5-day programme:
https://www.daryllscott.com/nlp-for-professional-coaches

Schismogenesis & Culture

Sun, 04 Jun 2023 17:29:37 GMT

How systems fall apart

Culture may indeed eat strategy for breakfast, and if we are not careful, it can eat people for breakfast too!

As Sun Tzu wrote, "Even the finest sword plunged into salt water will rust."

Most leaders recognise the importance of culture.

An individual who is inspired is 125% more productive than one who is merely satisfied. Can you think of any other variable that can more than double performance?

Mismatch in culture is the most common reason why most mergers and acquisitions fail to live up to their expectations. Some studies suggest that as many as 90% of mergers fail.

One of the challenges that people concerned with culture in most organisations face is that culture needs to be communicated, but when we define it, we make it a static thing rather than seeing it as systemic and dynamic.

A culture is a living system, and it’s communicated through everyday micro behaviours: What is tolerated, prioritised, recognised, ignored, encouraged, discouraged, laughed at etc.

Leaders think of culture top-down, but culture happens bottom-up ( see blog on top-down or bottom-up thinking ).

What happens when we think of culture not as a static quality but rather as a live, changing context?

Whether we are leading through a merger or coaching for performance, we need to hold a space for people to work through differences and keep them glued together enough for the process to remain functional.

In my opinion, Schismogenesis is the most interesting concept to consider. Coined by Gregory Bateson from ‘schism’ meaning division, and ‘genesis’ meaning a process of origin, it describes the process of how things come together and break apart and highlights the fundamentals of division that occur between individuals or groups.

Bateson suggested that schismogenesis can occur in two different forms: complementary and symmetrical:

Complementary Schismogenesis happens when the behaviour of one person or group elicits a contrasting response from another person or group. The differences polarise, leading to an escalating cycle of opposing behaviours.

Bateson suggested that schismogenesis can occur in two different forms: complementary and symmetrical.

The TEMPERAMENTS model clearly demonstrates how this occurs at a team level. Some positive actions oppose other equally positive actions, and this difference can generate tensions that escalate, causing actions to become dysfunctional.

Symmetrical Schismogenesis, on the other hand, involves a competitive escalation of similar behaviours.

This is more like an arms race, where one party acts in a particular way, and the other responds with the amplification of similar actions. Healthy competition can be a great motivator but can quickly become a source of conflict.

There is a third type of schismogenesis, and it’s what may be affecting us most in today’s great resignation, gig economy, disenchanted workplace: Systems holdback. It’s a mutually aggregating spiral in which people hold back their contributions because they suspect others may be holding back their contributions.

It’s very similar to the sucker effect is when individuals reduce their efforts because they are put off by the unfairness of having the free-rider in the group. Social loafing, (also known as the Ringelmann Effect) amplifies the holdback as the group gets bigger, because individuals feel as though their contribution has little impact on overall success or failure. It’s also easier to go unnoticed in larger groups which provides the opportunity for the free-rider effect, the belief that someone else will do your work for you, which in turn amplifies the sucker effect in an ever-decreasing downward spiral.

This is awful for business leaders because people look busy; they are in meetings, they are doing tasks, but somehow the numbers just don’t add up.

Now we see that keeping people inspired not only boosts productivity to more than double but also prevents the organisation from slowly and inexplicably dying the death of a thousand tiny cuts.

References

Sun Tzu. The Art of War.

“An individual who is inspired is 125% more productive” Source: BAIN & COMPANY and EUI RESEARCH.

“Some studies suggest that as many as 90% fail” Source: HBR.

Schizmogenesis: Gregory Bateson. Mind and Nature.

Framework of Organisational Tensions: Robert Quinn .

Leaders Develop Themselves

Tue, 25 Apr 2023 16:49:13 GMT

Why is so much organisational development focussed on leadership?

Organisational performance is most affected by culture, and culture is most influenced by leadership behaviour. According to HBR , an inspired employee is two and a quarter times more effective than one who is merely satisfied. Can you think of any other variable in business that will make a 225% difference? Therefore, developing leaders to create a compelling culture and inspire the people is likely to give you the most bang for your buck.

Simple so far. Now we come to the trickier questions; what is leadership, and what abilities need to be developed?

Most leadership theories focus on either the traits of the leader (like autocratic, democratic, bureaucratic or charismatic) or focus on ways in which the leader exerts their power and influence (like situational, transactional or transformational). The well-rounded leader needs the awareness and flexibility to shift between these different styles, and when they do, the lines between these categories begin to blur.

For example, leaders are required to:

Make themselves visible but also not hog the limelight
Be clear and decisive but also be open-minded and curious
Prevent failure but also take risks
Set clear outcomes but also be open to change
Plan actions in advance but also be agile and responsive
Get clarity and be data-led but also act decisively when things are ambiguous
Make things simple but also remain aware of the complexity and nuances
Understand individual circumstances but also act for the good of the collective
Drive high performance but also prevent churn or burnout

These judgements cannot be made from a list of dos and don'ts. The leader is required to engage in complexity and emerge with clear, congruent communication and behaviour. This adaptive ability is too complex and nuanced to be purely based on theoretical knowledge. Leadership styles or principles, whilst helpful for leadership thinking, don't transform leadership behaviour. Being a leader is intrinsic and embodied.

Leadership is not a job title, it's a way of being.

It's not the world that's in crisis, it's our leadership

At the time of writing the acronym, VUCA is often used in business to explain why leadership today is so tricky. VUCA stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. It was coined in the 1980s based on the leadership theories of Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus .

The world has only ever been VUCA and always will be. Nature is VUCA. The problem is not that the world is VUCA, the problem is our inability to deal with it. To think the world is not VUCA, you must narrow your attention, lull yourself into a sense of consistency and ignore the possibility of unexpected events.

For years leaders have created economies of scale by ignoring inconvenient, messy, complex reality. In doing so we have created industrialised, globalised systems that unrealistically require the world to be Consistent, Certain, Simple and Clear (CCSC), which is the opposite of how the world really is (VUCA).

The terms leadership and management are often used interchangeably, but as activities, they are fundamentally different. Management is about today, leadership is about tomorrow. They require different mindsets.

In large organisations or institutions, leadership abilities are managed away. Great managers who are a consistent, safe pair of hands and tick all of the boxes on a competency framework are promoted to leadership and inevitably find themselves ill-equipped to deal with the volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity of the role.

Curate your own leadership development - here's a roadmap

1. Self Awareness

Leaders are individuals. There is no blueprint for leadership. Indeed, if you look at examples of extremely successful leaders you will find every personality type represented. leaders must understand what leadership is, understand their own style and understand their impact on others so that they can design and cultivate a way of working that fully capitalises on their strengths and completely manages around their weaknesses.

To understand your personality, these free resources are really good: 16 Personalities and VIA Character Strengths Survey .

Self-awareness, self-acceptance and a growth mindset are the first steps in the journey. For leaders to reach their full potential, they must approach their development with curiosity, courage and humility. In case you have somehow escaped the concept of a growth mindset, check out the book: MINDSET

I'm qualified in the Marshall Goldsmith style of coaching, which is great for getting past the defensiveness and getting on with the business of growing. Check out these two of his bestsellers: What Got You Here Won't Get You There and TRIGGERS

Due to the difficulty, responsibility and visibility of their roles, it is difficult for leaders to avoid manifesting behaviours that are often described as syndromes.

Imposter Syndrome describes the condition where people find it hard to believe they deserve any credit for what they may have achieved and remain internally convinced that they are frauds. In leadership behaviour, this manifests as a lack of trust in other people's abilities, ranging from becoming suffocating control freaks to 'washing their hands' and offering no guidance whatsoever.

Founder syndrome is particularly prevalent in entrepreneurial leaders. Consequences of this mindset can include autocratic decision-making, constant firefighting and crisis management, obsessive behaviour like micro-management and bringing in external experts but remaining impervious to their recommendations.

Hubris syndrome describes the way in which leaders become overconfident, lose touch with reality, focus on personal image, develop contempt for advice or criticism of others and behave impulsively.

There is quite a lot of overlap between these syndromes, they are all driven by the same thing, which is wobbles in self-esteem. The best way to address this is to get a coach who can create the opportunity for frank and unfiltered feedback and help you to work through the behaviours that you discover. If you don't have a coach, email me . It's good to work through these ticking time bombs before you find yourself in a position of power. A few years ago, I wrote a short, practical book about feedback conversations. If you want a copy, drop me a line .

2. Anti-Fragility, Flexibility and Flow

The opposite of fragile is not resilient, it's anti-fragile. If something is fragile, it breaks, If something is resilient, it stays the same, but if it is anti-fragile, it grows. Resilience suggests that we can endure adversity, whereas anti-fragility is the ability to adapt to adversity and see the opportunity in it. As Nietzsche said, "That which does not kill you makes you stronger." In leadership, when faced with challenges, it is not enough to ask how to weather them, the real question is how to learn and grow from them. To achieve this, the opportunistic leader is required to:

Overcome cognitive biases that form inflexible expectations
Overcome unhelpful knee-jerk reactions that paralyse thinking
Attribute a balanced meaning to whatever happens
Maintain a clear focus on the future

ANTIFRAGILE was coined by Nasim Taleb. Books by Matthew Syed are also helpful.

Leaders need to consider multiple factors, like financial growth, operational excellence and customer experience, all from multiple perspectives. Data alone does not provide adequate insight to lead the future.

Leaders must think deductively (top-down, seeing patterns or trends in data) and inductively (bottom-up, making concrete observations and extrapolating them). For a little more on this, see my blog: 'Are you a bottom-up or top-down thinker?' . They must also be logical, and empathetic, and a little creativity helps too. All of these abilities can be developed. Look into resources to develop your IQ, EQ and CQ.

It is widely recognised that the most productive, decisive and harmonious state that an individual can be in is a state of flow . When we are in flow, we are in the zone and perform at exceptional levels. When we are not in flow, we overthink and become clouded by emotion.

Typically flow states are indicated by: Intense and focused concentration, a merging of action and awareness, a loss of reflective self-consciousness, a sense of personal agency over the situation or activity, a distortion of time and a feeling of intrinsic reward.

Flow states are considered to happen when you meet a difficult challenge with a high level of skill - but it need not only be something you dip into during activities where you are already confident and competent. You can be far more purposeful and deliberate about putting yourself into flow. Utilising high-performance activities from NeuroLinguistic Programming (New Code), you can learn how to put yourself into high-performance flow states at will. For more information, visit my NLP page.

3. Interpersonal Dynamics & Psychological Safety

Customers, employees, suppliers, in fact, all stakeholders are people. Leadership is about people.

Yet the over-promoted manager will overlook the dynamic, 'contact sport' activities like developmental delegation and team dynamics in favour of spreadsheets, tools and measurements. You can't be a great leader without the human element. The interpersonal dynamics that leaders role model create conditions under which team members thrive or become withdrawn/dysfunctional. For understanding interpersonal dynamics, I have never found anything that comes close to FIRO theory . It makes sense of our own very changeable behaviour and the behaviour we want from others.

In a project codenamed 'Aristotle' researchers at Google compared 180 different teams that varied in performance and looked at a wide range of factors from seniority to emotional intelligence. The conclusion was that performance was a product of how the team worked together, with the most important factors ranked as follows: Number one on the list was psychological safety. This is the extent to which team members feel safe enough to take risks and be vulnerable in front of each other. Two and three on the list were Dependability and Clarity, respectively. These relate to clear roles, clear objectives, and the autonomy to get things done. Four and five were meaning and impact, respectively. Meaning is achieved by the work being personally important to the team members, and for impact, they need to believe that their work matters.

The way for leaders to make people feel safe, and create the space for all of the other factors to exist, is to be attentive, patient and respectful of their contributions. It requires the ability to remain composed without judgemental knee-jerk reactions. There is a reason that your behaviour in such moments naturally gets most of your reflection - it's the behaviour to work on.

4. Vision & Rhetoric

When leaders purposefully communicate a vision, everything becomes a lot less chaotic. We can deal with bumps in the road positively and decisively when our vision is firmly fixed on the destination, and the only way to predict the future is to create it. Leaders must blend the awareness of situational demands with unswerving attention to the future. Leaders who are not building the future steal from it.

We live our lives through stories and metaphors. Aristotle, who was very, very clever indeed, defined Rhetoric as "The faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion." He believed good rhetoric educated people and encouraged them to consider both sides of a debate. He was right. As media currently favours juxtaposed binary opinions, bullet-pointed facts and sensationalised sound bites, it is little wonder that we are fuelling ever more polarised landscapes. Aristotle defined three persuasive audience appeals: Ethos is how qualified the speaker is to speak on the subject. Pathos is an appeal to the audience’s emotions. Logos is an appeal to the rational mind of the audience, usually facts and figures.

Communication is the meaning that is exchanged. It doesn’t matter what you meant. It doesn’t even matter what you actually said. Whatever people take away from the communication is what has been communicated, like it or not. Therefore, to become an effective mass communicator, the detail of the content is not as important as understanding the way it makes people feel and the meaning they attribute . My first book from way back in 2008 has a lot of techniques for communicating effectively.

Conclusion

To invest in your ability as a leader, I recommend that you invest in the following journey:

1. Self-awareness - Learn about personality and get a coach, mentor or brutally honest friend.
2. Flexibility - Learn how to navigate your own mind and get into flow states.
3. Interpersonal awareness - Learn how to read the room.
4. Vision & Rhetoric - Learn how to tell a compelling story.

Are You a Bottom-Up or Top-Down Thinker?

Wed, 01 Mar 2023 15:14:06 GMT

Exploring the tension between discovery and data

There are two equally valid but distinctly different types of reasoning that can be applied to understanding a system you work in:

Inductive reasoning (bottom-up logic)
Deductive reasoning (top-down logic)

These two different ways of thinking provide valuable insight, but they are both subject to unhelpful biases.

Deductive, top-down thinking begins at the top with systemic data and then makes assumptions to work out what’s going on in reality.

Inductive, bottom-up thinking begins with observations of concrete reality and extrapolates those observations to imagine what’s going on at a system level.

It’s a bit like the difference between two fictional characters; deductive Private Investigator Sherlock Holmes and inductive Time Lord Doctor Who:

Sherlock often says, “If you remove the impossible, whatever is left, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” He arrives at a crime scene after the event has already happened, so he cannot observe the actual event. He, therefore, applies deduction to sift through the details and clues that may or may not be relevant. He makes an assumption, explores it until it reaches a dead-end, then abandons it and begins to explore another assumption instead.

On the other hand, Doctor Who cluelessly and spontaneously immerses himself in the live-action to observe and understand what’s happening in reality. For example, if he is fighting his nemesis ‘the Daleks’ he tends to make a specific observation about an individual Dalek and then extrapolate that discovery out to defeat the entire Dalek army.

In everyday organisational activities we see both types of observation & enquiry:

Top-down thinkers would survey their people/customers and then think of ways to influence the visible trends in the data. Bottom-up thinkers would enter the workplace, observe conditions and talk to people.

Top-down thinkers would analyse data to decide how a retail unit is performing and which products are successful. Bottom-up thinkers would mystery shop the customer experience or ask customers naive, open questions.

Typically, creative agencies think bottom-up, empathising with the customer and engaging their imagination to design for that customer. This is the basis of design thinking. Management Consultants with MBAs think top-down, looking at the data from the whole population first and making assumptions often without concrete observation.

This difference may be a product of your professional discipline, but as a natural thought process it's psychological and neuroscientific. Bottom-up thinking happens when we pay attention to sensory information and then think about it, whereas top-down happens when we are more goal-oriented and think first before looking for sensory examples.

Taiichi Ohno, an executive at Toyota, led the development of the concept of the 'Gemba Walk' in business. 'Gemba' is a Japanese term meaning 'the actual place'. The ethos behind 'Gemba Walking' is that problems that perplex people in meeting rooms are often clearly visible, and improvements or new ideas are easier to find if you go to the actual place where the activity happens. The objective of a 'Gemba walk' is to observe and understand waste, safety, conditions, standards, status and relationships rather than simply review results on spreadsheets and make superficial judgements.

Most of us are conditioned to think deductively like Sherlock. It’s a robust way of thinking, especially if the subject you are exploring is unobservable, but it’s also reductive. It’s a filtering process of top-down logic that is only as good as the data you have - and the data is only as good as the questions you asked. Deductive thinking is critical. When we think deductively, we attempt to improve things by critiquing and removing the negatives, but there’s a big difference between making something good and making something less rubbish. Deductive thinking may filter away the errors, but it rarely adds anything new.

The challenge when working in large organisations or institutions is that we need to work in a world of statistical evidence and deductive logic to be credible, yet we need to observe and understand the messy and organic reality to be effective.

Sadly, inductive reasoning is often dismissed as being merely anecdotal and not statistically or scientifically robust. It’s true that inductive reasoning starts from small observations and opens the door to several cognitive biases, from overestimating the significance of small samples of data to confirmation bias which will lead you to find evidence for what you believe as you extrapolate the observation - but inductive reasoning is the only way to be imaginative, creative, pragmatic and based on actual reality.

When we think deductively, we fall into two problems:

We could be missing the point entirely because we don't have any data which points to the real issue
We could fall into the trap of making future decisions based exclusively on retrospective data

Past data does not tell us about next year, and no data is as rich as observation, but without any data we are shooting in the dark.

Conclusion

If we are not utilising both data and observation, we are not playing with a full deck. We need both sources of insight to think properly.

References

Bodek, N. (2004). Kaikaku: The power and magic of lean: a study in knowledge transfer . PCS Inc.
Nickerson, R. S. (1998). Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises. Review of General Psychology, 2(2), 175-220.
Palmer, F. R. (1981). Semantics . Cambridge university press.
Taleb, N. N. (1999). The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, New York 2007

Daryll Scott's Blog

A Deep Dive into Culture OS

A manifesto for Cohesion, Engagement and Performance

Understanding the problem

1. Metrics That Mislead

2. Polarisation in Teams

3. Quiet Quitting

The Solutions

Vision

Values

Perspective

Feedback

Trust

How To Create Psychological Safety

The opposite of psychological safety is walking on eggshells.

What Safety Actually Looks Like

We All Live In Different Worlds

Meaning-Making is Idiosyncratic and Context Dependent

Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE)

In-Group / Out-Group Dynamics

Expectation Becomes Reality

A Mindset for Safety

References

Do you have a VISION, or just some high-level ‘business speak’?

In this article, I will introduce the overlooked, essential human element:

Confessions of a Hypnotist

Hypnosis debunked and influence decoded.

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Does hypnosis work?

What are the different types of hypnosis?

What conditions are required for someone to be receptive?

What makes suggestions acceptable?

How does a hypnotist maintain influence?

What’s the difference between influence and control?

Cutting through the BS with BS (Behavioural Science)

A post from UK election day

Exploring some well-known biases can demystify many political shambles and shenanigans.

We don’t really need much knowledge or experience to form our perceptions and beliefs.

As well as ignorance being confident bliss, we create our beliefs with bonkers biases…

Pouring more money into a broken system does not magically fix the system, it burns the money.

But we can’t fix tomorrow’s problems with nostalgia!

But don’t worry, it’s not you, it’s everyone else…

Why did I write this post?

Can we talk about feedback?

Leadership Techniques for Creating a Performance Culture

Before we explore the interpersonal, a quick note on frequency:

Why is it so tricky to give feedback?

The magical power of communicating intention

Performance improvement is a mindset

The dreaded perception gap

Seek to understand

Behaviour change is easy

Assist the process of self-awareness

Making it cultural

Summary

References

From 'Types' to 'Temperaments'

The psychological synthesis that underpins my diagnostics

A Hope for Hopefulness

When it's dark, look for the stars

“Blessed Are Those Who Plant Trees Under Whose Shade They Will Never Sit.”

The Hope Cycle

Conversations About Conversations

Building a performance culture

Emergence

Organisational Behaviour Change

Designing solutions in advance of understanding?

You can’t not…

Fear of the unknown

The only way around it is through it

We do it together

Intrinsic motivation

Positive reinforcement

Do not pass GO

A proposed paradigm for the emergence of behaviour change

The Hybrid Double Bind

Why is it so difficult to find an ideal answer?

Do Coaches Need a Hippocratic Oath?

Coaches: Beyond individual ethical dilemmas, what are your guiding principles?

Remember who your client really is, and never coach by proxy