Book Review-Emotional Intelligence

Robert Bogue April 3, 2013 1 Comment

I read a lot of content on psychology. I love learning more about how people think. I am intrigued by different attempts to understand the human condition. However, I don’t find myself interested in studying the neurology of how the brain works. In Emotional Intelligence, I got both neurology and psychology in one convenient package. The neurology is of lesser practical value than the psychology is to me but it is nice to have support for some of the psychological ideas about how we believe the brain works through an understanding of the chemical and electrical interactions between different parts of the brain. So while I wasn’t looking for the neurology, it was very helpful in terms of validating the psychology.

Emotional Intelligence as a book has components which I can’t really process well. Certainly the neurology is a part of that, but more broadly, I think that there are some important lessons to learn that are woven into the text. Let me catch you up to speed on what emotional intelligence is, and then explore some of the nuances of the book.

Multiple Intelligences

Most of us have heard of the intelligence quotient (IQ). This measure was designed to assess how smart someone is, however, the way that it measures “smartness” is somewhat narrowly defined in the context of academic learning. It says nothing about how socially aware or in touch someone is. Further, IQ isn’t the strongest predictor of success over the long term. In contrast to IQ, the model of multiple intelligences was put forth by Howard Gardner as a model for depicting how people are gifted towards different aspects of the human experience. The idea is that individual areas of intelligence are only loosely connected to one another. Strength in one area doesn’t necessarily imply strength in another area. One particularly interesting intelligence that has emerged from Gardner’s thinking is Emotional Intelligence (EI). That is, how emotionally aware and connected a person is to themselves and to others.

Speaking as someone who has reviewed content for technical accuracy and clarity for dozens of years, I can tell you that statistical sampling doesn’t work when it comes to content. An author can be absolutely brilliant on one topic (say hard drives) and completely incompetent on another (say networking.) Overall they’re gifted. Individually they may – or may not – be in a given subject area. Because of this, it’s easy to resonate with me that we can have areas of strength and weaknesses in our intellect.

The Neurology of Love and War

You’re “keyed up.” You walk across the room unable to hear the voices around you because your heart is pounding out a lightning fast rhythm on your eardrums. As you reach the girl you so desperately want to ask out your mouth goes dry. Your brain is deep within a sympathetic arousal. Your brain has determined (incorrectly) that this moment is critical to your survival and if she says yes you’ll take flight and if she says no you’ll want to fight. Your body has prepared itself for battle. Your focus is so narrow you barely register the other people – even her best friend that she’s talking to when you walk up. In your head, she’s become the central threat of your world.

Six months from that moment, she’s said yes and you’ve been dating. This is when you’re both relaxing hand-in-hand, leg over leg, on the couch watching a movie, you’re likely experiencing a relaxation or parasympathetic arousal. That is, your body detects no danger and has lowered its guard. As a result you’re ready to work with your girlfriend on planning anything – even if it’s a wedding.

You’re seeing rather extreme examples of the neurology that happens in all of us every day. Sympathetic arousal quickens our pace, focuses us in on one or a few things, and gets us ready to fight or flee. This is the body’s normal response to stress and one that’s triggered by the amygdala. Conversely, a state of relaxation allows us to see more of the world. We’re able to see a broader view and accept views that may not be our own because we feel safe.

In Drive, Daniel Pink talks some about how we manage stress and how motivators narrow our focus. Fear works the same way. We ignore the extraneous to focus on the thing that we believe to be the most critical to our survival. When we’re in a sympathetic arousal state – for any reason – we’re going to be focused. That can be bad because the mechanics of our brain that manage stress weren’t designed for the kinds of stress we encounter today. Focus is important if you’re trying to run away from a lion on the plains of Africa – it’s less useful when you’re trying to determine which college to go to.

The Neural Shortcut

Fear flashes. In an instant you feel it. You saw something that you don’t even understand and now you’re afraid. How does that work? How can you be afraid before you even understand? In short, your amygdala. The part of your brain inherited from reptiles which is responsible for emotions and the fight-or-flight response. It’s raised the alarm. But how does that happen before you can even understand what it is that has been done?

Well, that comes from signal splitting and two different processes which are evaluating the signals as they’re coming in. The sensory input that you’re getting is routed to two different parts of your brain. The amygdala which is like the Paul Revere of the brain raising the signal that the British are coming. The frontal lobe also gets a copy. A more recent invention of neural biology, the frontal lobe is our rational consciousness. It carefully considers what we’re getting and does enhanced pattern matching to classify the information we’re getting. The frontal lobe doesn’t make many mistakes but in doing its careful analysis it tends to take longer than the amygdala.

From an evolutionary perspective having a few extra milliseconds to know about a threat can mean the difference between escaping a predator and being its next meal. So the amygdala makes a quick evaluation, determines that it saw a gun. It triggers the rest of the brain into alert. It causes the endocrine system to release chemicals and Paul Revere is on his ride through the body to mobilize every muscle. Sometime later – in the next few milliseconds – the frontal lobe makes its evaluation of the input and decides through longer evaluation that it’s a toy gun or it was just a kid’s finger playing a game of cops and robbers. The frontal lobe then explains “false alarm” and your brain – and body start to come down off of high alert.

The problem is that it’s too late to halt all of the effects. The chemicals that were released in those few milliseconds are already flowing through your body and while they have made you ready to move – to fight or to take flight – they’ve also altered your mood. The effect of that short flash can last hours. In Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink, he speaks of the framing of input and how sometimes people make bad split second decisions because their perception is altered by the environment. Gary Klein in Sources of Power goes to great lengths to explore how people make decisions – and in the latter half of the book describes how the context of events often times do change the decisions.

Daniel Kahneman speaks more directly about this in Thinking, Fast and Slow. He speaks about how we have a quick mind that works all the time, silently taking care of things until it discovers it doesn’t know how to process something, when it then engages a secondary and slower system. The trick is that the automatic, everyday fast system doesn’t always engage the secondary processes when it should. We can say the same thing about our emotions, sometimes we’re not aware of the need for some rational counter balance to our feelings.

Emotional Hijacking and Cognitive Incapacitation

What about when the frontal lobes can’t reign your emotions back in? At some level you’re aware that someone didn’t intend to make you angry. They’re not really a threat. They can’t really harm you. Despite this, there’s a feeling that you just can’t shake and more importantly, you’re doing things that you know are ultimately very destructive to you, to others, and to your relationships. Welcome to emotional hijacking. You quite literally don’t have the capacity for reason. Temporary insanity defenses sound insane – except that from a neurological perspective there’s support for this happening. The amygdala takes over control and any of the expectations of a civil society are off the table.

The normal circuitry in the frontal lobe for telling the rest of the brain and body that the amygdala is “crying wolf” are shut down. The frontal lobe simply doesn’t have the ability to regain control. Eventually the amygdala won’t be able to sustain control and will give up – however, that can be hours away.

There’s a different kind of problem that sometimes occurs as well. It’s not about a quick emotional hijacking based a single event. It’s a slow, building level of saturation in the system from which it becomes impossible to think. Consider the quote from Ghost Busters — “I’m terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought” – Dr. Egon Spengler. The line is funny because it’s not an emotional hijacking – the character is aware of his feelings but he’s not wrestling control from rational thought. Instead the ability for rational thought is suppressed due to overload – due to flooding. Rational thought is slower and too much input and memories have overwhelmed the ability to process.

So what do we do about it? Earlier in my career I worked for Woods Industries and one of the product lines was surge suppressors. They work based off of something called a metal-oxide varistor (MOV). A MOV has high resistance at low voltages and low resistance at high voltages. So when the voltage is high (like during a surge) the resistance is reduced and current can flow more freely. What happens is that the MOV shunts the power to ground, suppressing the surge. This works great. However in the process of shunting the power sometimes the MOVs build up damage. The damage comes in the form of a pathway inside the MOV which doesn’t work the right way. Bad patterns develop which make the MOV less effective.

The key is to develop positive patterns that create easier pathways to follow when there’s a chance of emotional hijacking or cognitive incapacitation. In the case of hijacking, it might be a habit of counting to ten before taking an action – basically breaking the hold of the amygdala by introducing a short break. Addressing cognitive incapacitation might require a longer period of time – and an agreement to walk away from the conversation (or confrontation) for a while so you have time to process everything that is coming at you and everything that you’re feeling.

The Tale of Two Minds: How We Do Emotional Processing

It’s widely believed that talking about your anger makes it better. It’s called cathartic. The only problem with this is that it’s not true. There seems to be no therapeutic benefit from talking about your anger. In fact, talking about it in the wrong way can actually reinforce and intensify the feelings and make them more difficult to deal with. If you think about what’s making you angry – if you focus on it, you reinforce the anger – rather than releasing the energy from it. A more effective strategy is to tear the emotion apart and figure out what is causing it.

I once listened to the audio version of the book Destructive Emotions which was a dialog with the Dalai Lama. In that book there was a comment that in eastern philosophy “anger is disappointment directed.” That one statement has been, perhaps, one of the most valuable things I’ve ever heard. It allows me to ask the question when I get angry… what am I disappointed by? This allows me to try to process my emotions and figure out what’s behind them. Fear is similar. Fear is that we feel threatened. A good question is: how do I feel threatened? Once I get that answer, I can ask the “Why?” question.

This activity is the frontal lobe processing the emotions that were triggered by the amygdala. Processing emotions can be very healthy as it allows you to learn how to self-manage your emotions – once you’re aware of them.

The Voice inside Your Head (Cognitive Therapy)

“You’re not good enough.” “You’ll never be fast enough.” “You’re not as smart as your sister.” “You’re amazing.” “You’re special.” “You bring smiles to other people’s faces.” Some version of one of these is playing in your head from time-to-time. It’s an internal tape. It’s a sort of background noise to the way that you think. These little voices keep talking to you over and over and over again. Eventually, whatever those voices say is what you’re going to believe.

One of the most effective therapies developed has been cognitive behavior therapy. That is the process of changing the voices in your head from relatively negative voices to more positive voices. The voices that we start out with are ones which are echoes from what our parents, friends, and our relatives have said. They make up our core beliefs about ourselves and while our core beliefs about ourselves can’t be changed directly, these voices can be changed.

This is particularly true of how we see emotion. If we believe that our anger is justified then our internal voice may reinforce it. If, however, we view the way that we’ve acted as a result of our anger as bad we may choose different ways to express our anger next time. A voice that says I’m a good person but that I’ve chosen some bad approaches will be more effective than I’m a bad person and I’m doing bad things.

It turns out that there’s a difference between guilt – admitting I’ve done something wrong – and shame – believing that I’m inherently bad. A voice that tells me I’m a good person who made a bad choice. By being conscious of the voice that’s playing inside our heads and shaping it in more healthy ways, we can shift our feelings by creating better emotional reactions.

Of Self and Social (The Heart of EI)

What is emotional intelligence? According to Goleman, there are four keys to emotional intelligence:

Self-Awareness – This is an awareness of what you’re feeling (and thinking). It’s about knowing you’re grumpy, angry, hurt, or tired. You can’t very well be in touch with yourself if you can’t describe your feelings.
Self-Management – The first step may be awareness that you’re angry – but what if the anger isn’t appropriate or it isn’t appropriate to express? Self-Management is a set of skills that allow you to regulate or manage your feelings.
Social Awareness – Knowing how you feel may be essential, but in relationships with others the ability to detect their emotional state is critical. It’s the foundation of empathy and the ability to be in relationships with others.
Relationship Management – Being able to be in relationships is the pinnacle of emotional intelligence. Knowing how to relate to others at a deep level enriches lives.

Characteristics of Character (Enthusiasm, Persistence, Hope, Unflappable)

What makes someone successful in life? I’m not just saying successful in terms of being financially wealthy but rather successful in a more holistic view of loving their life. As it turns out some of the most telling factors for how successful someone will be in life aren’t about IQ. They’re more about Emotional Intelligence. It turns out your ability to monitor your feelings, distract yourself, manage your responses, read others’ emotions and feelings, and ultimately manage your relationship with others is more important than any other factor in terms of your long term success.

A famous study most often referred to as the marshmallow experiment tested delayed gratification (which is essential for self-management and relationship management) by offering kids one marshmallow now – or two if they waited. This isn’t interesting in itself. What’s interesting is that those preschoolers who were able to delay gratification and get the two marshmallows showed significantly more successful measures of life. In other words, something as simple as whether you can delay your own gratification has a substantial impact on your long term success in life.

However, delayed gratification isn’t everything. Persistence has its place. Consider Lincoln. Our most beloved president had a string of political losses before becoming president. His wife was widely reported to be a very difficult woman to live with. Yet, through set-back after set-back he managed to move forward in his life and lead the country through one of its darkest hours. Consider Einstein. Most folks believe that he was a brilliant man – and he was – but what they don’t realize is that he struggled in school. He often spoke of the fact that he wasn’t smarter than others – just more persistent. If persistence makes folks like Lincoln and Einstein … sign me up.

What is perseverance when you have no enthusiasm or passion for what you’re doing? You may keep moving forward but it will grind you down. It will wear at you. We’ve all seen the army of bitter people who continue to struggle to move forward but they aren’t enjoying their world. They’re simply surviving. There’s something to be said for bringing enthusiasm to each new challenge. Consider Edison. He was creating things that didn’t exist before. While we may be mystified by LED and compact florescent bulbs, consider a time when even the incandescent bulbs didn’t exist. Candles and lamps provided light at night. Edison reportedly had a thousand failures at creating a light bulb, however, he refused to count them as failures. Instead he chose to say that he had discovered a thousand ways NOT to make a light bulb. That’s enthusiasm.

Oprah liked the book The Secret and drew heat for it. The central premise of the book (as I understand it, having not read it) is that you attract what you think about. If you think positive thoughts positive things will flow into your life. I don’t go this far in terms of my beliefs, however, I will say that looking for the positive in every situation – finding a way to cultivate your hope for a better future is important. As I mentioned in my review of Who Am I?, Viktor Frankl, a concentration camp detainee, observed that folks who had a meaning for their life were the ones that survived – hope is that sort of meaning. I hope (or believe) that my suffering will serve others – and in that I can survive even the most miserable circumstances. Hope is a key characteristic of a happy life.

Hope waxes and wanes in each of us, however, there is a characteristic of unflappability – an inability for people to be disturbed by what is happening around them. Unflappability can actually be caused by two different things. One is an inability to process your environment emotionally, which would be bad. However, there’s another side. That side is the mastery of the ability to be aware of and manage your emotions so well that seemingly nothing fazes you. This can be very healthy.

The Great Paradox: You Must Feel Safe to Become Vulnerable

I learned more about how trust is reflexive – that is, the more you trust, the more others trust you – from Trust & Betrayal in the Workplace and Building Trust: In Business, Politics, Relationships and Life. There’s a sort of inherent elegance in this. There’s almost an innate understanding that you trust those who trust you. However, there are parts of the human experience in which the way to get trust is counter intuitive. Trust is allowing yourself to be vulnerable – vulnerable to a failure in another person.

However, someone else being vulnerable to you isn’t going to be enough for you to be vulnerable. You have to feel safe. Certainly trusting the other person is a good start, however, you have to feel safe in general. The trick is that being safe and feeling safe aren’t the same thing. Many people have an anxiety when flying on a commercial plane. Of course, flying in a commercial plane is substantially safer – statistically speaking – than driving your car to the airport to get on the plane. This doesn’t stop the anxiety.

Conversely, you probably feel very comfortable in your own home. However, in-home accidents are a leading cause of death. So while you should feel safer in an airplane and less safe at home, the opposite is true. It’s an odd thing to realize that you have to feel safe to allow yourself to be vulnerable.

Finding Emotional Intelligence

No one book will dramatically change your life and improve your emotional intelligence overnight, however, if you’re looking for a way to get in better touch with your emotions, to control your responses, to understand others, and to be in relationships with others; Emotional Intelligence is a great place to start.

Book Review-Who Am I?

Robert Bogue March 29, 2013 No Comments

After trying to figure out the meaning of life, trying to figure out who you are has to the biggest question of life. Over the years, countless folks have tried to simplify the complexity of people, their motivations, desires, and their expected behavior into a set of simplifications that would allow people to be classified. Some of them with more success than others.

They’re looking for the displacement (Archimedes’) method for measuring an irregular solid – something that makes sense, is relatively easy to do and has good results. Whether you’re fond of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), Disc profiles, the Enneagram, or something else, many people have tried to figure out how to classify people so that they can better understand themselves and others. In Who Am I?: The 16 Basic Desires that Motivate Our Actions and Define Our Personalities Steven Reiss shares his research into the sixteen desires that he believes motivate our lives. They are (in Reiss’ words):

Power is the desire to influence others.
Independence is the desire for self-reliance.
Curiosity is the desire for knowledge.
Acceptance is the desire for inclusion.
Order is the desire for organization.
Saving is the desire to collect things.
Honor is the desire to be loyal to one’s parents and heritage.
Idealism is the desire for social justice.
Social Contact is the desire for companionship.
Family is the desire to raise one’s own children.
Status is the desire for social standing.
Vengeance is the desire to get even.
Romance is the desire for sex and beauty.
Eating is the desire to consume food.
Physical Activity is the desire for exercise of muscles.
Tranquility is the desire for emotional calm.

Reiss is careful to point out that this is the refined list of the most important characteristics to influence behavior and that some desires – like the desire for shelter may be important to biology but not psychology.

Scales

The idea is that people are motivated to behave in ways consistent with their desire for these 16 areas of their life. That doesn’t necessarily mean that someone who is a high-status person will always seek status rather it means that someone who is a high status person will seek status to reach their perceived normal level. If they get too much status they’ll find a way to lower themselves. It’s all about a natural desire for where you are at – a sort of normal set point, not some absolute desire. This is consistent with the way I view the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) as well.

From my point of view we have a natural place where we exist on any scale – whether it’s Dr. Reiss’ scale of honor or whether it’s the intuiting-sensing scale of the MBTI. From that natural set-point we have a set of adaptation skills. That is a range in which we’re comfortable operating. If we’re a highly internal person (MBTI type I) then we might be OK in gatherings of 20 people or less. Or perhaps we’re OK in groups up to 100. However, when we’re at Disney World waiting for Space Mountain we might find ourselves overwhelmed. Mostly changing our core motivations isn’t something that is generally believed is possible – at least it’s not easy. However, creating a range of where we’re comfortable operating is something that we can do.

For instance, it’s possible to condition ourselves in areas just outside our comfort zone to expand it slightly. Like sitting in the middle of a busy mall for 10 minutes before heading home. This conditioning may not change our core desire for tranquility (Reiss) but it will, over time, change our ability to accept a different level of tranquility than we would prefer.

Just as we can change our comfort zone for a particular motivation we can also have others influence our behavior through social conditioning (upbringing, culture, etc). For instance, consider a person with a high romance component who is taught that sex before marriage is bad. In this case, the person may not do behaviors that bare out their natural desires, but they still may have them. It’s worth mentioning here that Kurt Lewin said that behavior is a function of both person and environment. That is just because someone is naturally inclined one way doesn’t mean you can’t create an environment that will discourage that natural behavior.

Means and Ends

Aristotle divided human motives into means and ends. Ends are the things that you want intrinsically. Means are what you want in order to get to the ends. For most folks (except perhaps those who are high saving) money isn’t really the goal. Money is just a means to whatever ends they want whether that’s a better car, a vacation home, or something else. They say that most marriages end over fights about money – however, I’d put forward the idea that marriages end because of a difference of ideals and it just happens that money is the means to most of those ideal ends. Separating the means and the ends is useful because it changes the reasoning for behavior. Someone who likes physical activity may exercise because they enjoy it – thus it’s an end. However, someone who is high on romance may do exercise in order to reach their ideal form of beauty – thus exercise is a means.

Addictions

It’s been said that our addictions are the result of our natural desires gone awry. They may have gone awry because of a bad set of situations that have “taught” us the wrong answer – like an elephant that won’t escape when tied with a rather flimsy rope. The elephant has a specific kind of learned – or in this case conditioned – helplessness around pulling loose his leg. An addiction is a habit that has such control over us that we quite literally feel powerless to stop.

It’s our strong desires that drive our addictions. Our natural desires are under-met and therefore we create solutions which eventually ensnare us in a hopeless attempt to figure out how to get our needs met – generally with an unfulfilling approach.

The Meaning of Life

Reiss toys with the idea of the meaning of life through referring to the works of a former concentration camp prisoner, Viktor Frankl. Frankl observed that the survivors of the camp were those that found a way to divine meaning from their lives. It didn’t matter who was strong or weak – it was most important that the person be able to find meaning in their life. This is consistent with The Time Paradox, The Happiness Hypothesis, and Stumbling on Happiness. People who had the ability to stop chasing the everyday addition to distraction and were able to find meaning in their lives are – overall – happier than their peers.

Not Being Understood

I have a high need to be understood. I’ve spent a ton of time learning how to communicate more effectively, considering different learning strategies, better learning how to predict what others are thinking, and so I was encouraged by a rather short section in the book on understanding – and how there are two different drivers for a lack of understanding:

“Not Getting It” – This is driven by a serious value system difference that makes it impossible for two people to understand each other. Further communication on the matter will make the problem worse, not better. Please excuse a rather sensitive example that I’ll use here. I don’t accept or agree with adultery. I just don’t. No amount of discussion with someone who has committed adultery will make me understand it. I have several folks I’ve met for which this is a reality – but no amount of discussion about it will make me understand.
Misunderstanding – Generally further discussion can clarify any misperceptions that have come to be between two folks who are misunderstanding one another. I find that often if I just focus on one word at a time – verifying the shared meaning of one word after another we’ll eventually find the misunderstanding.

Perhaps equally intriguing was the ideas that there are two factors that make understanding more difficult:

Self-Hugging – The natural belief that our way is the “right” way to do things. For instance, whether toilet paper should unroll over or behind the roll. Whatever your belief is – you believe that your answer is right. This is a result of confirmation bias (we see what we look for).
Everyday Tyranny – The belief that what is right for us is right for everyone. For instance, I’ve been an independent consultant most of my adult career. It’s right for me – but I know many people where the challenge and lack of stability would drive them mad. Imposing what works for me on to others would be a form of everyday tyranny.

The Psychology of Dependence and Religion

It used to be believed that dependence was a sign of a weak will and by extension the idea that people are dependent on God (or religion) were somehow psychologically weaker or less advanced than those without a belief in God. Certainly there’s a pattern, which Stephen Covey describes in his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. However, the point of interdependence – which Covey recommends – is a selected dependence on others. It’s an intelligence and awareness about the dependence.

Dr. Reiss states that there’s no statistical difference in the psychological health between those who have religious beliefs – and those who do not. On the other hand, churches and synagogues in the United States provide more than twice the philanthropy of social causes.

Putting It Together

So the book included a quick and simple approximation of the assessment test which I codified into an Excel Spreadsheet which you can find here. If you’re interested in finding out more about who you are, I highly recommend Who Am I?

SharePoint REST TypeScript Library

Robert Bogue March 26, 2013 No Comments

At the end of November I posted a blog post titled SharePoint, REST, TypeScript, and the Library where I talked about the TypeScript library I built to demonstrate the power of TypeScript as a tool for large scale JavaScript. JavaScript gets messy quickly, particularly when you have to make a series of calls and deal with deferred callbacks.

I’ve had a few dozen people ask for the code and I’ve finally gotten around to publishing it into codeplex at http://sprestts.codeplex.com — if you’ve offered to help and you don’t see an invite from me in the next day or two go ahead and send me a follow up email and I’ll get you added.

SharePoint Saturday Indianapolis 2013

Robert Bogue January 19, 2013 1 Comment

Last Saturday (Jan 12, 2013) Indianapolis held a SharePoint Saturday. We were honored with…

472 registrants
302 attendees
96 evaluations
30 sessions
10 sponsors
1 good time

Our overall satisfaction score for the event was 4.53 – which I think is really, really good and it’s a testimony to the great steering committee that we had. I’d like to recognize them here.

Amy Dehmer, Event Logistics
Kevin Dostalek, Speaker Support
John Ferringer, Volunteer Support
Marcy Kellar, Social and Marketing
Amy Kemper, Sponsor Support
Cory Retherford, Facilities

I couldn’t have asked for a better team. They really made the event a pleasure.

Book Review-Infographics: The Power of Visual Storytelling

Robert Bogue January 19, 2013 No Comments

One of the problems I have with my blog – and I’m keenly aware – is that its text based. While I insert the occasional graphic, because of the logistics of the medium it’s difficult to get the level of images in the stories. I also find that I’m often trying to convey complex items where words aren’t always the best choice. That’s why I try to introduce bullets, tables, etc., to help with the comprehension. The ultimate solution is to use Infographics – something that requires design skills that I don’t have. So when I started reading Infographics: The Power of Visual Storytelling, I knew I wouldn’t likely be able to produce the end result. I’d have to be content with just knowing what made a good infographic and a few tips I could use.

The “big rock” division that the book lays out is whether the intent of the Infographic is for explorative reasons – or narrative reasons. Explorative are more minimalist in their representation and tends to convey concepts and relationships where narrative tends to deliver much more information. It informs and entertains.

The book is full of examples of infographics – and a great deal of information about how they were formed. However, I think the book for me had three keys. First, is an idea that there are three key reasons to do an infographic – one for appeal, the second is for comprehension, and the third is retention (of the information). They break out three key markets (academic/scientific, marketing, and editorial) along these three dimensions as shown below.

I also found the idea of the quality of an infographic as being defined by it’s beauty, soundness, and utility quite useful, however, the best part was probably the process for creating an infographic:

Idea
Research
Content
Story
Design

These five steps are the approach that the authors use to get good results from their infographics projects – and they’re probably a great idea for you to use as a starting point as well.

If you’re trying to communicate visually, pickup Infographics.

Book Review-The Art of Explanation

Robert Bogue January 19, 2013 No Comments

I spend quite a bit of my time in the professional world trying to explain things. Sometimes it’s to clients. Sometimes it’s developers. Sometimes it’s to the infrastructure team. Whomever it is, I know that sometimes my explanations work – and sometimes they don’t. The Art of Explanation holds the keys to at least some of the problems I have when trying to explain things. I wanted to share some of the highlights from the book with you but before I do that I have to share a story.

Many, many moons ago. My guess is about 20 years ago, I was a LAN manager for a manufacturer. I was the guy that got to go solve the problems that others couldn’t solve. In the age when the Internet wasn’t commercial yet and email was truly store and forward. I got called to help the sales secretary with something – I don’t remember what. I do, however, remember being very frustrated and coming back to my boss at the time. He said something that has never left me. He said “Rob, you were trying to teach her why it worked and all she wanted to know was how to make it work.” For me, I really want to build the mental models that Gary Klein talks about in Sources of Power. I want to understand how the pieces work. However, many people just want to do whatever it is so they can get on with their “real” work. I can try to explain how something works – and the person I’m talking to doesn’t want to know.

The book starts by describing that people who don’t know much need to know “Why” and the more they know they cross over into wanting to know “how.” That isn’t new if you’ve ready about The Adult Learner. One of the clarifications that I believe is important – that the book leaves out – is that it’s just the “Why I care” and not “why it works that way”. Similarly, there’s the “How do I do it” – and not the “how it works.” For the most part, people don’t care how it works – or why it works that way these days.

The Art of Explanation also speaks of how you can’t really understand the trees until you’ve seen the forest. You have to have a context to place the idea in or you won’t be able to remember it. That’s one of the reasons why explanations are not facts. Facts exist without context. To be good at explaining, you have to provide some context.

Interestingly, Efficiency in Learning says that you should “Teach System Components before Teaching the Full Process.” (Guideline 13). This would seem to imply that teaching the trees before teaching the forest is appropriate, however, the kinds of information are different.

Consider the movie the Karate Kid. One could say that “Daniel” was taught karate through the fundamentals. However, there’s a difference. “Daniel” was motivated to work towards a goal. He understood the forest. He knew where he wanted to be. Once he had that vision and the desire to get there, he needed the fundamentals taught to him. In effect “Daniel” had already received the “Why” – he already cared because he didn’t want to be bullied any longer.

From a learning standpoint, he was taught the fundamental moves – and then he was taught (very quickly in movie-time) how to apply those fundamentals to the appropriate situation. This hints at another aspect that the book makes clear, through a quote from Robert McKee’s book Story. “Anxious, inexperienced writers obey rules, unschooled writers break rules. Artists master the form.” This reminded me of my blog post Apprentice, Journeyman, Master. (In which I speak of another aspect of the Karate Kid movie.) In other words, we need to have a way to explain the basics. The rules. The foundation. Then we need to learn the principles behind the rules and know when to break the rules to stay in alignment with the principles.

Pervasive Information Architecture pointed out that we grasp the abstract through means of the concrete. That would seem to imply that we should provide concrete examples of everything – which is hard to do when explaining the forest, however, I believe they’re talking about two different points in the learning process. The first point is where the person doesn’t know why they need to know or why they care. (The learner’s need to know from The Adult Learner.) In most explanations the audience doesn’t know why they need to know – or at least they don’t know why precisely. They key point is to help folks see the broad environment when they’ll be working – before getting to the detailed specifics – the trees of the situation.

My point in raising potential objections to talking about the forest first is to show that they’re less about objections – and more about just slightly different views of the problem.

The Art of Explanation talks about how context is important – if content is king then context is the kingdom. The funny thing is that it also talks about recipes and the fact that they don’t need context. They’re designed specifically to be context-less. That’s actually the core idea behind the Shepherd’s Guide. It’s a set of recipes for getting things done with SharePoint. The context of the comments we read, the perspective they’re coming from is a core part of the message. The information that applies to one person in their situation – their context – can be completely inappropriate to another person in a different situation.

Thinking, Fast and Slow talked to the way that people think – and how we feel. The Art of Explanation makes the point that you want to help people get their mind into the story of what’s happening. You want them to feel the pain of the actor in the story. I know from my work writing marketing copy that only writing to the intellectual and rational doesn’t work. We need to speak to the elephant as well as the rider. (See Switch and The Happiness Hypothesis.)

Then there is the curse of knowledge. That is, the more you know about something the harder it is to explain it to others. Of course Einstein said “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” I think he was talking about the folks who like to pretend they know something but then can’t explain it – mostly the more you know about a subject the less that you can remember what it was like to know nothing. (Back to Thinking, Fast and Slow and what you see is all there is.)

Before getting to the concrete tips from the book (blended with my thoughts), I need to rewind one last time and talk about how the features of something aren’t equivalent to its utility. Diffusion of Innovations makes it clear that the consequences of an innovation are difficult to predict. Similarly, it’s hard to explain how a tablet will be used. Enumerating it’s weight and battery life don’t communicate to you that it’s a great consumption device for browsing the web and reading books – the features (lightweight and long battery life) don’t automatically convert to how someone can use it.

The Art of Explanation considers these the key components of a good explanation:

Context – The agreements and shared experiences we start with.
Story – The big ideas of the narrative.
Connections – Analogies and metaphors to connect the new concepts with what people already understand.
Descriptions – Details and benefits.
Conclusion – A summary of what was learned.

The book also talks about the different mediums and their suitability of differing explanations. I’ve adapted this information into table form.

Type	Time to Produce	Scanability	Communicating Concepts	Communicating Details	Ease of Replication
Text	(+) Quick	(+) Scannable with appropriate headings	(-) Difficult for people to see the forest for the trees	(+) Because it can be reviewed, good for communicating details	Excellent
Image / Graphic	(-)Difficult to produce, sometimes require specialized skills	(+) Can be scanned with relative ease due to the compression on to a single page	(+) Good for communicating high-level concepts	(-) Insufficient space and the large time to produce	Good
Audio	(-) Somewhat harder to produce, requires audio recording equipment and awareness about good quality levels	(-) Audio cannot be scanned and search engines don’t index into the time when a word was said.	(+) The ability to hear intonations in voice or other-non word audio can enhance the feeling and therefore the overall feel.	(-) Lack of scanability and general retention of facts from audio will reduce usefulness for facts.	Good
Video	(-) Much harder to produce good video explanations. Requires equipment and skill.	(-) Video cannot be scanned and search engines don’t index into the time when the word or concept was discussed.	(+) Allows for audio, text, visuals, motion graphics, etc. Extremely good at allowing users to grasp concepts	(-) Lack of scanability creates some level of challenge for communicating details. However, because of multi-modal communication (visual and auditory) it can be somewhat effective.	Good
Live Demonstration	(-) Preparation time can be large	(-) Only the materials are potentially scanable. See comments for the type of materials	(+) Interactivity allows you to adapt the message to the audience.	(-) If backed up with written materials. Used to create AWARENESS and use other methods to create RETENTION.	Bad

The Art of Explanation is a great book – if you want to learn how to explain things better.

Developer-IT Pro Cage Match

Robert Bogue December 15, 2012 2 Comments

While at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference in November, Dux placed a microphone in my face and asked what I’d be doing if I wasn’t doing SharePoint. My answer is probably more than a bit confusing. I said “The same thing I’m doing now, refereeing developer-it pro cage matches.” (Or something similar, I had quite literally just arrived.)

That sounds sort of odd on a couple of levels so I wanted to tear it apart.

What If There Were No SharePoint

I’ve made quite a bit of my professional career in SharePoint. I’ve had plenty of room in SharePoint to do infrastructure, development, end user adoption, workflow, governance, and tons of other things. Certainly if there were no SharePoint my world would be very different, however, at its core, I see SharePoint as a platform for solving business problems. If I wasn’t doing SharePoint I’d still be doing something to help businesses recognize value out of technology. My guess is that I would have ended up at some large organization as an enterprise architect, putting together pieces to minimize problems – and make it easier for the organization to recover.

I’m a high challenge person as nearly everyone who knows me will attest. That doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m challenging – it means that I will seek out challenges and try to conquer them. That’s another way that SharePoint has been fertile ground for me. In the beginning we were facing technical challenges that hadn’t been seen before. (SharePoint 2001 would continuously respond with HTTP 100 Continue messages – confounding most of the monitoring tools of the day.) We’ve been faced with scalability problems. I could go on about the technical challenges that we’ve conquered as a community over the years.

I believe that SharePoint is one of the most challenging applications to sell an organization because it’s not an application. It’s a platform. It’s infrastructure. Back in 1991 when I was first working with email, we didn’t have a defined need for email. We didn’t have a specific business purpose. It was just something people were playing with. I was lucky enough to be a part of Woods Industries at the time and with the overseas sourcing we did find a specific need and over time we began to develop an awareness of the benefits – but even with the spark of an initial need it was still a struggle.

In many organizations today it’s difficult to explain how SharePoint can be helpful – even to those who already have it and need only learn to use it. The fact that there’s not one thing that the tool does makes it hard to explain. It’s a desert topping and a floor wax – and it will always be that way.

Why Can’t We All Just Get Along

Why I describe what I do as refereeing a cage match is another mystery. The short is because I often act as a translator between developers and IT Pros that just don’t speak the same language. I am not surprised by the conflict that exists between infrastructure and development – and you shouldn’t be either. Infrastructure is goaled on keeping systems stable. Development is goaled on delivering new solutions for the business. New solutions mean change and change means instability.

It’s no surprise that the conflict that’s created with the opposed goals spills into other areas and the finger-pointing game begins. Developers believe that the performance is bad because of bad infrastructure. The infrastructure team believes that the performance is bad because the developers are writing bad code. I don’t believe I remember an organization where development and infrastructure really got along.

The cage match bit is that developers and IT Pros can’t get away from each other. In a regular match you can go away. However, if you’re in an organization the idea that you can get away from the conflict isn’t realistic.

Whether I’m doing SharePoint or not, I’m looking forward to bridging the gaps, improving understanding, and making the developer-IT Pro relationship feel a lot less like a cage match.

SharePoint, REST, TypeScript, and the Library

Robert Bogue November 27, 2012 1 Comment

For the Microsoft SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas I did a session on using TypeScript to develop for SharePoint and Office. In that session I demonstrated a non-trivial example of a library I built in TypeScript for accessing SharePoint’s REST services. I did this because TypeScript is about building enterprise scale applications – something that JavaScript doesn’t do particularly well (to be as kind as possible.) I got several requests by the other speakers at the conference and the attendees about what I intended to do with the library. And I’m happy to confirm that I’ll be releasing the code as an open source community project. The intent is to create a library that can be used anywhere to build applications for SharePoint.

However, before I decide where to put the library, I need to know who would be willing to help with the enhancement of the library. I don’t want to create a project on CodePlex to find I’m the only developer – if that becomes the case I’ll just host the project here on my site. I’m really looking for who would be willing to contribute. I should be clear much of the code won’t be super-technical, highly architectural. A lot of it is just slogging out support for various interfaces and following the pattern I’ve already created. Not that there won’t be fun problems to solve but I also don’t want to discourage folks who don’t feel like they’re architect-level developers yet. Before go into more details, let’s talk about the library itself.

What is TypeScript?

If you missed it, TypeScript is a super-script of JavaScript that compiles down into regular JavaScript. The benefit is that it adds type safety through compilation time checking – and intellisense in Visual Studio. It’s a great tool for those who are tired of debugging for hours to realize that they had a capitalization problem or a typo on a method that they just couldn’t see while looking at the code. I believe that it’s the future way to develop JavaScript. We’ll develop in TypeScript and compile down into JavaScript as an intermediate language.

Who Can Use the Library?

Because the library is TypeScript based it compiles into regular JavaScript. That means anyone that has a platform that uses JavaScript can use the library. Whether it’s Office and SharePoint applications like the library was built for or whether it’s a Windows 8 HTML/JS application. The one requirement is the use of jQuery as a base library. It’s also likely that the library will ultimately require the datajs library that’s being developed to make OData access easier. Otherwise, the library is intentionally easy to use.

What Does the Architecture Look Like?

The primary challenges for most developers who are getting involved with JavaScript are the lack of type safety and the increased dependence on asynchronous calls to keep work of the primary display thread. Building the library in TypeScript resolves the concern of type-safety. The dependence on asynchronous calls is handled through the use of promises. jQuery includes a Deferred object. This object implements JavaScript promises.

The short is that a promise is a “publish-subscribe” object which allows you to subscribe to events you’re interested in and get notified when they’re completed (typically through anonymous methods). Once the event occurs your code is run. The beauty of this is you can write code that looks something like:

Obj.DoSomethingAsync().done(function () { alert(‘success’); }).fail(function () { alert(‘oops’); }).then(function () { alert(‘next?’); });

This will cause the right methods to be called when the async method completes. This approach keeps the async response code together with the code that started the async event. The beauty of this is that the deferred object can be held and if other code wants to subscribe to the event later it can. If the event is already completed the code that is subscribing to the event will run immediately. This allows you to do caching internally in your objects to minimize repeated calls.

With this as the basis the objects mirror the objects in the server side object model. The methods are intended to mirror the way that you deal with the objects on the server. There are a few differences because of the way that JavaScript works when compared to .NET/C# — however, the differences are designed to be minimal. A developer who knows the SharePoint object model should be able to use Intellisense in Visual Studio to see what’s happening.

Why not the JavaScript Client Side Object Model?

A rather obvious question is, “Why would I write a totally new library to access the REST services when there’s already a JavaScript client side object model?” The short answer is that the JavaScript Client Side Object model doesn’t always work. It works just fine if you’re in a SharePoint hosted application. However, in situations where you don’t have an app web the SharePoint JavaScript library won’t work. Even when it does work – outside of the SharePoint hosted app – it’s quirky. I wanted one library that worked whether I was working on remote server, a Windows 8 application, or on the SharePoint server itself. I didn’t want to have to do things fifteen different ways.

Developers Needed

At the beginning I mentioned that I wanted some other folks who would be willing to help me flesh out the scope of the model. That work is something that doesn’t require a huge amount of skill – it’s something that’s good exercise for developing against SharePoint remotely. If you’re relatively new to development – I absolutely can use your help here.

In addition, I’m looking for some folks who are willing to help me keep an eye on the architecture of the library as it grows. I’ve got a long background in building architectures and libraries – but JavaScript isn’t my native world. I’d love someone who can help with the finer points of architecting enterprise scale JavaScript. For instance, techniques for managing cross-domain calls.

If you feel like you can help (even if it’s only a few hours a month) please email me. If you don’t feel like you can help – but you want to see the library to see if it would be useful to you, send me an email. I’ll send you the code for your educational use. Yea, it’s send me an email and I send you a response. I want to track the number of folks who are interested in it so I can notify them where I end up posting the project.

Book Review-The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business

Robert Bogue November 25, 2012 No Comments

I heard Patrick Lencioni speak at the Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit and that prompted me to pick up his latest book, The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business. I’ve been a fan of Lencioni’s work for a while. In fact, one of his previous books, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team loosely inspired my blog posts in 2009 chronicling the top four most common corporate delusions, and then the fifth and sixth most common corporate delusions.

Note: Most of the ideas in this post are Lencioni’s, however, in some places I’ve extended concepts he started with my own thoughts or thoughts from other books. I’ve made every effort to delineate what came from The Advantage and what came from elsewhere.

The Advantage lays out four key ideas that Lencioni believes lead to organizational health. They are:

Build a Cohesive Leadership Team
Create Clarity
Overcommunicate Clarity
Reinforce Clarity

Over time Lencioni believes that these will eliminate wasted effort – in other words reduce friction – and will allow the organization to learn more quickly. (Which reminds me of The Fifth Discipline which I read a long time ago and the drive to have an organization that learns.) While I wholeheartedly agree that the types of organizations that Lencioni describe are better – by multipliers not mere percentages – but I’m not completely convinced that the book lays out everything that someone needs to transform their organization into the high-performing organization they want, I believe there’s a level of personal transformation that is required which I don’t believe Lencioni fully addresses. (Don’t stop reading here, it’s a great book, I just believe it assumes a level of emotional intelligence that I don’t believe every leader has.)

Building a Cohesive Leadership Team

One of the prerequisites for a good organization is for it to have a good leadership team – and that isn’t to say that each of the members must be good at their roles – that is an assumption. Having a good leadership team is to say that they have to be in sync with each other – willing to accept each other as whole human beings and also willing to challenge each other. This is where I believe the challenge lies. The level of personal strength of character that it takes for a leadership team to be both open and vulnerable to one another is strikingly uncommon in my experience.

One of the points in the book, which appeared in Switch too, is the idea of a fundamental attribution error. That is that we tend to justify our own behaviors based on circumstances and tend to attribute behaviors to another person’s core makeup – rather than realizing the situation they were in. This creeps in to drive a wedge between members of the team. It’s just one of the small factors that often lead to a leadership team becoming a group of leaders working in the same company (not a team.)

Lencioni lays out a set of five behaviors that he believes will build a cohesive leadership team – which I agree that if these things are done, you’ll get a cohesive leadership team. I’m just not sure that there’s not still a point of “and then the magic happens” where the caterpillar is transformed into the butterfly. In other words, it’s easy to say and hard to do.

Behavior 1: Building Trust

I’m no stranger to learning about and writing about building trust. My previous book review was Trust Me and before that I reviewed Building Trust in Business, Politics, Relationships, and Life and Trust & Betrayal in the Workplace. I boiled down the foundations of building and rebuilding trust in my blog post Building Trust: Make, Renegotiate, Meet. Lencioni believes that most folks think of trust as competency based trust. That is you believe the other party is competent to do their job. His belief here is that it takes vulnerability-based trust to be really effective. His vulnerability based trust might also be called authentic trust. And it’s more about trusting the whole person to behave relatively consistently. (As a sidebar, if you find that people are not behaving consistently you may find that two or more of their values are in conflict.)

Lencioni shares his approach for rapidly improving trust amongst a leadership team. He leverages standardized psychological profiles like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator to help the team learn more about themselves while maintaining that everyone is good – just people are different. This is important because it helps people understand and accept who they are in both their strengths and their weaknesses. (Sidebar: I heartily support the use of the MBTI, but if you’re looking for an alternative approach you can look at using the Enneagram.)

In fact one of the exercises that Lencioni discusses – an exercise where the entire team talks about one of the best things about a person – as it relates to the team – and then shares one of the most challenging things about every other staff member. The hope is that everyone realizes they are imbued with strengths and weaknesses. Lencioni discusses how this exercise must begin with the leader and their willingness to accept their strengths and weaknesses – so that the rest of the team will understand how to respond.

So fundamentally I’m in agreement about the approach. Building trust – not through some fluffy rope exercise but real trust – is critical to a leadership team. Much of my consulting time is creating pockets of trust in an otherwise distrusting organizations. Where I believe that Lencioni and I may differ is that I don’t believe that a two day workshop can build trust between managers. I believe that a two-day offsite can sow the seeds of trust in an organization, but I’m not convinced that anything short of a long-term coaching engagement can really transform a leadership team and help them to realize their deep need to trust each other and the great lengths that they go to in order to avoid trust.

In short, my experience has been that most folks aren’t comfortable with themselves enough to really trust others. Because they don’t trust themselves how could they trust someone else? This may be a rather dim view of the state of leadership in organizations, however, I believe it’s born out in news stories every day.

Behavior 2: Mastering Conflict

Some people are conflict avoidant. Other folks are instigators – always looking for a conflict. Always looking for a fight. Some folks, like myself, are conflict apathetic. That is to say that we’re not really deeply troubled by conflict. As a truth, no one really likes conflict not even the conflict apathetic. It’s always a bit unsettling, however, sometimes conflict is necessary. Said differently as the lyrics from an Alanis Morissette song, the only way out is through.

There are, however, some things that can be done to improve the results of a conflict. Perhaps the most effective way to have a good conflict is to really listen to the argument on the other side. Most folks get stuck in trying to justify their position and as a result rather than empathetically listening to the other party they’re trying to develop the next part in their argument. This tends to escalate the conflict because neither party feels like they’re heard (because they aren’t.)

Behavior 3: Achieving Commitment

In my experience most organizations that conflict is avoided like the plague. I see people nod their heads in meetings only to do nothing later – or occasionally sabotage the actual initiative. One of the techniques that I’ve seen good project managers do – and is called out in The Advantage is actively asking each person in the meeting for their agreement with the decision. Another technique mentioned to get everyone talking is that the assumption will be disagreement – rather than agreement – if someone stays silent.

One of the challenges I often see in business conflicts is people who hold onto a position well past the point that the position appears silly to everyone in the room –including the person who is supporting it. The result is frustration sets in because someone isn’t able to accept that their position wasn’t the “right” position. Achieving commitment is predicated on the need for professionals to abandon their positions when they no longer make sense.

Achieving commitment is built upon resolving conflict but extends this to reaching a consensus about the right course of action – that everyone is agreeing to take.

Behavior 4: Embracing Accountability

Few organizations that I’ve worked with really embrace accountability. In fact most of them have a form of commitment cancer that’s insidious. I first mentioned commitment cancer in a post about running users groups back in 2010. Commitment cancer is the failure to hold other folks accountable for their commitments. I see it everywhere.

I “grew up” in publishing. With author credit on 22 books and editor credit on numerous others, I got to know how technical publishing works. However, in some ways, it doesn’t really work. It just appears to work. The schedule for publishing a book is notoriously a matter of fiction. Every acquisitions editor knows that whatever schedule that you start with won’t be the one your end with. It’s routine for authors to be weeks, months, and sometimes years late on when they say they’re going to be done. Everyone in the industry simply expects this to be a truth and therefore there’s only the most trivial level of wrist slapping when an author is late with a chapter – or the whole book. There are a lot of down-stream impacts with editors, printers, etc., but this is just accepted as a cost of doing business.

However, a healthy organization is one where commitments that are made are commitments that are honored. I should say that they don’t have to be met every time – but they should be renegotiated when they’re not going to be met. That’s great in theory, however, most business people don’t operate with this high a level of personal integrity. They instead hide when they miss a commitment. They don’t really hold others accountable when they miss a commitment either. Everyone has entered into a tacit agreement that if you don’t point out when I miss a commitment, I won’t call you out when you miss yours. The problem with this is that it complicates the process of getting anything done because you never know whether something will happen – or not.

Holding everyone accountable, as Lencioni points out, is something best handled directly by peers. When a manager has to force accountability there’s an internal resentment that builds based on the confusion about who “ratted them out.” When peers are free to professionally challenge each other and hold each other accountable the leader doesn’t need to step in and the team will function more effectively. Ironically to get to this state the leader often has to start by holding people accountable so that everyone knows what to expect.

Behavior 5: Focusing on Results

Over the long term, a team that isn’t producing results isn’t a good team. I understand that there may be market factors, there may have been insufficient budget, there may be force majeure – but over the long term if a team isn’t producing – it’s not a good team. Some would argue that good teams can be put in bad situations. I’d agree – but then again good teams will get themselves out of a bad situation eventually. Ultimately the effectiveness of the organization will be based on results – and so too should everyone inside the organization.

In a sense, the focus on results is the natural outcome of accountability. Ultimately someone has to be or become accountable for the results just as the CEO is accountable for the overall performance of the organization.

Create Clarity

Most folks see the key change that lead to the industrial revolution was the development of the steam engine – however, I see the situation a bit differently. I see a situation where the standardization of parts. Suddenly we started to have consistent bolts, nuts, etc., which could be used relatively interchangeably. This may seem like a trivial, insignificant thing and in some ways it was. However, in other ways the clarity of having a set of standards allowed people to work together who didn’t know each other – and that lubricated the economy in ways that couldn’t be expected before.

Having a common standard or a way to communicate precisely between a set of people has a dramatic impact on the amount that can be done. We’ve all had situations where we have had misunderstandings with someone else. Where the word that you were using meant something to you – and something different to someone else. It was probably comical when you discovered the source of the miscommunication. However, that didn’t save you from the time it took to find the miscommunication.

In many of the leadership and change books that I’ve read such as: Switch, Good to Great, Leading Change, and The Heart of Change there’s a common thread of resistance to change. And a common message that sometimes things which on the surface appear to be resistance to change aren’t really resistance to change as much as it’s a lack of understanding about the change and when folks aren’t sure what to do by and large they simply stop and wait for clarity. However, when clarity doesn’t come it’s rare that they’ll seek out clarity or spontaneously start taking actions.

Even a small amount of fog in an otherwise clear message can add up to a big change. For a moment imagine a point with 360 lines radiating from the point in one degree increments. When the lines are very close to the point, the amount of separation is minute. It’s quite difficult to determine one line from another, however, as the lines project out further a great deal of space will exist between two lines even if they’re only one degree different. This is how clarity works. Even a small degree of lack of clarity can lead in an infinitesimally small error – until that error is projected out through the weeks, months, and years.

Ferreting out where there is a lack of clarity can be a daunting challenge. It involves not only the obvious work to address language differences and differences of interpretation but also the conversion of the generic agreement to a specific agreement. The old saying that the “devil is in the details” is true here as it takes time to think through even a subset of the different ways that an agreement will impact various departments – and to verify that those impacts are truly intended. One technique that Lencioni uses is the creation of a playbook which answers six questions.

The Playbook and Six Questions

When a football team takes the field they’ve got something that most organizations don’t have and that is a playbook. They know what the plays are that they’ll run and how to identify them. While it’s not possible to script out every part of every play on a football field any more than it is possible to script every part of a business, the playbook forms a common language and a standard set of operating procedures for how the team expects to operate before improvisation needs to happen.

In the book Heroic Leadership there was the concept of “our way of proceeding” – a set of guidelines and a worldview shared by the Jesuit team. This was described as a compass and not a checklist. That’s exactly what a playbook should be inside of the context of a business. It should describe the operating principles and approaches without attempting to be an exhaustive catalog for every decision.

To create the playbook Lencioni recommends that organizations answer the following six questions:

Why do we exist?
How do we behave?
What do we do?
How will we succeed?
What is most important, right now?
What must do what?

The answers to these questions form the basis for a playbook. In other words the core purpose of the organization – and it’s “way of proceeding.” Lencioni acknowledges that you can frame the purpose of the organization – the why do we exist question – in several different contexts and suggests these six categories:

Customer
Industry
Greater Cause
Community
Employees
Wealth

The second question, how do we behave, leads to a question of values. Lencioni breaks values into four categories:

Core – These are the unchanging values upon which the organization was founded. They’re essentially immutable.
Aspirational – These are the values that the organization wants to cultivate because it believes that they are necessary for the long term success of the organization
Permission-to-play – These are the values that they believe the market requires for any organization to participate. These are the values that every organization says that they have. In consulting it’s generally hiring only the best people, etc.
Accidental – These are values that just happen to be a part of the organization and may – or may not – be helping the organization.

There is guidance for the other questions as well – but ultimately the goal is to create a clear vision of where everyone is going and what they’re doing.

Overcommunicate Clarity

How many times should you tell your employees about your mission, values, and current goals? One more time than you’ve already told them. While leaders have had the benefit of working through and refining the vision the employees of the organization have not. They’re experiencing it like they would experience advertising. And in advertising you have to deliver a message seven or more times for folks to recognize it. Guerilla Marketing quotes Thomas Smith from 1885 which speaks of needing to see something twenty times before taking action. Whether it’s seven, twenty, or two thousand – it’s more than the once that leaders want to communicate it.

In an organization part of the need for repetition is simply to demonstrate commitment. Employees hear so many initiatives, goals, decisions, etc., that they are challenged to sort out the noise from the truly important pieces. Leaders on the other hand, driven by efficiency, hate the idea of having to redeliver the same message over-and-over again. Delivering the same message over-and-over again frustrates leaders who are always looking for a challenge. However, as Diffusion of Innovations pointed out, knowledge isn’t the same thing as changing someone’s attitudes, much less practices. Repetition is a part of changing behaviors – because the learning becomes more ingrained into the person. Repetition alone won’t drive a change in practices for everyone, however, repetition coupled with the innovators that can be changed with simple repetition can bring along the rest of the organization.

One way to create the kind of intimate connections necessary to drive behavior change is to leverage what we know about the diffusion of innovation. That is that people’s attitudes – and practices (behaviors) are driven differently based on the kind of communication. Mass media communications create awareness, however, close personal communications are often needed to push people into attitude and behavior changes. Lencioni recommends a practice he calls cascaded communications. This relies on managers communicating a message to their direct reports orally – that is person-to-person or over the phone. This attaches the message to someone closely connected with each person and therefore is more likely to influence their behavior. (I don’t know that Lencioni understood or didn’t understand the diffusion of innovations, however, the approach aligns well with that research.)

Reinforce Clarity

You can communicate and overcommunicate clarity, however, these require that there be continuous effort on the part of the organization to keep communicating the message. A better approach is to systematize some of the reinforcement of the communication so that it becomes woven into the fabric of the organization and requires less effort. That isn’t to say that you should stop communicating. Rather, Lencioni is saying that you should weave the communications into the fabric of the organization – and continue to periodically communicate clearly to the organization. Perhaps the most common – and least effective way of systematizing clarity is creating a corporate mission statement.

The Grand Platitude – The Corporate Mission Statement

Lencioni laments that in the 1980s organizations were sold the idea of creating a corporate mission statement and how hollow that mission statement was. It was so lofty and disconnected from the organizations’ real operating practice that it was a laughable exercise. Most mission statements despite their flowery words and generally positive positioning, are interchangeable with other corporation mission statements.

In my talks I speak of platitudes – dull, flat trite remarks especially one uttered as if it were fresh or profound – I use the corporate mission statement as the penultimate example of a platitude. So on the one hand, the recommendation is to systematize the continued communication of corporate values, on the other hand they cannot be encapsulated in a way that is seen as fake.

Hiring Practices

Even in the best organization, there are times when an organization will need new people to take up the corporate banner. This need not be due to people leaving for other organizations. Spouse’s jobs moving and retirements will still remove employees from the organization. On the positive side growth of the organization typically means hiring additional people. Thus the best long-term game for all organizations is to create a set of hiring practices that emphasize finding folks who share the worldview of the organization – who are ready and able to become committed to the values that the organization holds dear.

It’s all too easy to have hiring practices which are neither effective at screening for talent nor effective at screening for attitude. Lencioni discusses hiring practices – which I’ve seen myself – which are more like dating than they are like an organized process for identifying good candidates. Instead of focusing on the core beliefs and skills that the person will need to know, interviewers sit across the table from someone and talk to them about their background.

Developing a set of hiring practices that are designed to effectively filter people into those who can help the organization move forward both financially and on its values is a critical way that organizations can systematize the kind of organization that they want to be.

Refinement

Refinement is my own addition – not something you’ll find in the book. It’s been my observation that continual tinkering with the message — while keeping it stable at the core – is an effective way to continue to keep the message alive. The process of creating the values isn’t a one-shot thing. Instead it becomes a part of the culture to continually evaluate and reevaluate who the organization is. This in and of itself forces a consistent focus on what the organization is – and isn’t about. This is a way of converting what all too often becomes a one-time or periodic activity and converts it into a “way of proceeding.” Instead of big course corrections every few years everyone is all the time learning about what the values of the organization are – and what must be done to stay in alignment to those values.

Meetings

Perhaps it’s because one of Lencioni’s previous books was titled Death by Meeting or perhaps it’s just because most organizations are victims of how well, or poorly their meetings are run that he includes a section at the end of The Advantage on meetings. Having been involved with so many organizations over the years, I’ve seen a great number of styles of meeting. And despite some truly spectacularly run meetings, the par is – well – uninspiring. Even in good organizations the results of meetings are not very good. Lencioni offers a few clues as to why meetings are run so poorly.

Advocacy and Inquiry

Most of the time spent in meetings feels as if it’s a person lobbying for their position. They want to make their approach known. As was mentioned above in the mastering conflict section, people sometimes spend their time preparing their next argument, instead of listening to the other folks in the room.

However, healthy meetings are filled with people inquiring as to what the others in the meeting mean. They seek to fully understand what others are saying with inquiry. Not just the hollow and simple questions but ones that seek to fully understand the position of the other person. Learning reflective listening by restating what you heard the person say in your own words is an excellent first step leading to inquiry. Once you’ve reflected back what someone has said, you can ask if your assessment of the meaning is correct. In other words, the questions ask what does the impact of the idea look like.

Too often meetings are filled with advocacy and snoring. Another quick meeting tip is to actively engage every member in the room.

Meeting Types

Lencioni recommends meetings be broken into categories like this:

By having different kinds of meetings with different lengths and frequencies you can maximize effectiveness of the meeting time – if you have a strong leader to keep the meetings on track.

Big Company and Small Company

One of the things that struck me while reading The Advantage is how focused it is on large organizations. The problems described in the book are largely not problems that smaller companies have. In Lencioni’s defense, these are the kinds of clients he deals with – larger organizations who struggle with large issues of alignment, trust, and organizational health. I bring this up because if you’re running a small organization – or even a mid-sized organization – you may find that some of the advice here isn’t completely applicable to your situation. While the ability to identify unhealthy behaviors, to run better meetings, and systematize your operations are things that organizations of any size should consider, much of the content is targeted for larger organizations – which from my experience are much less healthy than their smaller counterparts.

My caution is that if you’re in a small organization without a hint of politics, you may find that this book is aimed for a different audience.

Converting Strategy to Tactics

At the start of this book review, I mentioned that it felt like there were still places in the book which were “and then the magic happens.” One of the areas, for me, that I felt like was sorely missed was the process of converting the vision and strategy into meaningful tactics. Having worked with organizations on alignment of actions to the strategy and vision, I can say that there’s an art to converting strategies into a set of interlocking tactics that lead to the strategy and that many times managers don’t have the right kind of mindset nor the level of clarity needed to get to the right tactics.

I’d love to see more about how others approach the strategy to tactics conversion.

Wrap Up

A practical framework for building a healthy organization is hard to come by so The Advantage wins with its framework for creating a healthier organization. Pick it up and get better alignment in your organization.

Book Review-Trust Me: Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma

Robert Bogue November 17, 2012 No Comments

It might seem odd that one of my most recent book reviews was Humilitas and focused on humility and now I’m reading about charisma. Perhaps your thinking is that the humility thing was just a phase. However, my favorite thought about humility is “power held in service of others.” One of the things that I’ve realized is that my intent is good. I really do want to help folks get more value out of technology, but sometimes the message doesn’t come out right. I’m like the awkward teenager at a dance, unable to make what’s in my heart come out clearly. I realize that we have all had at least one of these moments – even if it wasn’t at a dance. The thinking for me is to minimize the number of times when I’m not able to authentically communicate my intent to others.

To that end, and at the mention in Fascinate, I read Trust Me. While structured practically into “do this and you’ll get that” holds a great deal of wisdom and challenging questions. Unlike the previous two books that I’ve read and reviewed dealing with trust (Building Trust in Business, Politics, Relationships, and Life and Trust & Betrayal in the Workplace ), Trust Me is less about one-on-one trust and more about one-to-many trust.

First among the challenging questions is which conversation people believe. Do they believe the conversation you’re having with your words? Those well thought out, well-reasoned arguments about why your solution is right may not be what they’re paying attention to. In fact, it may be all of the non-verbal cues that they’re picking up on. The book eloquently makes the point that when your non-verbal language is in conflict with your verbal language your audience (of one or one thousand) will believe your non-verbal language.

This leads us to two important questions. First, whether our words control our gestures or vice versa, and whether we make decisions emotionally or rationally.

Words Leading Gestures

It’s common knowledge that we gesture to support our words. However, that common knowledge may be wrong. Ekman (see Social Engineering) is known for his work on micro-expressions and teaching folks how to read what’s happening inside of the mind of another person. These expressions occur very quickly and are then quickly suppressed by our higher level brains. So it seems like we move before we form the words – or even ‘think.’ If that’s true then how can it be that our gestures are formed by our words? Research has shown that we’re always trying to rationalize our world. That we’ll come up with an excuse for something we’re doing if we don’t know why we’re doing it. Patients with split-brain disorders will rationalize their choice of words when shown two different images that don’t relate. So perhaps our words come after our feelings and after our gestures.

If you’re a dog lover like I am, you might be fascinated by the research that was done about how dogs look at human faces. The uptake is that dogs look at the left side of our faces first, why? Well as it turns out, that’s the side of our face that tells our emotions slightly quicker and slightly more strongly than the right side of our face. It’s scary in a way that dogs have adapted to watching the left side of our face to get a slight head start on knowing what to do next.

So, are you still certain that our gestures follow our words? I’m not, or rather I’m certain that they don’t. It is right that people look at my gestures – my body language to see how I really feel.

Emotional or Intellectual Decisions

Gestures are one thing but surely, our reason is in control, or is it? I mentioned the split-brain disorder patients above and their propensity to explain so we know it’s certainly natural that humans will rationalize. However, who’s really in control? If you rewind to my book reviews of The Happiness Hypothesis and Switch you may realize that in the Rider-Elephant-Path model the rider only appears to have control. The rider can exert control for short periods of time but ultimately only within the limits of the emotional elephant – and only when the rational rider isn’t tired or inattentive. Coupled with the knowledge that we are fantastic rationalizers, is it so farfetched to believe that we decide emotionally that we want something and then we justify or rationalize our emotional decision? Well, that’s what Thinking, Fast and Slow seems to say. We’re slaves to our emotional (system 1) thinking.

The Nick Morgan’s point in Trust Me is not so much that we should give up well-reasoned, rational arguments – in fact he shows a framework for doing this. Instead the point appears to be that we all too often ignore the emotional conversation that’s happening in the midst of the intellectual argument. Much of the emotional context of the conversation comes from five scales on which your audience (of one or many) can be measured:

Open-Closed – Is the person open to your ideas or walled off from the possibility of reaching common ground?
Sincere-Insincere – Are they simply humoring you to get what they want?
Allied-Opposed – Are they in your camp or forming embattlements to lay siege to you?
Powerful-Subservient – Do they view themselves has having more power in the situation, or view you as being the powerful one?
Committed-Uncommitted – Are they committed to what you’re saying or merely interested?

Morgan encourages that everyone practice what he calls empathetic listening. It’s also been called reflective listening. The basic premise is that everyone wants to be understood and that by restating their information – in your own words – you’ve indicated that you do understand. The in your own words is important because a tape recorder can replay he words – by changing the words you indicate that you’ve assembled it in a way that makes sense for you.

There’s a subtlety in this as well, by carefully reflecting back what they’re saying you can establish the frame for the conversation. You can slightly shift what the person said into a frame that makes the outcome that you’re looking for easier. For instance, if your spouse says that she’s displeased when you don’t place your socks in the hamper, you can respond with “I hear that you’re happy when I put my socks in the hamper.” The meaning is the same but the rephrasing takes on a positive frame – and therefore is more likely to lead to better outcomes. (Framing is also covered in Thinking, Fast and Slow.)

Ascribing Intent

One of the challenges that often comes up when you begin to pay attention to the second conversations is determining the meaning behind what you’re seeing. Ekman was fond of saying that you can tell that someone is suppressing an emotion – such as anger – but you can’t reliably predict the reason. Said differently, you can determine that they had a flash of emotion and that they’re suppressing it but not the intent of the suppression. You could accuse me of something and see a flash of anger which could indicate that I feel like I’m going to get caught at something – but it could just as equally mean that I’m frustrated because I seem to be always accused of things I didn’t do.

One of the things that we do naturally is to ascribe intent to the things we observe in the world around us. If we go back to Thinking, Fast and Slow, we’re always on the watch for things that may be harmful to us. Predicting intent – no matter how poorly – is what we do. The problem is that we get this wrong so often that it’s laughable. That is it would be laughable if it weren’t so sad.

Consider a meeting of subordinates and two of them square off on an issue. One may be thinking that the other is trying to grandstand, to demonstrate how they’re better, or one-up the other. However, the intent can be completely the opposite – to prevent a respected peer from embarrassing themselves. Based on our perception, and trust, of the other person we’ll assign whichever intent we believe closely matches our expectations of them but who’s to say what the intent really is? In most cases I find that the person who was speaking rarely recognizes what their intent was themselves.

Four Steps

Morgan believes that there are four steps to creating authenticity and charisma. The four steps in Morgan’s plan are:

Being Open – Be comfortable as you would be with a friend.
Being Connected – Establish a rapport with your audience to make it easier for them to hear you.
Being Passionate – Express your emotions
Listening – To maintain your connection with the audience you’ll need to listen to them.

While I believe this is the right path, there’s an aspect of this that feels like “and then the magic happens.” To some extent Morgan leaves the “how” of some of these steps as exercises for the reader. This makes sense given that each of us is a unique creature and we’ve got different issues that we need to work through. However, I can see how it might be frustrating for someone looking for a recipe to realize that there isn’t a recipe as much as there’s a philosophy of cooking being covered.

While these rules are about communications in general, Morgan does have specific feedback about the verbal conversation – the rhetoric.

Rhetoric Rules

Morgan doesn’t ignore the written or spoken language – it’s an important part of the overall communication. Here are Morgan’s rules for persuasive rhetoric:

Persuasive rhetoric is about phrasing your arguments so that your listeners can hear them.
Persuasive rhetoric has a clear goal in mind and is usually transparent about it.
Persuasive rhetoric deals with problems and solutions
Persuasive rhetoric deals in stories, facts, and tropes.
Persuasive rhetoric passes the test of four critical questions:
1. Is it articulate?
2. Is there a real alternative?
3. Is the idea consequential?
4. Do the words shock but not surprise?
Persuasive communication cuts through the clutter of information overload by dealing with safety issues
Authenticity and charisma in content require self-revelation in this confessional age.

In some of these I feel like I do a good job – and others not-so-much. I’ve been a consultant for a very long time so I’m very focused on listening to clients and trying to reflect back their language in our communications. That’s quite directly the way that I try phrase my arguments so the listener can hear them. The more I can get into their lexicon, vernacular, or language the better.

Where I sometimes struggle is where I’m trying to shock – but not surprise. The difference here is subtle and it’s something that I remember from my comedy training. You can get a laugh by misdirection – it is the classic way to get a laugh. Make someone believe you’re going someplace and instead end up someplace else. However, there’s another way to get a laugh – a Duchenne laugh – tell a universal truth that’s undiscovered. For instance, in the SharePoint space most folks have either a governance problem – their environment is out of control – or the opposite problem they don’t have anyone using it. So when you put those two together – If you don’t have a governance problem then you must have an engagement problem – you’ll probably get a laugh because while people understand these things and it makes sense, they’ve never connected the two. The point about surprises is that any idiot can be different – the trick is be different in a meaningful way. (See Brand Is A Four Letter Word.)

Morgan also notes that intimations – not directly saying something – often have a magnetic or comedic effect. That it’s great to experience people who are able to communicate their idea without directly saying it. This is something that the misdirection of comedy teaches.

A final important point about rhetoric is about the tone of your voice as you speak. There’s two components resonance and presence. Presence is the nasal quality that makes the voice easy to be heard. Resonance is the reverberation that allows you to connect with others. By speaking at your maximum resonance point (Morgan explains how) you can more consistently connect with your audience.

Principles

Morgan’s principles for authenticity and charisma are:

When the verbal and nonverbal [communications] are aligned, you can be an effective communicator. When they are not, your audience will believe the nonverbal every time.
We interpret body language unconsciously in terms of intent.
In the nexus between the verbal and the nonverbal conversations is persuasion, and that’s concerned with leading someone else to make a decision. This is the essence of leadership communications.
Decision making is largely an emotional, and therefore a nonverbal, process
The source of our nonverbal conversation is deep in the oldest part of the brain in emotions, survival relationships, and the other fundamentals of human connection and our connection with our surroundings.
To become a persuasive communicator (and leader), you must first consciously master and then control your second conversation.
To master the second conversation, you must make yourself aware of your own unconscious behavior and that of others.
To control the second conversation, you must focus on your emotional intent rather than your conscious awareness.
To be perceived as an authentic public person, you must align your nonverbal and verbal conversations. This means aligning your emotional intent with your conscious thought.
Authenticity and charisma derive from becoming open, connected, passionate, and listening with and to your audiences.

Postures

Before I end, I have to share three postures that Morgan discusses in Trust Me. These postures start from a fully upright position as if the top of your head was being lifted by a string and from there small differences change the way that people will interpret your stance.

Submissive, Intellectual, Uncertain, or Deferential – Head forward of perpendicular
Sexually charged – Pelvis forward
Authenticity, trust, heart – Shoulders back but not tense, head high, small of back forward and stomach in

It’s been a while since I’ve watched old movies of Elvis performing but it is pretty clear that he had at least one of these postures perfected.

Spaces

I want to leave this review with one final piece. That is the impact of space. How close you’re allowed to get to someone demonstrates how much they trust you and connect with you. In the diagram below (which is to scale) you’ll see different levels of closeness and connectedness based on whether you have a social, personal, or intimate relationship with the other person. It makes a difference – Trust Me.

Public Speaking