Sunday, November 29, 2009

December 10, 2009 Speaking Engagement

I will be speaking to the San Diego chapter of  the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) on Thursday, December 10. This will be my last speaking engagement for the year, and it couldn't be for better bunch of business people. The meeting is free, but you MUST RSVP to attend. Get more information at http://www.sdincose.org/index.html

Note - there is a mention on the flyer that the speaking date is on November 19. Rest assured that the correct date is December 10. All the other information on the flyer is correct. I hope to see you there!
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Hurry for January Classes

To all of you that have already signed up, thanks. This is going to be an outstanding class.

To those of you that have not yet signed up and intend to have your employer pay for your "High Performance Communication" classes atarting in January, you may want to start talking to them about it! It is only 7 weeks away and you don't want to get shut out.
  
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Moving from Advocacy to Collaboration

I have spent the last few articles talking about how the use of the “advocacy” model is difficult to apply in daily life because unless, special steps are taken to assure the ENTIRE model is preserved ( rules for the presentation of evidence, 3rd party mediation, objective evaluators of evidence) , it is easily manipulated and ceases to serve its purpose as a critical decision making activity. So, how do we drive advocacy into collaboration when we see it?


We ask questions about content. Questions about content, when asked with sincere curiosity and openness, will begin to turn the discussion immediately from an exercise in satisfying an agenda into one that seeks to test all perspectives until the best decision can be made with the information at hand. The more information, the better informed the decision will be. In order to get back on a collaborative track, begin by doing the following:

• Assure yourself that the discussion is important. Use your energy to solve the things you consider “time-worthy”.

• Make sure you understand what the controversy is about. To test this, see if you can express it in one or two simple sentences and get agreement with the other party. If you can’t, you need to work on defining it (with them) until you both agree on the basics of the controversy.

• Understand what the purpose of the discussion is for each of you. Find a mutual purpose – something you both wish to achieve by resolving the issue. If your purposes are not mutual (usually they are), then at least be able to articulate what each of you would see as an ideal outcome from the discussion.

• Seek to understand exactly what the other party’s perspective is. Be able to articulate it so that they can agree that you understand it.

• Exercise empathy to understand why the other party may feel the way they do. Recognize that you may NEVER agree with their point of view, but understanding it, understanding why they hold it, and understanding that they have the right to hold it will help you see each other as respectful and reasonable. All of us are more willing to continue trying to reach an agreement with someone that we feel is respectful and reasonable than someone we feel is not.

• Be humble enough to recognize that your own view may be flawed, and courageous enough to work through it with someone else to make a new, stronger perspective.

• Welcome those moments in which you find errors in proposed path forward; the sooner you find the defects in the logic, the sooner you can strengthen it.

• Be aware of changes in the discussion that signal a move from discussion to distance. Reduce the distance between you and your counterpart by making sure that they know that you are committed to working things through with them and achieving your mutual purpose.

You can invoke this point of view at anytime in any discussion. You can control the degree of collaborative activity in the discussion. This is communication for the strong; the weak would prefer to manipulate. As your skills improve, so will your results. I will speak in detail of some collaborative approaches in the next newsletter.

Insist on great business results! Go to Pathfinder Communication

Sunday, November 15, 2009

Advocacy and Inference

When a statement is made in a discussion, it may raise a question from the other side. For example, if I say that the decline in my company’s stock price is due to our decline in sales, my sales manager might say “Where do you come off saying THAT!? You can’t blame the nose dive in the stock price on sales! The entire ECONOMY is tanking!”

It may not be clear to you, but the sales manager has just asked you for evidence – what is your evidence to back up the claim you made about the declining stock price being due to sales.

When evidence is presented in a discussion whether by collaborators or advocates, the evidence is expected to connect to the claim it is intended to back. That connection is called the “inference”. In my example, I would need to use some evidence and an inference of Cause to explain why flagging sales CAUSED the drop in stock price. I might use statistics to show that our stock price tracks sales and that when they drop, so does the stock price. The other side might say several things, all of which would hurt my case:

• Just because they track, doesn’t mean one causes the other. Maybe the stock drop causes people not to BUY our product.

• There are other things going on when the stock price drops; it’s not just sales

• There are other things going on that causes sales AND the stock price to drop!

Notice that the sales manager didn’t say my EVIDENCE was wrong; they said I came to the wrong conclusion or misinterpreted it. This is a very effective way to dismiss good evidence, so you must be VERY good in developing good inference




There are six types of inference of which I have listed four in the table above. When an inference is made, you should determine which of these four types it is. You should be able to describe why it works (if you are making it) and why it doesn’t (if your opposing advocate is making it).

Of course, as you know, I don’t support the general form of advocacy in a business setting and prefer collaboration in almost every case.

Next week, I will close on the topic of advocacy by showing how to change (even fiercely) advocative discussion into collaborative ones.


Insist on great business results! Go to Pathfinder Communication

Sunday, November 8, 2009

January Classes

There is still room in the public workshop being held starting January 22. This will be the only workshop planned for 2010 that will be open to the public so, unless your company intends to host a workshop in 2010, this is your shot.

You can learn all about the workshop series and sign up (via PayPal) here.

Don't be left out. If you prefer to pay by check, write me at

gregg.oliver@pfcomm.net

Insist on great business results! Go to Pathfinder Communication

Attacking Evidence

We have been talking about advocacy and, as one good friend and past student remarked to me last week, “Just because it isn’t the preferred way to communicate doesn’t mean you shouldn’t teach it.” And of course, she is right. We need to know how deal with things as they come to us. This week, as promised, I’ll cover how you attack a case. Next week, we’ll talk a bit about how to convert Advocacy discussions into Collaborative discussions (which IS the preferred way to communicate).


First, recall that there are three parts to the SPIRAL model; 1) the claim, 2) the Evidence to support the claim and, 3) the Inference that connects the evidence to the claim. The best way to attack advocacy positions is to attack either the evidence presented, or the inference.

There are three kinds of evidence; 1) the presenter’s credibility, 2) Objective evidence (evidence that can be independently examined and reviewed) and, 3) Social Knowledge (common knowledge, stipulation, or other things that “we all know” and “go without saying”). Effective attacks can be made against any of these.

First, we can attack the presenter’s credibility. The first run should NOT be personal. We can for instance, raise doubt as to whether the presenter really has any expertise in the subject at hand, or whether they actually have any first hand access to information, or if they are simply speculating. If we choose, we can make it more personal and describe their sketchy track record of being right on the subject, or their background and training is too lightweight for them really to grasp the subject under discussion thoroughly.

You can attack Objective evidence in several ways. First, if it is statistical, it is usually easy to show that it was not gathered properly. You can find more on that here. Other kinds of objective evidence can be dismissed if you can show that the evidence could also be attributed to something else. For instance, I was once in a discussion in which an opponent mentioned that “children with low birth weights tend not to attend college”. I pointed out that there are many of reasons that certain groups tend not to attend college. One of those groups is the poor, which is also a pretty good reason for having low birth rates. I finished by saying that if they had done any research at all they would have seen how incomplete their logic was and never had made the statement. So, even though they were correct, it appeared that they hadn’t thought out their position.

Common knowledge is easy to disrupt too. You can point out other things that are supposedly common knowledge that are untrue (cashew nuts are not nuts, for instance), or things that have ONCE been common knowledge (the Earth as the center of the Universe, for instance) and describe that just because we accept certain things as true today, doesn’t make them true. Finally you can point out counterexamples in order to dismiss ideas. For instance, if someone points out a certain team is a great team and claims it is because the individuals on it possess great individual talent, you can point out teams that contain no stellar individuals but still function well as a team, OR you could point out teams populated by superstars that don’t live up to potential of the individuals because they don’t work as a team. In other words, it is usually easy to find exceptions to generalizations and most common knowledge is based on generalization.

Next time, we’ll attack a position based on inferences.


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