Chapter 2. - Thinking About Thinking

Chapter 3. - Communications

Chapter 4. - Getting Personal

Chapter 5. - Training Your Brain as a Tool

Chapter 6. - Group Dynamics

Chapter 7. - Managing Performance Shaping Factors

After two weeks of frustrating attempts to get the people in his unit to respond differently, Roger begins to reassess. His unit is less productive. His people don't trust his new management stance. This isn't the first time Roger has come back from the company's latest training effort. Today he has a new load of work to do, and it's got to be done now, so he uses his old and familiar responses and gets the unit moving again. He will soon forget his new and expensive training. His organization has wasted millions in such attempts. What's wrong?

Real change cannot occur and remain in place until every individual in the group has learned to think differently. There is no way around that. It is not the manager. It is not the employee. It is the dynamic in which they are all held that determines how you will or will not manage. Coming from the society in which your organization is embedded, you and your employees think alike. You are doing a dance with steps you learned long ago. You need to understand Performance Shaping Factors clearly, each and every one of you, to make the change you say you want to make.

There hasn't been a new approach to the science of human behavior in a century. It has been stalled, entrenched (or, entombed) in a thought pattern that has tremendous support from individuals who have a vested interest in it. The same is true of management training. It has been stalled for centuries by people who have a vested interest in stalling it.

During the past half century there have been many management revolutions. The trouble with revolutions is that the end product is always the same as the original because the brains haven't been changed. New actors play the parts that were once played by those who were beheaded. ("Some pigs are more equal than others" - says George Orwell about Communist "equality" after the revolution). Management has been authoritarian always. It has never changed. It can't change. If you change the manager, the workers are uncomfortable until they force him back to his old and familiar arbitrary ways. If you change the workers, the manager doesn't know how to "get them to work". By way of revolution, various forms of permissive management have been proposed and tried during the past half century because the cost of authoritarian management is no longer acceptable. They have not worked.

Look at management as a behavioral scientist. Compare permissive management methods with authoritarian. What difference is there between them? In authoritarian management the manager tells you what to do. In permissive management the authority gives you permission to do "what you want to do", whatever that means. They are exactly the same thing. They are dressed in different clothing. Permissive management is authoritarian. It is exactly the same thing, and just as costly. Permissive and authoritarian management can't get the job done because they both use the same methods. In authoritarian management the authority (manager) uses fear to attempt to force the worker to increase production and reduce error. In permissive management the authority (manager) uses guilt ("Are you proud of this shoddy work?") to attempt to force the worker to increase production and reduce error. High levels of fear or guilt will increase error and totally disable some kinds of work. Neither authoritarian nor permissive ("country club") management approaches will work in this or the next century. Both authoritarian and permissive management methods are identical. They are parent-child models. They serve more to replicate and fight out childhood issues than to manage and to get the job done.

Managers and employees are de facto behavioral scientists, holding their organization together in whatever way they can. They are helpless because there hasn't been a new approach to the science of human behavior in a century. It has been stalled, entombed in a thought pattern that has tremendous support from individuals who have a vested interest in it. Holding the same haughty authoritarian stance as the traditional manager, the behavioral scientist may "deign to" "give permission" to his subjects, clients or patients as is "best for them". Never, however, will that behavioral scientist give up his haughty stance as social gate keeper who believes he knows more about how you think (and hence behave) than you do!

Traditional managers and therapists alike wish to continue to "control" what they think they control. They do this for dollars, power and personal satisfaction. They like to direct, give advice and pontificate on what's wrong with a person or on how the job is being done. Caricatures of both managers and psychologists portray people who control willing others in areas where the others (client or employee) knows better. Society, in accordance with the purposes of the human brain to replicate childhood perfectly, has stalled dead.

Meantime, during the century that these people have controlled "psychology" and "management", lots of new information has been discovered by researchers which does not fit the accepted forms of behavioral science. Some has been suppressed by the researchers themselves because they don't want to be identified as "out of the main stream". More of it just sits in journals where it resides unnoticed.

For entertainment, you can look at some examples. My favorite is the experiments published as early as 1916 which J.B. Watson did on Little Albert. The published studies showed how the experimenters, by suddenly clanging a tire iron over Little Albert's head while he was handed one of the white rats he liked to play with in the laboratory, reacted with tears and extreme aversion to the rat from then on. What is preserved in the research findings, and the published documents do not report, is that if Little Albert was allowed to suck his thumb while he was handed a white rat in the other hand, he didn't react with aversion. You aren't given this information because behavioral science still doesn't know what to do with it. They don't know how feelings change thought and behavior. They do not know what to do with behavior which doesn't fit their head set.

Or take it to another area of behavioral science, medicine. Your doctor learned that feelings are learned biochemical and physiological responses to your environment to prepare you to respond in an appropriate way, but which can cause physical illness. They and other behavioral scientists know that you learned to have feelings in one way, and I in another way. Learning means that you do your feelings lawfully, that is, the same way every time. But your laws are different from mine or the psychologist's. Only you know the laws which govern your feelings (you probably don't but you can discover them yourself fairly easily). You are the only expert on your feelings and the behaviors they make you do and the physical illnesses they make you have.

Some doctors, some managers and some therapists are beginning to find ways to shift from their parental stances to more participatory and mutual approaches. The behavior patterns of the doctor, manager or therapist are the same, from the same society (but different childhoods). All of these people in parental roles are facing the same problems. They are recognizing that they often do not know best. Some react with more parental authority and others with more support for patient or employee "empowerment". The manager forgets that you were employed because you can know things and can do things your manager can't. Some doctors, managers and behavioral scientists avoid the very information, held invisibly in thousands of invisible studies, and keep repeating support for theories which support their parental stance.

I stunned my complex technology audience, especially the trainers and psychologists, when I reported the studies over many years that state clearly that human beings do not break down as the stress becomes ever higher. They do, in fact, become more and more rigid and accurate in earlier and earlier behavior patterns, regardless of how inappropriate those might be. This information is important in many industrial and business settings, and vital when a pilot knows how to fly a 727 better than he knows how to fly the DC-9 he is flying. Almost no behavioral scientist or consultant knows this information. After I made that presentation the next speaker addressed my paper and stated that he had observed this fact eighteen months previously and then forgot it. He forgot what he observed "Because, as Tom Sargent just pointed out, behavioral science has no conceptual framework within which to hold this information." That's why, until you succeed in creating whole new paradigms for yourself, you will not become able to shift from your pre-industrial management stance. You will not be able to hold facts about human behavior (most of which you already have observed - like how you responded with your old car behavior in an emergency) and be able to apply them in your organization.

The information you are learning here is designed to help you shift how you perceive your job as manager, supervisor or employee. Further, it is designed to help you hold and sustain your new paradigm and especially your dynamic thinking. Nothing you are learning is static. As soon as you observe something the situation has changed. It has changed, but lawfully. Now you are learning the laws which govern those changes and you are using them. That permits you to understand how these things are changing, held in a constantly moving dynamic. You are a behavioral scientist.

When you think dynamically, you understand that "cause and effect" is a Newtonian concept which does not apply in a dynamic. In human behavior an effect can just as easily become a cause. When dogs cause a person to fear, the fear also causes dogs. Impossible? Meaningless? Not in human dynamic. People who are afraid of dogs notice dogs you don't see and see dogs which are only bushes (fear causes dogs). And you can dismiss that, but the person can't because they are just as scared as they would be if it really was a dog. If you dislike a colleague, dislike (of anything) will make you think of that colleague and increase your dislike. By now you understand the effects of how, in a dynamic, effects become causes of what was the cause and now becomes the effect. That is how it is in the workplace or in any group. Furthermore, nothing in human dynamics is the result of any one thing. You will soon learn to think dynamically and observe constant flows of multiple causation. That makes it impossible to blame or find fault. The whole dynamic, as a unit, is involved in the blame or fault, including managers and executives at all levels.

Don't expect a behavioral scientist to know this. Behavioral scientists will respond to your communications about this in strictly linear terms. If they sketch it for you, you will soon begin to observe a modern version of planetary epicycles, which you should look up and enjoy. What you are dealing with as a manager or employee is just not describable in usual behavioral science concepts. It requires the same paradigm shift that happened a half century ago in our understanding of the atom. The old behavioral science concepts are dead, and have been for nearly a century.

Because feelings, stress and emotion are idiosyncratic to each individual, they are avoided by behavioral scientists, and by this society in general. They, above all other aspects of behavioral science, elude the parental stance of the manager, physician or psychologist. While they are absolutely lawful (notice the laws of feelings around your workplace, the anger, fear and tears that you can predict), they are lawful only within that one individual. Each of us has a set of laws about our feelings that others often know only too well, and we pretend not to know. This fact makes feelings well out of the reach of managers, behavioral scientists and others who hold a parental stance. Feelings control perception, thought and behavior. They are the basis of behavioral science.

Feelings are physiological and biochemical responses of the human system to change, change in either the internal or external environment. They become "feelings" when they are sensed or "felt", that is, when the events in the organs of the body are transmitted to the limbic system of the brain. Emotions are the same phenomena when considered as moving or motivating (notice the word "motion" in the word "emotion") the individual who is experiencing or sensing them. Stress is undefined unpleasant emotions, usually of some intensity, although in more accurate uses of the word it refers to both pleasant and unpleasant intensities. In this use, pleasant intensities are termed "eustress", unpleasant are "distress".

Feelings arise from both the present environment and through past association. Entering an environment such as a room in which a feelings state was "caused" may stimulate the same feelings. Most interpersonal feelings are restimulated from early childhood learned responses and are intense. Because of their intensity they are likely to be very motivating, motivating to behavior which imitates childhood issues. Thus childhood reenactment becomes rampant in the workplace.

It is possible and desirable to become able to detach from the past intensities of childhood issues, particularly from those associated with conflict. There are several activities, such as Removing Roadblocks, which require that you set aside those intensities long enough to listen and tell accurately. Your detachment from childhood intensities will permit you to interact with a detached appreciation and respect for the other person. This clears the atmosphere for accurate listening and communication.

Feelings are the control valves of thought and perception.

Since your first moments on Planet Earth, you have been training your brain to do things for you. First you trained it to copy the behavior of those people the behavioral scientists call the "significant others" in your life. They would be your parents, older siblings or other care takers. After you taught yourself how to mimic their noises and gestures (especially those expressing intense feelings), you noticed that certain noises and gestures of your own (again, especially those expressing intense feelings), succeeded in managing (manipulating) their noises and gestures. So you trained your brain to mange your parents. This is how human beings learn. You train your brain as a tool to act for you. It is a much more proactive a process than most behavioral scientists will admit. And (we apologize) you can't blame it on your mother. One of the unpublished laws of human behavior is that behavior recorded with intense feelings is dominant over other behavior. That's why we observe so many heated and plain childish issues raging in some work settings.

When you think about yourself this way you will notice that there are two parts of you, the part that conducts the brain training and the part that is trained. That is, you might have taught your brain to generate either anger or sadness to attract attention. If so, today you are a depressed person or an angry person. Or are you? Think about it. You trained your brain to walk. You are not your walking. You understand that you have that walking somewhere, but it is not the part of you that trained your brain to walk. So with the angry or the sad. It is something you trained your brain to do. It is not you. Rather, the part of you that trained the other part of you to be angry in order to manage your parents better is obviously very clever. So your walking person is a different part of your brain. It is the part that you trained. Also, your angry person is a different part of your brain. It is the part that you trained.

Let's take this in two directions. Let's name the part of your brain that trained the other part of your brain the Aware Function. You will recall that you can also call it the SELF (using all caps so that we can distinguish this from all other uses of "self"). You, your SELF, has trained another part of your brain. That part responds automatically. It automatically replicates things you have trained it to do. We will call this other part of the brain the Automatic Function. We will continue to use these names for the two parts of the brain. (There are apparently some differences between this and the valuable left-right hemisphere concept. For example, intense feelings are almost always automatic, from the past).

The second direction we wanted to take the fact that you trained your brain to walk or get angry for you is that, since the Automatic Function is what makes you act angry or sad, or whatever your act is, it's not your fault. You will also discover that you can't just "change" it. The fact is, it's your Automatic Function. You trained it to be that way. You fix it. How? By adding a patch to it that makes it self destruct. This is the unlearning, described elsewhere, as in Book 1, Chapter 5 and in Chapter 5 of this book. You and others around you do not have to be plagued by what saved you ass in your childhood. Congratulations on inventing that behavior. Now quit it!

Having led you to observe and understand your two functions as we did just now, we will move away from that and come at them again from a completely different perspective. This will help you to hold this information about your own brain and that of others. Up to now, unless you took psychology at the University of Indiana, you probably believe that the human brain is infinitely complex and only understandable by the specially trained people with their mysterious tests, black bags and large bills. As my friend Paul Boyer said, after finishing our training program, "If the human brain were as complicated as we have been told it is, we would have figured it out by now". The human brain is so simple that a newborn child can operate it (without a manual).

Scientists who have studied the human being in the context of evolution (the "survival of the fittest") have noted that the human brain is the most adaptable item on Planet Earth. To survive, humans have adapted to hot and cold climates and to extensively different life styles and foods as they find themselves in different geographic settings. Recently, human beings have extended that to survival in empty space, and to survival in the depths of the ocean. Notice the kind of thinking all these different settings required of the brain. People who wanted to survive under these conditions had to think and invent new ways of doing things. They had to imagine new products to produce, ones that were completely unthinkable before new concepts were developed to make them thinkable. With this flexible brain they had to observe and understand changes in their surroundings (it's like new markets and changes in the old, isn't it). They had to be, they are, reflexive, open thinkers, or they and their organizations wouldn't survive. So the process of survival produced the Aware Function and placed it in the head of the manager and in the head of the employee, and they used it with delight and laughter and play until they invented what they wanted.

"Wait!" exclaims the sociologist. "Human beings are social animals. Their society is regarded as more important than the individual". For a society to survive there had to be a way for the individual to pass it along so that it would exist beyond the lifetime of any one individual. So the laws of survival produced a permanent, unerasable memory, bound together with a thought and computing mechanism which is so rigid that it will reproduce exactly what its owner trained it to reproduce. To do this, Mother Nature or Father God saw to it that the human baby (unlike a horse or a chicken) would be born prematurely. It would be popped into the world before it was complete, before its crust had hardened. In fact, the baby of the human can't walk (while the colt and the chick can, right away) for many months. The human child's nervous system isn't even finished.

This premature birth and rigid (reliable) computing system permits the baby to observe and then train its brain to perfectly replicate its family of origin. It learns every stance and behavior it observes. It stores them permanently. It reproduces them perfectly, even in all their diseased detail. (The Hartford Courant reported that studies indicated that managers who were abused as children were likely to abuse their employees. Isn't it exciting?) Then, as the child grows and is exposed to a wider society, it observes and trains its brain to replicate that also. The human brain is capable of reproducing its society of origin perfectly as well. Even after that society has significantly changed (technologically, for example), the human brain will replicate the society that no longer exists. It will do this mindlessly and powerfully. After all, that's how it survived. We are mindlessly replicating in business and industry a society which has long since evaporated. And then Father God or Mother Nature placed this accurate and powerful Automatic Function inside the human brain.

And God or Nature beheld what she had created. She admired it. She noted that this human brain had two often conflicting parts, the Aware and the Automatic. Then she giggled cruelly and said, "Suffer! Or, enjoy."

There once was a young man and a young woman who lived near each other in the City. They saw each other almost every day as they walked their dogs after work, and they longed to meet and to be with each other. But they were kept apart. They were destined to remain lonely. They were destined to long for each other. You see, their dogs fought viciously, so they had to stay apart forever. Because of this duality, the Aware Function that would connect with others and endlessly invent and create, and the Automatic Function that "must" act as it was trained, the workplace becomes a battle ground for this built-in contradiction. Your workers and executives would like to know each other, but their patterns fight viciously. They either have to stay apart or fight. It's also possible that they can decide to let the patterns go off and fight by themselves. Then they will become a new and efficient working system of human dynamic.

That's letting go, letting the patterns fight, but not buying into the fight. When you become able to do that (let the dogs go and do their thing) you can then take the steps which you want. With your aware intent, the clarification process of human conflict becomes easy.

Thinking is mostly processing information. The brain processes information in two distinct ways. The first and original way is through the Aware Function. This is the thought method that a tiny child first uses to explore and learn. As the child learns, the second processing method, the Automatic Function, is created by the act of learning. As the child explores, experiments and learns, a record is laid down that persists. This permits anything that is reinforced (repeated in one way or another, including imagination and fantasy) to become programming. That means that the child can forget what she has learned and go on to invent and learn more new behavior. What the child has learned can be relied upon to always be there and to replicate itself automatically and perfectly.

The Aware Function part of the brain is so flexible that it can imagine anything. It can invent and thus survive in all environments, from hot to cold, from under the sea to the surface of the moon. The second part of the brain evolved to assure the ability of the human being to be a social creature. The Automatic Function can replicate the past perfectly. What it learns is indelible and reliable. The first childish noises can be observed in the three year old bossing around the two year old. They can also be observed in the manager bossing around the children he has collected in his department. They can also be observed in the infinite varieties of resistance among employees.

The Automatic Function can be counted upon to repeat the past, so that the Aware Function can be freed up to explore and invent new ways to do things. When the brain encounters change, it becomes even more resistant to change and tries to use an old and reliable automatic response. Members of an organization which is dealing with change need to know how to manage the brain to think flexibly and how to discard old responses (both from childhood and from "how we used to do it").

The indelibility of the Automatic Function is well established. The way people in an organization do things become lodged in their Automatic Functions. They are capable of learning new ways of doing things. The brain is like a sponge, soaking up learning. What it can't do is forget. You can expect to observe in yourself and others the return of old responses. They lurk there, in the memory of the Automatic Function, to take over for you again. Old responses do this when they think it is time, not when you do. They can live your life for you and take embarrassing action on your behalf for a long time before you discover that you have "regressed".

A second reason (in addition to its indelibility) that old responses interfere with today is the immense capacity of the Automatic Function. Playing one day with the results of research on the capacity of each of the two functions, I calculated that the information processing capacity of the Aware Function is one one hundred thousandths of one percent of the capacity of the Automatic Function. Keep that in mind the next time you catch yourself filling out the form the way you were used to doing it last year, and not the new way you know perfectly well to do it now.

The information processing capacities cause problems of their own. The brain has the capacity to take in approximately three billion discreet bits of information every one second. Actual processing is probably "only" one billion bits per second. The lowest estimate is one hundred million. In remarkable contrast, the Aware Function has a capacity estimated at from twelve to forty two bits per second. After years of reading the literature and working with the results, we have adopted the German (Steinbuch) conclusions, that the Aware Function manages sixteen bits per second, while the Automatic Function manages a billion during the same second.

Small wonder that when there is any automatic response which might remotely fit a situation, it will come forward and act for you. For years psychologists have described how old responses of pigeons in a box become "extinguished" over time as they are taught new responses. Without reading the research carefully, and playing accurate statistical games, they rightly report that (with no stimulation of past responses) the behavior is observed later only incidentally. It is, they say, "extinct". It was just such "extinct" behavior that caused the pilot of the DC9 to regress to the more familiar 727 behavior in 1987, and to die with twenty seven of his passengers. They say that the fact that he had only forty hours on the DC9 against a thousand hours on the 727 that caused the crash. Statistics again. You will observe the 727 behavior less and less, but how much is less enough? Incidentally, you no doubt know that when the stress level gets high enough, the individual breaks down and becomes erratic. This "fact" is just plain false. The supposedly erratic behavior is exact replication of an older learned response. It may be the wrong response, but it is not erratic.

Because the Automatic Function is so persistent and unawarely manages so much information so easily, it lurks to destroy you unless you can cripple behaviors you do not want. It will return unawarely to outmoded manufacturing or office systems without your knowledge until you interrupt or reroute the undesirable behavior. You can do this through our process of unlearning, in which you add a new element to that old and indelible behavior. This new patch is designed to stop the old response cold, and automatically. It can be made to lead to new behavior. You can't put sixteen bits per second against a billion and expect to win. You can put new directions inside the old response and expect it to reliably end that behavior at the impressive rate of one billion bits per second. Play it smart. Play the odds.

With these two information processing systems you can engage in a variety of kinds of thinking. Most people do these automatically and unawarely. In most business circumstances you can't afford to just happen to think this or that way. In a nuclear plant the operator need aware and lateral thinking during an accident, while stress narrows thinking to logical and linear approaches. In low stress times operators become creative and do old procedures in new ways. This sometimes sets up the plant for an accident. They need exact and automatic thinking just when their minds become creative. This problem costs you millions in any work situation. Choose the appropriate thinking form for the situation at hand. Unfortunately, the brain will choose by itself unless you direct it. In a disruption or change situation, it will impose automatic responses which feel right, whether they work or not. You will learn to take back for your SELF the option of choosing your mode of thinking.

Recall what the effects of stress are on perception and thought. In general, an increase in stress level narrows the perception and thought. Most of us learned that in high school or college. When you raise your stress level you can "concentrate" and motivate your productivity. Low stress encourages free, aware, lateral and creative thinking. Deductive thinking is the rule under stress and inductive thinking in low stress. With experimentation, experience and personal training you can alter these rules.

Another significant aspect of thought is how one has learned to integrate the two functions. Each individual is different. An excellent fine artist uses both functions to paint a picture. She has for years gone through intense training. She knows how to draw, the rules of color and balance. She has developed style and has learned several approaches. When she looks at a blank paper she imagines images which she will paint. Then she begins. She uses her creative Aware Function to design and create the picture. Accurate strokes are assured by her Automatic Function.

The creativity comes from the Aware Function. The automatic and exact skills of her art come from the Automatic Function. In most human enterprises such an exquisite integration of the two functions, operating in concert, is necessary. Business can eat the cost of failure of effective integration. Other enterprises cannot. In most cases, the two functions war with one another. The Aware Function creates new directions for the individual, while the Automatic Function forces conformity to what has been the rule before. You will notice this phenomenon if you set out on a new direction and hear voices of objection in your head. "Too risky. Not right." You can set them aside by using the image of a committee, sitting around a table in your head, deciding what you should have done, what you must do next. If you make that image laughable, you will successfully unlearn those past learned recordings.

Understanding the feelings which alter how you think as bodily changes can underline how feelings are control valves for thought. Feelings are the opening up and the shutting down of various organs. Each "feeling" is a different configuration of your entire body. Every tissue, organ and system is altered by you in order to create that feelings, which is then detected in your brain. Simply stated, your body alters itself to be any one of a myriad of machines. Your brain is one of your body's organs and subject to change as your feelings change. You may be an eating machine, a hunting machine, a reproducing machine or a thinking machine. Each is a different configuration of the parts of your body, a different feeling. Each configuration supports or impedes various kinds of thinking. To fully appreciate this phenomenon, use your dynamic thinking. Observe the incredible integration of the your entire body. To help, consider that the mind is your body "at think".

"I'm sorry, but the CEO is contemplating his navel right now. Can someone else help you?" Doubtless that has never happened to you. If the CEO does meditate (many, in fact do keep regular appointments for this purpose) her secretary covers for her. In a way similar to laughter, which is regarded as making something unimportant, meditation is regarded as nonproductive time. Contemplation and meditation are required for some types of business work, and not for others.

Learning to know yourself, especially being able to separate your Aware Function (SELF) from your Automatic (bad habits?), demands low stress, personal ease and a meditative stance. Brainstorming needs a similar setting. For creative, lateral, inductive and breakthrough thinking, ease and relaxation are necessary. During the development of new products these abilities are vital. Some people are uncomfortable with the unguarded experience of such "out of control thinking". They can be excluded from team sessions which require creative thinking, just as the automatically creative thinker might well be excluded from the productive times.

Concentration or attentive thinking can be managed in such a way that it is either more like creative thinking or more like the logical productive thinking needed to move toward a goal. What it is designed to do is to raise protective walls around the thinking activity. Those walls are interesting. They are impenetrable enough so that the child can go to the concentrating Dad and get movie money from him without his being aware that it happened. But let a slight whiff of smoke drift by and Dad's brain suddenly shifts to attention to the possibility of fire. Concentration caused incidentally by high stress or other stimuli can produce tunnel vision. At Three Mile Island the operators could not "see" the warnings of an accident in progress. The accident that happened was entirely different from what they thought (wrongly) to be happening. Again, that cost billions. What does it cost you? Perhaps little enough so your outfit can eat it.

Logical, linear and deductive thinking is our most common thought form. We learn it by social conditioning and are taught it formally in school. The only difficulty this presents is that it is considered to be all there is to thinking, and that any other kind is not. Because other kinds of thinking interfered with logical thinking in school years (as in, "but what about?", and "what if?") and were dismissed or discouraged, we shy away from other thought forms as adults. They can even be frightening. I was told again and again, by a strictly linear and logical thinking father, to stop daydreaming.

There are many other ways of thinking about things. George Orwell described "Doublethink" in 1984. It is interesting that he accused the Communist controllers of using it to change how the people think, a method to do away with the memory. That's exactly what this text is about, only the person who changes how he or she thinks is you, of your own free will. Let's replace "Doublethink" with "acceptive thinking". It is the process of holding several mutually exclusive ideas in your mind at the same time, each as true. Always, way off in a corner of your mind, your committee will be saying, "outrageous", "unthinkable", "impossible", "it can't be". Do it. Then, become able to hold the ideas and opinions, beliefs, values and attitudes of your opponents as your own, and then become able to represent them to others. With this kind of thinking you have the advantage of understanding (perhaps better than he does) the views of your opponent. Practice this. It useful.

The most important new way to think for the purposes of managing a synergy or dynamic is dynamic thinking. You will find example and methods of learning and using it throughout this material. A universally believed myth is that structure (organizational structure) is the source of the resistance to change in business and industry. The reality, now becoming more and more obvious, is that the resistant structure is primarily in the human brain. How you think is hard to change. The other source of resistance is in that dynamic among human beings called variously "climate" and "culture". To manage that, you will need to begin to think dynamically.

Notice dynamics. For example, when I shut off the clock radio in the morning it goes of gradually, after the power is cut. It keeps receiving and playing, gradually quieter and quieter. That's because when I cut the power, the magnetic field (that builds up around a wire with current flowing through it) collapses. A collapsing magnetic field makes electricity flow through the wire it cuts. That runs my radio, even when the power is off. Then that electric flow stops, and its new magnetic field collapses, creating more electric flow. The Hartford station is still transmitting. My radio has no power source, no battery, no connection with the house current. Where does the power come from that keeps the radio talking to me? A dynamic has power of its own. It has accumulated power from the time it has been on. It has a life and laws of its own. My radio continues to speak to me. This continues as a dynamic until it is imperceptible. Think about this dynamic system. To do so you must use dynamic thinking. Begin to train yourself now.

Apply it to anything dynamic. The boss orders a new whatziz, due by the end of the day. He gets it. But he loses a day on another project. He hollers at the people who were responsible. Whose fault is it? Who is to blame? Nobody. Everyone. Note that fault and blame are linear concepts. They will destroy your dynamic thinking. Follow the sequences, millions of them. Yesterday he wouldn't listen to a request to prioritize projects. "Just get it done". Use the interpersonal meaning of behavior. Make up how he was feeling. How today he might have prioritized. Think dynamically and notice how in your organization, it has a life of its own, laws of its own. Blame and fault are meaningless in such a setting. Explore. Play with it. Teach yourself to think dynamically.

After you have learned to think dynamically, after you are able to immerse yourself in the dynamic of human affairs, explore these linear thinking concepts. Let's start with "blame". Whose fault is it that the deadline was not met? This is a traditional pastime in organizations, and it becomes serious when the blame is successfully made to go all the way down or all the way up. If the copy was delivered to Jane ten minutes earlier she would not have had the other project started. If Fred had not lost that paragraph during his edit, Frank could have been on time with his work. Fred would not have lost the paragraph if the computer repair person had gotten to Fred's computer before he worked on this project. The computer repair person would have been on time if Jane had called five minutes earlier, before he went on another job. She would have made the call if Fred had not also requested help with the project that ended up late.

In a classroom of small children the teacher asked Bobby why he hit Johnny. "Because Johnny hit me back first", was the correct response of this small dynamic thinker. Once the project is in the hands of a unit or team it is in the hands of the dynamic. It's nobody's fault. It's everyone's fault. In fact, fault is meaningless. There's a breakdown, a glitch, in the dynamic.

You may recall that Sally was late for the meeting and her input was lost. The project went on with band aids. That's really why the deadline was missed. Sally did not keep her commitment to deliver the material for which she accepted responsibility. Sally, it seems, was in a bad car wreck. Someone was killed and she was slightly hurt. She was not at all at fault, according to the linear thinking police. So it was not Sally's fault she was late. Right? Fault doesn't exist. The only fact is that Sally did not keep her commitment. While you are struggling with the unfairness of that statement you will miss the truth you could discover if these linear concepts didn't keep interrupting your dynamic thinking. Why did the unit or team fail to set up an alternative plan? "Why" leads to "because". Linear thinking. To explore how the unit failed, conduct an open conversation. Think dynamically.

Besides being a "blame" term, "why" is linear, leading to "Because". In dynamic thinking there is rarely one answer to such an inquiry, so if you ask "Why?" you will miss most of the answers. I recall listening to the operators at Johnson Space Center after an aborted training mission. "I want to spend the weekend sorting out how I came to neglect the acceleration, as required by my manual, which I wrote". The response from another operator was, "I guess we all need to spend the weekend exploring how that fact escaped our attention". That's dynamic thinking.

How did we come to neglect having options on so important a meeting? That's the question to ask. Then you can identify and correct the holes in your dynamic, your process. That's dynamic thinking.

The brain's capacity for change is extremely limited (to one one hundred thousandths of one percent). Dealing with change is emotionally draining. In marked contrast, the brain's capacity for exact replication of the past is both effortless and incomprehensibly huge. Those are forces which will defeat your attempts at change. The brain will always go back, automatically, to what it learned in the past. It is very reliable. Expert, in fact, at doing what it always has done. Change has to be carefully designed, slowly implemented and powerfully sustained.

New Zealand Airlines had a tour trip over the South Pole. On one of the tours it was so cloudy that nothing could be seen. The pilot dropped to a lower altitude, hoping that a break in the weather would let his passengers see the area. His engineer warned him that he was heading for a mountain. The pilot rejected the message because he didn't want to conform to the new information and thus disappoint his passengers. The rest is recorded in the famous black box.

In offices and on factory floors communications are notably bad. Most of those communications can be cleared up with simple methods. The vulnerable points of communications are the simple acts of listening and of giving information. By now you understand that nothing in human dynamic is simple. You have merely to insert the PSF "Interpersonal Meaning of Behavior" and a simple act such as stating the time or hearing the communication of what time it is can become complex beyond belief. Therefore, merely describing or learning new behaviors is not enough. They must be put in place against a torrent of objection from dynamic forces which began in childhood and dash forward to block what you intend today.

A mother shouts "You aren't listening to me". She means that the child is failing to do what she wants. In childrearing there is usually no room for the child to hear and to not do. Hearing and doing are associated into one action. The child develops patterns of not hearing in order to not have to do. Because they were connected in childhood, they are connected now. We associate listening with having to do what we hear. So we continue to use childhood responses of not hearing, or not hearing well. This is a powerful block most people have in communications. It requires an active determination to hear accurately.

To train yourself to listen accurately and attentively, learn to use active listening. You can think about ten times faster than the other person can speak. Your mind becomes active during that "lag time". Notice how you often find yourself thinking about another concern and failing to hear the message. Or you are already formulating an answer wrongly based on the first few phrases of your "opponent's" message. Or you believe that this jerk isn't worth listening to, or that his message does not deserve the support of your even listening to it. These are usual rationalizations for not listening and for your attention to be miles away.

So, don't listen. Tell him to screw. If, on the other hand, you are required to know the information, or this is your enemy and you need to understand his plans for attack, you had better do something about your inability to listen accurately. When you choose to listen accurately you can use the lag time in a congruent way. That means your listening must be accompanied by congruent activities to harness your mind while listening. Even (or, especially) when you are listening in order to find a way to defeat the other person, learn to appreciate the other person and what he is saying. Use congruent activities such as appreciation of the speaker's voice, vocabulary, appearance and expressions to help you hear the message. Don't rule out snide statements such as "you sure are good at destroying other people with your erudite words." The point is, if you want to hear a message accurately, use the lag time for a congruent activity, otherwise all those old responses from childhood and elsewhere will take your attention away and block the message. Presumably, you won't have to listen to irritating messages or irritating people all the time, but when you can listen to them you have learned active listening.

Reflective listening is a method which fully considers the message communicated. Socially, that carries the interpersonal meaning that you agree with the message. Reflective listening communicates the fact that you are seriously considering the message. The usual meaning from childhood is, "Since I have heard and considered your position I am honoring it and may soon agree and then have to act on it". To learn reflective listening, you will have to set aside all this childhood noise.

Reflective listening is a means of assuring that a communication has been heard and is being considered. When a person says something to you, you state back the entire content of the message in order to give the opportunity to check whether the information you received is the information she meant to transmit. Reflective Listening is especially useful in conflict, assuring that communications are clear in spite of distress. Once you learn the process, use it occasionally to keep all communications accurate.

When you reflect and use the same words, you are parroting, and that may be experienced as mocking. Parroting fails to indicate that the message entered your brain more than superficially. In reflective listening you will make sure that the reflection is not like a mirror, but in your own words. That means that you had to think about the message. It communicates as friendly and appreciative.

Communicate back to the other person the entire content of her message in your own words so that the she has the opportunity to correct it. Do it in a fashion which assures the other that you have thoughtfully considered his opinions and concerns. When appropriate, include reflections of the feelings that he has communicated. Use phrases like, "You are angry that I " and "When I , I frighten you". Keep those statement as close to giving observable information as possible. Avoid judgments.

If you experience intense distress with the content of her message, this will press you to add to or subtract from the communication in order to deal with your own feelings. Deal with your feelings another way. Do not add or subtract from the message unless you intend to. Catch yourself at it and interrupt that tendency. Learn to use additive or subtractive reflections. Subtractive responses can suggest to the other that they could reduce their investment in what they are saying and additive responses can be encouraging of the actions implied in the communication. Use those only when you choose to. Beware. Your automatic responses will use them to play games.

Use reflective listening as a method to assure a completed communications cycles. It assures the speaker that the information is being thoughtfully considered. When reflective listening is used skillfully it returns a message to the speaker which contains all the information of the original transmission. This confirms correct reception of the information. Use your own words to communicate that you are considering the message. This is reassuring to the speaker and reduces the distress she may have had about the issues.

Next learn Reflective Listening when you have a powerful investment against the content you are reflecting. Investment is an emotional value given over to a position or opinion. After you have argued or debated long enough with another about an issue, you have become emotionally invested. When you have an investment in my thinking you are a nice guy, and I say to you, "You make me angry when you don't listen to me" you are likely to reflect that, "You are upset because you think I am not listening to you". "Think" is a subtractive statement often used by people reflecting what they do not want to hear. It is a failed communication. I communicated that you do not listen to me, and you carefully diminished it because of your investment in the accusation not being true.

To accurately reflect a communication in which you have an investment you need all the SELF Confidence you can muster. You might exercise your Grounded and Centered Stance (see the next chapter). Then focus on the fact that you are reflecting what I am saying, not honoring it or agreeing that it is accurate. You reflect so that I experience a complete cycle, including the fact that you are thinking about how you might not be listening to me. Save your belief of what is true for a later communication when you will give that information.

Having dealt with the listening part of communications we are ready to look at giving information. Once again you can expect distortion to come from all areas of the dynamic in which these communications are taking place. Almost anything you say will take on interpersonal meaning, some yours, some the other person's. It's almost a given that when someone gives information others will grasp onto guesses about "why", interpretations about its "real" meanings and judgments about the person communicating. These are all static on the lines. You need to be increasingly prepared to clear it away.

Giving information starts with describing only the observable information. Practice this as often as you can and notice the interpretations you may add, especially as slight stress is stimulated. For example, Mr. Jones has just been given some information by Mr. Smith. You observe and give the information that Mr. Jones is getting red around the neck and face, and sweat is beginning to form on his forehead, that his speaking is noticeably louder and more rapid. That is giving information. Be cautious as you continue. If you communicate that Mr. Jones is angry, that takes one step toward interpretation. When you add that he is wrong and has no right to be angry, that is a judgment which adds more static to the lines of communication.

Learn to give information from an easy and centered stance and observe that when you are upset you are probably skewing the information giving. Practice until no amount of stress will make you lose the ability to give information accurately. General Chuck Yeager was able to focus on and write down flight information during a crash that he believed would result in his death. An effective way to learn this process is to look at the chair. Say, "This chair is red. The desk is brown. I am tall. The book is blue." Then you might say aloud, "I think you rejected Smith's information too quickly, Jonesy". Don't try to prove it or document it. Just say it like you did about the chair. That's giving information.

"I Statements" are a form of giving information which offers words about yourself. Most of us grew up learning that self revelation is dangerous. Parents and sisters and brothers took advantage of us, so we learned to be concealed and devious, holding our cards close to our chests. When we engage another in communications about differences of opinion, belief or concern we soon learn that we match each other in concealing our real beliefs and opinions. We attempt to dig information out of others (making them reexperience the danger of letting information slip out) and we conceal ours. Making I Statements can seem dangerous and feel frightening. Be prepared for this.

We usually conflict with statements like, "You make me very angry when you take my ideas as your own". That's a you statement. Notice how, "I feel angry when people take my ideas as their own" is an open self revelation rather than an accusation. It will feel vulnerable at first. Notice that neither statement reveals more information than the other, while the "you" statement restimulates defensiveness.

You will need your Grounded and Centered Stance (next chapter) to be effective at this. Give the information about yourself slowly, deliberately and carefully. You are learning to be able to use I Statements as a form of self revelation. Be cautious. Reveal only as you learn when to and what to reveal. Do not reveal information which can be used to your disadvantage. Train yourself to use I Statements regardless of the feelings, but with careful regard for the realities and consequences.

At first all these skills will be awkward to use. After you become familiar with them they will gradually slip into your own unaware. They will slowly change from skillfully learned behavior until they seem to be instinctive responses. As they are integrated with the rest of your social skills you will use them without an aware thought, in ways that assure other people of your attention and interest in them. Clear communications skills are the lubricant for effective human interaction in any setting.

A few decades ago libraries were depositories for books. As a career counselor, I placed many people in libraries because the success rate for the sort of person I placed there was high. Experience dictated that individuals who feared interpersonal contact would do well as librarians. Then it happened. Libraries became information sources. The job of librarian became intensely interpersonal. This was very upsetting to many of them, and they didn't know why. I was involved in retraining hundreds of librarians to deal with their personal issues and retiring personalities in order to become once again excellent at their now redefined jobs.

At that same time management was confronted with similar change. Troubled organizations sought new ways to keep a flow of productive work going among a work crew with new beliefs and values, and in a world which was changing so fast that old ways of managing, of manufacturing and of providing services, no longer worked. I was involved in the development of a new organizational structure for Olin Industries at that time. Similar work was done in countless other organizations. Group management and participatory decision making, team actions which crossed departmental lines and evaluations of superiors by employees were instituted. Personal growth was expected at all levels of employment. All of this disappeared as managers learned that they had to deal with their own personal issues and attitudes. They weren't ready.

The necessity still exists. Managers can no longer manage as they did and produce effective results. Employees can no longer function as they always have, and stay employed. Every individual must learn to hold new attitudes, act in new ways and perceive themselves and others differently. All of this is extremely personal. Perhaps it's the kind of stuff that one shares with his analyst, but not in a work setting. The resistance to this requirement of the times is still there. We just don't want to change, but we want others to change. But the necessity won't go away this time. Your business can't afford to perform as it has in the past. Sooner or later, at your present employment or the next, you will deal with these issues. So, why not take a page from the book of the courageous librarians and start now. This stuff is personal. You have already started. Keep going.

SELF Confidence is a clear assessment of your qualities. It is hard to hold before the social conditioning of false "modesty" and its opposite, the "I can too" stances. They serve to distort perceptions of your major assets. You will function as well at work with these distortions in your personal specifications as a tiny balsa wood stick trying to substitute for a pine two by four as a wall stud.

During the past years of floundering attempts to change how we perform at work, self knowledge and self esteem have been high on the list. In countless approaches, all involving sometimes painful personal experiential exercises, workers from various levels have had to participate in this or that workshop. This area has dwindled because it just didn't prove effective. Especially, as individuals increased in self knowledge, their esteem was likely to go down, not up. This was because all those lousy little habits, which you and I denied, avoided noticing and fought with others about, had to be included as part of self knowledge. Then, you discovered, they are extremely hard to get rid of. When you separate the part of you that thought up these habits from the habits themselves you have your automatic response mechanism (the Automatic Function) and your SELF (Aware Function). They are different. One is the inventor, learner and intender. The other is how you learned to walk, how you learned to talk and how you learned to get angry or sad. Your unpleasant habits are yours, but they are not the same as your SELF. Just as your walking isn't you. You are responsible for those learned responses. It's just that they are not you.

All that time and energy spent on getting to know yourself was wasted, unless you made this distinction. You can recognize some pretty bad things that you automatically think and do, but these do not take away from you, the SELF that thought them up in some upsetting childhood situation. You can even begin to unlearn them, that is, disrupt them. Your SELF you are stuck with. SELF Confidence is the knowledge of and appreciation for that part of yourself which has always run your life (when your learned responses will let it). Let's start looking for the real "me", the SELF that developed them.

SELF Confidence is an accurate appraisal of your own personal specifications. Finding your SELF will happen when you are in a contemplative or meditative state. Your SELF seems to be the awareness you may have been noticing within relaxed ease. You can see it as randomly free while inventing during low stress brainstorming. Learn to relax. Picture yourself in a place that is special to you, perhaps a beach or a mountain, perhaps beside a stream or sitting on your bed or in your favorite chair. In this Special Place, reach out and touch something. Notice how it feels. Say your first name, Relax and sense your body touching the chair or standing. Connect your first name and what you are touching. Notice how the rock you are sitting on is different from the trees. Notice how you are different, too. Notice some of the qualities, specifications, of the water, the bed spread or the air. Notice some of the qualities of you. Notice three that you like, and associate them with your name, what you touch and the pleasantness of being in that Special Place.

Notice and write down the qualities you have named. At first they are likely to be things like "good manager" or "good worker". Omit the "good". It's a judgment, not an observation. Then notice the qualities in the roles of manager or worker as you do them. When you install a wall stud, it is not a "good stud". It is a piece of pine with specifications. It is solid and strong. It is of a specified length. Those are qualities. Perhaps as worker you are persistent. Write it down. You are careful, accurate, willing and strong. These are the specifications, the qualities, which are of your SELF.

Perhaps you are responsive and you are preoccupied. You walk by a fellow worker and don't even say "Hello". You are still and always a responsive person. You just didn't happen to do it right then. If you have a high IQ, you are capable of doing stupid things. Even while doing something stupid, you are intelligent. You can't not be. Get clear on this. The chair is red, the table is brown and you are intelligent. The chair may be broken, the table may be upside down and you may have done something stupid, but you are still intelligent, the chair and table didn't change their colors. Find out who you are and what your specifications are, and then expect that you will be more accurate about what you can and will do as a worker in this job.

You can extend this exploration in many ways. Take a quality and see it at work. Explore associated qualities. Then do the same qualities (you are the same person) in a hobby, society or other activity and notice how new specifications and qualities show up. Describe your qualities as a book or movie character might if he or she knew you. Your collection of personal qualities will continue to grow.

Your assets, the qualities you used as you learned to walk, to talk and to manipulate or copy your parents and to invent responses, are what you bring to work every day. You may have learned to hide them as a child. You may have had to conceal your independence, your self reliance, your determination or responsiveness. They are still there, even if buried under whatever behavior patterns you learned to hide them. Your SELF isn't doing all this. Your SELF just is.

You can tell a lot about people by how they hold themselves. You can even anticipate what might be said and how it will be said, just by the stance. A human being is integrated.

Some of what you are beginning to do will require a stance or two that may be unfamiliar. It is sad to say that if you lose the stance that goes with your intended action, you are likely to lose the action also. You may even get yourself into a stance which is antagonistic to what you intend to do, and how you would like to perceive yourself. The Agreement Strategies, for example, require a stance that is open to possibilities, unpredictable change and accessibility. You will learn to let go of investments. There is one stance which is basic for all others. When you master this you will be able to move into any other stance instantly. Your SELF Confidence will be held in a Grounded and Centered Stance.

Stand and hold yourself proud. Look, with the eyes of your imagination, at a sunrise over a place that is pleasant and important for you. Smile. Now try to be depressed. Notice the two are incongruent. All aspects of your body and mind conspire to support the one emotion of pride and pleasure.

The Grounded and Centered Stance (GCS) is designed to automatically help you hold and experience your solid SELF Confidence under all kinds of stress and negative stimulations. Complex technology operators use this to regain cognitive flexibility when a sudden accident confronts them. Surgeons use it to recapture clear awareness after something unexpected and disrupting happens during surgery. Managers and employees use it to regain accurate perception and thought during conflict or other disruption.

In order to be able to use the GCS you will identify it carefully for yourself and then practice and reinforce it until it becomes automatic.

Stand and hold yourself proud. You are on the ground. Sense the floor or ground under your feet. Let yourself experience being connected with Planet Earth. Tighten all your muscles and then relax them. Notice how you are relaxed in different areas of your body. Notice ways you are tense. Tighten again and then release and be relaxed.

Notice a rock that you see often. It is unmoved by anyone's criticism. It is merely there. It is. So are you. You Just are. Grounded. Present. Aware. Solid. Proud.

Your stance is centered. You are balanced. Notice how being off balance will change how you think. Recall what you know of the martial arts. Many martial arts exercises are balancing and centering exercises. Hands together, palm to palm, raised skyward, thrust slowly forward, then drawn back and up to the sky again. Balanced. Centered.

I once was doing work with a man who kept being so upset about his partner he couldn't think straight. I knew that he did Tai Chi every day. That's the slow moving balancing exercise the Chinese do in the mornings and at noon. I instructed him to stand in the middle of the room and do Tai Chi. Then I asked him to tell me about his partner as he continued Tai Chi. He discovered that as long as he did Tai Chi he could talk about his partner clearly and accurately. When he got into the upset material, his childhood responses, he would lose his balance. He chose to talk about her from balance and clarity, and found some important new information about their relationship.

The purpose of the Grounded and Centered Stance is to help you find a balanced position from which to do your thinking. Some useful thoughts and information can be found while thinking during stressful upset. What you cannot do is to think clearly. You cannot think thoughts that you can count on and that you can base either personal or corporate decisions on, during upset. For example, perhaps a disruption leads you to respond with aggression. It may be effective, or effective for the moment. Give some clear thought to that response by becoming grounded and centered. What do the results, even the long term results, look like from there?

When you learn to be able to return to your GCS you will be able to count on its aware and flexible thinking process. From there you will be able to initiate and control any automatic responses you may choose to use. One behavioral scientist calls the Aware Function the "Executive Function" because sometimes it acts that way, in charge of all your other thought processing. You can use it to put chosen thought processes in place.

You can train yourself to use this GCS any time you want it. At first, stand. Notice how you are grounded and centered. Know that you are. Feel it. Experience it. Practice it. Reinforce it.

Another individual uses a ski pole. When she holds it she is schussing down the mountain. At first, she actually stood and held one ski pole in her hand. Now she can sense it as though it were there. In fact, she can sit and hold it in her imagination and get herself rapidly into her GCS. I have a stone which I wear as a string tie. When I touch it I am standing on ancient rock up the side of Red Lodge Mountain where I helped develop a ski area. As I write this now I feel the excitement and connect with the hundreds of times I visited there. I become suddenly grounded, proud, solid and free. It is a very solid Grounded and Centered Stance for me. From there I can choose to think in any mode I wish. This is one of several GCSs that I can call present in an instant. Find one or more of your own and reinforce them until they return for you quickly and reliably, especially in stress.

As you build your GCS, attach some clear and solid personal qualities to it. My stone reminds me that I am knowledgeable and imaginative. I picture the hot and humid climate in which this stone formed. I experience my connection with Planet Earth and my concern for it. It makes me imagine the valley before me on that mountain side, a beautiful and fertile valley once owned by the Crow tribe. My qualities can go on for ever as I scan such connections with my stone. My Grounded and Centered Stance serves me well. I associate my first name with it and with my stone. The scenes, the stone, my clarity of thought and my own qualities all associate together. This becomes a strong place from which to deal with anything before me. It has served me for years.

This ability to regain cognitive flexibility can be vital in complex technology. It is essential in some of the strategies you are learning, especially in Removing Roadblocks, which can be stressful. When you need to listen accurately, when you need to make an important decision, when you need to think and act accurately, you need to be able to return to your Grounded and Centered Stance first. Then you can effectively stave off attack or restore effectiveness during disaster. Go slow. We do so much so fast that there is no hope of changing how we communicate. Slow it down and notice how information is being used by you and others. Check it out from your GCS, and then proceed.

Now that you understand what a stance is, there is one which will serve you well in using the Agreement Strategies. That is a stance of openness, of inclusion. It represents an abandonment of childhood defensiveness and self protection. Hopefully this will become the stance required by your group climate. You can hold this by sitting with your legs and arms open. Notice when you find yourself in a closed stance, with your arms closed across your chest and legs crossed. This is probably the result of some fear stimulated by the circumstances. You can motivate yourself to hold an open stance by registering that others are observing your closed stance and are acting, perhaps against you, in accordance with your closed stance. When you hold an open stance you come across as powerful. You are at ease holding your position in the setting. Do not neglect to protect yourself when that is necessary. This is a giving up of both child and parent protective stances, never of real protection. Learn to know the difference between feelings of risk and real risk. Do not let the feelings stop you. Do protect yourself from the sharks.

You may wish to move to this stance from your GCS. It will take more of your power into your openness. I learned this by watching myself on television talk shows. At first I held myself close. I was concerned that I might make a mistake and come off poorly. I was afraid. I could observe this on the TV monitor. I requested a monitor where I could see it during the show, just like the mirror you can use to practice your stances. I taught myself to hold an open stance. Then I discovered this truth. I could make all kinds of mistakes from the open stance and then correct them, and have it be a part of my openness, which, in fact, it was. My presence changed radically. How you hold yourself, your stance, communicates far more about you than you might care to discover. So make your stance portray what you choose.

Be sure to practice your dynamic thinking while you are exploring and practicing stances. Notice your own dynamic, how your thinking changes your stance, and how your stance changes your thinking. "What's the matter?" is a common response to no communication but a changed stance. "Wear a smile" is an overused but effective admonition. These make a difference in how you think, how you behave. Notice the effect on others. One of my dictionaries defines stance with a first meaning of how a person holds his body, and a second meaning of how a person thinks about something. It defines attitude as how a person thinks about something, and a second meaning of how a person holds her body. The two areas, thought and posture, are held within the same personal dynamic. You can change one with the other. Consequently, each area has an impact on the dynamic of any group the person happens to be in.

The effectiveness of the Agreement Strategies depends more on the stance and attitude of the participants than on any technical form of communication. Learning the skills which produce benefits from Removing Roadblocks will take forever if you do not hold the attitudes which obviously surround them. Four elements are given for the effective use of this strategy. They can be covered simply by holding a genuinely open stance, open to the person and open to the message being communicated.

Get into exploring the possibilities which flow from strategies such as Removing Roadblocks. Even welcome what you may discover about yourself. Suppose that you are being wrongfully accused of behaving in an unpleasant manner. The childhood response is defensive and protective. Perhaps you have been accused of this before. Take this opportunity to engage this person in helping you discover how you come across this way. Think dynamically. Such a stance is disarming. If you resist a possible truth about yourself it will live to get you again. Let go and discover. Begin to delight in surprises and discoveries you might make about yourself. The openness feels risky. It is not. The people who experience and watch you already know all of this about you. You may as well discover it, too.

Look around you. Describe the various examples of stance which you can observe visually. Watch as one person approaches another and you will see assertive, tentative and aggressive stances. This is what the new employee first observes and experiences. This is the corporate culture at work. When you enter such a group climate you will do your best to emulate it (unawarely, of course). The stance you hold communicates to the other person. The stance the organization holds communicates to the entry level person. Nobody has to call the training department to train the entry level person (be it a boss or an employee) about the corporate culture. It is identified and copied automatically, accurately, unawarely and almost immediately. Every human individual has been doing this since birth. You can count on the power of your stance.

The human body is full of tools. There are levers to lift, ball and socket joints for rotation and pumps for air and blood. There is also an information processing system of immense capacity.

The brain has two almost opposite systems for processing information. They are often at war with one another. One is designed to be free, open, creative and aware to deal with the present and its changes. The other is designed to be automatic, and for perfect and exact replication of the past. The creative Aware Function is of minute capacity (while consciousness assures the individual that this tiny element is all there is). The indelible and reliable Automatic Function has an enormous capacity which it carries out at tremendous speed. The individual who wishes to enhance the capacity for change which is contained in the minute capacity of the Aware Function will use every method possible to free up and enhance this flexibility. An individual who wants flexibility rather than the perfect replication of undesirable past learned behaviors which are contained in the massive capacity of the Automatic Function will use every method possible to identify and block this source of rigidity.

The brain is a tool which you have already trained accurately to conduct perfectly and automatically such functions as thinking, communicating, walking and relating. Like a robot, this tool acts for you, on your behalf, whether what it has chosen to do is appropriate or not.

There are several characteristics of your brain which you need to keep immediately in front of you if you choose to train your brain for behavior that is appropriate today, as opposed to how you trained it to adapt to your family and society of origin. The automatic part of your brain is designed to resist change and replicate your family and society of origin perfectly. There are three powerful forces which will block any change you wish to make.

1) The brain is indelible. With the exception of psychedelic chemicals and brain injury, you cannot lose any information. (That's different from losing access to the information).

2) The off button turns the automatic behaviors and memories on. (So does the on button). That means that when you pay attention to something you do not want to do, you are more likely to do it than if you didn't stimulate it by attention. As long as you are using your Aware Function you can choose not to do something. If you pay attention to something else, you go back on automatic, and that's when you are likely to see the behavior you wish to end.

3) The more you pay attention to behavior you don't want, and the more intense you make that attention, the more dominant you will make that unwanted behavior. That's why punishment does not work. It produces the behavior you intend to extinguish in your victim, while also increasing that person's aware intent to not do it.

The human brain is a voracious learning machine. It is designed to perfectly replicate what it has learned. That learning cannot be unrecorded. Unlearning is the process of throwing monkey wrenches in the patterns themselves so that they stop dead automatically, all by themselves.

These are laws of the brain. Use them to work for you. Your difficulty will not be in learning new behavior. The design of the brain which resists change will block you. The past will mysteriously materialize before you as you try to take a step into the future. Unlearning is a way to stop that.

Science fiction writers have been fascinated by the possibility of a robot taking over its maker. Computers and robots learn how to think in human ways and then enslave their masters. I believe that the fascination for this scenario is the result of our subliminal awareness that this is exactly what has happened to each of us. With brilliance and determination we train our brains to manage every aspect of life for us automatically. The result is astounding. The robotic Automatic Function does as we trained it and acts for us. It does things we couldn't begin to do with our tiny sixteen bits of information managed by the SELF, the Aware Function.

What the brain has learned it keeps in separate compartments. It is as if learning is on separate computer disks. When you are in one disk (mental condition or place in your brain) you do not have access to information you know that you have. Some human behavior is like expecting a word processor to act as a data base. Patterns are dumb.

You will have seen somebody in a rage. The phone rings and he answers it with warmth and delight. The rage is gone. Then he hangs up and turns back to you with full rage in progress, all the time declaring that it would be impossible to let the rage go.

Think about "spontaneous". Did you ever notice that what you believe to be spontaneous is a recorded action taken by your robot? That's what makes it spontaneous. It's a learned act which happens without effort or thought because it's rehearsed and automatic. A true spontaneous action, one from the aware intent of the SELF, is experienced as "contrived" because it is newly contrived.

Just as the person on the phone did it, you can ask a pattern to step aside for a moment. It won't know the difference. It will agree to your demands. So just promise R2D2 that you will return shortly, and he will be quiet for a few minutes while you do "Removing Roadblocks". It has been our experience that if you do not keep your promise, that is, if you do not return to R2D2 when you agreed, he will never believe you again. Return on schedule. When you return you have a surprise in store for you. R2D2 will never be the same, or at least, seem the same, again. You have already taken a step towards breaking free. You will then have much more control over R2D2.

Use the constant learning capacity of the brain. It works by simple association. ADD TO the behavior pattern which is interfering with the change you wish to make. ADD TO it a glitch of some sort, your monkey wrench. It can be a simple interrupter. Laughter is the most effective. Even when it seems like laughing at yourself, laugh at your brain's attempt to interfere by bringing in the past. Especially when it's not funny at all. Just say, "It's not funny" in various voices with various tones until you laugh. You must add this glitch at the instant that the behavior is running. It's a tiny moment. You will miss it at first, and then catch it and then reinforce the laugh and then you won't observe that behavior any longer.

In unlearning you will build associations between your unwanted learned responses and the interrupters which will stop them. The undesirable responses are permanently recorded in your brain. When you find an image or behavior which interrupts the response, you will attach it to the indelible response recorded in your mind. Now each time the undesired response runs, your interrupter runs also and your response stops permanently. You still know "how to do it", but it will no longer automatically take over your life for you.

These are the Steps to Unlearning:

1. Identify the Unwanted Behavior. Identify and become familiar with and accept the unwanted behavior. Get inside its unpleasant nature so you can effectively sabotage and unlearn it. Don't think about it because thinking takes place in a different part of your brain Besides, it will be so complex that you can't come to know it through thinking.

2. Get inside the pattern. Catch yourself at it. Live it. Be it. Experience all its awful emotions. Get to know it and become familiar with it.

3. Explore interrupters. Once you are inside the unpleasant habits you can play with them and learn how to disrupt them. Identify any feelings, exaggerations, mocking, dramatization and laughter which will interfere with them. Play with the pattern, fool around with it. Explore foolish things that will interrupt it. Then interrupt it. Repeat, being sure to "not know" what you are about to do. Experience the pattern again, then the interrupter. Repeat and reinforce this until it sticks, until the two become permanently associated.

4. Identify how you use the behavior. All behaviors are invented for a purpose. Then find other things to do instead of this unwanted behavior. Accept loss of the behavior. Take steps to learn new behaviors to replace the old. Fill the void.

5. Reinforce the Interrupters. Reinforce the interrupters until they become associated with the responses they are designed to stop. The interrupter must be added inside the unwanted behavior. Reinforce it so that it permanently acts for you to automatically eliminate the unwanted response.

6. Integrate. Continue the process. Integrate the interrupter, or, integrate the old behavior as interrupted, with important areas of your life. This will give you greater reliability for automatic elimination of unwanted responses.

You will add to your permanent and undesirable behavior patterns configurations which reroute, inhibit or arrest the automatic working of the original response. The interrupters are attached by the simple process of association.

Unlearning is similar to a "patch" on a computer program. Since the rerouting mechanism is imbedded in the original response sequence, it cannot fail to eliminate the unwanted response. Permanently.

Your organization depends on you doing your own unlearning. It must change and adapt or it will fail with the thousands of other organizations which could not adapt to a changed world. As a member of this organization in a changing world, prepare yourself to unlearn.

1. Understand Your Mind. Notice your own duality. Your social training and experience support that you are aware of everything. You are not. You are aware of less than one percent of what you do. You are mostly automatic. Although you learn new responses, the past always lurks to take over. Recognize this. To unlearn you will have to begin to delight in how your two functions work.

2. Know and Appreciate Your SELF. Before you are ready to unlearn you will need extensive SELF Confidence. Know how to hold your Grounded and Centered Stance. Have an open, adventurous and accepting stance available.

As you change your stance and attitude about your unwanted behavior you will be able to play more lightly with it. Then you can watch and "catch yourself at it". You will begin to observe when and how you do it. You will notice what restimulates it and who it is designed for. It is your responsibility, but don't blame yourself for it. That will stimulate your methods of hiding and defending. Treat it lightly, as an old friend, a familiar companion. Give it a name. That will give you an advantage over it.

The interrupter you attach is permanent. It can be overcome if the unwanted behavior which it interrupts becomes more intense. Intensity makes a behavior dominant, as Paul found out. Paul, a successful manager in a large construction company, became upset about his new manager. Each time they had extensive contact, Paul would turn into incompetent jelly inside. He reluctantly ran the incompetent jelly in our first session, and I asked him to share the images. His words, tones and body posture indicated early childhood, so I asked him who he was making jelly for. Instantly he identified his father, and soon he shared his feelings of total incompetence in his father's presence.

Paul's father was one of those rarities, a warm and loving person who was always right and always good and always available. He was a much loved Vermont country doctor, and very fond of Paul. He was a hard act to follow, and Paul felt childlike and incapable, in spite of his size and powerful personality. In three months of weekly sessions Paul exaggerated his tiny child act with a high squeaky voice. He laughed at the incongruity, and he expanded his SELF appreciation and his Grounded and Centered Stance. He even (inside his head) called his boss by his father's first name. The job was done effectively and I didn't see Paul for another ten years, when he called me from out of state. The undesirable behavior which he had unlearned had returned.

Paul drove four hours for a one hour appointment. His father was dying and Paul described how he turned to jelly in the hospital room. The intensity overrode the interrupter. He wished to be a person in his father's last weeks. We got into the work again, which Paul couldn't remember but I soon recalled. I even recalled the interrupters and in a few minutes we intensified them, plus the SELF appreciations and Grounded and Centered Stance. The session over, Paul left for Vermont to visit his dying father. He called the next day and agreed to keep the appointment for the next week just to make it solid, but the interrupter and his SELF appreciations worked like a charm and he visited with his father as a person, not a witless child.

The unlearning process works just as you would expect when you know how the brain works.

Individuals in an organization have behavior patterns which continue to respond according to the past even when the response is known to be ineffective. Watch an ant climb a stick with a heavy load again and again, each time falling before it gets to the top. Going around it the stick is not in its repertoire. The behavior pattern is mindless. It only knows what it was taught. Anything new or otherwise outside of its purpose is, by design, filtered out. When you are absorbed in correcting a manufacturing problem, the pattern filters out thoughts of how best to deal with a customer. If you do think of the customer, you may disrupt how you are correcting the problem. The system is efficient and self contained, perfect for what it was designed for and resistant to change.

Edward, an engineer, reacted to writing reports for his manager because his manager reminded him of his father. His reaction to his father was to resist to the end. So Edward resisted writing his reports, even though he wanted to get them done and out of the way. I instructed Edward to put paper in his typewriter and write, "Today I am not going to write my reports". That gave him the whole day to be productive and do his process engineering. Previously he had spent most of the day so upset that he wasn't writing. This upset distracted him from his other productive work. Gain number one was that he was free to do his other work well. The next day, as he agreed to do, Edward wrote, "Today I am not going to write my reports, but if I were to write my reports this is what I would write --" and continued to write without interference from his behavior pattern. He tore off the top lines and handed the completed draft to the secretary who finished the job.

Be sure that you understand how this can happen. Edward defined that he was not writing the reports. He was writing something for himself, not for "his father", so the resistance was absent. Part of Edward's mind knew what was supposed to happen, that the report for his boss would be written. He effectively made sure that this information was not available inside the behavior pattern. Keep this in mind as you do the interrupter the second or third times. Keep them a secret and then as you get into the undesirable behavior, zap it again with the same interrupter to reinforce it.

The fact that information is variously available to different areas of the brain is vital to understand. Often it becomes essential to take information and associate it with an area where it does not presently exist. Information which is easily available to you at one moment may be unavailable at the next when it is in a different part of your brain. Thinking about a behavior pattern is a sure way to remain outside of it. The activity of thinking puts you in the thinking mode or compartment and outside the response pattern itself. If you want to learn about a behavior pattern you have to get inside it. Thinking about it is another activity which takes place in another part of your brain. You can keep secrets like that from one part of your brain while they are available to another part of your brain, just as Edward's pattern didn't know what he was up to. You can also insert such information where you want it, just as you will insert information, feelings or images inside your unwanted behavior patterns so they will self destruct.

Repeat the drill with such dedication to the unwanted behavior that you sense that this time you are running it for real. Inside the pattern you have no idea that the interrupter is going to happen, but then, zap again, the interrupter stops the sequence dead in its tracks. Another reinforcement. Do this and repeat it with such dedication to and appreciation for the unwanted behavior that it is caught completely off guard. If you do not, you are likely to use the interrupter so quickly that the pattern has barely started before it is stopped and the interrupter will never become firmly associated and fixed inside the pattern. Run it with zeal and then zap it again. Soon the pattern itself will contain the interrupter. Then, regardless of how vehemently you run the pattern, without any aware attention at all, the pattern will interrupt itself. Then, and only then, you are done. You have effectively unlearned.

The various things you do to make a powerful and automatic connection between the interrupter (the patch) and the behavior you are ending are designed to reinforce the association between them. Reinforcement is essential for useful steps in training your brain.

Reinforcement includes rewards, repetition and different ways of learning the same new behavior in order to continue it. Reinforcement in the unlearning steps is the repetitive running of the behavior pattern with the interrupter. Reinforce the interrupter again and again until you are sure it is a reliable part of the undesirable pattern itself. Do this by rehearsing it again and again. Write about it or about any new learning to involve other parts of your system than only the imagination. Get into it, feel the unpleasant emotions of the old behavior in all their picturesque elements, and then, zap, run the interrupter. Tell people about it. Tell yourself about it in the mirror. Develop images which will reinforce it, like how it will function when the unlearning is complete. Dwell on it in all its vivid dimensions. Dwell on it until it is done.

Perhaps the chief cost of unlearning old management and employment behaviors is the loss of motivation. Notice how motivating it is to do something to please a boss or to show him up. Then you zap those childhood responses, and who the hell cares if you do a decent job?

After you unlearn anything that has been important in your work life, you have two jobs remaining. You must learn new ways to get the job done, the job that the old behavior did for you, and you will have to insert new forms of motivation.

Motivation is movement. "I am moved by your plea". During your Grounded and Centered Stance, you can motivate yourself by merely identifying what you want to do and then doing it. Those moments are rare. It is more efficient to train your brain to motivate you, to move you. If you do not, everything you do will be hard, and left undone at any time you are using up your limited aware attention. The chief motivator is feelings or stress. Under the name "emotion" (there's "movement" again), feelings make you do things automatically.

Feelings cause behavior. They are called emotions when they move or motivate you. Some feelings are pleasant and they draw you to them. Other feelings are unpleasant and you act to avoid them. Intense feelings drive you, as in acts of passion when you hit someone in anger. It is common to use anger to motivate others to pay attention to you. You use guilt in others to get them to do what you want of them. The most efficient use of feelings as motivators is when you build associations between things you wish to do and the feelings which will make you get there. All behavior patterns have feelings sequences which drive them. Feelings are the most vulnerable points at which to interrupt and then unlearn most unwanted responses. If you alter your feelings your behavior changes. When you alter another person's feelings, his behavior changes. You have been doing this since infancy. Now add feelings which will cause the new behavior that you want to have.

Suppose you are adopting new standards, such as ISO 9000. You are upset about the new things you have to learn, and the necessity to adhere to a specific and foreign system by meeting ISO 9000 requirements. Begin by unlearning your objections. Pout, stamp your foot and say, "No!" in a childish voice. Once you have done that you can begin to identify reasons to support the new requirements. "Let's see why they are given such high priority". " - what we can learn". Hold your GCS and stand proud. "I'll do this one exactly". "I learned that there are always three systems or procedures, the written one, the one we say we are doing, and the one we are unawarely doing. Let's see how identical I can make these." Picture a challenge that has meaning to you, a race, catching a trout, hiking up a trail. Tie it in until the motivation just flows - all by itself.

Tie it in by reinforcement. Use all the skills you know. Dwell on it like you find yourself worrying. Here are a few others.

Repetition. The simplest way to learn something is to do it again and again. You will learn it better if you repeat it at longer and longer intervals. Repeat your images of motivation or the interrupter. Do it, for example, every day for three weeks. Then reduce it to three times per week for a month. Then once a week for a month. Then every other week for two months. Then once a month for six months. Then every three months for a year, and finally once, six months later. That's a span of almost a year and a half, and less than fifty repeats. Research indicates that varied and intermittent reinforcement is more effective than regular repetition. Every compulsive gambler knows this. The fifty repetitions in the plan above will be more effective than the five hundred and forty seven if you did it every day. Long lapses are especially effective for reliable access and superglued associations. It's very effective, and worth your while, depending on what you are learning and how well you want to learn it.

You can also use intensity, either upsetting or pleasant, to do the reinforcing for you. Associations with intensity are quickly made and remain reliable. An event with screams and a smashed window, or with candle light and your favorite music, or in your Special Place, will make its mark in the memory more vividly than repetition. Learn how reinforcement works and what reinforcement works best for you. Then use it.

Vary the reinforcement. Begin with words, then add images. Identify an interrupter, a self appreciation or a motivating feeling, then repeat it with an image of a situation in which you observe it in action. "I am resourceful". I repeat this statement as I image myself using this example for you. This puts solidity and dimension to the words. Write it down. This adds the dimension of a physical activity. Tell someone about it. Thus adds a dimension of graphic detail and substance to the statement as well as interpersonal commitment. Stand in front of a mirror and describe this to yourself aloud. "I am excellent at ISO 9000 systems." Explore ways to make the statement, visualize the image, and speak it to yourself. "I enjoy my excellence". Find ways that are solid, grounded and effective for you.

The final steps of training your brain have not taken place until what you want to learn, the interrupters, emotions or personal specifications, usually several of them, are firmly in place and integrated with the rest of your life.

Associate the new with the undesirable response so that when the old response stops the new response will begin. This will soon slip into your unaware and happen in an instant. You will quickly forget that you did all this work. Now it's automatic and you can put your aware attention to other more useful projects.

Build associations which integrate your new learning and new responses with the new skills and behaviors which take you where you want to go in this organization or in your life. Most important of all, build associations between the new behaviors you want and the feelings which will motivate them. Reinforce that you are relieved at losing an unwanted response and excited about your new freedom and the new possibilities. Use the most intense feelings you can summon up so they will lead you forward automatically.

Write a Two and Eight. This is a formal way to reinforce and integrate what you are learning. Write about it. When you write you exercise other aspects of your human system. The Two and Eight is a ten minute exercise. Don't extend it or you may not do it. All you do is think about the thing you want to reinforce for two minutes, then write about it for eight minutes or only one eight and a half by eleven sheet of paper. It's not for future reading, so throw it out. It is only an exercise. You may want to keep some of them or keep a journal to document change. If you make your work too complicated you won't do it. Do enough to make your work pay off for the rest of your life. Do it now. It will serve you always.

Keep it simple.

Dynamics is one of the natural laws of the universe. Evidently things of all sorts, suns, moons, electrons and people get into dynamic interaction. The things of the universe clump themselves, but rarely as inert blobs. When they get together, pieces of the universe set about to relate in a harmony so that opposing forces and other differences hold a dynamic balance.

"Group Dynamics" used to be the most popular word in business and industry. Now other buzz words are far more common. It is strange to note that in so much writing about excellence, reengineering, transformation and other forms of recent business advice, the role of group dynamics is barely mentioned. Perhaps it's too hard a concept. Perhaps it seems too magical or mysterious. Perhaps (perhaps?) it is too personal. At any rate, it isn't there any more. Of course, you read remarks about the group climate and corporate culture, but nothing substantial about how to manage them. You will hear that staff at all levels need to change at the same time. They don't tell you how. You have observed how employees or managers (what works best, top down or bottom up?) return on fire with new ideas and exciting resolve from the latest million dollar training effort, only to lose it all within weeks when they return to the powerful pull of the dynamic of their unit. Group Dynamics is the key.

I enjoyed this passage in Pat Conroy's Prince of Tides: "Why does everything my mother says, every single syllable, every single insincere phoneme, piss me off? Why can't I ignore her, Sallie? Why can't I simply go limp when she comes over. If I just didn't respond to her, she couldn't touch me. I know she loves me with all her heart. But we sit there and say things that wound and damage and destroy. She leaves and we both have blood on our hands. She cries and I drink; then she drinks. You try to intercede and we both ignore you and resent you for even trying. It's like we're in some monstrous passion play where she and I take turns crucifying each other. And it's not her fault and it's not mine." (Page 25)

Like it or not, you are caught in a different play each time you are in a group, and you will speak your part. Explore this. You will discover that you have no choice, inhuman as that seems. Try out a change in a group. You might have left an impression as you were ejected (of course for some reasonable reason), but the lesson was learned by the others, and the next attempt at change will be even less acceptable.

A dynamic or synergy has a life of its own. That life has clear rules. When you understand and use the rules of the synergy you become an efficient employee or manager. If you persist in linear thinking and direct "control" (by your managers or of your employees), you will remain ineffectual. Your organization is held within a container, its dynamic. Expecting to deal with yourself or others individually is somewhere between impossible and inefficient. Dealing with the dynamic (which, remember, includes you) is both effective and efficient. The synergy has a life of its own with rules of its own. Learn them and how to use them so that you can manage the dynamic.

The dynamic is far more powerful than all the training your organization will ever do. How the training didn't work is nobody's fault. You have already heard the blame. The workers are stubborn (recall Daddy saying that?) and the managers are ignorant (recall how ignorant Daddy was?), and that's why it didn't work. Nothing can "work" (whatever that means) until the dynamic (the concrete) which holds the unit together is addressed. It's that simple.

The rules of group dynamics are simple (what did you expect our aboriginal ancestors to invent? A PC?) Change occurs only through an action-reaction process. This is always mutual, whether you have established a command system or a mutual system. This always includes the manager within it, whether she tries to remain aloof (condemning and blaming) or not. The action-reaction process is simple in the extreme. Well, it is if you are thinking in a dynamic mode. The rule is that a group will do today what it did yesterday. What the group does ("The way we do things around here") is the group climate, the culture. If you violate the culture of the group, the group's dynamic will produce a reaction. It may welcome the new behavior with delight. Then the new culture of the group will insist upon the new behavior. Or it will reject, sanction and exclude the new behavior and perhaps the offender. In addition to this process of sanction and exclusion there is a more powerful sense that the excluded behavior is forever rejected, just like all of management's training efforts.

Because this is the dynamic force of the group, next time you will be more careful. You will, thinking dynamically, time your offensive action with great care. You may seek out two or more individuals in the group who might support the new behavior. You will take whatever time it takes to gain their support and to provide the necessary reaction of the group which will change its culture. You will avoid poorly timed and unsupported offense of the group climate because you know that will deepen the group's resolve to resist.

The forces of group dynamics are simple. When you thoroughly learn what the Interpersonal Meaning of Behavior is and how to use it to analyze a dynamic (mostly by observation and drawing those silly little bubbles that cartoonists use to represent what the meaning of a communication or an action really is), you will have eighty percent of all you need to know about group dynamics. Then, as you come to understand the Gentle Massage of Culture, how the group climate or corporate culture controls its individuals, you will understand another eighty percent. Together you will understand about ninety to ninety five percent of all you could learn about group dynamics in a couple of masters' degrees.

Notice that I attached "interpersonal" to the "meaning of behavior". In group dynamics, that's all that counts. Notice that I changed "culture" to Gentle Massage of Culture. I don't use this phrase much any more because it has a mysterious tone to it. It refers to the fact that when you know that the group consensus requires you to wear this, you can and probably will choose that. (Interpersonal Meaning of Behavior, anyone?). The power of group dynamic comes only when it is subliminal (Gentle) and seductive (Massage). They both refer to the same fact, that if I can manipulate you without you knowing it, you will do what I want. Subliminal means below the level of your awareness, that is, somewhere outside of your Aware Function's ability to catch it. Magicians use all sorts of diversions to get your aware attention away from what they are doing. So, all you have to do is something that takes your aware attention and everything else goes on automatic. Then, whoever controls your automatic controls you. It's simple, lawful and still obtuse until you mobilize your ability to think dynamically.

That, simply put, is all there is to group dynamics. There are a few details. Groups are useful in business and industry largely because they are composed of diverse individuals. The purpose of group dynamics then becomes to hold diverse people together, to keep them both diverse and together at the same time. Sounds like a dynamic or synergy, doesn't it! Another simple detail is that action-reaction process which is always necessary for group climate to change. This requires dynamic thinking. It also demands that all groups be mutual, that is, the decisions are not made by the boss. Sorry. The decisions are not made by the boss, but by everyone. There is no fault or blame. The dynamic makes you a unit.

You are a member of the group, even if you are a remote manager. If you have been pointedly rejected and remain forcefully excluded you are deeply embedded within the dynamic of the group. Review the interpersonal meaning of behavior. You don't even have to show up. Ever. All you have to do is send a message. The reaction will be excluding. You already guessed that. It doesn't matter what the message was. So you can change the meaning. You can send a deputy, but only when you know that such a person will not be likewise rejected. It is action-reaction. So think dynamically and play it smart.

The synergy of your group contains elements of both degeneration and regeneration. Poor morale produces poor motivation which produces criticism from the boss which produces poor morale. Are you thinking dynamically? Simultaneously, criticism from the boss produces low motivation which causes poor morale. In most human dynamics, causes of effects can become effects of the effects. The cause and effect arrow works both ways. That's because human thought and behavior works by the simple rule of association. If A is associated with B, B is associated with A. And, in human behavior, there is never a single cause, always multiple. Think dynamically. Observe degeneration and regeneration. As you begin to use the Agreement Strategies to produce the regeneration which keeps your group alive, you will observe a more productive, more pleasant and error-free dynamic.

When employees and managers use the parent-child management system, you insert family of origin issues as the dominant behavior (with a little time left for work). Explore the regenerating and the degenerating flows in group process with parental behavior. In the degenerating process (draw a circle with arrows going counter clockwise) write the words "parental management" at the top. Then, at nine o'clock write "childish rebellious or dependent behavior". At six write "mutual depreciation of managers and workers". At three o'clock write "defensive stance". In the center write "Degenerating", and under it "unpleasant feelings". Notice that you can reverse the arrows and the same degenerating dynamic flows. Be clever. Insert other strings of sequence which support the degenerating dynamic.

In the regenerating process (draw a circle with arrows going clockwise for now) write the words "dynamic management" at the top. Then, at three o'clock write "cooperative and additive behavior". At six write "mutual affirmations of managers and workers". At nine o'clock write "assertive, proud and open stance". In the center write "Regenerating", and under it "pleasant feelings". Notice that you can reverse the arrows this time also, and you can insert other strings of sequence such as mutual support, enjoyment of the workplace, keeping the grounds and shop clear and clean, etc. and support the regenerating dynamic even more.

You are now a graduate expert in group dynamics. That is so outrageous that it sounds sarcastic. It is not. When you thoroughly understand the few and simple principles described above, you have as much knowledge as any graduate of a group dynamics program, and furthermore, unlike them, you have that knowledge in a practical and useful way. Get to it and use it.

The rigidity and resistance to change that characterizes group dynamics can be used as a tool for change. While viewing an organization of hundreds or thousands of individuals who block your every effort at change you can feel discouraged. Use that resistance to change.

When we took the ineffective team in a nuclear plant and split up the individuals and placed them on other excellent crews, the ineffective behavior disappeared. Then, after a time, we reestablished a new fifth team. The five teams all contained the same employees that had been in the original five teams, differently distributed. They all functioned with excellence. Groups can be "magically" "cloned". There is no magic about it. They are all held in the resistant rigidity of their group dynamic. It persists and controls the individual within.

The same can be done with teams in any organization, particularly if teams may cross widely separated unit divisions. Find individuals and groups who are already interested in change or who have already changed. Get your training department to help them solidify their new behavior in their group dynamic, their group climate. Then slip in other individuals, even if you are building teams bigger than you need. After a time, divide the teams and then include others. You can involve the individuals in the venture. Make them part of the process, knowingly. Train them in group dynamics. Give them this simple knowledge and set them loose to change those hundreds or thousands. It has been done. Now you can do it.

Think dynamically. Think of the group dynamic as a container. Then, with them included, begin to use that rigidity productively.

Studies in excellence and in quality keep discovering that organizations which are outstandingly productive seem to have very specific corporate cultures. One of the exasperating experiences which is reported in such studies is that while a new organization with new products may be efficient, operating powerfully while in the "skunk works" phase in someone's garage, the minute it becomes a "listed" company, conforming to "modern manufacturing" methods, the corporate culture changes and the organization becomes much more "usual" and non-productive (or at least noncompetitive). This observation confronts us with two facts. The dynamic determines how people behave; the dynamic can be changed, is always changing, lawfully. You know the laws. Use them.

One approach to changing group climate to one which would support continual improvement (kaizen) is by presenting meaningful rewards for high numbers of suggestions. This engages employees in improvement. "Meaningful" means meaningful within the understanding of the group climate, such as a day off. As suggestions are made, the makers join others in discovering how they might be implemented. Now the employee is becoming engaged in the process of the group at work. After about eighteen months, awards are given only for high numbers of suggestions which include methods of carrying them out. Now the whole organization is involved in improvement and in the work process. You have changed the corporate culture.

Human response is as varied as individuals, yet it is endlessly repetitious. Excellent and productive teams or individuals seem to be unable to fail, and inferior behavior seems similarly persistent and resistant to change.

After people work together in an organization for a time, and the group climate becomes familiar, the very familiarity helps to resist change. Some are rewarded by the status quo and will resist losing those rewards. Others resist merely because of the familiarity of resistance, or because they have turned unrewarding circumstances into rewards, such as the pleasure of making someone else suffer more than they. People begin to perceive that they are controlling others, and they often do not want to give that up.

Control is usually obtained through the manipulation of the behavior patterns of others. All you have to do is stimulate emotions which are motivating enough to force the desired behavior. Patterns govern most of our behavior, and anyone who can manipulate our patterns can control our behavior. It can be as simple as being downcast because your spouse won't go to a movie in order to stimulate guilt so he will. For example, a manager can use firing to stimulate fear and the fear stimulates those behavior patterns in the worker which will relieve the fear, such as a sudden burst of productive work.

This automatic childhood control requires two people to play it. Therefore, when an employee and a manager are engaged in the dynamic of control, both must be playing. That also means that either one can stop the dynamic. One of the characteristics of top managers and executives is their ability to let go of control. They do not have to "win" the latest skirmish. They can walk away without the "last word". Then they can take considered action without being controlled by the skirmish. Playing the control game provides feelings of personal fulfillment for all parties or it will stop playing.

While these childhood reenactments of conflict are costly and cannot be productive, real conflict is vital to an organization. In the Agreement Strategies this is made into a science of human dynamics. Both agreement and conflict are affirmed in a display of differentiation which is carefully integrated.

1. Establishing Common Ground. In this strategy agreements which are shared are identified and maintained. This is a solid ground from which to work on the disagreements. Then the disagreements are agreed to as disagreement, another area of agreement.

2. Removing Roadblocks. This will identify and eliminate childhood issues, while holding creative conflict as the life blood of an organization responsive to customer, market and change.

3. Managing Synergy. Synergy is the balance of tension between agreement and disagreement among individuals and groups. It is the endpoint towards which excellent and effective management moves. When you affirm and openly use the creative dynamic of a celebration of differences and when you support the generation of options, you have found a quick way to get an effective group climate.

Synergy has a persistence which resists sudden change, unless sudden change is one of its designated characteristics. It has a fluidity which is constantly and slowly changing and adapting to new situations. It is a dynamic balance of differences and disagreements which contribute to each other. They cause actions and creative thoughts which may result in new ideas for the organization. Dr. Bob, cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous, said "If you and I are exactly alike then one of us is not necessary".

Group dynamics, the balanced interaction of differences, is what you are in. You have the skills and knowledge to make it work for you.

Over twenty years ago it was my pleasure to work with Olin Industries on a new organizational plan to institute group and team management in their companies. The plan was premature. Business preferred to carry the costs of inefficient management than to change. The dynamic thought process and concepts which had created the field of nuclear science and produced countless new technologies had never become popular or "understandable". The dynamics of intentional mutuality could not be managed. The Olin plan was never seriously implemented. The work did, however, make it clear that the manager of the future would have to be a behavioral scientist in preference to a business school graduate. Administrative work and strategic decisions might be made by business administrators, but management of people would be left to this new class of people.

The organizational structure model that Olin produced was like an hour glass, with the manager in the middle, not at the top. Being aware that the bottom half of the hour glass reminds people of the usual form of parent-child management, I prefer to turn the model ninety degrees and have a bow tie. So we will discuss my bow tie model, with the manager in the middle. You will find that many concepts described here are now being used widely in industry.

The organization would operate on the basis of teams formed to develop or produce a product. Workers might be on several teams, or only one, but it was important that nobody champion a product that was not able to make a profit for the company, just to protect his kingdom or his job. Therefore, job security could not be based on a product. It would be the manager's job to see that personnel was moved around from one organizational unit to another so they would be used effectively and morale would remain high because employment was secure. Employees could be placed temporarily on teams where they could learn new skills and information which then would be used on another team, perhaps simultaneously with the employee being part time on both.

The cone shaped bows represent the units or teams concerned with a product. They would contain engineers, market people and floor workers, so that each could contribute to the development and manufacturing process. The manager serves the team. He or she is in charge of finding and assigning employees with the skills and information needed at this particular point in product development or manufacture. The decisions were made by the team. The manager might have more than two teams to serve, so the bow tie image needs to be replaced with one of a number of fins, with the manager still at the center.

Seniority and pay would be diagrammed along the length of the fins. The manager would by no means be the highest paid worker. That would be decided by merit and seniority. Evaluation, hiring and firing would be team decisions, with the manager as a member of the team.

In current management practice most organizational structure and practice are modeled on the family of origin of the modeler. Whether appropriate or not, pay, employee evaluation, parking places and desk size were (at the time of the Olin model) determined by who is the biggest father (or the biggest mother, as the case may be). This is wasteful of both human and organizational resources. That cost used to be absorbed. You will notice that many of these consistently parental old behaviors have started to change, with some benefits to the corporation.

The Olin model was certainly not a revolution, but it was a start. That it didn't carry was not the fault of the model. The conceptual framework of the average manager simply could not hold such a new way of doing business. Managers constantly pointed out that quick decisions could not be made within such a structure. They couldn't be more wrong. Teams and other units in which consensual decision making is the manner of acting have demonstrated the kind of quick action most managers mean when they throw that argument at the team structure. They evidently have never heard of the OSS or of the Johnson Space center. Both of these groups were organized on a team basis. Both made many quick decisions. Both, unlike the manager who launches this criticism, made such quick decisions with the certainty that other workers in on the deciding would state clearly any objections, and that all would agree to act immediately, even if they still disagreed with the decision itself, and they would support the decision. The Japanese have noted the quickness of American hierarchical response. They also note that the Americans do not follow up on their decisions quickly because minority objectors block quick action.

In both the team structured groups mentioned above, "superiors" could be "ordered around" by "inferiors". You know, there is really no way to describe this because it is outside the paradigm of ordinary management practice. I can sneak you in through an American Indian approach which I will describe later. Armed services officers hated to hear about the OSS, because often a sergeant would take command over majors and captains. That is threatening to officers and managers born, bred and nurtured in the parental approach they learned and had reinforced from childhood. Thinking dynamically, you can begin to imagine the thousands of ways in which such teams can learn to act in order to decide quickly and firmly, while acting together in voluntary mutuality. For example, the person who knows the way to the picnic grounds can take over the logistics of getting there. Others will be supportive, and they will offer suggestions which will be taken seriously. In an organization like that the leadership will shift rapidly as the skills and knowledge must shift depending on the task.

The plains Indians had their way of managing consensual decision making. There are several aspects to it. It always took time, often more time than was wise. They had a social contract (which I suggest that you, whatever your position, adopt). When you start to speak in response to another, by the act of speaking you are communicating that you have heard and you are understanding what the other person has said. Since that often requires that you take the time to digest the ideas, and the time to create in your own head a new or altered concept to hold the idea, you will need a period of silence. You and your team can begin this process. Ask for the floor. Then maintain silence. Look at the previous speaker (or the one who has just inserted a controversy, to which the previous speaker has responded) and admire her or him. Admire the idea. Think about it. If you do this you might agree or you might expand the idea. Whatever you do, this pause will put you in a better position to oppose it, if that is what you find you must do. Also take that time to notice how awkward silence is in an American setting. Then when you start to speak, new ideas will occur to you. Stop and notice them. Take the time to think about them. Lest the others think that you are through as you do this outrageous action (you are pausing to think!), hold your hand up before you, palm out, like you would if you had to pause to burp. It's still your turn, and thinking might just become acceptable.

I have a book of readings in managerial psychology. Included is an extensive reading on the plains Indians, with quotations from the sixteen hundreds and onwards about their behavior in this matter. That reading was excluded from later editions, at just about the same time as the Olin model was laid to rest. Twenty years ago people knew that this day was coming, but the cost could still be absorbed, so the brief time of experimentation came to an end. The paradigm held by the average manager simply could not hold the concepts necessary for such a new way of doing business. There hasn't been a genuine new approach to managing in a millennium. It is interesting to note that many of the facts about the atom that couldn't be explained or held by Newtonian thinking were widely known. It was a real conceptual shift, a total paradigm shift, that produced the modern atom, and hence most of the technology that your business stands upon. Yet, that shift to dynamic thinking is so great that few people have made it. They didn't have to unless they were studying the atom and nuclear (the shift required "nuclear" too) science. You, on the other hand, are being asked to change how you think in the core of your daily life. You cannot manage (not at all) unless you change how you think.

I suggested that more on those Indians may help you observe how they came to habitually act mutually. In a sense they didn't, actually. It was more like the OSS. The concept they had in their culture is "manitou". It's a bit like magic and a bit like charisma and a bit like skill, cunning and knowledge. So hold these together in the concept "manitou". Please note, I'm not interested in selling manitou to you. It's a bit too mystical for me. Identify and explore how to copy what this concept does to the culture, the social conditioning of that Indian. The Indian will follow the manitou. If someone does something and it works, that person has manitou. Then you follow that person until the manitou fails, and you look for another. The real payoff is that if a leader finds his manitou has failed him, he, just as intently as the others, will look for and follow another who has the manitou. Now, drop the manitou and keep the behavior. I witnessed such behavior at the Johnson Space Center. The ease