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Step 4: Dance Toward Insight

A critical difference between control and motivation is that control demands obedience without thought and motivation recognizes that people are able to think, to find their own path to a desired outcome, and encourages them to do so. As such, "dancing toward insight" rather than issuing directives is a critical component of quiet leadership.

Four phases of Insight

The author considers problem-solving as a four-phase process:

Recognition

Generally speaking, our perception of the world around us tunes out the things that would, and perhaps should, upset or alarm us. We perceive the environment to be unthreatening and static, or at least predictable, and only on rare occasions to we become aware of the signs of a problem that requires our attention.

We generally perceive this as a sudden flash of thought, cued by something new or something we failed to recognize or realize before. The author suggests that this moment is outwardly visible, often in a person's facial expression. If a leader can learn to recognize this expression, they can be more effective at improving thinking.

In the workplace, many of our issues are expressed as dilemmas: we want to accomplish a goal, but something else stands in our way: it may be a conflicting goal, insufficient resources, or even our own inability to see a way to achieve one outcome without harming another.

Initially, the perspective is crowded by the filigree of details - but there comes a moment when we can boil it down to a single sentence that gets to the heart of the matter (e.g., I need to get this project done but am constantly being interrupted), at which point the parameters become clear. It's not always that simple, but it quite often is.

The conversations that leaders have with their subordinates that make the most substantial differences to performance often involve recognizing and resolving exactly such an dilemma. And while the temptation is to rush in with a solution, you must first get them to recognize that there is a problem, and to see it clearly.

Reflection

Once an individual has recognized a problem, there is a period of reflection in which they are considering the situation and a possible solution - the two tend to overlap at first, and they may dismiss the problem rather than moving forward, but if they choose to move forward they begin to consider solutions.

More accurately, they begin by recognizing that they do not know a solution, and there is a process of coming up with ideas and mentally testing them until they arrive at an idea in which they are confident. And then, they asses their level of confidence.

The author refers to a report (Jung-Beeman) of a study that suggests that the brain of a person who is trying to solve a problem gives off an elevated level of alpha-band waves just before they arrive at a solution. The alpha wave is theorized to be what happens when a person stops paying attention to external stimuli and focuses on internal processing.

It's also noted that alpha waves have a high correlation with serotonin, a neurotransmitter that increases relaxation and eases pain. This is a neurological basis for the observation that people enjoy or feel good about solving problems.

It's also noted that doing detailed work, such as mathematical calculations, corresponds to a decrease an alpha waves and serotonin, which is the neurological basis for another observation: that getting into the details causes people to lose sight of the big picture.

Another assertion is that there is a difference between problem-solving an analytical thinking: analysis takes place in "working memory" of the conscious brain, whereas problem-solving taps into deeper resources - the memories and hard-wider connections that have greater bandwidth and power than conscious working memory.

In essence, a person who solves a problem may have the perception that he didn't have to think about it - it just came to him somehow - because the heavy lifting was done below the surface.

Illumination

"Illumination" refers to the instant at which the metaphorical light bulb switches on: after recognizing the problem and mulling over solutions, the brain latches onto a compelling idea.

Right at that moment, there is a flood of neurotransmitters that have a simulative effect, along with others that create a sense of euphoria. It's this reaction that sent Archimedes running naked through the streets, and that causes people in the modern world to fire off a salvo of emails when they are struck by a brilliant idea.

This is the "high" people seek when they engage in problem-solving - it's intensely pleasurable. In some instances, we engage in activates to achieve that state: consider how a person who reads or watches a movie, particularly a mystery, feels a rush of excitement and pleasure when the pieces fall into place and they figure out the plot.

Going back to the Jung-Beeman study, it is found that the moment of insight correlates to a spike of gamma-band brainwaves. Unlike other brainwaves, gamma waves do not localize, but occur in all parts of the brain. Studies have also found that there is a very specific frequency - 40 Hz - at which gamma waves resonate with one another at this moment. It's further suggested that this does not occur when making a logical connection or correlation, but when the brain completely reconfigures its "super-map" (master directory of all other mental maps).

As an aside, gamma waves are absent during complete unconsciousness, such as general anesthesia, and people who have learning difficulties demonstrate a lack of gamma waves.

Motivation

The motivation phase occurs after a compelling idea has stuck, and the subject is energized to leap into action. However, the intense motivation we feel immediately is also temporary.

An hour after you've had a great idea, it's gone - which his the reason some people seek to write it down immediately before they forget about it.

Also, the inspiration of an idea leads people to undertake actions with great energy, but their enthusiasm subsides. This is the reason many bright ideas fizzle into unfinished projects - the motivation cause by the inspirational thought is not enough to carry on.

This is where discipline comes into play - specifically, the discipline to see a task through to completion, even after the chemical stimulants released at the moment of inspiration are gone.

For leaders, it's therefore important to permit and encourage people to take action on their ideas quickly, when they are still feeling the rush, but then to follow up with them to encourage they see them through to fruition.

Dancing Toward Insight

Commanding a person to undertake a specific action is like a straight-line march; getting people to discover solutions is more of a dance. It's a slow, indirect, and sometimes oblique method of encouraging them in the right direction rather than telling them where to go.

In the course of teaching leadership skills, the author has noticed a lot of bad habits that leaders use in an attempt shortcut the process:

They rush a person into making a quick decision
They focus on granular details rather than general ideas
They do not allow the other person to use their own mind
They focus on addressing the problem rather than helping the person
They toss in curveballs and distractions that prevent focus

Rather than addressing these issues individually, the author proposes they can be addressed simultaneously by adopting a process for having more effective communications that support employees' mental processes.

The "Dance of Insight" has four parts - permission, placement, questioning, and clarifying - which are designed to keep the employees' thinking minds engaged and avoid distractions. Each will be discussed in detail.

But first, a general observation: when the Dance of Insight is done well, the leader becomes almost invisible in the conversation. Their task is merely facilitation, ensuring the goals are clear, the other person's mind is engaged and on track, but not participating directly in the thinking process. Again, the technique is not about solving the problem. But coaching the problem-solver.

Permission

There's little use in attempting to pursue a conversation with a person who doesn't want to talk to you. No amount of enthusiasm on your part will make up for a lack of interest on theirs. This seems fairly obvious, but many managers and executives suffer from exceeding narcissism, and the belief that other people are interested in what they have to say. But like anyone else, they have to ask for permission, especially when they intrude upon the private place that is a person's mind.

The author speaks to his personal experience: he was interested in engaging in discussions without permission, barging in and chattering away while ignoring the signals others were sending that they didn't want him intruding. In his attempts to get people to engage with him, he found the simple act of asking for permission to talk about a given issue to be highly effective.

Consider that permission comes in levels: there are certain topics we won't discuss with someone we've met for the first time, others we won't discuss the other person is a friend or colleague, sill others we won't discuss unless the other person is a very close friend or family member, and others still we won't discuss with anyone at all. One interesting point is that the level of permission seems to stick - two best friends who haven't seen one another for years will resume their discussion at the permission level they had set years before.

We're also very aware of the level of permission we're willing to give to others. Asked to share a personal detail, perhaps our bank balance or our health, and we can sort out fairly quickly whether we would give that information to a specific person. This differs by culture: in some cultures, asking how much money a person makes is a perfectly acceptable question for casual conversations - but most Americans would be put off by it.

Getting too personal too quickly damages trust, and makes the other person more guarded for a long period of time. We have a strong tendency to assume other people are just like ourselves when it comes to the level of privacy they attach to certain information, and this can lead us to overstep our bounds.

And so, your opening line in any conversation should ask permission in two ways: permission to discuss a given topic (as just mentioned) and permission to have a conversation at all. Asking "Would this be a good time to talk to you about that new project?" gains permission not only to talk about the project, but to have the conversation now.

(EN: Here and elsewhere, the author seems to assume permission will be granted by the other party. One of the chief problems with business etiquette, in my experience, is that people persist even after the other person has refused. I don't believe he addresses that at all.)

You should also be mindful of shifts in the conversation when the permissions level increases. A person might casually tell you what they do for a living and where they work, but if you then ask about their salary, their defenses come up. People generally become relaxed during a conversation and disclose a little more on their own, but if they seem to become evasive or uncomfortable, it's a sign you've gone too far, too fast.

One particular difficulty in workplace relationships is that people in positions of authority do not feel the need to ask permission - by virtue of their rank, subordinates must comply and answer any question they might ask. Culturally speaking, they're right about that when it comes to work-related topics, but using threat of authority to extract information is akin to bullying, and while the other person may feel compelled to answer, they will feel resentful and untrusting. The better approach is to ask permission even when it is not strictly necessary because it shows respect and builds trust.

Placement

Placement refers to giving the other person a sense of context in any given conversation. Making it clear where you are and what's about to happen next puts people at ease and focuses their thinking on the issues to be discussed. That is, knowing what has happened so far puts people in a state to discuss what comes next - which is particularly important in having multiple conversations about a topic over time.

Placement also better defines the topic to be discussed, which is important because people may be interested in difficult angles: given a project, one person may want to talk about the overall goals, another person focused on a specific step, and yet another on the budget. Unless they are directed to the same aspect, the conversation will spiral and wander about, failing to achieve the goal you had in mind when you initiated it.

People are generally inclined to use placement when faced with a difficult conversation. That is, they will provide background and context and overtly state their goals for the conversation because they sense a high level of risk. But it's a technique that can help to focus any conversation, even a low-risk one.

Some of the issues you can address in placement are the specific topic, the background, how long you'd like to speak, where you're coming from, what you hope to achieve, what you need from them, how you would like them to participate, how the conversation is going to flow, etc.

An important note is that placement is a control mechanism, but it's not just about controlling the other person, but yourself as well. For the other person's perspective, placement is a promise that you will keep the conversation within certain boundaries. For yourself, placement gives you direction so that you can keep yourself from meandering off topic.

As with permission, placement is done at the onset, but if the conversation becomes complex or goes awry, it may be necessary to repeat placement. In a lengthy conversation, it may also be necessary simply to update or refresh the perspective.

In all, placement is a tool for making conversations more productive by keeping them on topic and out of the weeds.

Questioning

Asking questions is the primary way we get other people to think ... provided that we ask the right kind of questions. The author concedes that heuristic methods are not the fastest approach, but he's convinced based on years of coaching and observation that it is the most effective.

People in general, and leaders in specific, tend to take the wrong approach: they want to tell the other person what to do rather than help them think through their own dilemma. Recall that people are more motivated to follow their own ideas, and tend to be resistant to and suspicious of suggestions from others.

Quiet leadership means coaching people to discover solutions. Compared to other leaders, they give very little advice. That's not to say tat they do not share ideas or make suggestions, but this is not their primary mode of interaction.

The Problem of Advice

The most common reaction to a person who states a problem is to tell them what to do to solve it. In doing so, we are giving them a ready-made solution that they can follow without thinking. The author mentions three reasons this is a very bad idea:

Our advice is ignorant. We know only what the other person has told us about their dilemma, which is seldom comprehensive.
Our advice is off the mark. Without exploring the dilemma, we may be dealing with a symptom rather than a root cause.
Our advice is unwelcome. People are independent thinkers, and their immediate reaction is to argue against or ignore other peoples' ideas, even when they have asked to hear them.

Ultimately, your role in helping a person find a solution is not giving them the solution, but to help them to find it - that is, to discuss the dilemma until you can identify the central challenge. Very often, when you clear away the clutter, the solution becomes clear.

Even when a person seems to want advice, and asks for it explicitly ("tell me what to do"), there are two reasons you should refrain. First, such people very often know what they might do, fear the consequences will not be entirely positive, and are looking for a scapegoat - and by giving them guidance, you are accepting responsibility for the outcome. Second, consider that if you give people advice, they will keep coming to you with problems. The task of a leader is not to solve problems, but to develop his people to becoming problem-solvers.

Asking the Wrong Questions

The author describes some of the bad tactics in asking questions: asking questions that are too direct or too specific. This seems like a fast route to success, but what often happens is that people get lost in the weeds: they will vent at you about the rotten situation they are in, explaining why they feel helpless to take action, or defending their decision to refrain from taking action. Non of this is productive.

Another unproductive approach is to phrase advice as if it were a question: "Why don't you [do this]?" is phrased as a question in a grammatical sense, but in essence we are providing g them with a specific course of action that has not occurred to them, and which we are implicitly encouraging them to take.

Another unproductive approach is to shortcut the conversation: to ask the person "what are you going to do?" or "what do you think you should do?" This is spineless, which damages our credibility as a leader, and patently unhelpful: the other person knows they ought to do something, but doesn't know what it is.

The last unproductive approach the author mentions is making suggestions for how a person ought to think about things. The description is a bit oblique, but the author seems to be talking about making assumptions about their mental frame and suggesting that they adjust their attitude about the problem, rather than exploring the problem itself. The author suggests that this is often offensive - you are in effect criticizing the person with the problem, rather than helping them solve the problem.

Asking Thought-Provoking Questions

Instead of probing the problem or prodding toward a solution, ask questions that enable the other person to think about the situation. It may even be useful to insert the word "think" into the question, as a gentle way to suggest that the person reflect and consider their answer. Rather than ask "How important is this?" ask "How important do you think this is?" To get people to think, it's necessary to get them to focus on their thought process rather than the external things that provoke them to think.

(EN: The author doesn't call attention to this, but something that struck me about his list of "thinking" questions is that they tend to focus on the future rather than the past: i.e., what a desired solution might cause to happen, and what steps might be taken to achieve that outcome, rather than the historic details of the problem.)

A way to know that you have asked a good question: the other person doesn't shoot back immediately, but pauses a moment to consider what they are going to say. The more you can stay above the detail, problem, and drama, the quicker people will find solutions.

Another suggestion is to ask the right kind of question, specific to the kind of thought you wish to provoke. Some examples:

Thinking: How long have you been thinking about this?
Vision: What do you want to achieve here?
Planning: What's your plan for achieving these targets?
Detail: Tell me about what you've done so far.
Problem: What's in the way of hitting your targets?
Drama: Tell me what will go wrong if you don't hit your targets.

The most useful of these questions are the vision and planning ones - though you may have to ask a thinking question to get them into a pensive state at all. Detail and problem questions don't add much to the dialogue - these are things people can sort out on their own once they have a vision or a plan - but it can be useful to participate in this process until a person gets the hang of it. Drama questions can be dangerous - people tend to go directly down the slippery slope of emotions - though sometimes it's useful to surface emotions so that they can be set aside.

Clarifying

After getting permission to engage, framing the conversation, and helping a person to think through a problem, there remains a final step to bring cloture to the conversation: an explicit statement of what has been achieved in the conversation and what will occur as a result of it.

The author describes a situation in which, after discussing an issue, a person walks away "cloudy" - still trying to make sense of it all, doubtful about the outcome, uncertain of what to do as a result. When people are in this state, they are still not ready to be productive. In other words, the connections have not been made, and working memory is still processing in search of a conclusion.

There's a distinction to be made between clarifying and paraphrasing The latter merely involves repeating back what was said in fewer words, and can be an effective method of acknowledging placement in the context of the conversation, but doesn't serve to move things forward. Clarifying, as the word implies, makes things clear - not by repeating what was said, but by drawing a conclusion from it, or perhaps stripping away some of the inessential and distracting details to focus on what matters. It speaks to the essence of what is said, not the particular details.

Clarifying also involves taking on some degree of risk, and trusting in your own intuition and judgment - you may well have missed the point. When you get it right, people will nod along, but even if you get it wrong, they will pitch in to help clarify in a way that gets it right. Either way, the conversation can move along based on mutual understanding.

Putting the Dance Together

In the chapter conclusion, the author provides a few hypothetical examples that illustrate how the parts he has described work together in the course of a conversation. Nothing new is added, but it does illustrate that the "dance" is not a sequence of steps performed in order, never going back, but rather a set of techniques to move the conversation forward in a loose and adaptive manner.

Ultimately, the dance of insight is not a direct line to solving a problem for another person, but in encouraging them to think for themselves in the course of solving their own problems. In the short run, it's takes more time to resolve an issue in this manner; but in the long run, it saves far more time by developing people into independent problem-solvers who will come to you with fewer issues.

JIM.SHAMLIN.COM

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