Dream time

Early morning.

I’ve been repairing working relations between the Brazilians and the Argentinians in my team. There have always been tensions. Although they live so close to each other, they are continuously at each other’s’ throats, finding fault, failing to clarify and resolve misunderstandings, undermining mutual projects and so on.

What’s to be done?

I’ve tried all sorts of things up to now. For example, I got them into a room together to try to understand the other’s point of view by role-reversing, so that the Argentinians became Brazilian and vice-versa. I taught them how to paraphrase what the other was saying in order to create clarity of meaning. I had them try out English as a mutual language instead of Spanish, which always puts the Brazilians on the back foot.

Nothing seems to work.

But the real problem is: none of this is real. I don’t have any Argentinians or Brazilians in my ‘team’.

It’s all in my dreams.

 

The Power of Paraphrase

Over the years I have had the pleasure of partnering with (and learning from) some wonderful facilitators. And, amongst them all, a few particular moments remain in the memory.

One such was in Amsterdam. I was working with my colleague Emma Luten, helping one of the top ad agencies there, JWT, to create a new vision and strategy.

From quite early on, it was clear that the local management team was unhappy. Overwhelmingly Dutch, they clearly did not like each other, scoring points off one other at will, and resentful of working in the meeting in the international language, English.

So, after about twenty minutes, one of them told Emma to put away the marker pen, to sit down and be quiet.

“We need to talk to each other,” he said. “In Dutch.”

They went at it, hammer and tongs, many speaking at once, voices raised in anger and frustration, nobody listening to anyone else. Emma and I sat silently.

After half an hour or so, they paused to draw breath. Emma said: “Do you mind if I say something?”

“What?”

“Well, it seems to me that there are three main issues here.”

“And they would be...?”

Emma calmly laid them out before them. The team was stunned and reluctantly agreed.

“My suggestion would be that we use these issues as task headlines and work together on each of them in the remainder of this meeting,” said Emma.

So that’s what we did.

The illusion of communication

“The main problem with communication,” wrote George Bernard Shaw, “is the assumption that it has happened.”

This may well be one of the eternal truths of mankind.

And it’s particularly a problem when we are innovating. The nature of innovation is that new ideas break existing “rules”, and an immediate and natural response is to invoke the rule and put up an objection.

So often this knee-jerk reaction springs from having misunderstood some aspect of the new idea.

The best way I know to deal with this syndrome is to use paraphrase.

To say to the person who has put forward the idea, “What I hear you saying is…”, is far more likely to result in real comprehension. Especially compared with the usual tactic.