Integrating Missionally

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“Even the people who wrote the Bible were smart enough to know, ‘tell them a story.’ The issue was evil in the world, the story was Noah…. Now the Bible knew that and for some reason or another I latched on to that.”

That was Don Hewitt, creator and executive producer of one of the longest running show in U.S. television history, 60 Minutes, explaining the “secret” of his success. Watch his explanation.

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There are three reasons why a good story can be a useful leadership tool:

To inform. We all want the facts, but if a leader wants the facts to matter he needs to add a little seasoning. Stories can take raw data and give it life. For example, why not use a spreadsheet to tell a story about rising sales, or declining quality? Use the data to make your points. Then, flesh out that explanation with stories about the effect on individuals, teams and the company as a whole.

To involve. If you need to get people on your side, you need to involve them in the process. You need to engage their interest. For example, if an executive needs to persuade people to support an initiative, she can describe how the initiative will benefit the customer but also emphasize how it will improve the lot of employees, too. (More customers, more sales, more revenues, more jobs, more opportunities for promotion, etc.)

To inspire. Employees become jaded; there is only so much “importance” they can absorb, even when their jobs are at stake. So it falls to leaders to find ways to inspire their teams. Stories are the ideal vehicle for inspiring people because successful ones can dramatize the human condition. A story about a customer service representative who drove to the house of a customer to rectify an error, or a sales person who drove through a raging blizzard to close a sale, can quickly become the stuff of corporate legend. These stories give sustenance in times of travail, and say to an employee faced with long odds, “If he can do it, so can I.”

Read more in the article: Why Leaders Need Stories: A Lesson from Don Hewitt.

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Communication researchers Chip and Dan Heath have investigated what makes a message stick.  By stick, they mean that a person’s ideas “are understood and remembered, and have a lasting impact – they change your audience’s opinions or behaviors.”[1]  What they discovered was that sticky ideas shared certain traits.  And while they admit there is no formula for sticky ideas, sticky ideas do draw from a common group of traits.[2]

The first characteristic is that the message is simple. Communicating with simplicity is finding the core of the idea. This means we need to strip the idea down to its most crucial essence, weeding out the superfluous. The key is finding the most important idea and not getting bogged down with good ideas.  Finding the core is about shedding many great ideas so that the main idea can shine.  Communication designers must work to discover how much can be stripped out of an idea before it begins to loose its essence.[3]

Too much superfluous information can lead to decision paralysis.  Research has found that the “mere existence of uncertainty seemed to alter how people made decisions.”  Another study noted that decision paralysis could be caused by choice.  Too many choices create situations where people do nothing.  As a result, prioritization in the message is key.  “Prioritization rescues people from the quicksand of decision angst, and that’s why finding the core is so valuable.  The people who listen to us will be constantly making decisions in an environment of uncertainty.  They will suffer anxiety from the need to choose – even when the choice is between two good options…”[4]

Simplicity is both core and compact.  Simple ideas function like proverbs.  They are “short sentences (compact) drawn from long experience (core).”[5] Only ideas with profound compactness are valuable. To accomplish this, the communicator needs to pack a lot of meaning into a little bit of messaging. Using flags, tapping into the memory of an audience, using what is already there does this.

The second characteristic of sticky communication is unexpectedness. The first part of communication is to get people’s attention. Some communicators have the authority to get attention. A policeman or a parent would be good examples. However, the most basic way to get someone’s attention is to break a pattern.

Humans adapt incredibly quickly to consistent patterns. Constant sensory stimulation makes a person tune out. For instance, the hum of an air conditioner, or traffic noise, or the smell of a candle are sensory stimuli that a person gets used to and often does not recognize after a period of consistent exposure. The person may become aware of these stimuli only when something about them changes.

The brain is designed to be aware of changes and communicators will not succeed in communication unless they break through the clutter to get people’s attention. In addition, we complicate our messages to the point that we will not succeed unless we keep people’s attention.

To understand this, communicators need to understand two emotions that are commonly provoked by naturally sticky ideas. The first is surprise. The second is interest. Surprise gets a person’s attention, while interest keeps that attention.[6]

Schemas enable profound simplicity and help create complex messages from simple materials. Schemas are like guessing machines. They help a person predict what will happen and how he should make decisions. When something unexpected happens, the schemas have failed and the person is surprised.

Surprise jolts one to attention. It is triggered when a person’s schemas fail and it prepares him to understand why the failure occurred. When those schemas fail, surprise grabs our attention so that they can be repaired for the future. Surprise acts as an emergency override when a person confronts something unexpected and his guessing machines fail. Activity comes to a halt and is interrupted and his attention focuses involuntarily on the event that surprised him.

Unexpected ideas, then, are more likely to stick because surprise makes one pay attention and think. That extra attention and thinking sears unexpected events into the memory. Surprise can prompt a person to hunt for underlying causes, to imagine other possibilities, and to figure out how to avoid surprises in the future. Surprises make a person want to find an answer and big surprises call for big answers. If communicators want to motivate people to pay attention, they should seize the power of big surprises.[7]

The surprise, however, is not enough. Communicators also need insight. To be surprising, an event cannot be predictable. But to be satisfying, the surprise must be “post-dictable”. The twist makes sense after someone thinks about it, but it is not something he would see coming. To make ideas sticky, communicators have to break a person’s guessing machine and then fix it.

A good process for making ideas sticky, then, is to first identify the central message to be communicated.  In other words, find the core. Next, figure out what is counter-intuitive about the message.  For example, What are the unexpected implications of your core message? Why isn’t it already happening naturally? Next, communicate the message in a way that breaks an audience’s guessing machines along the critical, counter-intuitive dimension. Then once their guessing machines have failed, help them refine their machines.[8] Read the rest of this entry »

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Mirror Neurons. Have you ever heard of them? Here is the definition of mirror neuron, from wikipedia:

A mirror neuron is a neuron that fires both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another animal (especially by another animal of the same species). Thus, the neuron “mirrors” the behavior of another animal, as though the observer were itself acting. These neurons have been directly observed in primates, and are believed to exist in humans and other species including birds. In humans, brain activity consistent with mirror neurons has been found in the premotor cortex and the inferior parietal cortex.

Some scientists consider mirror neurons one of the most important findings of neuroscience in the last decade. Among them is V.S. Ramachandran, who believes they might be very important in imitation and language acquisition. However, despite the popularity of this field, to date no plausible neural or computational models have been put forward to describe how mirror neuron activity supports cognitive functions such as imitation.

The function of the mirror system is a subject of much speculation. Many researchers in cognitive neuroscience and cognitive psychology consider that this system provides the physiological mechanism for the perception action coupling (see the common coding theory). These mirror neurons may be important for understanding the actions of other people, and for learning new skills by imitation. Some researchers also speculate that mirror systems may simulate observed actions, and thus contribute to theory of mind skills, while others relate mirror neurons to language abilities. It has also been proposed that problems with the mirror system may underlie cognitive disorders, particularly autism. However the connection between mirror neuron dysfunction and autism remains speculative and it is unlikely that mirror neurons are related to many of the important characteristics of autism.

For a great explanation of this, check out this video from PBS.

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Because the pathway to reason integrates the emotional and the mind comprehends through images, as incarnators of the message of Jesus, Christians have to be cognizant of the communication experience.

Traditional communication design has historically focused on the idea of transmission.  The goal has been to “define the conditions that must be met to create a clear message.”[1] Research has, however, revealed that cognitive styles, culture, emotional states, and other dimensions affect the way people deal with information.  Communication, then, deals not only with transmission but interpretation, and as such, communication clarity has become relative; there is no one way to make communications clear for everyone.[2]

Focus has now shifted to the idea of communication design, where the focus is now on the audience.  “The task of the designer, therefore, is not that of translating with a view to transmitting, but that of creating ‘a space,’ a space where people engage with a message, and develop their interpretations.  In others words, designers create conditions that favor the interpretation of a message in a certain – approximately – predictable direction.”[3]

Part of doing that is creating frames for a person’s perceptions, understanding and actions.  Framing is the placing of the message in a context for meaning.  It is a schema for the interpretation of meaning.[4]  This is necessary because people “only understand things that relate to things they already understand…Our previous knowledge provides us with tools for building the frames that will help us acquire new knowledge.”[5]  The struggle for a communications designer then is to create appropriate frames and be conscious of the cultural differences that change the meaning of the message.

A biblical example of this can be found in the organization of the Bible itself. The Bible opens with creation and closes with re-creation. The whole Bible is framed as creation/re-creation. Humanity in the Bible begins in a garden and ends in a garden. Salvation, wholeness and peace are found as people move back into the garden. The center of the Bible is the crucifixion, which indicates that the way back to re-creation is the cross. There are many more examples of reframing, those are just a few.

The frame is important for communication, but space is also important.  For the past several decades, designed space was focused on consumptive activities.  However, new design spaces are emerging.  One is what designers are calling experience space where the focus is on doing and using.  There is also the adapting space where activities include adapting, modifying, and filling in things in a personal manner.[6]  Both of these are emerging from a shift from a consumptive to a creative culture.

People are not sitting passively and enjoying, they are participating and doing. There is interaction.

What this means is that the communicator needs to learn to build “scaffolding for experiencing.  A scaffold is a special type of communicational space, one that supports and affords creative behavior.”[7]  The essence of this scaffolding is interactivity.  Designers create environments where people can interact, adapt and create their own experience within the greater space.  Doing so releases control from the designers hands and frees the creativity, learning style, preferences of the individual, personalizing the communicative activity, and creating a meaningful experience for the individual.[8]

NOTES:

[1] Jorge Frascara, Designing Effective Communications: Creating Contexts for Clarity and Meaning (New York: Allworth Press, 2006), xiv.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Richard Bandler and others, Reframing: Neuro-Linguistic Programming and the Transformation of Meaning (Moab, Utah: Real People Press, 1982), 1.

[5] Frascara, vi.

[6] Ibid, 72.

[7] Ibid, 73.

[8] Ibid.

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What we see is not reality. Instead, our brains “combine information from our eyes with data from our other senses, synthesize it, and draw on our past experience to give us a workable image of our world.”[1] What we “see” in the world, then, is really a function of our brain, an image that integrates past experiences, memory, cultural learning and other multi-sensory information.[2] What a person perceives or sees is not the world. It is actually a prediction of what should be in the world based on what a person has experienced. This prediction is constantly tested by action.[3]

Television gives us an example of how this works. People typically misunderstand thirty percent of what is shown to them. A person’s emotional state, mindset at the time, and prior experience construct meaning for him, but this could be far from the actual meaning the show was trying to express. It is interpreted by the person, but is not what actually exists. As a result, “[we] go about our lives…mostly assuming that what we see is what really ‘is,’ as if there were no intermediary process…”[4]

The way our mind receives input from an external context has been redefined in recent years. Prior to the last decade, it was thought that emotions came after the processing of conscious thought.[5] However, research now demonstrates that information obtained from the senses travels in a parallel mode. Sensory information travels first to the emotional center of the brain, the amygdala before a second signal is sent to the neocortex, which handles the cognitive processing functions. What this second route indicates “is the likelihood that much of cognition…is merely rationalization to make unconscious emotional response acceptable to the conscious mind.”[6] Meaning therefore occurs independently of conscious awareness.

Meaning is also a function of comprehension. Baruch Spinoza, a 17th century philosopher, and neurologist Antonio Damasio both conclude that reason is founded on feelings. Damasio found through research that “we are not primarily thinking beings who also feel, but essentially feeling beings who also think.”[7]

Spinoza went on to say that “when we comprehend something, we automatically accept it as well. The only choice we have, he thought, is to reject an idea deliberately or not.”[8] Instead of a two-step process of interpreting and then accepting or rejecting an idea, Spinoza articulated that acceptance was part of the interpretation. “If the ‘off switch’ which signals ‘no’ to an idea is not activated, processed information – possibly emotionally laden via the thalamo-amygdala pathway – is simply accepted as true.”[9]

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