Making positional awareness visible creates conditions for colleagues to do the same. But what do you do with what they do… with the conditions you create?
Starying With Your Practice
You’re practicing reflexivity. You know what it means to spot your working models operating, and what it means to make them visible. You wonder how to guide colleagues toward awareness and visibility. You have a hunch that if you can do it, good things will happen. Answers, solutions, communication, relationships. But how do you show them how to do what you’ve done?
Coaching, training, or facilitation would close that gap. You know the concepts and could introduce them, talk them through. But you don’t need to coach, train, or facilitate – you’re just sharing, right? Is that enough? It isn’t formal. Does it need to be? Would colleagues even want to know? What if it doesn’t work?
You have more questions than answers – and let’s not try to get answers. Let’s not go down that path because it’s a trap.
One of the biggest ways it’s a trap is that the moment you step into a coach, trainer, or facilitator role, you step outside yourself. You become an outside problem-solver and exit the collaboration or conflict systems you’ve practiced being in. You stop doing what you want others to start doing. You can’t be a player-coach in this game. So what do you do?
Stay in your practice – and model it.
Engage your practices in colleagues’ presence so you show without telling. Make what you do visible. It can be a coffee conversation, walking to a meeting, in a team meeting, in a client conversation. Some will notice and like what they see – and copy. Some won’t. That’s true of any approach so you’re no worse off for that reason. You’re better off by staying where you are – inside your awareness – no matter what colleagues do.
Let’s see how this could work.
Your Practice, Modeled
You’re probably familiar with behavioral modeling by other names – imitation, emulation, mimicry, mirror neurons, social learning. There are decades of research behind the concept, and we’ll dig in deeper another time. What it means for us is that observation and copying are fundamental to human learning. They’re mechanims present from birth. They operate below conscious awareness. And they require no instruction or intention to activate.
You don’t need to teach colleagues to follow your lead. You create the conditions in which following happens naturally. The move you make is to awareness of your working models or mental maps, and accounting for them in real time. That creates the conditions.
The metaphor which captures this, for me, is a goalie. Not playing defense and blocking shots – metaphors have their limits. A goalie’s fundamental job is awareness and response. Watch what’s coming, track it, catch it, put it back in play – which is what you do in awareness practices. You don’t control what comes your way. You don’t control why or what it means. You stay present, aware, and responsive to what arrives. You field it. Keep it in play – in your consciousness – to examine it. You can also keep it in play with colleagues.
Working with your working models is what you model for colleagues. Not a technique. Not a script. The practice itself – staying present, catching what arrives, keeping it in play rather than reacting to it. Colleagues observe that. And because behavioral modeling operates below conscious awareness, they begin to do the same. Not because you asked them to. Because they watched you do it.
Imagine a colleague dismisses an idea – that’ll never work. You keep it in play – what part? What will happen? What have you seen happen? What would you do instead? Imagine a colleague loves an idea – we should have been doing that all along. You keep it in play – what do you like about it? What should have been done by now? Why hasn’t it happened? What should we do to make it happen?
I’m not suggesting you pepper colleagues with questions. You use questions to pick up a shot on goal and keep it in play to learn more. To learn what information is behind comments – especially when a first shot might sound like a last shot. Opening shots often sound like conclusions. That’ll never work. We should have been doing that all along. Keeping ideas in play enables elaboration.
Making Working Models Visible
If we know what to ask, models or maps start to reveal themselves. They reveal three things:
- Perception – what we see
- Interpretation – what we make of what we see
- Action – what we’d do toward some end
Each of us sees certain things in situations, but not other things. We make sense of what we see in some way, but not some other way. We’d take certain actions toward certain ends, but not others. And we do all this for reasons we can identify – roles and responsibilities, goals, training and education, expertise, heuristics and biases, past experience. If we make questions out of these mental map moves, we can reveal them:
- What do I see in a situation? Why that and not something else?
- What do I make of what I see? Why that and not something else?
- What would I do toward what end? Why that and not something else?
I call these Wayfinding questions because you can use them to find your way, to navigate situations with the information they reveal.
There’s no right way to use them. You can ask them as-is or modify them. As-is would sound like “Tell me what you see? Why that and not something else? Does that comefrom your [fill in the blank with experience, training, role]?” Modified could be “I hadn’t thought of it the way you explained. Tell me more. Has that been your experience?” The right way is the way which works for you in a situation.
Let’s see what this looks and sounds like.
Imagine a colleague uses the term accountability several times in a discussion. You spot it as a cue[mfn]Communication researchers use cue in some distinct but overlapping ways, depending on their theoretical tradition. A common usage – which I adopt – is that cues carry meaning without being the content itself. This makes them the how rather than the what of communication – tone of voice, facial expressions, body posture, eye contact, physical proximity, response latency. They don’t say something, but they mean something.[/mfn] and follow it…
- You: You mentioned accountability several times. Tell me more about what you see.
- Colleague: Too many times I’ve seen that division get away with bad performance
- You: When you say ‘get away with,’ what happens?
- Colleague: They set targets, don’t hit them, and nothing happens. They set them again, miss them again – and sometimes they’re rewarded!
- You: What reward did they get?
- Colleague: When they missed last quarter they had two people added!
- You: I see. They got a bump in resources while we have a hiring freeze.
- Colleague: Exactly! That division manager is the boss’ favorite and can do no wrong.
You get the idea. Only part of what any of us know and think is communicated on a per-comment basis. Spot a cue, follow it, and turn it into conversation and you can excavate more information.
But here’s the secret: Cues are in you, not in your colleagues. We think we spot them in others – in their words, tone of voice, facial expression – but that’s not how mental maps work.
We’ve talked about how eyes detect lines, edges, light, shade, color, and ears detect sound waves. That what reaches your brain is a stream of electrochemical signals – while what reaches your consciousness are judgments or interpretations of those signals.
Your colleague used accountability and meant something by it. What that means to you – initially – is in you. What it means to your colleague is in them, and might or might not be clear from how they used the word. Spotting your cues – which could range from “Here we go again!” to “Now we’re getting somewhere” – and following them makes your internal experience, external. It makes your private experience public. You keep the idea in play and to make its meaning clear – or its meanings – rather than go with what your working model told you accountability means in this conversation.
This is where your reflexivity practices and interiority make your model visible to you, to make it visible to colleagues, to model behavior for them to do the same.
Wayfinding As A Practice
I coach and teach what I call The Cue Method in four steps: Spot cues, follow them, turn them into conversation, turn conversation into action. Action refers to what you and colleagues do with the information just surfaced. That could range from validating an assumption to implementing a solution. This is where all your self-awareness practices become problem solving. This is where Wayfinding is put to work.
Wayfinding operationalizes everything you’ve read in these Foundational Blogs. It’s the practice of orienting and navigating unfamiliar or unmarked terrain. It’s used to design and navigate spaces like cities, airports, buildings, parks – even digital space. It has three parts:
- Orientation: Locate and confirm current position
- Navigation: Locate and confirm future position
- Routefinding: Choose and travel a route from among options, re-locating and re-confirming positions as you go
To be aware of your maps and models is to orient you to yourself. To learn about colleagues’ maps and models is to orient yourself to them. To make them visible to each other is to orient to the group.
Navigation is a tricky term because it means several slightly different things. In backcountry, or standing in front of a mall map looking at the ‘you are here’ red dot, navigation refers to the direction of travel you’ll take. Direction – not route. Technically, it’s a line with a compass or clock number on it – as in 90o or three o’clock. When you say you have to get your bearings, or you’ve lost your bearings, you’re refering to where you’re headed. At work it’s the intent to understand a client problem, decide business goals, recommend a budget, improve quality.
If navigation is about the endpoint, routefinding is how you get there. It’s the who, what, where, when, how, why information needed to accomplish your objective – including the things you learn while working on the problem. Your straight-line bearing – reallocating budget, salvaging that client relationship – involves all the normal twists and turns of such a task or goal. Colleagues don’t agree on the exact problem, the boss wants a plan now, a deadline moves, key personnel changes unexpectedly – you have a fender bender and miss a critical meeting.
I’ve built my coaching and training around Wayfinding because the truth of collaboration and conflict at work is that one day you find yourself in Rocky Mountain National park, and the next day you’re in the Everglades. I want you to be able to find and make your way through any terrain you’re in. Not because you’re scripted or have a bag full of techniques. But because you know how to orient, navigate, and routefind – and help colleagues do the same.
It sounds presumptuous to say I could help you find peace in work collaboration and conflict – but that’s what I hope happens. Not by flawlessly handling situations – to me that’s more stressful. But by changing how you experience collaboration and conflict. By changing your relationship to it to know what’s possible and not, how and how not, why and why not. And not takes some pressure off. Maybe there’s a welcome exhale there, and better handling.
Test Drive Handling Better With Colleagues
Here are some things to try, to test drive ideas in this blog:
- Reflect on how you copy others’ behavior. Was or is there a parent, teacher, coach, colleague, friend who exhibited a behavior you admired and copied? What was the “short cut” to a new behavior like? What was it like to see an example and not have to dream it up?
- You know yourself well but have you ever asked yourself what you see in situations? Are there patterns? Or asking why you see what you see but not something else? If you ask yourself Wayfinding questions, does tacit, implicit knowledge become explicit? If yes, is it helpful? How? If not, why not?
- Reflecting on your communication behaviors, are you likely to respond point-by-point to something a colleague says, or to ask for more information first? If you like to seek clarification, does The Cue Method add anything to your current practices? If you respond point-by-point, what do you think it would be like to suspend that for a few minutes and follow cues? Is there a reason you think spotting and following cues is a bad idea?
- It’s natural to think we see communication cues in others. What do you think of the idea that cues are in you? If you want to call a colleague’s facial expression or tone of voice cues (some researchers do), what would you call the judgment or opinion you have of them? Or would you say you don’t have a judgment or opinion of them? If you don’t, how do you know what the facial expression or tone of voice means? And where does that meaning reside?
A test drive isn’t a test. There’s no passing or failing, only trying and noticing. Sometimes you’ll have an ahh-ha! moment. Sometimes you’ll raise more questions than your answer. Both are the point.
The stance this series invites is different from the problem-solving, technique mindset most professional development offers. The goal isn’t to apply a technique correctly. It’s to better understand your relationship to work collaboration and conflict – so that you know what you’re doing with technique, and why, not just how.
