Most people associate shame or loss of power with being wrong. Ever felt yourself getting defensive? When your meeting participants turn defensive, especially when they feel they are losing ground, neurochemistry hijacks the brain. Because they are addicted to being right, the amygdala, our instinctive brain, takes over. With a focus on being right, participants are unable to regulate emotions or handle the gaps between expectations and reality.
“In situations of high stress, fear, or distrust the hormone and neurotransmitter cortisol flood the brain. Executive functions that help us with advanced thought processes like strategy, trust building, and compassion shut down.”[1]
Scientific studies suggest four responses that every facilitator should expect from meeting participants, namely:
- Fight (keep arguing the point),
- Flight (revert to, and hide behind, group consensus),
- Freeze (disengage from the argument by shutting up)
- Appease (make nice to your adversary by simply agreeing with him)
Addicted to Being Right: Restoring Balance
Addicted To Being Right Requires a Facilitator to Restore Balance
Without facilitation (especially active listening and challenge), the four responses lead to sub-optimal results because they prevent the honest and productive sharing of information and evidence-based proof.
Some suggest that “Fighting” is the most common and most damaging. Can you imagine a professional fight without a referee? Of course not, and the facilitator is the meeting referee. In humans, bio-chemicals drive the urge for “fighting”.
“When you argue and win, your brain floods with different hormones: adrenaline and dopamine, which makes you feel good, dominant, even invincible. It’s the feeling any of us would want to replicate. So the next time we’re in a tense situation, we fight again. We get addicted to being right.”
When these dominating personalities are allowed to take over a meeting, they become unaware of the impact on the people around them. While they are getting high from their dominance, others are being drummed into submission. Group dynamics undergo a strong diminishing of collaboration.
However, oxytocin can make people feel as good as adrenaline. Oxytocin activates connections and opens up the networks in our brains, driving from the prefrontal cortex. When participants feel connected, they open up to sharing and trust.
Addicted to Being Right: Facilitator Tips
Great facilitators seek to amplify the production of oxytocin while striving to avoid spikes of cortisol and adrenaline. Help others who display addiction to being right by embracing some or all of the following suggestions:
- Anticipate and provide appropriate ground rules: Remind everyone that they have a fiduciary responsibility to speak up to support or defend claims
- Avoid judging: focus on issues, not personalities
- Carefully manage scope creep: strongly avoid the tendency for the group to fall into a harmful conversational pattern
- Counteract the domineering: ensure that everyone contributes and consider going around in a circle (ie, ‘round-robin’) or demanding Post-It® notes from everyone with their point of view (again make sure you capture the perspectives visually and transfer small Post-It notes to large format display so that everyone can see all the claims)
- Focus on open-ended questions: Be careful to avoid close-ended questions and force a multitude of open-ended responses
- Listen with empathy: Strive to explore and understand everyone’s perspective as there can be more than one right answer
- Provide visual feedback: Highlight the evidence-based claims (i.e., objective support)
“Connecting and bonding with others trumps conflict. I’ve found that even the best fighters — the proverbial smartest guys in the room — can break their addiction to being right by getting hooked on oxytocin-inducing behavior instead.”
[1] See “Conversational Intelligence: How Great Leaders Build Trust and Get Extraordinary Results” by Judith E. Glaser
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Terrence Metz, MBA, CSM, CSPF, PSP01, HTTO1, is the Managing Director of MG RUSH Facilitation Leadership, Training, and Meeting Design, an acknowledged leader in structured facilitation training, and author of “Meetings That Get Results – A Facilitator’s Guide to Building Better Meetings.” His FAST Facilitation Best Practices blog features nearly 300 articles on facilitation skills and tools aimed at helping others lead meetings that produce clear and actionable results. His clients include Agilists, Scrum teams, program and project managers, senior officers, and the business analyst community among numerous private and public companies and global corporations. As an undergraduate of Northwestern University (Evanston, IL) and an MBA graduate from NWU’s Kellogg School of Management, his professional experience has focused on process improvement and product development. He continually aspires to make it easier for others to succeed.
You have summarized modern political discourse with a fine point. Politics, today is ONLY about being right.
Take a simple middle school math class. How were word problems solved?
First, you fully define the problem by establishing what kind of answer you are looking for which will inform you of the kind of information you need. After retrieving all the pertinent information, all other information is disregarded. Normally this involves determining the equation(s) necessary to solve the problem based on a dimensional analysis of the factors given.
Next, you manipulate the information gathered into an organized way that allows an easy understanding of what formulas to use and how.
Lastly, you solve the problem and check to make sure the answer makes sense based on the problem given.
I have fond memories of classmates protesting about word math problems, “When are we even going to use this anyways?”
ALL the time. You use basic problem solving methods ALL the time.
You gather all relevant information as determined by the parameters of the problem towards FULLY defining the problem. Once this is done, amazing things happen…
Sometimes opposing viewpoints on what problems to solve resolve, from a higher perspective of higher order causes, into revealing that opposing viewpoints are actually the same problem viewed from different perspectives.
When that happens, opposition no longer makes sense as a common goal necessarily results in cooperation and collaboration instead of conflict.
Another possibility is that two completely different problems may still share the exact same solution or require different components that can be amalgamated into the same solution. This, again, leads to cooperation and collaboration.
Not only do differing viewpoints allow for a better defined problem, but more minds bring more skills to the table for the solution development phase. Ultimately, it’s our differences that give us the most power to solve a problem, not our similarities.
This was the role of the jester. Through comedy, the jester was allowed to speak truth to power allowing policy makers to stay humble enough to consider viewpoints they normally would not. From a sci-fi novel from the Warhammer series: a naysmith. One whose sole purpose is to give voice to the viewpoints opposite of popular consensus to ensure a fully defined problem and appropriately developed solutions.
Political discourse, today, solves problems by defining a problem JUST enough to prove their viewpoint right which informs them on who to vote for to solve the problem. Sometimes, it results in a decision to protest in order to gain the attention of somebody who can solve the problem.
How many middle school math problems were solved by protesting or voting for the most eloquent classmate to solve it for the rest of the class?
I’ve mostly quit social media politics to begin work on the solutions that I’ve been arguing for because I found it impossible to find like-minded individuals who wanted to actually solve problems as opposed to merely proving that they were right about the problem and the best person to vote for to solve it.
When I do jump into a conversation, I mainly use it to gauge open-mindedness. I look for those willing to let go of their hyper-partisanship and the canned responses they rely on to define problems as they have been conditioned to define them by social media and need media.
The final point to all this is that emotions prevent the critical thinking necessary to fully define problems for the purposes of solving them. By continually cycling the same enraging types of news stories, cycle after cycle, society remains in a perpetual state of outrage. That perpetual outrage prevents minds from settling back into a rational state conducive to problem solving.
Imagine taking a math test where the teacher hands you the test one problem at a time. Furthermore, she takes that problem from you just as soon as you finish reading it and list two of several factors, and she hands you the next problem. This cycle repeats, until you receive the last problem, and she now takes that and hands you the first problem. After an hour, you are right back to the first problem, but you no longer have the notes from the first time it was presented to you. Now you must reread the problem and list the first two of many factors…just as she takes it from you and hands you the second one.
When do you finish the test? How do you finish the test? Can you even finish the test? Can you even solve ONE of the problems?
And that’s why modern politics is dysfunctional: people want to be right instead of solving problems like they should have learned to do in middle school math class.
One more thing:
Words do NOT define you.
YOU define yourself.
This simple truth is how you moderate unnecessary emotions in a discussion. You are an amalgam of innumerable ideas. You are not one single idea. Do not take a criticism of a single opinion as a personal attack resulting in an emotion-driven breakdown in communications. When more people understand this, less tip-toeing through tulips is required during discussion.
A basic concept of all communication is SNR: Signal to Noise Ratio. The higher the noise, the harder it is to extract useful information from a signal. This is what causes static in analog broadcasts and pixelation and digital audio effects in digital broadcasts. This is the glare on your windshield preventing you from seeing where you are driving. This is the loud party around you as you try to converse with a friend.
This is the emotion emanating from your reptilian brain flooding your cerebrum with brainwaves and hormones when you try to think critically.
Words do not have inherent power. They have derived power as determined by the receiver and how they have been conditioned to understand language. Emotions have existed long before language did, which is definitive proof that words (especially since they are imaginary, existing only within the mind), have only the power relinquished to it by the receiver.
A comment has two main aspects: the emotional; and the rational. The veracity of a comment is determined, solely, by the rational component. The rational component is the SIGNAL. The veracity of the comment is completely irrespective of the emotional content of the comment. The emotional component is the NOISE.
Simply stated, the truth of a comment is determined ONLY by WHAT is said, and that truth is unaffected by WHO said it, WHY they said it, or HOW they said it.
The IDEA in the comment is the SIGNAL.
The INTENT of the comment is the NOISE.
People have been conditioned to believe that words have power and the emotions elicited from them is automatic and unavoidable.
This is like saying a fear of bees is natural before ever experiencing a sting.
People learn to be hurt by words. Emotions are inherent. Many of their triggers are not. Emotions are located in the reptilian brain, and words/ideas are located in the cerebrum. A neural connection HAS to be made between the Wernicke’s area to the amygdala for a word to cause emotional distress.
Even though many have ignorantly allowed society to condition those connections and reinforce them over years or decades, the plasticity of the brain allows those connections to be atrophied or even broken altogether.
All it takes is an idea:
“Words do NOT define me.
I define myself.”