Metaprograms – Detail or Strategy

Geoff Roberts Uncategorized

Brain,metaprograms

Here’s another great metaprogram pair that, when you appreciate and understand it, will help you become more effective as an individual and part of a team.

A close friend of mine was telling a story about how she learned to manage the new boss who came her way some years ago. She clearly had a great relationship with her old boss, to whom she took her ideas and was generally given the nod to get ahead and implement them. What a surprise to find that her new boss was not as amenable and constantly came back asking nitpicking questions about her proposals. There was a risk that all these nitpicking questions could be interpreted as a lack of trust, however my friend knew different and she was familiar with the different ways that people thought, in particular how detail conscious thinkers differed from strategic or big chunk thinkers.

Her old boss was happy to hear the general idea and recognise how it fitted into the long-term plans; when thinking about an idea they wanted to be presented with a few bullet points that included how the proposal fitted into the broader context of the business. The old boss’ preference was for strategic or big chunk thinking.

Along comes a new boss who was more tempted by details; who needed bite-size chunks and to be told exactly how the proposal would be implemented and exactly how it contributed to the broader picture. This new boss became frustrated when such detail was not available and, perhaps not surprisingly, would generally not agree to my friend’s proposals going ahead.

So this pair of metaprograms has detail conscious thinking at one extreme and strategic thinking at the other. The detail thinker being frustrated by the strategist and a strategist being bored by the detail. Where do you sit? And what about your boss, your team members?

Until I understood about this stuff I used to treat everybody the same, and most likely to assume that what they needed, how they thought, was the same as me. I now find myself actively thinking, does this person require 10 bullet points or a 10 page report. My flexibility in meeting other people’s needs improves my chances of achieving my goals. The person with the most flexibility is most likely to get what they want.

We can help you learn more about metaprograms. Have a look at Thinking Styles.

Metaprograms – Internal and External Reference

Geoff Roberts Uncategorized

Brain - metaprograms
Yesterday I talked about Self- and Others-referenced thinking, today I would like to explore another Metaprogram in that same arena. Today I will talk about Internally referenced thinking and Externally referenced thinking.

In a prior existence I was responsible for a team of people who went round collecting samples of tapwater for analysis on behalf of our water company. The job was pretty straightforward, you took a van with a load of bottles and a list of addresses out in the morning, filled the bottles at the designated addresses and delivered them to the laboratory in the evening. (Actually it was slightly more complex than that, you needed to fill the right bottle the right premise but basically it was a fairly mechanistic straightforward job – and rewarded appropriately). Every night one of the samplers, let’s call him Bill, would bring his samples back and look for myself or his immediate supervisor to check that he had done the right thing today – even though he had been doing it for years and knew exactly which bottles to fill and how to do the job. At one time it used to frustrate me that I had to give Bill a pat on the back every single day, especially when compared to Julie who just got on with the job and sometimes, perhaps often, did not tell us about the changes that she had made to the schedule. We knew Julie would just get on with the job, but occasionally we had to pull her up because those changes were important – the records had to be right and we had to be sure that appropriate samples have been taken.

As soon as I discovered internal thinking and external thinking metaprograms all became clear. Bill had a very strong external thinking metaprogram; he needed feedback, he needed help in deciding what to do when he wasn’t able to take a sample from a designated points; his way of deciding whether or not he had done a good job was to ask others.

Julie, on the other hand, had a strong internal thinking metaprograms. She set her own standards, she was not very interested in feedback from other people, she was quite happy making decisions on her own and she was always right (even when she was wrong).

Do either of these extremes ring a bell for you, or perhaps people you work with for? Again, there is a spectrum and we can all exhibits tendencies to either end of the spectrum although we may well have an overall predisposition to operate closer to one end of the other.

Once I knew that Bill just needed that daily reassurance, it was a couple of minutes a day to keep him happy. Similarly, once I knew that Julie was happily changing the sampling regime without contacting anyone, we needed to explain to her how important it was to make sure that the records were accurate and samples taken appropriately. An understanding of metaprograms probably saved both of them their jobs – and me a lot of heartache.

If you want to learn more about metaprograms, perhpas by completing a pyschometric exploring how you ‘rate’ on the ‘Top 15’ then contact Suzanne Wade at Hidden Resources.

How our brains work – Metaprograms

Geoff Roberts Uncategorized

Brain, metaprogrammesI visited our local farmers market this morning (Leeds – it’s a very good market on the first Sunday of every month and a passable one on the third Sunday, so why not try it if you are local?). Going back to my car I noticed the usual muddle of newly arrived patrons looking for a parking space and then found myself looking on their behalf, indeed I actually managed to direct one car to a vacant space close to mine. This left me wondering about what it was that led me to volunteer to look for spaces on other people’s behalf, yet other people returning to their car would do so head down with no regard whatsoever to others trying to find a space.

I was reminded of the concept of meta programs – relatively hard wired perceptual and thinking filters that influence our thinking and action. Those of you who have studied psychology, or even NLP, will know that we all have a set of unique perceptual filters that help our brains deal with the zillions of bits of information that are continually impacting our senses and zapping around in our brains. Our brains are just not built to deal with this amount of information and so create a set of filters that help us narrow down the information streams to ones that seem most relevant or appropriate to us. One set of such filters has been labelled Metaprograms.

It has been suggested that there are over 100 such Metaprograms, however in this and subsequent articles I will comment on just a handful that I find particularly helpful (and of course, that selection is itself a manifestation of my own Metaprograms).

Some people in the world appear to others to act and think completely selfishly, always putting themselves and their needs first and rarely considering the needs of others. Conversely, I know people who put others’ needs in front of their own, sometimes to such an extent that they can make themselves ill dealing with other people’s issues – they sacrifice themselves for the sake of others.

You recognise the extremes of this scale in some of your friends, colleagues or associates? Self referenced thinking involves a belief that your needs are as important as others’ needs and that there are times when it is important to put yourself first; you might find you like to work alone and find being interrupted distracting or even irritating; you maybe sometimes find yourself too busy to help others do their work.

If you are others referenced (altruistic) you will be especially sensitive to the needs of other people; you are likely to go out of your way to help colleagues and friends even when this means putting your own immediate needs second; you might even find yourself anticipating the needs of others and providing for them before they have asked.

I have described the extremes of the spectrum and recognise that most others can display either of these two extremes or sit somewhere in the middle depending upon the circumstances.

We know that self-awareness is a key attribute of effective leaders and some sense of where you are on this spectrum is likely to help you lead other people more effectively, especially if they exhibit a different thinking style to you.

What is really happening?

Geoff Roberts Uncategorized

Today was one of those mornings…car won’t start, arrangements for our few days in Germany going to pot, non-existent ‘customer service’ from Netflights (very happy to name the ******s), kitchen scissors disappeared again, breakfast sausages still frozen… aaarrrgggghhhhh!! Why does it all happen to me!?

Do you recall the old sore “Bad things always come in threes”? How come the opposite does not apply “Good things always come in tens”? Well, it’s to do with perception, not reality (and OK for those of you who want to say that there is no reality, just perception – I Agree).

It turns out that us humans are very selective in what we notice about the world – have you ever noticed how mums- and dads-to-be suddenly start recognising other pregnant women or baby shops, when you last bought a new car did you suddenly notice rather a lot of them on the road…? My wife could tell you more about it, but we have this part of our brain called the – are you ready for this? – Reticular Activating System, which essentially pre-programs our brain to notice certain things and, by implication, ignore others.

Try this now – look around the room you are in and notice as many blue things as you can in 30 seconds. Surprised? Now, how many red things did you notice while you were looking for the blue ones? Weird eh? Your RAS programmed your brain to notice one thing (blue items) and implicitly ignore others (red ones).

Now this goes on all the time. We notice what is important to us or on our minds at the time (babies, blue things, churches, beggars, stuff going wrong…) and fail to notice all sorts else. This just has to happen. If we were to pay active attention to all the verious data streams impacting on our senses at any one time we really would need a brain the size of a planet and would be in a state of constant confusion.

I wonder what good stuff was happening while I was noticing all the **** this morning?

It has been suggested that the most effective long-term mental state is one of “pessimistic optimism” (of which, more in a future blog), so next time you find everything going to pot, remind your RAS to look out for the good stuff as well. And, equally, next time all is going swimmingly just be sure to put a tiny bit of your attention on what might go wrong – to recall what us Boy Scouts were always told “be prepared”.