Chat Log: Featuring Stever Robbins
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IRC Chat Log, August 23, 1998
All publication rights to the chat text below are reserved and shared equally by Stever Robbins
and Jonathan Altfeld. No unauthorized copying or publication is allowed without the
express written permission of the authors.
| Jonathan | Welcome to the chat, Stever! Thanks for coming!
| Stever | Thank you!
| Jonathan | And thanks to everyeone else for coming to listen to Stever tonight! Stever has agreed to discuss some areas of his expertise... using NLP in various ways in Business and Management!
| Stever | Hello, every one. As Jonathan says, my primary interest in NLP has been in NLP™ and business/management. Not in NLP business consulting, however. Most people in the world actually *aren't* consultants, no matter how much it seems like it sometimes. I'm actually interested in applying NLP directly to the practice of management. At the moment, I use it in all kinds of ways: in managing subordinates, in designing interview questions for job candidates, and in matching people to jobs. I've also used an NLP modeling approach to elicit a fair amount about how to diagnose business problems from some of the heavy-hitters at Harvard Business School.
| Jonathan | You're very interested in Startup companies, are you not? So you have your hand in lots of pots, so to speak!!
| Stever | I am, indeed, interested in startups. I have been involved in several early-stage companies, and am co-founder of one. Right now, I invest what meager cash I have in startups and work with the entrepreneurs around structuring business plans, understanding where their opportunities do/don't lie, and occasionally coaching them directly on various issues. Really in many ways, understanding how a business operates is a lot like understanding a person, when you think in process terms. The NLP mindset, where you're always after the underlying process, is extremely useful in business. I don't have a prepared speech (essay?) of any sort, since I don't know the background of you all, so why don't you tell me a bit about who you are and what you'd like me to go into.
| Jonathan | Let's get a measurement, as it were... of everyone's general NLP background and business interests please! Keep answers concise if you can. What are your interests with respect to NLP & Business?
| FullStop | Well my NLP background is minimal, and I'm not an executive but one of the things I'm dealing with at work is changing a process which management seems to have little interest in changing.
| Rondesgr | Extremely new to NLP, interested & currently working in various aspects of a manufacturing evironment.
| Tranzpupy | I'm interested in meeting and controlling client expectation. I attended Jonathan's prac traiining in April.
| FullStop | I have ideas about how to make myself, and others I work with more efficient, but am not sure how to approach it or how to get further ideas on what parts of the process could be improved.
| AccessNLP | NLP Trainer, own ACCESS NLP Seminars Group, interested in learning more about how to apply NLP in/to business without mentioning NLP per se.
| DaveB | Self-study of NLP with certificate in Hypnosis. I want to start a Hypnosis Business.
| thefool | NLP Master Practitioner, planning on applying NLP to teaching happiness.. workshops and talks... planning on doing a trainer's training soon...
| Jonathan | Frankly, I'm interested in learning anything I can from you, Stever!
| Tranzpupy | Me too!
| thefool | Me 3!
| FullStop | Me 4!
| Jonathan | Other backgrounds? Areas of interest?
| Stever | Hmm. Well, we have quite a lot on the table: changing a process from inside the company, starting an NLP training business, applying NLP to a manufacturing environment, setting & controlling client expectations, and starting a company teaching happiness.
| Jonathan | Just a few areas to explore. We can cover that in 10 minutes, right? :)
| Stever | Sure...! We also have a hired killer wanting to figure out how to set and control client expectations! Well, let's start by asking how expectations get set. ... Tranz, what do you do when you first encounter a client?
| Tranzpupy | Actually, try to establish rapport... physically at first. And Listen..
| Stever | Listen to ...? When you first meet with a client is the best time to begin eliciting their criteria for success and their strategies for knowing when they're achieving it.
| Tranzpupy | I try to do that.
| Stever | What kinds of questions do you ask?
| Tranzpupy | I ask them to give me an overview of what the project is supposed to do. I keep chunking up... so that if we start with maintaining lists we end up with ridding the world of cancer. When I get the *real* reason they are doing the project...
| Stever | I've found the term "chunking up" is used differently by different trainers. What is the question you use to chunk up?
| Tranzpupy | OK... chunking up... "What effect will this ...(database, etc) have on the goals you have?" Agh. It's easier in real time. (and not easy then)
| Stever | A lot of consulting jobs certainly begin by understanding what the client really wants. One thing to keep in mind: A LOT OF PROJECTS HAVE NO DEEP PURPOSE.
| Jonathan | Hah! That is so true!
| Tranzpupy | Yes. But I'm lucky, now, I'm doing cancer research databases... and they are all sure it's going to save the world. I try to find out the end they want... so I know what specific detail things to ask them later, and also, so I can use that to re-gain rapport when it gets shaky (like when they don't know what is involved)
| Stever | Things get started because "everyone's doing that." Or because "the boss likes that idea," or because "the Internet is the thing to do." It's remarkably rare that people give deep thought to why they're doing what they do.
| Jonathan | Keeping up with technology may be a good reason by itself, but not always, eh Stever?
| Stever | [to JonathanA: Though I am typing on a Pentium-400 networked to my P-180 downstairs and out my cable modem... I happen to think that most technology is overused for the wrong things . But that's another discussion...]
| Stever | Even when someone has a reasonable end goal is mind, often the thing they think will solve it ... won't. I was working on a consulting project last year with a company which spent $4.5 MILLION *annually* to build a huge database to capture knowledge that was leaving their company. At the time we worked with the client, the project had been going on for a couple of years and no one had ever accessed the database! Their goal was admirable: to capture knowledge of retiring employees. But they hadn't though through the rest of the strategy. When you capture knowledge, it has to come back out somewhere. When you're working with a client to help define their problem, you can chunk up by asking "Why is that important?" or "What will having this enable you to do?"
| Tranzpupy | One of the first things I ask is what they are going to use the data for... then specifically what reports, etc. Wow. this is cool. Yes, I didn't think about it, but that's what I say...(why important; having this enable)
| Stever | [I know that's what you say... you're saying exactly the right thing! or one of them]
| Tranzpupy | It blows me away that I'm doing this!
| Stever | If you successfully chunk up, you should then chunk back DOWN before you get into defining specific deliverables. If you've chunked up to "We need report X because it will enable us to save $Y/year," you must then begin chunking back down to understand THE PROCESS BY WHICH their high level goal links to the deliverable you'll be putting together. For example, if their high level goal is: cure cancer, and their strategy is "hire tranzpupy to build a database," you need to carry that further to understand what will be done with the database. Who will use it? What questions will they be asking as they use it?
| Tranzpupy | Yes!
| Stever | A lot of times people design a system -- computer system OR business system -- without considering exactly what the experience of the victim/user of the system will be. If you're designing the most wonderful recruiting system, designed to attract and retain excellent candidates, and you realize that you can do it most efficiently by having all interviews at 6 am [because you know that all your best people will be available at 6:00 ], there's still the point of view of the interviewers & interviewees to consider.
| Tranzpupy | Yeah, I'm still *asleep* at 6!!
| Stever | You really want to understand the process they expect to happen overall, and how your intervention fits into it. Then, WRITE IT DOWN.
| Tranzpupy | Good GOOD idea.
| Stever | This applies to all kinds of business stuff, by the way! Putting things in writing is one of the best ways I know to reduce ambiguity and poor memory. (OR make it apparent when there *is* ambiguity.)
| Jonathan | I will agree with that completely -- and also that in writing -- as in conversation -- chunk size becomes very important for getting buy-in -- The more you chunk down -- the more there is to object to in terms of how things fit for people who want to know how things will affect them
| Stever | One format I like: it's called an "IS/IS NOT" list. You define a deliverable by listing all the ways you can think of to complete the sentence "The deliverable IS..." and then all the "IS NOT"s.
| Tranzpupy | Great idea.
| Stever | When people do write things down, they typically cover "IS." Rarely do they cover "IS NOT." Let me give you an example: | THE WORKSHOP I DELIVER TO YOUR COMPANY IS:
THE WORKSHOP I DELIVER TO YOUR COMPANY IS NOT:
[I had to make that up on the fly, so it isn't necessarily the best] The key is to construct this list WITH your client. Do it together, and spend a bunch of time on the IS NOTs. Be very up front with your client, and explicitly try to predict all the ways someone could mis-interpret the deliverables. Then write it down, and SIGN IT. Then you both take copies...] "IS" one part of full management training Jonathan | Well, that's very useful advice for me & I assume also for AccessNLP... Thanks!!
| AccessNLP | Add to list of Is nots: "a panacea to all your problems!"
| Jonathan | I think this is excellent advice whether you're talking about trainings or any other business deliverables.
| Tranzpupy | I do too.
| Stever | Are you familiar with the concept of "innoculations" as Bandler uses it in his sales training?
| Tranzpupy | Vaguely. I read Persuasion Engineering. But please, summarize.
| Jonathan | Who is familiar with this? (y/n)
| JonathanA, Tomo, FullStop | y
| DaveB, EnchantCa, haylie, FullStop, rondesgr, Ruralguy | n
| Stever | Ok. In short, "innoculations" are simply preframing someone against objections that you know will be there. If you're selling hypnosis to someone, and you know that a lot of people will ask, "will you make me beg for a cracker, like the bad, bad birdy that I am?" then you can pre-frame the answer by starting off saying, "Some people think of clucking like a chicken and begging for crackers when they think of hypnosis. In fact, that's a totally different phenomenon..." you watch them nonverbally to find out whether they seem to agree that that statement applies to them and if it does, you go ahead and answer the objection without them ever having to ask it. It's a nice way of pacing them, as well. When you're setting expectations in a business setting, you want to include an innoculation component as well.
| Jonathan | You were just innoculating against us not knowing what innoculations meant.
| Tranzpupy | I need to do more of *that*
| Stever | Someone shared a beautiful interviewing technique with me: you ask a candidate, "If we were to hire...
| Haylie | Yes, what do you look for when you are going to hire?
| Stever | I do lots of criteria elicitation when I'm hiring. "What do you want in a job?" Then when they give me a list of criteria ("I want something really fun and exciting") I begin to elicit their complex-equivalence for the nominalizations: "What do you find fun? How do you know something's exciting?"
| Haylie | So you want someone who is FULL of energy!!!
| Stever | Not necessarily. I want to understand what criteria a person wants in a job, and I want to understand what they mean by those criteria. Then I begin to make some judgment calls as to whether the job I want to fill will really match their criteria for what they want. Then I begin to understand what *I* want. Thinking in meta-programs is a good way to do it. If I'm filling a position that involves spending time with clients, I want to know whether they're "self" or "other." If they're going to be in a customer service position, I want their evidence procedure to be "external," rather than "internal."
| Haylie | I understand!
| Stever | Because in customer service, it's the CUSTOMER who knows when service has been delivered, NOT the employee! I also test for specific skills, depending on the job I'm hiring for. In general, the rule of thumb is "hire for attitiude and metaprograms" and train for skills.
| Haylie | Perfect! I agree.
| Stever | Sometimes, however, you need to make sure you're hiring the right skill set. I've been in companies full of people with great attitudes, none of which could do much, because no one knew how to do anything.
| Haylie | Because they weren't good with people?
| Stever | If you're hiring someone with attitude but who doesn't yet have the skills, THINK ABOUT THE PROCESS: you want them to learn the skills, so make sure that one of the attitudes they have is a commitment to seeking out new information and improving their own skillset.
| Jonathan | Stever -- when I worked at a tech support group, 1st job out of college: we had a team of Tech Support folks who had to have amazing problem-solving skills when interviewing people, we would have them interview with EVERYONE in the department. One of the more interesting parts of the interview was with 2 of the more tech-savvy people in the dept that included me. We would spend 90 minutes interviewing the applicants and instead of asking ANY of the usual questions we would put math/logic & reasoning problems in front of them OR diagram problems and watch them reason their way to a solution.
| Tranzpupy | Cool.
| Jonathan | The job required that (1) they get along with everyone in our group, (2) that they could reason their way through ANYTHING, or go learn whatever they needed to learn to solve the problem, or find the right person who could. So we didn't care if we had to train them... as long as they had the right kind of MIND. ;) talk about a nominalization, but... as long as they behaved in effective ways...
| Stever | Hey, Jonathan, that's pure strategy elicitation, you know.
| Jonathan | Sure! Describe to the group in your words!
| Stever | Hand them a problem and actually watch them solve it. What you're doing there is essentially "interviewing for strategy" rather than interviewing for content.
| Haylie | Yes
| Jonathan | Content is easy if they have the intent to solve!
| Stever | I have to hire a graphic designer soon. I can look at samples of their work, and that tells me about their content. I can ask process questions "how did you know to make the cow purple?" or I can actually have them talk through a design if I want to understand their strategy. In fact, since I do NOT know what kinds of strategies make for a good graphic designer, I rely more on examining their content/output than anything else.
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