Chapter 1
I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I fall in.
I am lost … I am helpless.
It isn’t my fault.
It takes forever to find a way out.
Chapter 2
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don’t see it.
I fall in again.
I can’t believe I am in the same place.
But it isn’t my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.
Chapter 3
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in … it’s a habit.
My eyes are open.
I know where I am.
It is my fault.
I get out immediately.
Chapter 4
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.
Chapter 5
I walk down another street.
Monat: März 2013
Young couple living in Beverly Hills raising a young son. Want him to know that they don’t live like many other families do. (Want to teach
him to understand about poverty.) Driving across the country, stop at a restaurant in a poor town. Converse with family at next table –
they invite the B.H. family over. Son goes to play with the kids, goes swimming in the river. Later, time to leave. Parents ask their son, ‚What did you learn today?“ „Mom, dad, we have trees and shrubs around our back yard… they have the whole horizon. We have a swimming pool, they have a river. We have the lights at night, they have the stars. Thank you for teaching me how poor we are.“
A woman in one of our seminars recounted the following excellent example of establishing rapport and a therapeutic relationship by matching a person’s content and cultural world models: She was staying with friends when one evening the friend’s little boy came running out of his room because there were „monsters in my room“. His parents told him that there was no such thing as monsters and compelled him to return—crying—to his room. The next day the boy overcame a great deal of embarrassment and fear to ask the visitor if she thought there were such things as monsters. She became serious and replied that CERTAINLY there were monsters, but that they were afraid of bed covers and of milk. He was visibly relieved to hear this and reported the following morning that there had been monsters in his room that previous night but that he had pulled the covers over his head, and when he poked his head out a minute later the monsters had vanished! This is an excellent example of mirroring an individual’s cultural model to create rapport, and then utilizing that cultural model to make the appropriate changes. The parent’s pontifications about „reality“ did nothing to change the boy’s reality, serving only to begin him questioning either his parent’s judgement or his own. Whether disrespectful of the boy’s culture, for among children it is a well known fact that monsters are possible, if not prevalent
An old man lived a quiet simple life until one day his village was taken over by Nazi occupation forces. A storm trooper dragged him into the street and said, „From now on, you will let me live in your house, and every day you will serve my meals, make my bed, and shine my boots. Otherwise I will kill you. Will you do as you’re told?“ The old man did not answer.
For two years he served meals, shined shoes, made beds and obeyed every order with one exception – he would not say a word.
Then one day the allied armies liberated the village. As they dragged the soldier from the cottage, the old man took a deep breath and finally answered the question: „No!“
The following story/parable outlines some potential parameters of a new paradigm for leadership and management. Anthropologist Gregory Bateson spent a number of years studying the communication patterns of dolphins and porpoises. He reports that, in order to supplement their scientific studies, the research center he was involved with often put on shows for live audiences using these animal sometimes as often as three times a day. The researchers decided to demonstrate to the audience the process of how they train a porpoises to do a trick. A porpoise would be led from a holding tank into the performing tank in front of the audience. The trainer would wait until the porpoise performed some conspicuous behavior (conspicuous to humans, that is) – say, lifting its head out of the water in a certain way. The trainer would then blow a whistle and give the porpoise a fish. The trainer would then wait until the porpoise eventually repeated the behavior, blow the whistle again and give it a fish. Soon the porpoise had learned what to do to get the fish and lifted its head quite often, providing a successful demonstration of its ability to learn.
A couple of hours later, however, the porpoise was brought back to the exhibition tank for a second show. Naturally, it began lifting its head out of the water as it did in the first show, and waited for the expected whistle and fish. The trainer, however, didn’t want the porpoise to do the same old trick, but to demonstrate to the audience how the porpoise learns a new one. After spending roughly two-thirds of the show repeating the old trick over and aver, the porpoise finally became frustrated and flipped its tail at the trainer in disgust. The trainer immediately blew the whistle and threw a fish into the tank. The surprised and somewhat confused porpoise cautiously flipped its tail again, and again got the whistle and the fish. Soon it was merrily flipping its tail, successfully demonstrating again its ability to learn and was returned to its home tank.
At the third session, after being led to the exhibition tank, the porpoise began dutifully flipping its tail as it had learned in the previous section. However, since the trainer wanted it to learn something new, it was not rewarded. Once more, for roughly two thirds of the training session the porpoise continually repeated the head lift and tail flip with growing frustration, until finally, out of exasperation, it did something different, such as spinning itself around. The trainer immediately blew the whistle and gave the porpoise a fish. Alter some time it successfully learned to spin itself for the audience and was led back to its home tank.
For fourteen straight shows the porpoise repeated this pattern – the first two thirds of the show was spent in futile repetitions of the behavior that had been reinforced in the previous shows until, seemingly by „accident“, it engaged in a new piece of conspicuous behavior and was able to complete the training demonstration successfully.
With each show, however, the porpoise became increasingly disturbed and frustrated at being „wrong“ and the trainer found it necessary to break the rules of the training context and periodically give the porpoise „unearned fish“ in order to preserve his or her relationship with the porpoise. If the porpoise became too frustrated with the trainer it would refuse to cooperate at all with him or her, which would create a severe setback to the research as well as to the shows.
Finally, in between the fourteenth and fifteenth session, the porpoise would seem to become almost wild with excitement, as if it had suddenly discovered a gold mine. And when it was led into the exhibition tank for the fifteenth show it put on an elaborate performance including many completely original behaving. One animal even exhibited eight behaviors, which had never before been observed in it’s species.
A friend of mine, Sally, works at big school where there are many teachers. She likes to walk along the corridor of the school and look through the little windows of the classroom doors to see what other teachers are doing in their classrooms.
One day, she was walking along the corridor and she looked into one of the classrooms and saw John. John was standing at the front of the class teaching. He was gesturing and talking and turning to write on the blackboard, and it looked like a very dynamic class.
Sally looked a little further into the classroom and got a big surprise. There were no students sitting in the classroom at all. In fact, it appeared that John was teaching to a completely empty room.
Naturally, Sally felt a little worried about John and wondered if he was okay. So she gently knocked on the door of the classroom. John looked around with a surprised look on his face and came to the door.
„Excuse me, John“, said Sally. „Do you have a minute?“
„Sally, I’m teaching now – please don’t disturb me. We can talk later.“
„But John, there are no students.“
John looked surprised and said, „well that’s got nothing to do with me. I am paid to teach and so I teach.“
Sally knows her head but didn’t really understand. In Sally’s mind, teaching involved students actually learning. For John, teaching obviously meant something else.