If I were to make a resolution in helping clients in any context – it would probably be to listen more and talk less.

And one of the things it would be worth listening to is the metaphor. One of my English professors many years ago decried the fall of the metaphor in favour of the simile in poetry, but metaphors are alive and well in everyday speech.

A provocative take on this is provided by Andy Austin in his work in Metaphors of Movement. He observes that we use them in several ways – to describe feelings, to provide context, to analyze our situations. These are mini stories, that like all metaphors, capture a huge amount of information in a single frame. They can also provide clues to what is wrong with our approach – particularly in how we are trying to solve a problem, or in our expectations of how to deal with it.

An amusing example is the business leader who comments that he has spent two years planning and building a business – and it is not taking off. Austin’s comment is that something so solidly built is actually not likely to take off. Wings won’t help. It’s solid and intended to stay put.

Brick Wall

So listening to the metaphor – and especially listening for the discrepancy between two of them can provide some insight into where we might be getting it wrong.

Some of New Zealand’s biggest companies are using psychological techniques to improve their call centre services. (Note: The HBDI is actually based on brain physiology – not psychology)

They can profile a caller’s thinking within the first 20 seconds of their call, said Wayne Goodley this morning on TVNZ’s business show. The techniques are an extension of the well-established “left and right brain thinking” concept.

Telecom has taken on profiling methods to improve call centres’ service and as a result won the Hermann International Learning Award. The Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI) was developed by Ned Herrmann when he worked at General Electric.

Goodley said Herrmann created the instrument when he noticed that the “learning taking place wasn’t coping with all the events that people had to contending with”. To enhance learning, Herrmann decided to profile the thinking of his staff. “This is a result of nature, your mum and dad, nurturing, your schooling and the free choice you exercise as an adult human being,” Goodley told AMP Business.

The technique is now being adapted to enhance services within call centres. Staff members fielding calls can “clue spot” the thinking of the caller and categorise them into “red” and “blue” thinkers. Goodley says if a person calls and says “look, I’m in trouble can you help me”, the person is a “red thinker”. According to the HBDI a red thinker’s thought processes are based around people, feelings and values. But if the person says “I need to address the situation with my broadband – I’m paying too much”, they are a “blue thinker”, says Goodley.
A blue thinker naturally prefers dealing with facts and figures and is more logical and analytical. Staff can then respond in a way best suited to the caller’s thinking preference.

According to Goodley, in the first period of using the HBDI, duplicate calls can be reduced by over 50%. Most big companies use it, says Goodley. He says “97% of the top 100 Fortune 500 companies use it”. In New Zealand, Fonterra, Air New Zealand and Sanitarium use the methodology.

Thanks once again to Robert Genn – here is something worth watching. You need 10 minutes.

First is the Victim. Why me? we say. The truth is some things we bring upon ourselves by our own behaviour. Other times we become involved in the behaviour of others that causes us harm – a traffic accident is a good example. How we respond to the things that happen, both good and bad, will go a long way to determining how useful we are to the others in the group.

Then there is the non-believer. Sometimes what we are asked to do isn’t our own first choice. So we systematically sabotage the action by openly or covertly doing everything we can NOT to make it happen. Staying in beginner’s mind, being open, letting others take the lead is something we find it almost impossible to do. We need to try.

The know-it-all is an arrogant combination of the other two. Taking on that role is often a defense against our real fear of going into the unknown. We protect ourselves by relying on what worked in the past, on our academic credentials and theories, on our need to stay in the same place.

We generally don’t like these folks a lot when we have to work along side them. So occasionally we need to look in the mirror to see if we ourselves are wearing one of these labels.

Ben Zander starts this last chapter with a story that is totally timely. He relates how he arranged for a group of students to study in England and invited his father to come one evening to speak to them. The elder Zander traced a subject that was dear to his heart – the long and memorable history of the Jewish people. He then began another story – that of the Palestinian people and their history and achievements. His son wondered where we would be today if there had been a similar respect for and understanding of both cultures before the time of partition in 1947.

So much of our history has been one of us and them – of politicians, of those who occupy Wall Street from different perspectives, of faith groups – even those within the same denomination let alone those of different traditions, of volunteer boards whose members have different interests and agendas. It applies right down to the level of the family where the scapegoat is perceived as the problem.

Zander’s solution is to look for the possibility of common ground emerging. It doesn’t mean that we should lose our sense of differentiation and identity. But it does mean that we look at the possibility. He sees it in musical terms as the melody that can be harmonized. It asks us to look at the best possibility within ourselves rather than staying in fixed positions, to entertain the possibility of relationship rather than the separation caused by fear or greed. Scripture refers to this as “listening with the ear of the heart” for something new emerging.

Roz Zander also tells a good story of her work as a therapist in dealing with an autistic child. Sometimes entering the world of another, even when that world is distorted will reach through barriers to a sense of “us”. Ben tells other stories of breaking boundaries, such as the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, a model that is now being used in other countries to heal the divisions of the past.

A key phrase for me personally came out of a conference in which remarks were getting heated about a future piece of legislation for the organization. It ended when a comment came from the floor. “There is no us and them – there is just us.”

We’ve come to the end of the book and it is well worth a read – not to be short changed by the very brief excerpts from it here. If you are interested in possibility – this is a place to start.

In times of fear and greed, what the Zanders call for is standing firm in the realm of possibility. And this depends on leadership. It often involves asking a new question rather than finding answers to old ones, or reinterpreting to gain a new understanding of purpose.

Ben tells a lovely story of his student orchestra in South America playing magnificently and then staying up late, annoying the hotel patrons with noise, going to bars when they were under age – all typical student exuberance. Rather than bawling them out the next morning for bad behaviour he simply asked them the purpose of the tour, – musical excellence only or ambassador? The kids got it and looked sheepish.

He goes after mission statements and their blandness. I did the same thing recently with a prospective client when I observed that their mission statement wasn’t a mission statement at all. It simply described what they did. If they wanted to gain support from others, they would have to provide some inspiration based on their higher purpose instead of their collective job description. Vision after all is something that people have to see and be inspired by

And he asked his music students to write complimentary letters to the NASA team before he went there to give a workshop. The kids provided the burnt out NASA employees with new energy as they realized what their efforts meant to others. As in other chapters, memorable stories provide a way to move others where we want them to go.

No – this is not about becoming a director – except perhaps of one’s own life. The Zanders note that when bad things happen to good people it is rather easy to become a victim. This stance, as others have noted, is really a form of self punishment that allows one to be stuck in a mindset that is ultimately self-destructive.

So rather than be a loser in a situation where one should have been a winner, The Art of Possibility suggests that one treat one’s self as the board on which the game is played. Life isn’t predictable – and just because we want it to be a certain way, doesn’t mean that will be the way it plays out. By doing anything, being anywhere, saying anything – we are exposing ourselves to risk. It’s part of life.

And rather than obsessing about why other people act the way they do, enter our path in a negative way or say hurtful or outrageous things – and we have all encountered these situations – the book invites us to ponder what our response might be. Rather than playing injured innocent, there may be some opportunities for learning.

The Zanders are great story tellers. Ben starts by telling how his father made a long trip just to talk to someone face to face. He took the same stance when he wanted to hire the great cellist, Mitislav Rostropovich. When he couldn’t get past the gate-keeper secretary he simply got on the train to Washington and arrived unannounced. By making the invitation personal, he got exactly what he wanted and benefited in other ways from the association.

I can remember a personal encounter with the great Canadian broadcaster, Lister Sinclair. I needed to hire him for a workshop and the association I worked for could offer a $500 fee. His stated fee was $5,000. When I approached him personally, he decided he wanted to do it because he knew he was exactly the right person to inspire others on his topic which was one that he loved.

The metaphor of lighting a spark comes from the middle ages when those who needed to start a fire carried a hot coal at the ready. Sometimes that’s all it takes and a sudden change of direction works. Rosalind Zander relates a tale of getting a flat tire and having no change to access a gas station coin box to use the pump. She asked for change from another customer but no one had any. She suddenly changed her request to “Will you give me 50 cents so I can use it?” The customer smiled and immediately handed it over.

Ben’s final triumph came from inspiring a corporate sponsor for an event with the London Philharmonia Orchestra. He got a polite refusal from the major accounting firm for his request, but conversation turned to the company’s involvement with education in “failing schools”. So he decided to use that angle as a means of enrolling the company in helping in the area where they already had interest and involvement. Not only would he take a full symphony orchestra to the school for a performance, he would also ask them to bring 200 students to the famous Royal Albert Hall afterwards.

Classical music in such a school? Even the intrepid principal thought that the kids would be disrupting the whole procedure by 15 minutes in. It seemed a recipe for disaster. Moreover 100 corporate executives joined the 1100 students. Only Ben Zander could pull off having all of them joining in the final chorus of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy.

There is even more to the story and it is well worth the entire book. What the chapter demonstrates is the ability to enroll even the most reluctant partners by energy, excitement and determination – all part of the spark. Any of the You Tube videos shows this in action and says it much better than this.

But times of sadness are also times to remember passion. It was Ben Zander’s presentation that led me to the book, Possibility and writing about it here in the first place. If you didn’t already watch his wonderful video about passion, the best thing you can do now is click on his name in the column to your right. Everything said here simply mirrors what he says there less effectively – you will have to scroll to the bottom to find it.

The Zanders begin the chapter by noting that expressive energy is a gift that we can tap into. Roz relates some of the times when nature gave her that energy when she let herself be open to it. (Her experience was with crashing surf where mine is restoration from looking at still waters. Ben moves on to explain how he encourages the same capacity with his music students. It requires a certain ability to go with the flow. He plays with this idea in proposing “one buttock playing” in the aforementioned video – not sitting full centre of the piano but bending to the flow of the music itself and its long line. In another video on You Tube he takes the student orchestra through a rendition of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony at breakneck speed that reveals the strenth of Beethoven’s passionate anger One buttock playing is an idea that can be transferred to other enterprises when one accepts the power of the passion.

And he closes the chapter with another wonderful acronym. He coached a Spanish student who was competing for an orchestra chair and told the student to give the work his all. Technical competence gave way to impassioned playing. Ben’s last advice was to “Play it the second way”. Later he met the student and asked him how the audition had gone. “I didn’t get the job”, the student replied in his halting English, “because I played it the first way. But then I said, ‘Fock it, I’m going to Madrid and compete for the principal cellist there – and I got it by playing the second way”. So “Beyond the Fock it” was born as a working model. Even the headmistress of a Catholic Girl’s School noted that BtFI was now the unofficial school motto. Like Joan Chittister the prolific writer of the same Catholic faith, the motto as she puts it, is “We Fall and Get up again, we fall and get up again, we fall and . . . “