Another Communication Boundary: How Far Can You Self-Disclose?

Organizational learning requires the ability — and willingness — among members to self-disclose. Senge and his colleagues use tools such as “Left-hand Column” and “Ladder of Inference” which require a member to be aware of, and to publicly describe, how one thinks. That includes many things: how one reasons out, what doubts and uncertainties one entertains, whether one agrees or disagrees and why, what one does not know or what is the extent of one’s ignorance, what facts or observations led to one’s conclusion, the meaning of a word or label one uses, etc. Below are two slides from a PowerPoint presentation on Senge’s “Five Disciplines” that I show my KM graduate class at the Technology Management Center, University of the Philippines, which lists things that members of a learning organization must be able and willing to talk publicly about.

Double-loop learning is more demanding: it requires self-disclosure that can bring about strong emotional content: personal likes and dislikes behind a behavior or pattern of behavior, personal fears and desires that affect work performance, tacit patterns of inefficient or ineffective behavior one is unwilling to talk about, etc. The strong emotional content itself can inhibit self-disclosure.

How far one is willing to be candid and public about his own thinking and feeling processes — which are normally private or personal things — is another form of communication boundary. This “self-disclosure boundary” delimits what one is willing or comfortable to tell others; just as the “communication boundary” we discussed in the previous blog post (“Announce Your Communication Boundaries”) delimits what one is willing or comfortable hearing from others. In both cases, discomfort is the signal that tells one that his boundary is being breached. These boundaries vary from person to person, and from context to context, but watching at what point the discomfort begins is a useful way to be aware exactly where one’s boundary is.

Browse through the profiles of your contacts in Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, or other similar social networks. You will notice the differences in the willingness to self-disclose. In fact people who are “very private” will not even join such social networks. You must be a “social person” or one who is less guarded about your “private space” or “personal life” to join and enjoy participating in them.

In the plane ride from Beijing to Manila last Tuesday, I sat next to a young man who visited his Chinese girlfriend. Wow! He disclosed to me — a stranger — much more than what I expected about him, his girlfriend and what they did in the two weeks he was in Beijing. He showed me their pictures in his laptop. He is a body-piercer. He told me so much about how he does it to minimize the pain in his clients. He described where (=what parts of the body) and which way he had pierced his lady clients as well as gentlemen clients, etc. He showed me the piercings in his face, mouth and head (he had temporarily removed the rings in them).

Willingness to self-disclose is not enough. Some may be willing to self-disclose more than others, and a few may be like my plane seatmate. Most people assume that they know everything about themselves — why they think, feel and do what they keep thinking, feeling or doing or NOT thinking, feeling or doing. This is a wrong assumption. Most people are actually unaware about much of their internal states. For example, most people are unaware of their “blind spots” or “blindfolds”. A willingness to self-disclose is not enough; self-disclosure to be productive of learning must be accompanied by self-knowledge that comes from years of constant practice of double-loop learning and “conscious living”.

Chris Argyris, who introduced double-loop learning, said: “Leaders and subordinates alike… must all begin struggling with a new level of self-awareness, candor and responsibility.”

In the February 2007 issue of the Harvard Business Review, Bill George and his associates wrote about learning how to be an inspiring and empowering leader. They asked 75 members of the Advisory Council of the Stanford Graduate School of Business what is the most important capability that leaders must develop. Their answer was nearly unanimous: self-awareness!

I believe that extending the envelope of organizational performance can be achieved through three steps:

1. The first envelope is through better technology: this is the easiest.
2. The second envelope is through better management: this is not difficult as there are numerous management tools for this purpose.
3. The third envelope is through better psychological-behavioral technology: this is difficult because the tools in this area are still works in progress.

According to Management Today, “Peter Senge’s advocacy of the learning organization helped begin a revolution in the workplace. And, the relevance of Senge’s work is growing rather than diminishing over time. As more businesses go global, the need to overcome psychological barriers to necessary organizational change increases.”

PETER SENGE

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Note that there are embedded links in this blog post. They show up as colored text. While pressing “Ctrl” click on any link to create a new tab to reach the webpages pointed to. Thanks to Wikimedia Commons for the use of the last image in this blog post.

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L21- On Michael Jackson, or Our Mental Models of People We Know

Through our experiences with friends and colleagues, we form a mental model of each person we know.

1. The “Business Card” Stage

When you meet a person for the first time, you tell each other basic facts about yourselves. You exchange business cards (or calling cards or name cards). You get to know superficial information about each other:

• Name
• Organizational affiliation
• Position in the organization
• Academic “pedigrees”
• Telephone numbers: direct landline, cellphone, fax line
• Geographical addresses: work and residence
• Email address
• Website of the organization

When you accept each other as a friend or a link in a virtual social network such as Facebook or LinkedIn, the same thing happens when you access each other’s profile page, except that you get usually more information about each other through this medium. Members of social networks can also update, add/modify, decide who gets to see how much about himself and engage in a large variety of voluntary interactions with each other.

People can become “acquaintances” but this is a superficial level of relationship. Most relationships stop at this stage. A small percentage proceeds to the next stage.

2. The “Regularized Communication” Stage

When two people communicate regularly for personal, work-related, social or other reasons, they begin to see behavior patterns of each other and they form mental models of each other. This process is very often an unconscious process on both sides. Our mental model of a person we know consists of:

• Memories of his actions particularly those that we liked or disliked
• Personal or work-related qualities we attach to the person based on the pattern of our experiences with him
• Labels or words we associate with the person
• Our judgments or attitudes towards the person or how he “measures up” to our own internal standards
• Our memories of pleasures or hurts we experienced with or due to (in our perception) the person
• Our level of comfort or trust on the person
• Etc.

3. The “Mutually Imprisoned” Stage

It is an unfortunate fact that in most cases, we form and revise mental models of people we know largely in an unconscious and therefore unsystematic manner.

Yet, our mental models of people we know, once established inside our heads, affect the way we behave and communicate with those people. They provide screens which color or slant our perceptions of those people. We stop seeing them as they truly are because our mental models act as if we are looking at them through colored eyeglasses or lenses. If our mental models of a person includes a strong judgment we have formed about him, for better or for worse, that person becomes the beneficiary or victim of our (internal) judgment.

We stop seeing people as they truly are because our experiences about him from the past intrude in how we experience him in the present. Our mental models then become our self-inflicted but unconscious mental box or mental prison that dictates how we relate to the person for the rest of our life. Then, we both become the unknowing victims of our unconscious mental models of each other. Unfortunately, we are often unaware that we have entered the “mutually imprisoned” stage.

A common negative result of this tyranny of our mental models of each other is divorce. It is likely that spouses who have come to dislike each other have formed mental models of each other that are no longer true representations of the other person. A well-known positive result of the tyranny of our mental models is the public adulation over Michael Jackson. It is likely that the mental model of Michael Jackson in the mind of a fan is a distant or perhaps distorted representation of the true Michael Jackson. Whether positive or negative, our unconscious mental models can act like tyrants who distort our thinking and seeing without our knowledge and permission.

To escape this stage, we need tools for consciously managing our mental models about people we work with — a pre-requisite for productive learning and working together as a group. We need Indigo Learning Practices.
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MICHAEL JACKSON

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Thanks to Wikimedia Commons and my acknowledgement to Alan Light for the use of the image in this blog post.

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A Value Driver behind Relationship Capital

My last blog post was about bridging leaders.

A town mayor who is a bridging leader is better able to bring various conflicted social groups in his town to talk and decide together. Why?

Some communities of practice (CoP) prosper and grow, but others do not. Why?

Early this year, Facebook backed off when millions of its users opposed its proposed new Terms of Service. Why?

The purchase order has not yet been received, but an urgent phone call from the president of a company to another fellow Rotarian president of the supplier company is enough for the latter to give instructions to his people to ship the goods immediately. Why?

A customer buys from Amazon.com and discloses her credit card number to the company. Why?

The technical qualifications of two competing consultants were practically equal, so the client chose the consultant they had worked with before. Why?

An ugly rumor sent the stock price of a company down 15% in one day, yet its tangible assets today are basically the same as yesterday’s. Why?

The answer is TRUST. Trust is a fundamental value driver behind all forms of relationship capital. Relationship capital and trust are both intangible yet they produce tangible benefits and outcomes.

Trust underlies the worst fears and threats to our planetary society. Trust underlies the efficient operation — or the threat of collapse — of the global knowledge economy. Trust is so important that we NEED to develop a new science and technology to understand and manage it. Our daunting global problems belie humankind’s ignorance of how to effectively work with this important factor.

The Philippines is a nation threatened by many societal divides: ethnic/upland-vs.-mainstream/lowland, Christian-vs.-Muslim, rich-vs.-poor, communist-vs.-free market, insurgents-vs.-government, Manila-vs.-provinces, etc. At the same time personal relationships are important to the common Filipino. These are some reasons why bridging societal divides and bridging leadership are active and growing development discourses in the Philippines. That is also why scientific research on relationships and social capital is also well-developed here.

The late Filipino psychologist Dr. Virgilio Enriquez developed an ordinal scale of Filipino social interaction, which of course is based on increasing (or deeper) levels of trust:

We really do need to develop a new science and technology of TRUST. What is your opinion on this?

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