Cultivate Curiosity, Don’t Communicate Conclusions

As I have been studying what I will call The Constructed Emotion Theory, or CET, I realize that I need to change the way I communicate in presentations and workshops.

While I have known for a long time that you can’t send people information like computers do, I can’t take the already finished spreadsheet and send it to them for them to use. We don’t work like that. I need to take a different approach.

Basically, I want to leverage the way our brains already work. We are not stimulus-response machines, we are prediction engines. We are constantly trying to anticipate what will happen so we can be prepared for it.

Lecturing, teaching in a traditional sense, does not seem to work well with adults, at least the way I have been doing it. So I want to try a different approach. And I am going to experiment with that today. Instead of getting up and giving a twenty-minute explanation about what a Forum Health Check is (if you want to know, leave me a message, I can tell you) , I will start very simply with, “I am here to help you discover how to create a better forum experience.” And then launch into an exercise of discovery with the group called, Alone/Together or Paired Sharing. I will ask them to look in and share their best (and worst) forum experiences. First alone, then in pairs, then they will select the “best” or most representative of each and go around the room. I will assign roles, Seasoned Viewpoints and Fresh Perspectives. I want them as a group to discover how they all see this “thing” they call a forum.

Instead of lecturing, I want to lead them on a journey of discovery and curiosity. I know that we are lazy reasoners. That when you argue with yourself, you always win. However, we are amazing in small groups getting to the truth of things. Our true powers of rational thought are focused outward, toward what is coming into us. And even this system is built upon our predictive abilities. When we dream up our reasoning, we are free to think what we want, largely unconstrained. However, when information comes to us, it must be matched against what we expected, and that matching produces discrepancies, conflicts, and before we treat someone else’s ideas as “prediction error” that must be corrected, we push back. We argue. We ask for clarification, or we present our prediction as an “alternative” that must be considered. And thus begins a process of negotiated mutual understanding. Our information, plus new information, and discussion or debate to get the “right” information. Also, don’t forget, this process must factor in what is acceptable to the group, the cultural milieu, or situation. Words are not simply sounds which hang in the air, but streams of energetic mental representations which can animate another person. (I found this interesting: when ordinary, everyday, spoken words are removed from their context and played back in isolation, adults can identify the word less than 40% of the time.) Communication is an act of mutual transmission; it is musical, contextual, and highly dependent upon many factors.

And what are words anyway? But the transmission of one mental construct, or representation, from one mind to another? Firing networks of neurons stimulate the complex muscles necessary to pulsate air in particular patterns. The three-dimensional sound waves then collide with the inner ear of another person (and this collecting of sound waves is so important we have two large flaps of skin on the sides of our head to collect and direct these oscillations to the necessary sensors). These sound wave sensors then generate electrical stimulations which are converted by the brain from temporal signals (sound happens in a rapid sequence) into something spatial, a representation which can be held and manipulated, worked with and combined, compared, and considered as representations in the other person’s head.

What started as patterns of electrical activity ended as patterns of electrical activity.

Thoughts do not only fill a mind like water filling a bucket, they are the fuel for future predictions the brain will use to interpret the world.

As such, because literally everything is compared against expectation (another word for prediction), crafting communication to be receivable is far more challenging than I realized. Well, communication I want to be received well.

If I do not give people the opportunity to compare, contrast, and contemplate their “prediction errors,” if they cannot “contribute” to the conversation, they will in all likelihood tune out, shut down, or resist much of what I say.

But What If…

What if I am speaking to an audience and I can’t give them an exercise or activity? What if it is too many people? I can tell a story. I can lead them on the journey of how I discovered what I learned. I can share my questions, and my exploration. I can engage our predictive prediction by making a mystery of it. As Malcolm Gladwell said in his master course. A surprise is when the unexpected happens, but a mystery is like a puzzle missing a piece. We know that we are missing a key piece of information, we even know what we are missing. The who done it, the core mystery is “who?” In other genres it could be a how? The caper genre relies heavily on our understanding that best laid plans go awry, the question is “How?” We know what to look for, what missing piece will make this puzzle complete? There is a gap in our information.

We also want surprise. The brain is constantly in search of novelty, but there needs to be a balance of what we expect interrupted with the unexpected.

But this means sharing my own journey, in as entertaining a way as possible, without jumping directly to my conclusions. I need to focus on the question of essence. In the case of the Forum Check, that question could be as simple as, “What is a great forum experience to you?” But for my work on video games, the question could be, “Why are young kids acting like they are addicted to video games?” The true depth of this question is better understood when you ask the question, “What is addiction?” The mystery of the iPads and kids becomes more profound when you realize that these kids have none of the preconditions for classical addictive response. In theory, it should be nearly impossible for them to become “addicted” in the classical sense of the word. And yet… That is probably the place to start: what is addiction anyway? If engineering school taught me anything, it was this: you have your best chance of solving a problem when you understand it. Or as they would say at Intel, “A problem well defined is a problem half solved.” Despite George Lucas’s assertion that slapstick physical comedy can solve hard problems (Anakin Skywalker ends the war with the Trade Federation by flailing around in the cockpit of his purloined space fighter - Oh gee, let me smash a bunch of buttons, oh wow, look what happened!) In what most of us would call real life, we have to understand a problem before we can solve it.

There is a similar saying: “If you find out why the fence is there before you go tearing it down, you will meet a lot fewer angry dogs.” Uninformed problem-solving can create new, unanticipated problems.

I know, I know, lecturing again. This is going to take some time. I suppose what I’m leaning into is uncovering and sharing my own motivations. I have my question: why are these kids addicted? What is addiction anyway? Why do I care about understanding addiction? Because a well-defined problem is a problem half solved. If you don’t understand what is causing the problem, or even the problem that is being caused, it is hard to know what changes need to be made to solve it.

So I can make it personal: do I even know what addiction really is? I mean, I am not a doctor, and I don’t play one on TV. But people, just like me, are being blamed for causing a problem, for harming kids. And that is not cool. I want to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.

What we can say for certainty is these kids are suffering and so are their families. What started out as a (largely innocent) desire by adults to entertain and engage the children they love is this turned into a nightmare for many of them. But why? What is going on?

And most importantly, what can we do about it?

Parents thought they were giving their child a toy, and their kids act like their parents got them hooked on crack cocaine. What the hell is happening here?

Summary

To bring this to a close, I want to rework all my stories, teachings, and shares to leverage the way our brains engage with reality. My conclusions are so far removed from people’s predictions they are very, very hard to digest. So we need to go on a journey together. And I need to build, Tools for the Traveller. How do we navigate this idea space together?

I do love that idea, Tools For the Traveller. If you are going to go on a journey, you should take what you need to get you where you want to go. And as a guide, I need to plan better to make sure I have what my guests need, so I can take them where they want to go.

And this is their journey. They want to have this experience. I cannot, nor should I, try to experience it for them. Maybe this is why Matthew Dicks says, “your vacation story is not a story.” Any time you (well, I’m talking to me) try to share a conclusion, you are telling a vacation story.