I am in an organizational storytelling group, Golden Fleece - an international community of practice devoted to storytelling in business and organizations. (To join the listserve, email [email protected]). Recently, one of the founding members, organizational storytelling pioneer Steve Denning, wrote a post regarding social constructionism and the brain. I am including part of it here because what he wrote speaks to the necessity of using new and different approaches to get people to think and act in new ways.
...I was reading a book called On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins, the guy who created the PalmPilot and the Treo. He stresses the crucial importance of a well-known fact about the brain, namely, that it is saturated with feedback connections. For every fiber feeding information forward into the neocortex, there are ten fibers feeding information back toward the senses. Put crudely, this means that what we see is only one-tenth what is "out there" and nine-tenths what we expect to see. The image that we have of the eye as a video camera and the ear as an audio recorder is an illusion: the brain is continually prompting us to see what we are seeing and the eyes and ears make minor adjustments at the margin.
It does underlines the truth of the old Talmudic saying: we see things not as they are, but as we are. This means if you want to get people to see things differently, you basically have to change who they are -- change the whole set of values, beliefs and expectations, which they are using to frame what they see.
This helps show why conventional approaches to persuasion - giving people reasons - are unlikely to work. To persuade people to see things differently, you have to catalyze a process by which they themselves adopt new values, beliefs and expectations, and in effect become new people.
Left brain analysis, rationale, and logic alone does not work in change and innovation initiatives that require novel thinking, and news ways of acting and interacting. In order for people to adopt new thinking, values, beliefs, and ways of being, they have to be engaged in new ways - i.e., using more of their brain; establishing conditions that support new types of interactions; using story, improvisation, visual and kinesthetic processes - so new ways of thinking and being can emerge.
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