1. Providing their employees with the form and its accompanying reframe, 3 days in a row. (See procedure 1)
2. Informing employees to fill forms in at the times designated (known only to the supervisor — these times will be randomized throughout the working day) during a three day period.
3. Collecting forms and checking them for intelligibility/legibility.
The point of having employees fill out forms in context is, of course, to minimize the slippage between their actual behavior and the words they use in attempting to report it on the form. After this initial information is gathered (assuming a move refined description is appropriate), the following steps would be appropriate:
1. Have first line supervisors compile a list of the six most frequently occurring activities/tasks as reported by their employees (spot check to keep them honest).
2. Design a form whereby the activity/task is placed in context by having each employee select a specific example of each one of the six most frequent activities/tasks and describe what they had to do to get ready to do that task efficiently (typically not more than 5 minutes before starting the task) and what they had to do to insure the task was completed, followed up on (e.g., File information with whom?, Positive receipt procedures to be used?, Information routed to whom?)
Each of you when you first came to work at your present job experienced both a sense of excitement as you faced something new and a sense of uncertainty about what was expected of you— what exactly you were supposed to do. These are a normal part of fitting yourself into a new job. We, here at company X, are interested in promoting that sense of excitement while reducing the frustration which sometimes accompanies the uncertainty. We are doing this by asking you experienced employees to take a minute breather several times a day for the next few days, and jot down where you are and what specifically you are doing. By doing this, you can help us help your future co-workers and help us help you when you move into any new position. Please indicate with as few words as possible where you are and what specific activity/task you are involved in at the times when your supervisor indicates. For example:
6.51 Interference.
Interference to the installation or start-up of an operation in an organization can be treated essentially the same way as it is with an individual strategy.
If the operation does not achieve the outcome, the first thing to check is the calibration of the operation — that is, are they all doing what they are supposed to be doing? If they are not, change their behavior so that they are, making use of the meta-outcomes to reframe your intervention (as described earlier). If they are, and you are still not getting your outcome, then you can essentially follow the same TOTE sequence diagramed earlier in this chapter to test and modify the specific procedures and the outcomes of those procedures.
Another important check to make is on the rapport between the members of the organization that are interacting with one another to carry out the installed operation. How do the employees react to one another? If you find that you have rapport problems, one very effective way to resolve them is to teach the employees, managers and executives about representational systems, strategies, pacing, anchoring, and so on, and help them to develop the tools of rapport building.
If there are specific conflicts, breaks in rapport to the point of precipitating crises, you may wish to use the arbitration and negotiation strategy described below.
6.511 Arbitration and Negotiation.
The processes of arbitration and negotiation provide a good example of the application of NLP principles to the handling of interference in organizations. The steps of the procedure are a slight modification of the reframing TOTE (they are very similar, in fact, to the procedure used with the two conflicting parts of the overweight client in the transcript presented earlier in this chapter).
1. Establish the specific outcome of each individual involved in the conflict in relation to a meta-outcome that all parties agree upon.
For example, have each person make the following statement, filling in the blanks. "I specifically want the outcome of ___, for the purpose of ____.
Their purpose will be a meta-outcome. If their meta-outcomes do not at this point match one another in some way, have each of them repeat the process again, this time substituting the meta-outcome each has come up with in the last statement as the specific outcome of this statement. Keep repeating this process with the newly generated meta-outcomes until you arrive at a general goal that everyone agrees upon. Then anchor their agreement.
Establishing that all of the parties actually have the same goal immediately puts a frame around the rest of the interaction. When all parties agree that they are attempting to achieve the same outcome, their conflicts become reframed as a matter of detail to be worked out, and the rest of your task is essentially team-building.
A. It also helps to establish from the very beginning that the conflict between the negotiating parties is counter-productive to the achievement of their meta-outcomes and specific outcomes, and to have all parties agree that it should be resolved as quickly as possible.
2. Get all parties to agree again on what a successful outcome of the negotiation would be. For instance, find out what would constitute an acceptable decision. And if a successful settlement is not made, find out what further information is needed, who will get it and how the information will be gathered. (See Design 5.32.)
3. As the parties are considering the issues and making decisions about what is to be an appropriate outcome to the negotiation, observe their strategies for decision making.
4. Access reference structures for possible resources — such as, "Have you ever been able to settle a negotiation before in a way that you were satisfied with?" or "Has there ever been a time when you were able to communicate with someone really effectively and surprised yourself by setting something right that you had previously thought would never get straightened out?" Covertly anchor these experiences so that you can put them into play at the appropriate time.
5. Control the analogue communications of the parties so that they produce no adverse effects on the negotiation proceedings. We believe that most of what actually gets communicated in our verbal interactions is the result of the accompanying nonverbal or analogue cues. When we arbitrate for organizations (or work with groups — as in family therapy) we pay attention to and control the nonverbal portions of the interactions more than we do the verbal portions. In our experience, this has made a tremendous difference in the parties' responses to one another. If an individual, for example, were to raise his voice and point his finger at someone while making a point or statement, and if we noticed that the person to whom he directed his nonverbal gestures began to tense up and stop breathing (indicating a negative response), we would have the person who made the statement stop, change their analogue and repeat the exact same statement. In practically every instance this will change the other individual's response to, or understanding of, the statement.