Group activity on communication styles

[Ned_Ruete]

In _Reading Lolita in Tehran_, Azar Nafisi says that one form of
courage is the courage to let others be whatever they are and not make
them be what you have categorized them to be. Sometimes learning
styles/ working styles/ communications styles instruments and
exercises give people the courage to let others out of their boxes,
sometimes it gives people more boxes to put others into. The real
question is how - or if - we as facilitators can help others get
courage instead of finding more walls to hide behind.

What do others think?

Ned Ruete
Sr. Facilitator
www.MakingSpaceConsulting.com
nruete@sbcglobal.net
860-739-8401 mobile 860-705-1389

[Gary_Rush]

I agree Ned. I've seen both and as a facilitator, I believe it is my responsibility - if I use these instruments - to help participants get themselves and others out of the boxes - not create more.

Whenever we put people into a neat box, we lose our ability to see them. We generalize and that is the basis of bigotry (along with fear, but that is often just based on generalized assumptions). When I've seen people look at the instruments and begin to realize that we are all different and we have different needs and expectations, then we begin to accept others as they are. Otherwise, humans have a tendency to expect everyone else to think and act as they do - which is obviously not a good assumption. When we can break that assumption, we start to understand.

The trick is - how to ensure that we get out of the boxes instead of creating new ones.

Ciao,
Gary

[Ned_Ruete]

<snip> Otherwise, humans have a tendency to expect everyone else to think and act as they do - which is obviously not a good assumption. <snip)
Gary

It's worse than that. We expect others to behave in a predictable manner even when we don't. Good example: most people I ride with do not maintain a constant speed on the highway, and most of them drive as if they expect that everyone else will. We all make simplifying assumptions about other people. I listened to a taped lecture on use of an assessment instrument on management style. There were 100 "yes/no" questions. YOu counted number of yesses and noes. That meant there were 101 possible scores (0 to 100 "yesses"), but 2 raised to the 100th power number of possible ways of achieveing those scores (1.26 with 28 zeroes after it). There were more ways of responding to the questionaire than people on the earth. Yet the trainer urged people to divide everyone into more "yes" than "no" and more "no" than "yes" and predict people's responses to every kind of situation based on whether they were an "a" or a "b." This trainer was less than helpful is giving us courage to allow others to do the unexpected and be more than our boxes of them.

Ned