Becoming a Learner in a Unilateral World
“You don’t know this person like I do; I’ve known her for 15 years. I’ve tried to deal with her. She’ll never change. This stuff just won’t work with her. Nothing will.” or “What if I use the Mutual Learning approach and others respond with unilateral control?”
People say these things almost every time they learn about our approach. You may have said them, too – or at least thought them. When we ask more about people’s comments, we learn that they’re concerned about being taken advantage of or making a career limiting move.
Here are some ways to think differently about this, increase your success rate, and lower your risk
First, a story that happened to my colleague’s friend: Johnny was a first grader whose teacher was very concerned about him. His teacher noticed that most of Johnny’s artwork was very dark; he used black or brown crayons almost exclusively. Concerned about his mental health, the teacher called a conference with Johnny and his parents. When the teacher cautiously asked Johnny why he used these colors, he said, “Look. I sit in the back of the class. By the time the crayon box gets to me, that’s all that’s left.”
So, what’s the point?
The point is that often when we’re faced with explaining why other people do things, we tend to overemphasize personality explanations and underemphasize situational or social explanations. We do this so often that psychologists have given it a name – the fundamental attribution error.
The teacher immediately explained Johnny’s coloring behavior in terms of his mental health; she overlooked the impact that the classroom setup and other students’ choices had on Johnny’s choice of crayons.
So what does this have to do with your concerns about others not responding to your Mutual Learning approach?
A lot.
First, you can recognize that when you interact with others you’re creating a social system with them; if you can change the way you’re thinking and acting, it changes their social environment. That increases the chance that they change how they respond. Remember, I said increases the chance; there is no guarantee. This means taking a risk and going first. To paraphrase Ghandi, it means being the change you want to see in others.
We also tend to overemphasize the risk of using a Mutual Learning approach with others – especially those who have more power. We underemphasize the risk of not using the approach because the risks of using the approach are more salient to us.
But the risks of not using the approach are great. We have clients who are internal OD consultants who are reluctant to use the Mutual Learning approach with executives who act very unilateral. What the consultants don’t recognize is that these executives often privately complain that the OD consultants are ineffective at creating change. By not using the skills with the executives, the OD consultants are increasing the risk of being seen as ineffective. And that can be career limiting, too.
When you use the approach, you can reduce the risk by doing several things:
- briefly explain how you want to act differently and ask whether the person is willing to have you use the approach;
- state that you are learning and that you may not use it effectively; and
- ask if he is willing to give you feedback immediately if you are acting in a way he considers ineffective.
Now let’s address the notion that because you’ve known someone to act a certain way for a long time, she can’t change.
You probably haven’t conducted a rigorous test to assess whether she can.
If you’re like most people, you have a long history with that person in which you have both acted unilaterally. You may have withheld information, or tried hard to convince that person to do something, or minimized expressing your negative feelings. That’s not a valid test.
To conduct a valid test, you need to be able to produce Mutual Learning behavior even when that person is “being difficult.” If you can – including inquiring into how you may be contributing to the other person’s unilateral reaction – you increase the likelihood that the other person will respond more effectively.
If, over time, you use a Mutual Learning approach and continue to get a unilateral response, you can share your observations about that pattern and test them out.
Changing habitual responses in a relationship with a long history takes patience and compassion on both sides. You’ve built up patterns over a long time; it often takes time to unravel them. But if this is a person who figures centrally in your work, consider the potential long-term value of investing the effort.
First change your own patterns and then use that as a more valid test about whether the other person will respond differently. You may be pleasantly surprised, as many of our clients have been.
If you have genuinely changed and the other person not only does not respond in kind but is using your Mutual Learning approach against you (such as taking retribution), you may choose to withhold information from that person. Ideally, you will explain why you are changing your behavior and the conditions under which you are willing to return to a more open approach.
Ultimately, you may choose to change positions, or even organizations – as some of our clients have done. The final choice is always about your own values and behavior and what you want to stand for.
For more on this topic, see “Being a Mutual Learner in a Unilaterally Controlling World” by Sue McKinney in The Skilled Facilitator Fieldbook.
What are your thoughts about this?
Originally published September 2005
