The chinese guy has his doubts

The other day, I was doing a cession on creativity. I had been working with this group for 15 hours over a period of a month and a half, and for the last cession, I decided to give them an assessment of the way they process information based on Ned Hermann' work.

This is very entertaining and nowadays people need to be entertained. Not that I am into entertainment, but I think it's nice to leave people on a cheerful note.

What about the brain structure?
This is based on the tri-unique brain of MacLean and on works by Sperry, Carla Hannaford and, of course, Ned Herrmann. For more info, just look up those names and add "brain" in you favorite search engine (To make it short, I should just say "google it"!)

So we are talking here about the neocortex (forebrain) and limbic brain, and also of the right and left hemispheres. The neocortex is were our intelligence and our creativity live. This brain's advantage is that he is very efficient, the limit being that he is not that fast, at least not as fast as the limbic brain, who can end up controlling things without us knowing about it.

The limbic brain is in charge of keeping us alive, as in "don't get run over by this speeding truck". His advantage is that he is very quick (need that to get back to the sidewalk) and his limit is that he's not very precise, so it make us make mistakes, especially in terms of our social fears (of judgment for instance).

About the right side and the left side, it's quite simple. The left side does two things: it controls the right side of the body and it works on linear stuff (lists, maths). As for the right side, it's the other way around: it controls the left side and it deals with global stuff (the big picture, no details).

In order to function efficiently, we need to have access to both sides and they need to cooperate. This happens when everything is just fine, but not when we are under stress and we shall also see that we always favor one side's activity (as in being right handed, or having a left directing eye when we aim).

How we process information
Obviously, when something goes on, the question we ask first is "what's happening"?. We need to understand first. The second step is "is this any of my concerns"?. The third step is "this is what I could do" and the last step is "how are we going to go about this"?. In Ned Herrmann's terms, this equates to :
- understand
- adopt
- project
- act

Those phases are dealt with different parts of our brain:
- the left forebrain takes care of understanding ("does that make sense"?)
- the right side of the limbic brain of adopting ("let's incubate")
- the right forebrain of the "got it!" part
- and finally the left side of the limbic is in charge of turning all this into an action.

Graphically and very schematically, it looks like something like this:



A beautiful tool
The beauty about this tool is that it give few information (you are not overwhelmed with data, you only see a simple diagram), but at the same time, it opens up to tons of valuable stuff as for how we function and how we can live and work efficiently with other people.

For example, if you are a big adopter (you score high on the lower right corner), and a low "projector" (upper right corner), you may welcome all kinds of information and churn it around, but you are at risk of never coming up with an "Eureka!"

I could go on and on like this, but, if you need more, just get in touch with me.

Enters the Chinese guy
So at the end of the seminar, everyone leaves and I'm packing my things when one of the participants comes to me. He's Chinese (you saw him coming), and his English is good but not really fluent. He's got a problem with the lower left corner, because he does not understand the "people skills" there. By the way, he was trained as an engineer.

I explain to him at length how it goes and finally he says "ooooh, it's about adopting (with an "o")". He actually had understood "adapting" (with an "a"). So I say "yes, it's like when you adopt a child, you say 'I'm going to take care of it'".

Then he says "ok, there is something there". And then he adds, "do you want to guess what I have on my chart", and I say (not a wild guess!) "I assume that you did not score too well on that lower right corner". Sure enough, he's pretty square on three corners (adopt, project and act; that is: phases 2, 3 and 4) but he's very high on understanding.

What it means is that this young man is very good at understanding things, but he's not too ready to make something of it. In other words, he's stuck in phase one, but does not go any further.

So, now he's about to leave, and he says "I'm glad you told me this because I had my doubts".

Where it all become clear
He came to me with "adapt" (language thing) but, wait, there's more (Ginzu knife thing). "Aadapt" takes place in the upper left corner (phase 3). But before you can do that, you need to adopt (phase 2). And then, before you do any of that, you need to get rid of your doubts. The bottom line is: before you can adopt and adapt, you need to get rid of your doubts.

For any English speaking person, "adapt", "adopt", and "a doubt" sound quite similar. The visible part was "adapt" (#3 and therefore above the forebrain/limbic divide) but the sunken part was "adopt" (#2, so below that line). This is were we got after ten minutes. But then there was more (I told you so!). Below that was the root of the problem: his doubt. I did not have to do anything, he said it by himself.

I finally told him "you know, this is the flow of life". I must have looking for a philosophical ending. "But instead of telling you 'don't doubt', I'd rather give you a positive direction: 'accept, open up' (as in the Nescafé add!). Welcome the information".

So when he left, he seemed happy because he had gone full circle.

The sherry on the Chinese cookie
Now let's look at it from the Chinese medicine angle (a discipline I had to look at in my previous trainings). Were you have a lack of energy, it means that there it too much somewhere upstream, and then a block somewhere in between. This is exactly what was happening with this young man: he had too much understanding and not enough of what was coming next. The dam was his doubts, and information could not flow freely. Get rid of the doubt, and? wow!

I know it's just a play on words, and some will say it sounds pretty lame, but who's going to say it does not work? Certainly not the Chinese guy!