Over the past few years, I’ve been learning to express my judgments in a way that I like better than my old way.

By judgment, I mean a statement that some person, event, or condition is good or bad, or morally right or wrong. For example, “John is lazy” is a judgment, a statement that John is bad in a particular way.

I’ve found that beneath every judgment lies a feeling, and beneath every feeling lies a need. Every judgment I make comes not from the person, event, or condition I’m judging, but ultimately from my needs, and from how I feel about my needs being either met or unmet. A “positive” judgment means that my needs are satisfied. A “negative” judgment means that my needs are unmet.

“John is lazy.” What needs and feelings lie behind that statement? The need could be nearly any need. Maybe I’m needing some companionship, and I’ve asked John to go to a football game with me. When John says that he doesn’t feel like going out today, my need for companionship isn’t met. I feel lonely, and attribute my loneliness to John. I see John as the reason that I don’t have the companionship I’m needing. I judge him to be lazy.

Judgments leave the most important information unsaid. “John is lazy” says nothing about my need for companionship or the loneliness I feel when my need isn’t met. My loneliness comes not from John’s actions, but from my need for companionship. If I had other people to be with, I wouldn’t feel lonely in response to John not wanting to go to the game. And my need for companionship is about me. It has nothing to do with John.

Judgments deflect attention away from my responsibility. “John is lazy” seems to be a statement about John. Though I’m the one making the statement, the content of the statement says nothing about me. It says nothing about my needs or about my feeling about my needs being unsatisfied. My needs and feelings are my creations, and therefore entirely my responsibility. By talking only about John, I distract your attention, and more importantly my attention, away from my responsibility.

Judgments are ineffective ways to satisfy needs. I believe that every judgment is an attempt to satisfy the need that gave rise to the judgment. But judging makes it less likely that I will satisfy my need. By judging John as lazy deflects responsibility for my feelings from me to John, and gives away my power. It makes John responsible for meeting my need. And given that John is not meeting my need, I’m stuck with my loneliness.

I’ve learned a more effective way to meet my needs: Express my needs and feelings directly. I might tell John, “I’m feeling lonely because I’m needing some companionship.” (I first learned of this phrasing from Marshall Rosenberg’s book
Nonviolent Communication
. The earlier first edition of Nonviolent Communication was my favorite book of 2001. Thanks to my friend Bill Pardee for recommending it!)

I see two main advantages in expressing myself this way. First, by expressing my need clearly and directly, this gives me a chance to find other ways to meet my need. And it gives John a chance to offer ideas if he chooses. Maybe he will invite me to his house to play chess.

Second, directly expressing my needs and feelings draws my attention (and John’s) to my responsibility. My need is my need. My feeling is my response to my need. If John chooses not to satisfy my need for companionship, I can seek other companions, or simply accept that I don’t have the companionship I need. In any case, I am now owning my need, and owning my feelings.

I’m still working on this. I’m often tempted to say “That was a great movie” instead of “I loved that movie.” Exploring the needs and feelings that give rise to my judgments is sometimes a lot of work. But I’m much happier with the results.

Here is an example of how
our stories affect our potential as agents of organizational change.

Susan, the Director of Human Resources at a large paper company, was leading a project to implement self-directed work teams in her organization. She was bumping into some resistance, and asked me to help.

“Most people are really excited about what we’re doing,” she said. “But then there are the resisters.” They don’t want anything to do with teams. Mostly, the resisters are people who have been here more than twenty years. Every time they come to a meeting, I already know what they are going to say.” As she said this she made a motion of pushing away with her hands.

I said, “Instead of calling these folks ‘resisters,’ suppose you think of them as people who are resisting this change at this time.”

She considered this in silence for minute, then looked at me and said, “Wow. That makes a big difference. When I think of them as resisters, it’s as if I have them all figured out, that they’re just resistant to change. When I think of them as resisting this change at this time, I see them more as people. Maybe they have reasons for resisting.”

I said, “Now, instead of thinking of them as resisting the change, what if you think of them as responding to it?”

Again she went silent. After a moment, she said, “Thank you! Now I know what I need to do!”

I talked with Susan several months later. She had met several times with the “resisters,” and focused on listening carefully to what they had to say. After a few long discussions, together they came up with an idea that worked for everyone: These company veterans would become mentors. When new people joined the organization, the mentors would help them to learn “how we work in teams around here.”

Experiment: Think about Susan’s role in her initial story, the story about “resisters.” If you were to name Susan’s role, what would you call it? What about the company veterans’ role? What would you call that?

Experiment: In Susan’s later story, the story about meeting several times with the company veterans, what role did Susan play? What role did the veterans play?

Experiment: Notice that there is another story being told here: my story. What role did Susan play in my story? What was my role? What role, if any, did the company veterans play?

Experiment: Notice that by telling you this story, I am enacting yet another story: my ongoing story about you and me. What does my publishing this story, and my offering all of these experiments, tell you about the story I’m creating about you and me?

Experiment: What story are you creating about all of this?

A relationship is a story. I don’t mean that as a metaphor. I mean it literally: A relationship is a story. In particular, a relationship is a story about two people responding to each other and with each other over time.

Like all stories, the story of a relationship is told from a particular point of view — some person’s point of view. The nature of the story, the nature of the relationship, depends a great deal on who is telling the story.

If you want to influence others, relationships matter. Of the four factors that affect the way people respond to your proposals and requests — expectations, communication, relationship, and environment — relationship may be the most important to nurture. Every time you talk with someone, your relationship enters the conversation before you do. You each bring a story into the room, a story that carries your history and expectations, providing the structure that integrates this conversation with your past and your future, and the context within which you attach meaning and significance to each other’s words and behaviors. As you interact, your story guides your experience — perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors — even as you weave your experience back into the ongoing, unfolding story.

I’ve been thinking about this idea, about relationships as stories, for a few weeks. It feels like a rich vein for me — every thought leads to three more thoughts. I struggled for days to start this article because I didn’t know where to begin. I struggled for hours to write it because I didn’t know where to stop.

I’ll stop here for now, having set out only the basic idea, and leave you (and me) with a few thought experiments.

Experiment: Think of a relationship that you are enjoying. If you were to tell an empathetic listener about this relationship, what would you say? What story or stories would you tell? How did the relationship begin? What events or patterns of events stand out for you as being especially important to you? What happened? What meaning did you make of those events? How did you feel? What role do you play in the story? How do you describe yourself? What role does the other person play? How do you describe the other person? What do you think will happen in the relationship over time? How does all of this affect the way you interact with the person? How does it affect the way you think and talk about the person when you’re apart?

Experiment: Think of a relationship in which you are feeling some stress or pain or frustration. Answer the same questions as above.

Experiment: Compare the two relationships from above. What similarities do you see? What differences?

Experiment: How would the other person in each relationship answer these questions?

Here’s a topic that comes up now and again among technical people and their managers: Do managers of technical people need to understand how to do the technical work they are managing?

Until recently, my answer has been: Not necessarily. If the manager can trust the technical people on the team to be able to translate technical information (about plans, progress, problems, and so on) into business information, and vice-versa, the manager can manage well even without personal technical knowledge.

A few weeks ago, management consultant John Levy gave an answer that I like even better. He had finished speaking to the local Software Process Improvement Network about managing technical work. Someone in the audience asked the magic question. “Must technical managers understand the technical work well enough that they can do the work themselves?” John’s answer:

Not necessarily. Managers must understand the technical work well enough that they can appreciate it.

Very nice!

And I’d say that John’s advice applies equally well to non-technical work.

I’ve recently discovered two intriguing new ideas from the blogosphere: grid blogging and The Internet Topic Exchange.

Grid blogging
is when many bloggers blog about a single, predetermined topic on the same day. The first grid blog happened yesterday. Dozens (or more) bloggers wrote about the topic brand. My friend Johanna Rothman wrote about it twice, once on her “Managing Product Development” blog, and again on her “Hiring Technical People” blog.

As the day of the first grid blog approached, a number of people wanted to know how they could quickly find all of the blogs that were participating in the grid. Hal Macomber suggested that every grid blogger add the specific label “[grid::brand]” to the titles of their entries. That way, interested readers could search the Internet for “[grid::brand]” to find all of entries for the “brand” grid blog.

One drawback of search engines: They don’t update their databases every day. If you had searched for “[grid::brand]” yesterday, you would have found very few of the grid blog entries. Some people wanted to know how they could find the “brand” blog entries early, before the search engines had updated.

That’s where the second intriguing idea comes in.
The Internet Topic Exchange
is a centralized web site that categorizes blog entries into “topics.” It includes a semi-organized directory of topics and a list of all topics. If you’re interested in photography, for example, you can look at the photography topic to learn who has been blogging about that. And if you have an RSS reader, you can subscribe to the topics that interest you, and be notified whenever someone blogs about them.

The grid bloggers created a category called grid_brand, and a number of gridders posted links to their blog entries. People who had subscribed to the topic were notified immediately that someone had written a new entry about branding.

The Internet Topic Exchange is, as far as I can tell, still in its infancy. The directory of topics seems incomplete. The list of all topics lists the topics in some arbitrary order (definitely not alphabetical). And some of the topics have puzzling names:
c_o_o_l_e_s_t, for example. What with those underscores? Or
amazon_and_ebay. Why lump Amazon and eBay together?

If the topics in The Internet Topic Exchange were cleaned up and managed well, I think it would be a very handy tool for bloggers and blog readers.

Before you try to measure something as complex as people’s performance, make sure you can make simple measurements reliably. Length, for example. The length of the coast of Maine.

How long is the coast of Maine? If you draw a straight line from one end of the coast to the other and measure the length of the line, it’s about 220 miles. That’s one measurement.

Now measure a different way. Take a string that’s ten miles long. Hold one end of it at the southern end of the coast. Stretch the string straight and find where the other end of the string touches the coast. Continue measuring these ten-mile lengths and add them up. The length of the coast is maybe 400 miles.

Next, use a one-mile string, then 1000 feet, then 100 feet. The shorter the string, the longer the coast.

If you use a very short string, say one foot, it is difficult to decide even where the coast is, or whether “coast” means anything at all. Where does the land end and the ocean begin? How do you measure around the mouth of the Penobscot River? What about all of those islands? Do you measure around those or not? And when you measure at such a small scale, the coast is moving as you measure it. Should you measure at high tide or at low tide?

As you measure at still smaller scales, say the width of an oxygen molecule, “coast” becomes even less meaningful. At a small enough scale, the “coast” is discontinuous. At that point, even if “coast” meant something, the notion of “length” may no longer apply.

Many sources claim that the coast of Maine is more than 3000 miles long. What does that mean? The number is nearly meaningless if you don’t know how it was measured.

The length of the coast of Maine depends almost entirely on how you measure it. Why would measuring people be any different?