“How do I feel about what I’m feeling?” This seemingly silly question is one of the more powerful questions in my repertoire. When I’m knocked for a loop by a painful feeling, aswering this question helps me to regain my balance. Here are two examples.

In 1996 I was an apprentice, along with Amanda Mathis and Nyra Hill, at a week-long leadership workshop led by Jerry Weinberg and Jean McLendon. The three of us apprentices were tasked, among other things, with helping each other with our own learning goals. We spent a lot of time together on that, and got to know each other quite well. We’d made a wonderful team, and the experience of working with Nyra and Amanda was one of the high points of my career.

At the end of the week, I was eating dinner with Jerry, Jean, Amanda, and Nyra. I was feeling quite low, and was not in a mood to eat. I had gathered a plate of fruit (the easiest thing to eat when I’m not in the mood to eat) and was picking at it. Jerry noticed and asked, “What’s going on?”

I said, “I’m going to miss all of you.”

“How do you feel about that?” Jerry said.

After a moment I burst out laughing. “I feel great about that,” I said. “It means that I love all of you.” I spent the rest of the evening enjoying the company of my wonderful companions.

On February 19, 1999 I moved from Portland, Oregon to Sunnyvale, California. That evening I was carjacked in the parking lot of my temporary apartment, and driven around in my car for 30 minutes with a gun pressed to the back of my neck.

One evening a few days later I was walking across a parking lot toward some department store. I noticed someone walking toward me and started to feel quite afraid. And then I felt afraid of feeling afraid. “What if I get stuck like this? I don’t want to feel afraid every damned time I walk across a parking lot!”

Then I remembered the “feeling about the feeling” question, and asked myself, “How do I feel about feeling afraid?” I realized that I felt just fine about it. Feeling afraid, and even “hypervigilant” as my critical incident counsellor called it, was all part of the healing process. The fear encouraged me to be more aware of my surroundings. I still felt the fear, but I no longer feared being stuck forever in that fearful mood.

From these and other incidents I’ve come to appreciate the power of that question. “How do you feel about what you’re feeling?” I now call it The Acceptance Question, because it invites me to test whether I accept what I am feeling, and whether I accept myself for feeling what I am feeling. I’ve thought about why this simple question works so well so often, and I think I understand some of it.

Our feelings come not just from what’s happening, but from a combination of what’s happening, our needs, and the stories we tell ourselves based on our assumptions and expectations. Many times the stories that give rise to our feelings are about some other time and place. “I’m going to miss all of you” was about the following weeks and months when I would be somewhere else. My fear in the parking lot was largely about what had happened a few days earlier.

One thing The Acceptance Question does is to bring me back to the here and now. The question doesn’t ask me to deny anything. It asks me to attend to information that I was neglecting, information about what is true here and now. And in the here and now, I’m usually doing just fine. The people I may miss in the future are here with me now, and I’m okay. The carjackers are not here with me now, and I’m okay. In the here and now I’m alive, I’m healthy, and I’m okay.

Another thing The Acceptance Question does is to allow me to tell a different story, one that is just as true as the story that gives rise to the painful feeling. “I’m here now with people I love” is just as true as “I’m going to miss all of you.” And given that it’s a story about here and now, it’s probably more true. Changing the story changes the feelings.

The Acceptance Question encourages me be more present with what is happening here and now, both inside me and outside me. This helps me to regain my balance, and to respond more effectively to my surroundings and to my needs.

The Pecker Principle: The people who care most about the pecking order are usually the biggest peckers.

Motivation consists of three elements:

• Expectations about ability
• Expectations about results
• Preferences

When we’re deciding whether to do an action, we evaluate all three of these elements, often intuitively or unconsciously. The end result—our motivation for or against the action—comes from a combination of these elements. I will do anything if:

• I believe I am able
• I believe I have a reasonably clear idea of what the results will be
• On balance, I want the results I expect.

Each factors is important. If I am certain that I will not be able to do a given action, I will be less likely to try, even though I would enjoy succeeding. If I have no idea what might happen, I will be less likely to try, even if I believe I am able. If I don’t want the results I expect, I will be less likely to do the action, even if I believe I am able. Motivation combines these factors in a manner akin to multiplication:

Motivation = Ability × Results × Preferences

Don’t take this “equation” seriously as being mathematically precise. I use it only as a handy summary of my Motivation Model. Each factor (confidence in ability, certainty about what will happen, strength of preference) can be high or low. If any factor is near zero, motivation will be low. And preferences have not only magnitude but also valence (or sign)—we may be attracted to a given result (positive valence) or averse to it (negative valence).

This model may seem at first blush to oversimplify the complex concept of motivation. In describing the model, I’m not ignoring that complexity so much as summarizing it. To explore the hidden richness of the model, pick one of the factors and expand it. What factors influence a person’s expectations about whether they are able to do a given action? What factors influence a person’s cause-and-effect expectations about the results of a given action? What factors affect a person’s preferences? (For my partial answer to the question about preferences, see my article “The Structure of Values.”)

I’ve found this model very helpful in a number of ways. The most important is that it helps me to explore my own motivation. If I find myself avoiding some task that I wish I would do, I can quickly check which element is missing. Am I able to do the task? What would happen if I tried? Which of those results do I want? Which do I not want? My answers usually give me a hint about how I can motivate myself. Sometimes my answers tell me that I really don’t want to do the task after all. In those cases, I stop trying to motivate myself (which is a perfectly fine result).

I also use this Motivation Model as I try to understand other people’s reasons for their actions (or inactions). The model is one of the foundations of my work on resistance. For details, see my article “Resistance as a Resource,” especially the section called “The First Factor: Expectations”. (If I were writing the article today, I would call that section “The First Factor: Motivation.”)

I developed this Motivation Model about 10 years ago, as I began to study resistence in earnest. Not long after I first formulated the model, I discovered that many other people had already described very similar models. You can read about some of those models in Edward Lawler’s book Motivation in Work Organizations.

Here’s a new game I’ve invented, called
The Resistance as a Resource Game.

Objective. To create, learn, remember, and express ideas about how to respond to resistance.

Where to Play. The game can be played anywhere that ideas can be posted, such as mailing lists, electronic forums, and conference rooms with walls, white boards, or flip charts.

Players. Any number of players can play.

Turns. It is always your turn.

Moves. There are four kinds of moves:

1. Change.
   Post an example of change that you are promoting.
2. “Resistance.” Choose one of the posted examples of change, and post an example of a statement that expresses “resistance” to that change.
3. Reason. Choose one of the posted examples of “resistance,” and post an example of a reason that an intelligent, competent, sincere person of good will might say such a thing. My article “Resistance as a Resource” might give you ideas for this move.
4. Response. Choose one of the posted reasons, and post an idea about how to respond effectively to someone who has that reason for making that statement.

Three questions lie at the heart of effectiveness. The better you can answer these three key questions and act on the answers, the more effective you will be:

1. What results do I want?
2. How can I create the results I want?
3. What results am I creating?

In my coaching and consulting practice, I’ve notice that people often focus predominantly on question 2, on “what can I do.” In particular, when people are feeling stuck or ineffective, they’re likely focusing exclusively on what to do. Even more specifically, they’re likely focusing exclusively on how to carry out some previously chosen course of action.

One clue that people are overly attached to a course of action is the way they ask for help. When people ask “How can I …” or “What can I do to …” or “What’s the best way to …” in a way that suggests they have been struggling to answer the question themselves, I begin to suspect that they may be neglecting to ask the other questions: What results do I want? What results am I creating?

There’s something seductive about focusing on what to do. I’m certainly susceptible to the seduction. My story about finding the right word is an example of that. I’d been struggling to find just the right word for “the people you’re asking to change.” I’d somehow chosen finding just the right word as my goal, and didn’t know how to find just the right word. With the help of my writer friends I realized that my stuckness came largely from holding too tightly to that goal. When I changed my focus from “how can I” to “what do I want,” I quickly discovered that my deeper problem wasn’t how to find just the right word for “the people you’re asking to change,” but how to write in a gender-inclusive way. Once I understood my deeper problem, I quickly solved it.

What makes focusing on what to do so enticing? Perhaps it’s because it seems to lead directly to action, directly to resolution. And perhaps it’s because we know that we will achieve our goals only through action. And perhaps it’s because focusing on action usually works.

It’s only when focusing on action doesn’t work that people become stuck. And in those cases, focusing on what to do often leaves people even more stuck. But there’s something about being stuck that encourages people to strive even more intently to figure out what to do. A vicious circle.

And that’s when they ask me for help. So by the time people ask for help, they are often not only stuck, but also intent on figuring out how to carry out the course of action that got them stuck in the first place. I’ve learned, from my own experience and from observing other people, that if people are persisting in a course of action that isn’t working, it’s likely that either they are not staying mindful of what they want or they are not seeing clearly the results they’re creating.

This model of effectiveness is a centerpiece of my approach to coaching and consulting. One of the most helpful things I can do for clients is to ask the questions that they have been neglecting: What do you want? and What is happening?
Time after time, these questions have proven to be both simple and powerful.

What makes these questions so powerful? One key benefit of asking “what do we want” is that simply revisiting our goal often jiggles us into imagining other ways to achieve it, or at least into considering that there may be other ways to achieve it. My “just the right word” episode is an example of that.

A key benefit of asking “what is happening” is that it invites us to seek information, or to recognize that we already have information, that can help us evaluate adjust our course of action.

Here’s an example in which I persisted in a dysfunctional course of action in part because I had neglected this simple question. The story takes place one day in 1992. A group of coworkers and I had for months been gathering in the cafeteria for snacks and conversation every afternoon at around 3 o’clock. For at least two weeks I had been holding court, moaning about our ignorant manager, and his stupid manager, and his bonehead manager, all the way up to the company’s evil CEO and deranged President.

On this particular afternoon, as we finished our break and were headed back to work, my friend Jack said to me, “You really know how to bring a conversation down.”

Yikes! I immediately recognized the truth of what he’d said. And I immediately disliked that it was true. I had been so focused on complaining, on my dysfunctional course of action, that I was oblivious to the effect I was having on my friends. Jack’s comment answered a question that I had neglected to ask: What results am I creating with my complaining? I immediately vowed to stop moaning all over my friends, and I spent some time figuring out what I really wanted, and how better to achieve it.

What results do I want? How can I create the results I want? What results am I creating? I’ve used these questions countless times to improve my own performance, and to help my clients create the results they want.

The Unwritten Rule of the Unwritten Rule:

The purpose of many written rules is to justify punishing people for violating the unwritten rules.

Now that I’ve written it, I guess I’ll have to change the name.

Once upon a time, I was a professional corporate bureaucrat. Part of my job was to define policies that would directly affect thousands of people, and indirectly affect thousands more. Early in that job I learned that our company didn’t offer much guidance about writing policies. Sure, we had clear policies about the format in which we would publish policies, but no guidance about other key elements of policies, such as how to define policies, how to maintain them, and how to encourage adoption. Lacking that guidance, I created my own.

Basic Principles

• Make your policy effective
• Encourage people to adopt your policy
• Help people find policies that affect them
• Help people determine which “policies” are legitimate
• Help people understand what they are being asked to do
• Help yourself maintain your policies

Make your policy effective

1. To make your policy effective,
   identify the policy’s beneficiaries, the people who benefit from the policy.
2. To make your policy effective,
   identify the business benefit that the policy creates its beneficiaries.
3. To make your policy effective,
   construct a cause and effect model that shows how compliance creates the business benefit.
4. To determine whether your policy is effective,
   measure compliance.
5. To determine whether your policy is effective,
   measure the business effect that the policy is intended to create.
6. To determine whether your policy is effective,
   correlate the measured compliance with the measured business effect.

Encourage people to adopt your policy

1. To encourage people to adopt your policy,
   describe the policy’s beneficiaries.
2. To encourage people to adopt your policy,
   describe the business benefit that the policy creates its beneficiaries.
3. To encourage people to adopt your policy,
   describe the cause and effect model that shows how compliance creates the business benefit.

Help people find policies that affect them

1. To help people become aware of relevant policies,
   link to each policy from web pages related to the policy’s scope and purpose.
2. To help people find the policies they need,
   publish each policy where people are likely to look for it.
3. To help people find related policy information,
   list all related policies, and only related policies, in the Related Policies section.
4. To help people determine whether a policy applies to them,
   clearly describe the scope of the policy by identifying who must comply, and, if appropriate, under what conditions.
5. To help people determine whether a policy applies to them,
   put all scope information, and only scope information, in the Scope section. Put other information, such as guidance, background information, or procedures, in a separate section or a separate document.
6. To help people determine which policies apply to them, when writing scope statements, use the “one-name-one-meaning” principle: each time you refer to the same set of people, use the same name; each time you use the same name, make sure it refers to the same set of people.

Help people determine which “policies” are legitimate

1. To help people determine whether a policy is legitimate,
   identify the person who approved the policy, and identify the date on which the policy was approved.
2. To help people understand whether a policy is in effect,
   indicate each policy statement’s approval status or revision status. Examples of status include approved, draft, and pending approval.
3. To help people understand the importance of a policy,
   put the word “Policy” in the title of the policy. Similarly, when creating titles for other kinds of admonitions, such as guidelines, standards, and procedures, include a word that identifies the type of admonition. This helps the reader distinguish among the types of admonitions, and give the appropriate significance to each.
4. To help people understand whether a policy is legitimate,
   keep the policy current.
5. To keep a policy current,
   periodically review the policy to determine
   • Is the policy’s purpose still relevant to the organization?
   • Are the policy’s compliance criteria necessary and sufficient to achieve the policy’s purpose?
   • Are the names used in policy (e.g., organizations, roles, technologies) still current?
   • Are the related policies and documents referenced by the policy still current?
   • Are there other policies that overlap or conflict with this one?
6. To help people find current policies,
   periodically remove old drafts and unapproved policy candidates from publication.

Help people understand what they are being asked to do

1. To help people understand what they are being asked to do,
   put all compliance criteria, and only compliance criteria, in the Policy section. Put other information, such as guidance, background information, or procedures, in a separate section or a separate document.
2. To help people understand the relationships among policies,
   list all related policies, and only related policies, in the Related Policies section.
3. To help people find information related to a policy, when referring to policies, events, practices, or other information defined elsewhere, give full citations. A full citation includes enough information to guide the user to easily find the referenced information.
4. To help people access information related to a policy,
   give citations in a form that readers can use. Some readers will read the policy on-line. Others will want printed copies of the policy. Use hyperlinks to help on-line readers. For people reading printed copies, give full citation information in the body of the policy statement, in a way that is readable on the printed copy.
5. To help people understand a policy,
   use the “one-word-one-concept” principle: each time you refer to the same concept, use the same word; each time you use the same word, make sure it refers to the same concept.

Help yourself maintain your policies

1. To make a policy maintainable, when assigning responsibilities, use role names; do not use the names of individual people. Refer readers to an external source (maintained separately from the policy) that identifies which people currently fill each role.
2. To make a policy maintainable, when requiring the use of technologies, require the most general technology that will achieve the policy’s purpose.
3. To make a policy maintainable,
   
   refer to related documents; do not copy text into the policy from other documents.

When I was first learning to delegate, my biggest challenge was letting go of control. After months of struggling, I created a model that helped me to ease my fear of losing control.

The model is based on three key ideas. First, all tasks have common parts. The most obvious part is doing the work to create the intended results. Other parts may be less obvious to new managers, but are inherent in any task. Here are the parts that I see in every task:

• Define the desired result.
• Define how we will know we’re done.
• Define how we will achieve the result.
• Define how we will assess progress.
• Do the work.
• Assess progress.
• Determine whether we’re done.

The second key idea is that I don’t have to delegate a whole task. If tasks have parts I can delegate some parts and retain other parts for myself. I can delegate the parts that I feel safe delegating, and retain the parts that trigger my fear of losing control.

And this leads to the third idea. I can improve my delegating bit-by-bit by letting go of just one more part of each task, then one more part, then one more. If I can choose wisely which parts to let go of next, I can steadily, safely, and effectively improve my delegating.

So which parts should I let go of next? To answer that question, I created a model that I call The Ladder of Delegation. I draw a ladder, and on the rungs I list the parts of a task, arranged according to my willingness to delegate them—the parts that I’m most willing to delegate at the bottom, and the parts that I’m most reluctant to delegate at the top. My Ladder of Delegation looks like this:

Here’s how I use The Ladder. When I’m preparing to delegate a task to someone, I notice how far up The Ladder I’m willing to climb. Which rungs am I willing to delegate? At which rung do I hesitate? Then I ask myself, “What would have to change in order for me to be willing to take one more step up The Ladder?” Usually my hesitation is a matter of trust. In order to take another step, in order to delegate the next part of the task, I would need to trust the person to do that part well. There are various ways to build that trust. Once I’ve clarified my hesitation by noticing which step I’m reluctant to take, I can usually see a path toward building trust.

I may be at different rungs of The Ladder with different people. With Dana, I may feel confident delegating up through the fifth rung, determining whether we’ve achieved the result. With Pat, I may be willing to delegate only doing the work itself. And even with a single person, I may be at different rungs for different kinds of tasks.

Build your own Ladder of Delegation and try it. Your ladder may not look like mine. Maybe you would slice tasks into parts differently than I have. Or maybe you would order them differently than I have. Adjust as you see fit. Then use your Ladder to improve your delegating. The key is to notice where on your Ladder you hesitate, to identify what would have to change so that you can take that next step, and to work toward that change.

Virginia Satir once said, “People prefer familiarity to comfort.”

In a recent conversation on the Extreme Programming mailing list, that phrase came up. Alistair Cockburn, an influential change agent in the software development industry, said, “I don’t know about you, but that phrase, besides ringing true, frightens the bejeebers out of me.”

My initial reaction was that it doesn’t frighten me at all. But given how frequently I advocate one change or another, I wasn’t sure why it didn’t frighten me. So I pondered.

I think it doesn’t frighten me because my persuasion style includes ways to make change familiar to people. I never thought about the things I do in those terms until I read Alistair’s message, but as I look at how I encourage change, much of it is about making the unfamiliar familiar.

For example, an HR executive named Susan once sought my help with some resistance she was encountering. I asked her a few simple questions, and that was all she needed from me. Though I wasn’t advocating any particular change in that situation, my questions had the effect of framing Susan’s problem so that it was suddenly very familiar to her. And once the problem became familiar, she knew exactly how to solve it.

Another example: Paul, an executive at a company that builds people’s dream houses, wanted my help with a customer relations problem. As I talked with Paul about the situation, he suddenly realized how he could solve the problem. As I look at that story now, I see that Paul’s epiphany was largely a result of casting his customer relations issue in a familiar light. Once the problem was familiar, he knew what to do.

In those examples, though I wasn’t advocting any particular change, familiarity played a key role in the changes my clients made.

When I’m promoting change, I do a number of things that have the effect of making change familiar. For example, I often work hard to find safe ways for people to try whatever I’m advocating. A small demonstration, maybe, or a “toy” situation to practice on, where failure doesn’t matter. Making it safe for people to try the new idea in a small way invites them to get a teeny tiny bit of experience, from which the new idea becomes a teeny tiny bit more familiar.

Also, I often tell stories, like the ones I linked to above, which can help to make new ideas more familiar.

I suspect that much of my persuasion style is about familiarity, though I never thought about it that way until recently. This gives me an idea for becoming a more effective change artist: What if I attend purposefully to familiarity, and the ways in which familiarity influences the way people respond to change? What new ideas does that give me for how to encourage change, and how to respond to resistance?

One of the most important elements of a helping relationship is permission to help. This applies to all kinds of helping relationships: coaching, consulting, teaching, psychological counseling, medical practice. If you don’t give me permission to help you, it’s dangerous for me to imagine that we have a helping relationship at all.

I’ve learned that if I am to help someone, I must first secure the person’s permission to help. That’s easy when someone asks for help. But what about if someone simply describes a frustrating problem? Is that a request for help? I say no. I’ve learned that permission must be explicit, and must be continually renegotiated after it’s given, because:

• Your experiencing pain does not necessarily mean that you see the pain as a problem.
• Your having a problem does not necessarily mean that you want help.
• Your wanting help does not necessarily mean that you want my help.
• Your wanting my help does not necessarily mean that you want my help right now.
• Your wanting my help does not necessarily mean that you want the kind of help I’m offering.
• Your wanting my help right now does not necessarily mean that you will want my help tomorrow, or three minutes from now.

If I want to help, I must repeatedly make sure I have your permission at all of these levels.