MIND MAP
Everything we can say about something is not the thing itself. As a result, we can never truly understand what another person has in mind when they speak to us.
Words can create illusions through a lack of clarity in the interpretation of their meaning. The meaning can be lost in generalisations, deletions or distortions.
Deletion – What information is missing that could aid understanding? There are no specifics or comparisons to make sense of what is said.
Distortion – What is being said that is illogical or is hiding the full truth? There is no clear information to see a cause or an effect, what is being presupposed or left to the imagination.
Generalisation – What is said presents a very limited description or summary of something? One specific experience comes to represent a larger range of events or experiences.
For example, if someone says “I’ve bought a car” it is is just a surface statement. Greater clarity comes when they say they have bought a red Volvo car, a red hatchback Volvo car, a red hatchback Volvo car from Metro Motors, or a red hatchback Volvo car from Metro motors for £2600 and so on. The first statement deletes the detail in a generalised statement. More detail gives greater clarity until the statement becomes distorted and loses its impact.
Words are just like maps they enable us to explain what something is like. But getting at what is actually being sensed and experienced lies hidden below the surface structure of language. When we describe our experience in words it is not the experience. So what we end up with is our individual mental map of what reality is for us. Each of us operates in the world from a very different mental map. To understand another person, we do the best we can to understand them from their map. No map is right or wrong, but some are more useful than others.
The best we can do is to look for how people do things that lead to a result. We can look for patterns to see what is done consistently. With patterns, we can predict behaviour and for this, we use stories, metaphors and moods to discover what is important in a person’s mental map.
Leaders know how to lead others into a more expansive view of reality. They create stories to produce movies in the mind’s of others by providing them with the words, emotional states and body movements to re-experience events through which a connection can be made. You ask them to make use of the experience and feel what it would be like to deal with a current issue or concern.
