Читать книгу The CommFlow System - Christian Horak - Страница 6

In the last chapter, I explored a bit how the brain is actually a highly evolved pattern recognition machine that continuously evolves external stimuli in terms of threat vs. benefit to come up with the most appropriate response. This is also true of any social interaction and communication. The part of the brain, the "social brain" so to speak, that is mostly responsible for this is called the limbic system. The limbic system "prefers" to evaluate any situation, and therefore communication according to the following 5 criteria:

(1) Status

(2) Certainty

(3) Autonomy

(4) Relationship

(5) Fairness

These 5 criteria are easily remembered with the acronym SCARF, and although they are listed from 1 to 5, they always get evaluated concurrently, not necessarily one after the other. Let’s drill down a bit.

(1) Status means that the brain, (which is always looking for ways to increase security, power and ways to have fun) will scan each situation and immediately evaluate the situation in terms of its impact to the social standing of the person. If the status is threatened, you get a threat-response, and not much clear and unimpeded communication after that.

(2) Certainty means that the brain will always check if the situation is stable or at least reasonably predictable. If things look too flaky, again, you get the threat response and the listening process pretty much stops at that point.

(3) The same mechanism is then applied to Autonomy, to evaluate how much flexibility is available in the situation. When people feel "cornered", they again will be forced into a threat response by the social brain.

(4) The same is true when relationships are threatened, or even if things seem to break the common sense around (5) fairness. You should easily be able to see how this automatic evaluation by the social brain can stop a conversation dead in its tracks. This is even made more complex when we are trying to communicate across cultures, where questions of status and relationship can be vastly more complicated that in our fairly homogenous western culture. The same applies when we are communicating under pressure. An excellent in depth treatment of this subject around the SCARF model and the Social Brain can be found in David Rock's article for the NeuroLeadership Journal. Here is the link to David's excellent work. http://www.your-brain-at-work.com/files/NLJ_SCARFUS.pdf So, what can you take away from this for your everyday communications situations? A) Remember the SCARF acronym

B) When you begin a communication, try to think about how you can acknowledge or reaffirm the persons status in the situation, how you can create a stable and predictable environment, how you can give the person you are communicating with more options to respond, how you can tie into the community and culture of the individual to increase the feeling of relatedness and, last but not least, how you can maintain fairness in the situation.

Just following the 2 points above has helped me almost immediately after learning about the SCARF approach. As I continue to develop this book, I will also add specific examples on how to apply this to everyday situations such as giving performance feedback to an employee, or trying to influence a purchase decision, or even when having a simple chat at dinner with an old friend.