"Seek first to understand..."
"...and then to be understood.” Stephen R. Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
When was the last time you really sought to understand someone’s point of view before launching in with your view of the world? What was the impact? Did you notice? Did you care? What would change if you knew exactly what your client’s expectations and challenges were, what the constraints are that he or she is working under or the political environment in which they are operating?
In my recent article “The Educated Client” I set out the case for helping your client understand all of these things about YOU and your situation – but this is to a certain extent putting the cart before the horse. Covey tells us it is so much more powerful in relationship building to understand others before we seek to layout our map of the world.
There is a principle in Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) that “the map is not the territory”. What this means to me is that whatever our view of a situation is it can only be a representation of reality, just as a map is a representation of the terrain and as such it can never tell you the whole story of what is going on at anyone time. In order to really understand you need to get into the territory and start to make sense of the symbols on the map. One way to start this is to overlay your map with that of your client.
Statistics show that the cost of making changes to a project rise exponentially with time and that our ability to influence the outcome of the project falls exponentially over the same time frame. By seeking to understand we add to our map of the world and begin to understand some of the territory in which we will be working. What this means is that time invested early in understanding what is required of whom and by when, is time well spent.By doing this first – and crucially this needs to be in an open and non-judgmental way – we build trust and rapport with our client and we do not obscure the detail with our own thoughts and beliefs about what is going on. This in turn leads to much more effective and open communication and by extension a significantly reduced potential for disagreement later on.
"Seek first to understand, then to be understood" is one of the paradigms of interdependence described by Stephen R. Covey in his book "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People".
Last Updated ( Friday, 24 August 2007 )