Double Aces: Listening to Understand
- Oct 2
- 9 min read
Article no. 1: “For 364 days out of the year most of the world lives and works in monarchies not democracies, and we don’t know the difference.”
The 6 Decision Points of democracy or monarchy:
We don’t really listen to each other. We think we do. Listening seems easy, but our own biology is stacked against us. Listening to Understand requires techniques and practice. I share one of those techniques in this article, the “Double Aces” approach.
Double Aces is one of my own concoctions, built from a few other techniques:
“Praise Question Polish (PQP)” of which I do not know the origins
the Nobel Prize winning research by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky covered in their book “Thinking Fast and Slow”
“Nonviolent Communication” by Marshall Rosenberg
techniques that Chris Voss shared in his book “Never Split the Difference”.
Praise Question Polish (PQP)
It’s a form of structured discussion that came out of the educational world. When working with young kids, teachers found that to get the best out of their students, the first thing they had to do was praise whatever their student was doing, right or wrong. Then they would ask the students questions about the choices that they had made. Only after those two steps would they suggest any points of ‘Polish’ for the student to do differently.
Then an interesting thing happened. Because they were doing this all day with their students, they just naturally started doing this with each other, even when there were only adults in the room, and they discovered that this had nothing to do with age. It was just a fantastic way to give feedback! Now, thanks to the research of Nobel-prize-winning economist Daniel Kahnemann and his colleague Amos Tversky, we also know why it works — biologically.
Thinking Fast and Slow
To summarize the work of Kahneman and Tversky, our brains are wired to do two things: Think Logically and Predict the Future. I’ll describe the ‘Logic Processor’ first, because this is the mode with which we are all the most familiar. You might call this the ‘Spock’ mode. “Live Long and Prosper!”
Logic Processor
The ‘Logic Processor’ mode is capable of great things. It can ponder new situations, perform complex calculations, and build new associations and pathways in the brain. But this ability comes at a cost. It is a slow process and uses a lot of energy. If you spend 30 minutes in deep ‘Logic Processor’ thought, you can burn as much energy as 30 minutes on the treadmill!
Imagine running on a treadmill all day without stopping. You’d be exhausted! So we actually don’t use our ‘Logic Processor’ very often, about 5%-10% according to Kahneman and Tversky. Now, technically, our Logic Processor brain developed later in terms of evolution because we already had another brain system that was extraordinarily effective.
Pattern Matching – Our ‘Default Mode’
This other system they called ‘Pattern Matching’. It is so effective, in fact, that even in modern times we still use this part of our brain 90%-95% of the time! It’s so pervasive, in fact, that one component of this process is referred to as ‘The Default Mode Network’ because if you ask someone to sit and do absolutely nothing, this part of our brain turns on by default.
The best way I can describe it is as a ‘difference engine’ by which I mean that the first thing that we see in any situation is what is different — what is wrong. When I look around the room I’m in, if I had to pay attention to everything in it, that would be a lot of data to process. So our brains figured out that we can efficiently ignore anything that we see that already meets our expectations. That leads us to only focus on the differences.
But there’s a hidden downside. When you start a conversation with someone, your brain immediately, by default, starts trying to predict what the other person is saying. Then, by default, you respond to what you predict the person is saying in your head, not what they are actually saying. Ninety to ninety-five percent of the time that prediction is close enough to what the other person actually says that neither of you notice. It’s only when that prediction is so noticeably wrong that one or both of you notice. Someone says, ‘That’s not what I said,’ or ‘That’s not what I meant.’ Hopefully, you stop and rewind the conversation, ask questions to clarify what was actually said, and hopefully develop a curiosity for understanding the real point of view of the other person.
Switching Modes
It’s biological, and it reveals the genius of what those teachers discovered:
Polish: By default we trade statements back and forth, offering points of polish on each other’s ideas until we hit a point of conflict.
Question: If we’re being gracious, we might ask each other questions to see where we differ.
Praise: If we can reach an agreement – and that’s a big if – we might offer praise for the other person’s ideas.
Our brain’s ‘Default Mode’ is the exact opposite of ‘Praise, Question, Polish’. And if you reverse the order, you can turn off the ‘Default Mode’ and turn on your ‘Logic Processor’. It’s amazing how it works! To say that again, slightly differently: To turn on our ‘Logic Processor’ we have to consciously reverse the order of our conversations.
So, by default, our brains work in the wrong order. How are we all still alive? Well, when the situation is a known challenge and calls for us to do something we already know how to do, then ‘Pattern Matching’ is far more efficient. This is where the power of ‘gut instinct’ comes from. Ninety to ninety-five percent of the time we can and should trust our gut, but when the situation calls for new thinking, that’s when following our gut can get us in trouble.
When our gut instincts collide with each other and we find ourselves in conflict, that’s when we need to slow down, reverse the order of the conversation, and consciously engage our ‘Logic Processor’ brain.
From PQP to Double ACEs
Appreciate or Acknowledge
When PQP was brought over to the business world, it was discovered that people found it really hard to praise something when they disagreed. So we found two other words: Appreciate and Acknowledge. When we agree with the other person, we say that we are in ‘harmony’ with their statement and can ‘appreciate’ it. When we disagree with the person we say that we are in ‘disharmony’. When you are in disharmony we ask you to ‘acknowledge’ something about the statement instead.
This is often the hardest step for everyone, and so it requires a lot of practice. A quick shortcut that I have learned is that every statement can be both wrong and right. But because our ‘difference engine’, our ‘Pattern Matching’ is so fast, what is ‘right’ about the statement feels obvious, so our brains log that part away and just move on, as it was designed to do.
It’s an interesting exercise to notice how many things you agree with in a day, compared to how many times you actually tell the other person that you agree with them. There is a strong temptation to believe that agreement is implicit. We feel that saying something would just get in the way, so we only speak up when we disagree.
I want to emphasize at this point that this is normal and biological. It’s baked into our DNA. But now consider the implications when someone only hears you speak up when you disagree, and hears silence when you agree. They might be led to believe that you only disagree. The unrecognized result of our ‘default mode’ is that people often hear 2x to 10x more negative statements in their life than positive ones, a huge imbalance.
Many people tend to only speak up when they disagree, so people often hear 2x to 10x more negative statements in their life than positive ones, a huge imbalance.
If you want to rewrite your relationship with someone, say the unspoken. Verbally tell them when you agree. And when you don’t agree, acknowledgement can be as simple as repeating their words back to them, so that they know they were heard. Sometimes just being heard goes a long way.
Never Split the Difference
‘Never Split the Difference’ is a book written by Chris Voss. He used to be the lead hostage negotiator for the FBI. Have you ever heard the phrase, ‘We do not negotiate with terrorists’? Under his term in office, he was responsible for making sure it was NOT the policy of the United States.
He found that not negotiating always resulted in the worst possible outcomes. Terrorists are terrorists because they want to change the world around them. You have to listen. More importantly than that, though, you have to find a way to let the other person know that you hear them and that you understand them.
But – and this is the critical link – there’s a big difference between listening to terrorists, and giving them everything they ask for. What he put together with his team was a fantastic outline of how to both listen and understand without giving in to their demands.
You don’t have to repeat the same words back to a person to acknowledge them. Don’t get me wrong. Mirroring is a great place to start, but the most important thing is to keep the focus entirely on the other person and not yourself.
Voss teaches three starter phrases to help us mirror someone else’s comments without using the words “I” or “me” and making it about us.
“It looks like…”
“It sounds like…”
“It feels like...”
Practice going a whole conversation, a whole meeting, or even a whole day without using the words “I” or “me”. It’s hard! When you want to say “I”, see if you can say the same thing with the other person at the center by using “It looks like…”, “It sounds like…”, or “If feels like…”
Clarify or Confirm
Step two in P-Q-P is the questions part. Another thing that we discovered when bringing this to the business world is that it’s a very specific type of question that we’re after. It’s called a ‘Clarifying Question’. When we don’t understand something that the other person said, we count that as being in ‘disharmony’ and we ask questions to understand it better.
Sometimes there is nothing to clarify, though. But it’s essential not to skip over the Question step if we really want to engage our ‘Logic Processor’ and disrupt our ‘Pattern Matching’. Here we say that we are in ‘harmony’ with the statement, but we are going to ask a question anyway. Please don’t skip this step. If you don’t have a clarifying question, ask a ‘Confirming Question’ instead.
In my own coaching, I find that when people ask ‘Confirming Questions’, 50% of the time there is something wrong with their assumptions. Asking the confirming question, gives the other person a chance to correct those assumptions. And if you are 100% correct, it’s just another chance to let the other person know that they have been heard.
Enhance or Evolve
Polish is not always needed, but if you want to offer words of Polish, it is absolutely vital to connect the point of polish to the other person’s original statement. Ask yourself, how can you Enhance or Evolve what the other person has already contributed? If you are in ‘harmony’ with the statement, how can you ‘Enhance’ it? If you are in ‘disharmony’ with it, how can you ‘Evolve’ the idea into a better form?
Listening to Understand
If you think Double Aces might help your team, send me a message. I have a free 1 hr workshop that I do that could make for an interesting Brown Bag Luncheon or a team building exercise.
There is also an example of this technique in chapter 5 of the book that Michael Dougherty and I wrote, ‘Shift: from Product to People’ (www.shiftingpeople.com), a novel about how to put people at the center of everything you do.
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