Every behaviour has a positive intention

This is possibly the most controversial suggestion, since it is so open to misinterpretation. It means that every behaviour has a positive intention, as far as the person exhibiting the behaviour is concerned.

Can we really transpose such a seemingly idealistic concept to the business-place? George M Prince, writing in the Harvard Business Review gives an excellent example of how this notion might be applied in management. He lists various `contrasting assumptions' that make the difference between a negative, critical manager and a positive, supportive manager, including:

Judgmental Manager: When subordinates express themselves or act in ways unacceptable to me, I point out the flaws.

Judicious Manage: When subordinates express themselves or act in unacceptable ways, I assume they had reasons that made sense to them and explore the action from that point of view.

We do not claim that all behaviour is necessarily the best possible choice from an objective point of view. Nor do we suggest that all behaviour will have positive benefits for everyone involved.

People will normally make the best choice available to them in any given situation

This means that people will make what seems to them to be the best choice out of whatever choices are available, even though this may not be the ideal `best' from an external point of view. To put it another way, few people ever deliberately, know­ingly make a `bad' choice.

A map is not the territory it depicts; words are not the things they describe; symbols are not the things they represent

In very simple terms, it expresses the notion that we can never know everything there is to know about anything, no matter how simple. In order to make sense of the world around us, then, we `draw' our own set of `mental maps', but always on the basis of a selected subset of all possible information (just as a `map' is not the landscape it depicts but merely a very limited subset of all possible information about that landscape).

Thus two people may have quite different views of the same subject, simply because they have different, though equally accurate, sets of information. That is to say, they can disagree, yet still both be `right'.

If you go on doing what you're doing now you are very likely to go on getting the same results as you are getting now

This is the first part of an extremely optimistic presupposition, emphasizing the fact that, in any situation, we always have choices. Though we may not be able to control what goes on in the world around us, we can always control how we respond to those events. If we always act/respond in the same way then the most likely result is that we will maintain the status quo.

If you want something different you must do something different, and keep varying your behaviour until you get the result that you want

The second part of the presupposition is that there's a solution to every situation if you're prepared to keeping on looking until you find it.

In a business context this points us to the fact that if change is required, then it had better be genuine change, not just an exercise in `skilled incompetence', as Chris Argyris calls it - adopting new processes, but using old methods to carry them out (like trying to play a CD on a gramophone).

This also assumes that developing multiple options in any situation is more realistic than having only one or two. This can be summed up in the subsidiary supposition: `The person with the greatest number of choices in a given situation is most likely to achieve their outcome.'

Change makes change

It is a common saying that `the only person you can really change is yourself'. We go one step further and also acknowledge that changing your own behaviour inevitably has an effect on the people around you. The underlying notion, derived from cybernetics, is that when one element within a system changes, the whole system must change in order to adapt to that changed element.

You cannot not communicate

This presupposition simply makes the point that we are constantly communicating, both by what we do and by what we don't do, by what we say and by what we don't say, by the messages we send deliberately and by a host of mainly uncon­scious non-verbal signals.

On this basis it is clearly in our own interest to understand the communication process as far as we can and to learn how to become effective communicators rather than simply leaving things to chance.

The meaning of your communication is the response that you get

The presupposition here is that people can only respond to what they think you mean, which may be an accurate or inac­curate interpretation of your intended meaning. (Please note: in this context, a `communication' is the `whole' message - not only what you said but also all of the accompanying non-verbal signals.)

The value of this presupposition is that it points out that if we want people to respond appropriately to what we say, then we need to talk to them rather than at them. That is, we need to be constantly aware of other people's responses to what we're saying, and adjust our communication accordingly, rather than just assuming that they will have understood what we meant them to understand.

Everyone has all of the resources they need

What this means is simply that people are ultimately able to deal with any situation in which they may find themselves by drawing on their own inner resources (or capabilities) rather than by relying on someone or something else to give them a resource which they didn't previously have.

When it is stated that bluntly, some people find this presup­position a little hard to believe. This is why I felt it worthwhile to draw up Bradbury's corollaries, which state that, in order to use a resource, you must: know that you have it, and know how to use it (though not necessarily at a conscious level).

Every behaviour is appropriate in some context

Another way of putting this is: if we repeat a certain behaviour it is usually because once upon a time it produced a desired result. The trouble is that we often go on using certain behaviours even when, from an outsiders' viewpoint, they are ;manifestly no longer appropriate. By implication, then, the most effective solution to unwanted behaviour is to find a more appropriate alternative rather than holding a lengthy, pointless postmortem over the old behaviour (which is more likely to reinforce that old behaviour than to drive it out).

Genuine understanding only comes with experience

You can read all you like and talk to other people - but you don't really understand something until you've done it yourself.

People aren't 'broken' and don't need to be 'fixed'

The old psychiatric metaphor for seemingly inappropriate communication and behaviour put them on a par with a broken arm or leg. This led to the assumption that people could be mentally `broken' and `fixed' just as they could be physically broken and fixed. However, this is an inappropriate and misleading metaphor. And W Edwards Deming (`father' of the Japanese industrial revolution) seems to have been in agreement with this view when he declared: `If people don't get it, don't fix the people - fix the process.'

Your mind and your body are indivisible parts of the same system

Until very recently, the idea that our body and our brain are separate entities was taken as fact in Western medicine. If there was something wrong with your body - from a sniffle to malignant cancer - the only solution was some kind of physical treatment.

Despite its position (literally) at the head of the central nervous system, in mainstream medicine it was received wisdom that, for all practical purposes, the influence of the brain/mind stopped at the neck.

Somewhat ironically, at the very same time General Semantics was investigating the idea that mental activity had a direct correlation to physiological activity. Only in the last couple of decades has practical, scientifically verifiable evidence come to light that shows beyond reasonable doubt that the immune system, for example, is integrally linked to brain activity, so that mental stress can inhibit the perfor­mance of the immune system and thus lead to a lowering of general bodily health.

There is no such thing as failure, only feedback

When something doesn't go as we planned we tend to see that as failure. Depending on the seriousness of the situation we might then get angry, irritated, sad, depressed, worried, guilty or whatever. None of which serves any useful purpose.

But what happens if we see the situation as feedback rather than failure? A real-life demonstration of how not to do some­thing? Instead of being wrong, we've learnt something. Instead of feeling bad, we are free to form a new plan of action and try again.

Thomas Edison is credited with having said that he did not fail 1,000 times in his efforts to make a viable light bulb, rather he successfully identified 1,000 materials which were not suitable for making a light filament.

What one person can do, other people can learn to do

The purpose of modelling those who are excellent in some field of activity.is to identify what they do that gives them such remarkable results. This is often referred to as `the difference that makes the difference'.

When the difference has been identified it can be communicated to other people who can then learn to perform the same activity with a similar level of skill and excellence.

Having said that, the person learning the skill must have the necessary aptitude, and be willing to carry out the necessary self development. In other words, whilst it is easy enough to model the activity of a world-class sprinter, for example, a person who has only one leg, or is severely overweight, or who refuses to take any physical exercise, is unlikely to be able to translate the modelled information into a personal skill.

With thanks to NLP