Here is the full transcript of Jim Tamm’s talk titled “Cultivating Collaboration: Don’t Be So Defensive!” at TEDxSantaCruz 2015 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
I want to share something with you today that I believe will make you much more effective at resolving conflict and building collaboration. But I want to start by telling you a little story about some groups of chickens, because believe it or not, chickens have a lot to teach us about collaboration. This takes place at Purdue University, where Bill Muir is a professor of genetics and a genuinely nice guy. And Bill was looking into the differences between groups of collaborative chickens.
These were just chickens that got along well with each other. I call them the green zone chickens. There were no star performers in their group. They were just nice to each other.
The Problem with Star Performers
And in the chicken world, a star performer is the hen that lays the most eggs. But the problem with the star performers is that they tend to be much more aggressive animals. And so we oftentimes see among the chickens something that we occasionally see in human organizations, and that is that the star performers become the stars, not by being so good themselves, but by suppressing the egg production of the other chickens. So they look better.
And they do this by pecking on them. Now I call these more aggressive star performers the red zone chickens. And they do a lot of damage. So the farmers have tried different strategies to deal with that.
One is to house the birds in individual cages about this big. Not a great solution because it’s very expensive, takes millions of cages. Another thing they tried is something that’s called trimming their beaks. Now this is a bit of a deceptive term because it gives you the impression that there’s a chicken manicurist out there sort of filing down the sharp point.
But really it’s an employee with a tool that looks a little bit like a pair of pliers and they go up and rip a big chunk of the chicken’s beak right off its head. Also very expensive, not to mention horribly unpleasant for all the chickens and the employee that’s assigned to do that. So Bill was trying to see if it’s possible to breed collaborative instincts into chickens. And if so, what would be the impact of that on their egg production?
The Experiment and Results
So we had all the green zone chicken groups over there and the red zone chicken groups over there. And he took the best of each generation’s egg producers to produce the next generation. He did this for one year, about five generations. And at the end of that one year period, the results were pretty dramatic.
There, this is a picture of the green zone chickens. They were healthy and productive. Now the next picture is what was left of the red zone chickens. And I say it’s what was left of them because more than half of the red zone chickens had been murdered by their colleagues, pecked to death.
Now they say that a picture is worth a thousand words. But if this doesn’t tell the whole story, let’s look at the egg production of the green zone chickens. In that one year period of time, it went up 260%. So what we can learn from these chickens is that red zone environments that are more hostile, that are more adversarial, highly conflicted, internally competitive versus externally competitive, they produce more red zone behavior.
It feeds on itself and can spread like a virus in an organization. And green zone environments that are more supportive and cooperative and more highly skilled at collaboration, they produce more eggs or whatever your organization’s equivalent is to more eggs. Now I’d like you to think back on that picture of those red zone chickens again for just a minute and get that in your mind. As a judge for almost 25 years, my jurisdiction was collective bargaining disputes, labor management conflicts.
And in that role, I believe that I have mediated more school district labor strikes than any other person in the United States. In just about every single strike that I have ever mediated, by the time we get to the end of that process, every single person involved in that process on both sides of the table knows exactly what those chickens feel like. Because that is the existence that they are trapped in. Now these are not mean people.
These are good people doing their imperfect best to improve the world the best way they know how. I mean, they’ve all dedicated their lives to public education. They didn’t lack an interest in collaboration. What they lacked was skills.
And this lack of skills was costing the state of California a tremendous amount of money in the cost of conflict. So a small group of us got together, we did a lot of research, and we set out to teach the more adversarial red zone groups to be more collaborative. We were wildly successful. Trust went up, conflicts went down.
We reduced the amount of measurable conflict in almost 100 different organizations by almost 70% over several years. It saved the state of California a huge amount of money. It also transformed the working lives of thousands of employees who had been trapped in that red zone chicken existence, which in turn, I believe, improved the quality of education for thousands of school kids who finally had positive role models who could teach them how to resolve their differences without destroying their community or going to war with each other. And what we learned from this experience is not just limited to public education.
The Importance of Managing Defensiveness
It is applicable in any setting that requires collaboration, whether that’s a family trying to figure out where to go on vacation together or the corporate world where it has become blindingly obvious lately that you cannot compete externally if you can’t first collaborate internally, or even in politics, where the defensiveness of our Congress probably cost as much as the entire defense budget at the Pentagon.
So what I’d like to do is share with you today what I believe is the biggest learning from that experience, and that’s this. There is nothing that will help you become more effective at resolving conflict and building collaboration more than better managing your own defensiveness. In over 25 years of working with other people’s conflict, I almost never had to deal with pure legal issues.
People were almost always before me because somebody would start feeling vulnerable, and then they would get defensive. And when we get defensive, our thinking becomes rigid, our IQ drops about 20 points, and we simply become stupid. And not only are we terrible problem solvers ourselves, but then we invite everybody else in the room to get defensive, and then what you end up with is a whole room filled with red zone people who cannot solve a problem. The technical term for that, by the way, is litigation.
It’s as simple as this. If you reduce your defensiveness, you increase your ability to solve problems. Now if we know that’s true, why don’t we just stay non-defensive and keep a more collaborative green zone mindset all the time? So I’d like you to try something with me that may give you some insight into that question.
Defensiveness Exercise
I would like you to use all your creativity and empathy to let yourself become one with this piece of paper. Know what it feels like to be this piece of paper, nice and cool to the touch and crisp edges and a few sharp corners and a few wrinkles like some of us have. So in just a minute, I’m going to ask you all to take a deep breath. We’ll do this all together.
And as you exhale, I would like you to focus all your attention on this piece of paper and just see if it’s possible for you to breathe yourself right into this piece of paper and become one with it. Okay, is everybody ready? All right, go. Ah.
Okay. Everybody have that now? Got it? Okay, everybody have that now? Got it? Now, anybody want to collaborate with me right now or build a relationship with me right now? Or more likely, anybody have any really strong negative red zone feelings towards me right now? So I apologize for this.
But I wanted to do this because I wanted you to see how easily and quickly you can move from the green zone, where pretty much everybody was in this room just a minute ago, into the red zone. And when it happens, it can happen just that fast. And when it happens, we don’t have defenses. They have us.
They own us. They become our operating system. And they determine how we see the rest of the world out there. And the problem is, it’s almost all unconscious stuff.
So we don’t even recognize that we’re getting defensive until it’s too late. So here’s our premise about defensiveness. When we get defensive, we are not defending ourselves from another person. We are defending ourselves from fears inside of us that we don’t want to feel.
Three big fears that come up all the time. Fears about our own significance, our competence, and our likability. Let me give you an example. Pretend I have some big fears about my own competency for doing this TED Talk today.
And say it’s going really badly. Maybe I’m jet-lagged and forgetting things and no one’s paying attention. That can cause me a lot of discomfort. Because believe me, I do not like feeling incompetent at all.
So one way that I could avoid a lot of that discomfort is I might start blaming you. I mean, after all, you are not the smartest group I have ever worked with, you know. And really, does anybody here think it’s possible to teach the whole audience to be non-defensive in the few little 18 minutes that I’ve got for this? I mean, give me a break.
Now, it might seem like I’m defending myself against a bad audience or a bad situation. But what I’m really doing is I’m behaving in a way that lets me not be in touch with those fears. Our defensiveness helps us hide our fears from ourselves. But unfortunately, that is an awful lot like putting whipped cream on dog poop.
And I know that’s a really ugly metaphor, but I’ll bet you’ll remember that one. If you’re getting defensive, it’s because there’s some fear there. But since most of us are not sufficiently in tune with that fear to do anything about it until it’s too late, what can be more helpful for most of us is to start paying attention to the outward behavior that we do. Our outward signs of defensiveness are usually much easier to spot at a much earlier point in the process.
So if we know what our signs of defensiveness are, they can become our own personalized early warning system. For example, I notice that when I get defensive, my breathing becomes faster, I tend to talk much louder, and I usually feel very misunderstood. So if I’m getting some feedback from my friends and I notice that I’m breathing faster, talking louder, and feeling very put upon, the alarm bells can go off. Ding, ding, ding.
Hey, Jim. I’m doing that thing. Then I can take some action. So it is worth your while to figure out what your specific signs of defensiveness are and then create your own early warning system.
Common Signs of Defensiveness
Now we’ve come up with a list of about 50 different signs of defensiveness. But these are just a few of the more common ones. So take a look at this and see whether any of these look familiar to you. If you don’t see your favorites up there, or even more importantly, if you happen to be sitting out in the audience right now thinking to yourself, well, I don’t really get defensive, let me suggest to you that you are probably in complete denial or overly medicated.
Because defensiveness, this is a human condition. So if you’re one of those few people on earth that thinks they don’t get defensive, when you go home tonight, I would suggest you ask your spouse or your kids. I’ve found family members to be remarkably willing to help out on this task, usually very accurate too. So your job is to figure out what your specific signs of defensiveness are and then create your own early warning system.
Addressing Defensiveness
Then when it tips you off that you’re getting defensive, here’s a few things that you can do that can help. Number one, acknowledge to yourself that you’re getting defensive. Now that may not seem like it’s a big deal, but if you don’t notice it, you won’t take any other action. Number two, do whatever you can do to slow down your physiology.
Maybe take a walk around the building, get some fresh air. Or if you’re trapped in a meeting, just take a few deep breaths. Number three, pay attention to your self-talk. If you’re engaging in negative self-talk, consciously try to turn it into something a little more positive and a little less toxic for you.
Number four, create an action step that is directly related to whatever your sign of defensiveness is. So for example, if your sign is flooding with information to prove a point, maybe your action step would be just to be quiet for 10 or 15 seconds. Just zip it up. If it’s high charge of energy in the body, maybe just take a few deep breaths or visualize some relaxing scene.
If it’s a sudden drop in IQ, do something that’s going to buy you a little time to let your thinking process catch up with the rest of your body. Maybe hang out in the restroom for a few minutes. One woman, her sign was always wanting the last word, and so she got this image of herself standing at the conference room door, throwing in the last word and slamming the door. And it was a way of not only reminding her of what she was doing, but also lightening up her mood a little bit.
So you create your action step. Then number five is this is a recovery model. This is not a model of perfection. So if you get defensive like we all will, you notice it, you take some action, and then start over and let it go.
Conclusion
So to recap, when you leave here today, the two most helpful next steps for you will be number one, figure out what your signs of defensiveness are and create your own early warning system. And then number two, figure out an action step and practice it. You want to practice it so it becomes automatic because the worst time to be figuring out how to deal with your defensiveness is when you’re defensive. Now if you can do both of these things, I guarantee you.
You will significantly increase your chances of ending up like a green zone person rather than one of those red zone chickens. In the words of one of our wisest, greatest modern day philosophers, “It’s not easy being green.” But let me tell you, it’s a whole lot easier and a lot more effective than being red and it could just make a big difference in your life. Thank you very much.