Patricia’s Meta Program Examples

Patricia Jiménez, from Peru, came up with some great examples of Meta Programs in quotes. She gracefully agreed to share them with you all.

Proactive – Acting quickly.
“You got a dream… You gotta protect it. People can’t do something’ themselves, they wanna tell you can’t do it. If you want somethin’, go get it.”
(Will Smith; Movie: The Pursuit of Happiness).

Reactive – Contemplating.
“The wise never says everything he thinks, but always thinks everything he says”.
(Aristotle)

Towards – Achieving Goals.
“A person should set his goals as early as he can and devote all his energy and talent to getting there. With enough effort, he may achieve it. Or he may find something that is even more rewarding”
(Walt Disney)

“Most people spend more time and energy going around problems than in trying to solve them.”
(Henry Ford)

Away from – Avoiding Problems.
“The formulation of the problem is often more essential than its solution”
(Albert Einstein)

“The world is not all sunshine and rainbows. It’s a very mean and nasty place and I don’t care how tough you are it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it.”
(Silvester Stallone; Movie: Rocky Balboa)

Internally Referenced – Own standards.
“Don’t ever let someone tell you, you can’t do something. Not even me.”
(Will Smith, Movie: The Pursuit of Happiness)

“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn”.
(Quote of the movie: Gone with the Wind)

Externally Referenced – Other’s standards.
“If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get to other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.”
(Henry Ford)

Options – See possibilities.
“When you think all is lost, do not forget that you still have the future your brain, your will and two hands to change your fate.”
(Werner von Braun)

“A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”
(Winston Churchill)

Procedures – Step by step.
“Whom do I call educated? First, those who manage well the circumstances they encounter day by day. Next, those who are decent and honorable in their intercourse with all men.”
(Socrates)

“I suppose my formula might be: dream, diversify and never miss an angle.”
(Walt Disney)

General – Large Panorama.
“I could never convince the financiers that Disneyland was feasible, because dreams offer too little collateral.”
(Walt Disney)

Specific – Focusing on details.
“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”
(Bruce Lee)

“Anybody can become angry – that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way – that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.”
(Aristotle)

Matching – Meeting the criteria.
“It’s the choices that make us who we are, and we can always choose to do what’s right.”
(Quote of the movie: Spiderman 3)

“During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities”.
(Nelson Mandela)

Mismatching – Not meeting the criteria.
“The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.”
(Albert Einstein)

“You may fool all the people some of the time, you can even fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all the time.”
(Abraham Lincoln)

Internal Locus of Control – Being in control.
“If you know what you’re worth then go out and get what you’re worth. But ya gotta be willing to take the hits, and not pointing fingers saying you ain’t where you wanna be because of him, or her, or anybody! Cowards do that and that ain’t you!”
(Silvester Stallone (Rocky Balboa)

“It’s the niceties that make the difference, fate gives us the hand, and we play the cards.”
(Arthur Schopenhauer)

External Locus of Control – Others are in control.
“My momma always said, “Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.”
(Movie: Forest Gump)

“I expected to do better but the weights were too heavy.”
(Manuel Mingifnel, weight lifter)

Maintenance – Stability .
“There are men who struggle for a day, and they are good. There are others who struggle for a year, and they are better. There are some who struggle many years, and they are better still. But there are those who struggle all their lives, and these are the indispensable ones.”
(Bertolt Brecht)

Development – Growth
“It is no use to man lament the times in which he lives . The only good thing you can do is try to improve.”
(Thomas Carlyle Historian, English essayist and thinker)

“Whenever I go on a ride, I’m always thinking of what’s wrong with the thing and how it can be improved.”
“I learned that the hard part is not getting to the top, but never stop rising”.
(Walt Disney)

“Blessed are those who are at the bottom of the well because from then on forward can only be improving.”
(Joan Manuel Serrat)

Change – Radical change.
“I can never stand still. I must explore and experiment. I am never satisfied with my work. I resent the limitations of my own imagination.”
(Walt Disney)

“If you want to change the world, start with yourself.”
(Mahatma Gandhi)

Sorting by People
“The workers in mainland China and inside the Disney park, their salaries are very low and the work days are very long.”
(Walt Disney)

Sorting by Activity
“Just as iron rusts from disuse, even so does inaction spoil the intellect.”
(Leonardo Da Vinci)

“We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering – these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love – these are what we stay alive for.”
(Robin Williams)

Sorting by Information
“I come from a world full of roads, mountains, jungle, sea, meadow and sand. I have a thirst for peace, so infinite! Do me a love nest for my grief.”
(Atahualpa Yupanqui. Argentine writer)

a. Concept b. Structure c. Use
“I went to the woods because I wished to live consciously, I wanted to live fully and extract the essence of life. Forget everything out of life, so i won’t find out in death, that i had not lived.”
(The club Dead Poets Society)

Together
“We deliver what was expected of us. People did not think we were going to permeate as a whole as fast as we have done”
(Kevin Durant, basketball gold in the United States and top scorer of the tournament with 156 points)

Proximity
“I like friends who have independent minds because they tend to make you see problems from all angles.”
(Nelson Mandela)

Solo
“I am now a legend.”
(Usain Bolt (Jamaica, Athletics), after winning the gold in the 100 and 200 meters)

“The strategy worked. I wanted it to gold, that was my goal”.
(Arthur Zanetti (Brazil, gymnastics) , after winning the first gold in history to the Latin American gymnastics)

Past
“I am a slow walker, but I never walk back.”
(Abraham Lincoln)

“Every piece of land , is sacred to my people , every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods , every meadow , every insect in its buzz. All are holy in the memory and in the experience of my people.”
(Head of the Tribe Suwamixh XIX)

Present
“If you are attentive to the present, the past will not distract you, then you’ll be always new.”
(Facundo Cabral, Singer songwriter)

Future
“After all, tomorrow is another day.”
(Scarlett O’Hara, movie: Gone with the Wind)

Visual
“I see little commercial potential for the internet for the next 10 years.”
(Bill Gates)

“I see Israel as one of the great outposts of democracy in the world, and a marvelous example of what can be done, how desert land can be transformed into an oasis of brotherhood and democracy”.
(Martin Luther King)

Auditory
“Listening to the past: towards a social history of popular music.“
(Network of Scientific Journals from Latin America, the Caribbean Spain and Portugal. Scientific Information System)

Kinesthetic
“I’ve been grateful my whole life to my father for teaching me to do physical work since childhood. My learning in infancy has been useful later more than once.”
(Aleksandr Kotov)

“People experiencing strong internal emotions are less vulnerable to external pain.”
(John Seymour)

Stimulating Team Interaction with Mindsonar

Working in a multidisciplinary team can be fun and rewarding. In the harsh day to day reality of dynamic business settings however it is often the opposite and team members tend to ‘shut down’ when faced with difficult meetings. Teamleaders  want to boost the team skills to innovate but do not know how to built a bridge closing the communication gap. One of our customers, a local sales and support organization for a global player asked us to help build that bridge. I decided to combine the Mindsonar® test with other business NLP techniques.

What is the big picture
Team members from various disciplines had to work together to set up a new business line. These disciplines included technical support, marketing, sales, management and fulfillment. The objective of the team meeting was to translate existing best practice into innovation for a newly set up business line. On the surface everything seemed to challenge the current business model: instead of delivering the product directly to large customers, the full service needed to be delivered via business partners to consumers. It faced the team with a new focus:  how to accelerate revenue and market presence?

The approach
Each team member filled in a Mindsonar® test for a specific context: the biweekly team meeting. The outcome of the test was used for:

  • Individual feedback to team members – how to improve personal performance;
  • Design of the interventions during the team meeting;
  • Finding stimulating interactions.

Interventions
Each team member received the standard Mindsonar® report with personal drives. During the team meeting I intervened by providing each team member with feedback on their behavior during the team exercises. I focussed on improving team interaction and creativity.

Using MindSonar
Analysis of the Mindsonar results led to the following conclusions:

  • 9 out of the 13 meta programs showed a high deviation from the average
  • Team members showed a variety of Graves drives.
  • Meta criteria (what is important to me) came from different angles (people, task, cooperation)

Based on this I designed the following interventions:

  • A presentation to create awareness of the positive effect of diversity
  • Experience the positive effects of diversity in a one-to-one setting
  • Gather meeting information using questions that are tailored to diversity
  • Group brainstorm with feedback on successful interactions.

Finding the right interaction
Positive human interaction boosts the emergence of innovative business concepts, plans and actions. Depending on the context similar or diverse kind of people boost creativity. Because the problem cause was unknown, I used a three-step approach with different interactions:

  1. Information gathering
  2. Problem solving
  3. Finding creative solutions

For the information gathering phase I analyzed two meta programs: Global/Specific and Procedure/Options. By plotting team members in a XY-graph I set up two teams of maximum diversity and one team of maximum similarity (see graph). These teams answered a set questions that were formulated using as many as different meta programs as possible. The advantage of this approach is gathering a great range of information.

image003

In the problem-solving phase the complete team interacted. Practical guidelines for team cohesion, such as balancing internal and external reference, were already given in the presentation. These guidelines came from an analysis of two types of meta programs and the Graves drives. During and after this interaction I provided feedback on specific meta programs that stimulated group cohesion (matching, specific, concept and use)

In the creative phase team members used the Disney Strategy as a general process. Now the teams were set up from the principle of similarity on two sets of meta programs : towards/away from and matching/mismatching.

MMiTA

For the dreamer (I,E and G): towards/matching. For the critic (F, D and A): away from/mismatching and for the realist (C, H and B) people who easily switch between towards/away and between match/mismatch.

Benefits
By using MindSonar to boost team interaction various effect arise:

  • A rich set of information is gathered
  • Information is analyzed from different perspectives and filters
  • Creativity is stimulated

Background information
The Disney strategy are described in Skills for the future (Robert Dilts with Gino Bonnissone).
Specific meta programs for team learning are derived from Energie door Wisselwerking (Published by Ruysdael, Author Rien van Leeuwen).

MindSonar and Teams: Lots of Insights!

It was a wonderful combination: working with a management team that was specialized in Graves’ theory. They asked me to accompany them in answering their question: How to put more effective marketing efforts in motion for the company, with the help of MindSonar? It was a typical win-win opportunity: the three of them experts in management drives, and me combining those with meta programs.

At first, we had a funny mistake about the colours. There are so many instruments in the HR-world that work with colours. The colours of the measured metaprograms in MindSonar do not correspond with the Graves’ colours in the report. The team thought it had to match and looked for the connection. I didn’t catch that immediately so for a few minutes we had a funny dialogue, misunderstanding each other  in our different colour perspectives.

After solving our confusion, we spent the evening looking at their team profile. This was very interesting, because most significant in their score together was:

  • they  scored very low on “concept”. “Use” and “structure” where both high;
  • they were high on “kinesthetic” and low on “visual”;
  • they were low on “information”, higher on activities, and highest on “people”.

This was fascinating because the firm has existsted for more than 20 years. One might think that without much “concept”, “vision” and “information”, a company doesn’t live that long! But their power was mostly in doing a lot of projects and things, and feeling what was going well and what was less successful.

During the evening I asked many questions to activate concept, visual and information as metaprograms. For example:

  • What is the essence of your product? Why does the company exists at all? What is the greater purpose of it?
  • What can you see as the advantage of your products for your customers? How do you see the future in a few global words?
  • What do you know about your customers? Are there any facts and figures to find about them? Is anything measured in what kind of customers the company attracts?

And so on. This was very funny, because as almost always, MindSonar proves itself in the now. The answers were all no……..

We later discussed the individual profiles and analysed who was the best in which metaprogram, and how he could contribute to the goal. And so MindSonar gave them  a lot of input for different marketing actions in the future.

And so I had a nice evening with my beloved instrument!

Powered by MindSonar: Eviont

Eviont, a Dutch NLP oriented consultancy firm, launched their new product ‘Help My Team Doesn’t Work!’ in September 2014. This product, sporting their TAA-system (Train, Analyze, Apply) has MindSonar at its core. MindSonar is presented as an element within the context of this larger, more specifically focused product. This is a good example of the ‘Powered by MindSonar’ principle we like to see: offer the client a specific solution, rather than a general instrument. They have a funny cartoon movie explaining the product (in Dutch).

Go to product web page