Raise your awareness.

An individual or group will generally show up moving along in one of the three voices. There are two issues: completion of their current voice and the transition on to the next voice. The two go hand in hand given that moving to the next stage is a natural outcome of completion in the current voice. So, how best to get completion in the voices?

Voice 1 - Ending

As in all the voices, there are three places to work: head, heart and feet.

Head Work

Voice 1 head work is the art of de-mystifying worst fears. Making lists of worst fears is good. For self or group. Taking each one and 'sanity checking' it comes next. Ask questions like "What sequence of events would have to happen for this to come true?" "What would have to be true for this to occur?" "Is the real world actually operating to produce anything like the conditions which the worst fear predicts?" And so on. Testing, testing and more testing against the facts of life.

Heart Work

Heart-work in Voice 1 requires fullest expression of the flow of emotional material which accompanies the disruption of a change, individually and collectively. Whatever emerges is okay and need not be judged for quality, depth or type of emotion. Just get it out and heard by yourself or your mates. Sometimes this is best done privately, writing it down in a personal journal. Sometimes spoken with a workgroup in a session designed to get everything shared so it does not have to be carried around inside and in secret any longer than necessary.

Feet Work

Since activity in Voice 1 usually means some sort of avoidance and denial, the effort is simply to discern and acknowledge all the ways the avoiding and denying occurs. More story telling in writing and discussion.

Voice 2 - Reinvention

Head Work

In Voice 2, our head needs to be busy adding two and two and getting seven or twenty three or more. We want to stretch out the range of our choices as far as we can without commitment or judgement. Brainstorming possibilities, writing down every wild idea and insight and daydream musing and the rest is needed now, building out delight-full stories of how they could become real. So, make the lists, draw the pictures, draft up the rough planning and sketch out the dreams by yourself and the others. Use scrap books, storyboards, collage and multimedia. Big fat markers make better tools than fine pointed accounting pens. Choose newsprint over fine letterhead.

Heart Work

Heart work in Voice 2 requires acknowledging the burdens which have been put down and the feelings which accompany our lighter loads. Writing these things down and acknowledging them publicly solidifies them.

Feet Work

Doing stuff in voice 2 is experimenting and learning in service of creating new, understood choices for yourself and team. You might be doing an internet search on a keyword that represents a potential new direction, activity, product, technology, quality or talent that you want to better grapple with. Perhaps you just call up the world expert, famous person in subject X, Y or Z and have a conversation you previously might never have had. Or, you could set up an exploratory design process which leads to a feasibility study for a product or service your team wants to explore. Basically get into action digging into the unknown and new in ways which will not break the bank, risk too much or force premature commitments. These experiments could cost nothing and take five minutes or cost millions and take years. Depends.

Voice 3 - Realisation

Living in Voice 3 is living out the alignment of our energy, intention and action around a single, clarified objective. So, getting in action here involves the release of all our energies in service of our commitment. In a way, that is the definition of commitment.

Head Work

In Voice 3, an almost endless process of refining and clarifying our objective goes on. We want to dig into what the objective is, what measures are used to tell us our progress to the objective, and where we look to find where we sit against the measures.

Heart Work

Voice 3 Heart Work requires the acknowledgement of the degree of commitment to self and the team. Talking about the meaning and nature of our commitment, and our feelings about it is worth doing.

Feet Work

Voice 3 Feet Work is the planning, organisation, direction and control of the systems and disciplines which must be in place to give us the best chance of maximising our investment and delivering the biggest win to us as we achieve our objectives. This is the kind of work we usually associate with doing business.

Absolutely. If we represent each individual member of the team by the story held in their personal TransforMAP, and place all those stories into the room as a collective story of the group, we find patterns of all nine domains, and tendencies for the group to be operating, primarily, in one of the voices. Wherever the group tends to be at the time suggests the work to be done by the group to complete the present voice. As each member contributes, their own story moves along however it will. After a time, the collective stories can be re-gathered and re-patterned to suggest new, appropriate group activities which will assist all the members to keep moving along the transition path.

Individuals don't seem to get stuck forever in worst fears. Although some people can get addicted to getting their emotional needs served by taking a life position of being in worst fears. This is not really authentic behaviour and may require some counselling to widen out the person's options for getting their needs met. Some people, acting from full authenticity, simply take longer than others to complete any of the voices. And, some will be much quicker than others. This may vary widely from change to change. In a group, make sure there are not any worst fear 'addicts' dominating the conversation. Find the thought leaders in the group - the natural leaders who people look to for being aware of what is going on - and make sure they are completing voice one. Have patience and spend some extra voice one completion time with anyone who needs more work to get complete in the voice. Healthy people need voice one and they get finished with it naturally given enough opportunity to get the value of experiencing the ending of things.

The joy of this tool is that it provides lots of opportunity to 'make it up'. We can begin an Implemento with any action, as long as it is an action. We've proved over and over that it does not really matter where one starts. If an individual or the group is completely stuck ask them to imagine a person who would definitely know what to do. Most all of us can come up with somebody alive or dead who would have an idea. Then ask them, "what do you imagine that person would do in this situation?" A way forward will appear. If there still is no idea, it is likely the basis for the Implemento is flawed. The 'why do this exercise?' question has a fuzzy, multi-purposed answer. Clarify that and try again.

To be precise, we never get others to shift their beliefs. They shift their beliefs in their own time and for their own reasons. That said, we can create conditions which favour other people's discovery and insights.

Stucco works because we use verifiable, observable actions and outcomes as the basis. When we believe that the actions and outcomes are accurate we then speculate about what forces and beliefs must be true for the actions to produce the outcomes we are experiencing. When the forces and beliefs become clear and believable, we have the established conditions for trying out new assumptions and mental models. Trying these on for size and playing out their effects through the believable forces is the iterative process which stirs the internal re-evaluation of beliefs which eventually produces a re-integration of the person. This in turn shows up in new behaviour which may be better aligned with self and world.

Forces are the truth of the external world. Beliefs are the truth of our internal world. Sometimes we confuse what we think about the world with what the world really is. So the first thing to do is to test every force to discern how much of your statement of the force is really your own wishful thinking. Move any and all of that to the domain of your own beliefs. So the first use of Forces is to clarify your own beliefs.

The second use for Forces is to test out new ideas for Actions, stemming from trial Beliefs. If a new Action produces a desirable Outcome through the Forces, you may have a winning new belief to promote.

There is no direct relationship. Although they are both storytelling tools they come from different perspectives. One is about finding out where you are in the story and the other is about creating or developing a new story. That said, Implemento can be a great tool to help complete and explore each voice of the TransforMAP. In any of the Voices I can speculate about something to do to move on. And then follow that with an Implemento. In Voice 1 it will flush out the worst fears and help let go of outworn beliefs and behaviour. In Voice 2 it will generate lots of new possibilities and experiments. In Voice 3 it will help clarify our targets, build useful measures and get us doing the right things in the right ways.

It can be done a number of times as changes go on, although we should be cautious of doing it too often. We would recommend one at the start of the project and then revisiting that same TransforMAP to check for changes rather than starting afresh. It is also worth using it alongside some action oriented tool, for example use Stucco and Implemento to investigate worst fears.

We use open questions! We need to be willing to listen to the voice that a person is currently stuck in. We might ask a single question in another voice but the real way to do it is exhaust the voice they are in, for example "Keep going... what else are you afraid of?" Being self-aware is another part of this. We need to be sure that we are not putting our own stuff in other people's TransforMAPs.

One method is to develop very specific questions in relation to each domain in the TransforMAP and run it as a series of syndicate sessions. For example, having explained the TransforMAP, its purpose and the three voices, divide participants into groups and start by asking them to spend say 30 minutes considering three questions in relation to the Ending Voice (There should be at least one question related to each of the three domains of Voice 1: Worst Fears, Angst and Resistance). They then have to present their responses to these questions back to the room. Then move on to Voice 2: Reinvention, and so on. This way, some participants are more likely to share their real thoughts which of course is where the value lies. Working with a smaller group is often easier for those reluctant to speak out. It is important, however, for all groups to answer all questions to ensure that the TransforMAP data is an accurate representation of the group as a whole.