Employ the “detour technique” to defuse emotion at work
- The human sensory system cannot focus on every little detail of the world around us so our cortex fills in the gaps.
- This leaves us open to “change blindness” whereby we focus on one thing but completely miss other parts of the complete picture.
- The science of focus can be used to improve your relationships at work whenever conversations become emotionally charged.
Have you ever been to a magic show? A magician shows you an empty black top hat, rotating it and shaking it to demonstrate that it’s a regular hat with nothing in it. He sets it down on the table, in plain view, center stage. He then waves his colorful long wand in an arc of dramatic showmanship, bringing it down with a flare of finality to tap on the brim of the hat. Out jumps a rabbit! The audience oohs and aahs. Of course, we know there is trick to it; the rabbit didn’t really materialize out of thin air. The magician used an age-old technique: distraction. While your eyes were following the theatrics of the wand, the magician’s other hand pressed a button on the side of the table that caused the hat’s rigged top to open down into a hidden compartment in the table where a rabbit was awaiting its treat-trained cue. Because you didn’t see the alteration to the hat, your mind perceives that the bunny had nowhere to come from. Magic.
The magic of the brain, actually. Sleight of hand, mirrors, elaborate props, simple verbal prompts — all of these are tools magicians use to leverage a neurological phenomenon called change blindness. The human sensory system is limited and cannot possibly focus on every little detail of the world around us. So our clever cortex fills in the gaps with past experience — in this case, what we knew about the hat from its earlier display. Perhaps the most famous scientific demonstration of change blindness was a study by Harvard psychologists Dan Simons and Chris Chabris in which subjects were shown a clip of a basketball game and asked to count the number of passes by the team wearing white jerseys. In the middle of the action, a person wearing a gorilla suit walks onto the court, pauses briefly to pound its chest, and walks off. Fascinatingly, in this experiment as well as a wide variety of replications since then, most subjects do not see the gorilla. They are dumbfounded when the video is played back and there, in plain sight, is a hairy ape. Subjects’ brains are busy counting, cannot attend to the whole basketball court, and as a result “fill in” the picture in their mind with what should be happening during a basketball game. Change blindness at work. Even more fascinatingly, there is a strong positive correlation between counting accuracy and change blindness. The better subjects do at recording the number of passes, the more likely they are to miss the gorilla. Some even fail to see it when they are told ahead of time that an ape is going to enter the play.
You don’t have to be a Vegas performer, nor a neurobiologist, to use the science of focus to improve your relationships. Simply implement the Detour Technique:
1. Make a mental list of three issues, at least tangentially related to the problem at hand, of significant importance to the person with whom you are dealing — but issues that either (a) have positive emotions attached to them or (b) are far less emotionally charged than is the topic of the current argument, disagreement, or debate.
2. When the conversation you’re having with the person escalates such that they stop using reason, interrupt in a collected fashion, asking for clarification on one of the items you identified in step one. For example, “You know, that reminds me of what you were saying a minute ago about __________. That was a good idea; could you walk me through that again?”
Your question takes a second for them to register and respond to. It’s a mini time-out — without the formal or artificial feeling of calling a time-out. It’s a detour in the conversation, and that pause is likely to lower high emotion. Then, because you’ve chosen a more rational topic, as the person begins talking about it, they shift to using reason.
You can wash, rinse, and repeat this as many times as it takes to modulate emotion so that when you return (if you even have to return) to the hot-button subject, everyone will be more levelheaded, more collaborative minded.
“Whoa, no way that works! People hate being interrupted,” you might be saying to yourself.
A legitimate concern. Which is why, when you pull out the Detour Technique, you ask a question instead of interjecting your ideas, suggestions, or opinions. Questions allow the other person to still perceive being in control of the dialogue; it’s still about them so “you” are not interrupting. Also make sure you go to a matter that’s at least somewhat relevant. Magicians don’t distract you by telling you to look offstage. It would be obvious that you were being intentionally manipulated. The best performers distract you in subtle ways, keeping you still directly engaged with them, thus not giving away what they’re up to.
