Zachary Shore

Reading others requires going deeper than their intentions and capabilities […] We need to get down to the level of drivers and constraints.Intentions are manifestations of a person’s underlying drivers. When you understand why people have certain intentions—what’s driving them—you can better anticipate what their future intentions will be. The same is true of capabilities. We often ask what a leader is able to do. But leaders can have all sorts of capabilities at their disposal, and still be constrained by a whole host of factors beyond their control, from things as concrete as financial constraints to things as ephemeral as the Zeitgeist.

The second and main insight involves a method for understanding another person’s drivers and constraints. And that is by focusing on the behavior of your subject at pattern breaks.The conventional approach to reading others is based on pattern recognition. That’s what Amazon and Google are focused on, using big data to predict what products we will buy and what our interests are. Patterns can be useful, but they can also be highly misleading. They can tell you how someone acted in the past, but that may not matter if the context has changed significantly. My book’s main argument is that we can better understand our opponents’ drivers and constraints from their behavior at pattern breaks—at times when deviations from the routine occur.

There’s a bit of nuance to this. To really gain insight into your subject, you first need to find a pattern-break event (or moment) that is meaningful. A meaningful pattern break is one in which a competitor’s response will impose serious costs upon him or her, usually with long-term implications.

There’s a second nuance, too. Pattern-break behaviors—that is, the response of a subject to a pattern-break event—does not have to entail change for us to learn something important. A person’s behavior at a pattern-break moment could continue on exactly as it had been before the event. Whether people change their behavior or not, the way that they respond at those times is usually more revealing about their underlying drivers and constraints than their pattern of past behavior.

Like this content? Why not share it?
Share on FacebookTweet about this on TwitterShare on LinkedInBuffer this pagePin on PinterestShare on Redditshare on TumblrShare on StumbleUpon
There Are No Comments
Click to Add the First »