Archivo Etiqueta: Gut-based

Just before starting a session I was invited to moderate a couple of weeks ago, during Woman’s Week in Madrid, I was by the coffee machine having a conversation with both the leader of a team we had recently worked with and a woman who was a member of the Board at the same organisation.

During the conversation she mentioned the word “apagafuegos” (firefighters) refering to the members of the team we had worked with. It struck me as a very accute description of what we had seen during our 2 days with them: a team dominated by Gut-based types that had difficulty selecting the next battle, since every new “emergency” was addressed immediately, with the consequent dropping of whatever they were doing at the time. Specially if the “doing” that got interrupted and dropped was thinking, or talking through things. We saw multiple instances of this during our work with them. Actually, the workshop was interrupted several times with “emergencies”. So much so, that we had to add another session to get through the material.

So, what is going on in a team where Gut-base is the overwhelming majority (and thus can be said to be the basis of the “grouponality” or group-personality?). In what follows, we will cosider the group as an entity with its own biases, blind spots and tendencies.

Gut-force

First, there is a tendency towards action, towards motion, towards doing and a consequent tendency to avoid reflection before action: body based types feel what needs to be done, and at times even need to be actually moving to be able to think clearly. Past a certain point of mental processing, sometimes they can feel like caged animals if you attempt to hold them back from action, by wanting to “talk some more”, for instance, or “go over it again”. It is not that they are unwilling or unable to think things over, even in depth, but tehy may have real difficulty doing so before they move into action. (más…)