This is Edwin k Morris, and you are about to embark on the
next Pioneer Knowledge Services because you need to know a digital
resource for you to listen to folks share their experience and knowledge
around the field of knowledge management and nonprofit work. If your company or organization would
like to help us continue this mission and sponsor one of our shows, email, b y ntk@pioneerks.org. Hello. I am Frank d Dominus from
Boulder, Colorado, which is a, a famous city for a number of reasons. I'm very pleased that I live near
a natural wonder to four miles away from me in the foothills is
El Dorado natural Springwater. It's rated as the number one or
number two best water in the world, but all the old, uh, Bohemians from
Boulder know about the actual source. So instead of going to the store
or even to the factory, uh, some of the older residents drive down
a country road all the way into the foothills. And there's a spigot where you could
take your one gallon or five gallon jug and fill up with clean
natural spring water. It's a great social place
too. People meet there. Then I was pleased to meet a gentleman
who had a van full of five gallon jugs and a pump , and coming up from Denver and
filling up with all this good water. I really love what I do. I've always
had a fascination with human nature. I grew up in the mean streets of
Philadelphia, Kensington, port Richmond. From that environment to where I am now, which is really like paradise gives
me the availability of quiet time to write, study, and teach because I really want to bring
to the table something new to people. I don't want to just give an academic
report. What I do is dynamic. I don't just feed information
when I coach or teach. It's about real life
situations. I'm not a therapist, but I do understand
interpersonal dynamics. The beginning of why we connect
and why we disconnect and why we have certain style
points that create tension in us. And we also create tension in
other people, but we're so dog on, self-centered, we are. So, it takes a little bit of a
horizontal step to realize other centeredness will help us to observe
the behavior of other people. The most fantastic job experience
I had was the reorganization analysis and conflict training
for Atlantic Telegraph and telecommunications. When the government divested
what was really monopoly and broke it into 17 pieces,
the morale was horrible. The trainers were great, but they were frustrated
because whenever there's change, there should be a change adaptation
program, right? We're aware of that now, but back then, ,
there was just a big change. It was like a bomb drop in and
everyone ran everywhere and friendships were broken up and people were posturing
for different positions and it was a mess. But I'm pleased to have been invited
to at least give an analysis and help top management to prioritize
the most serious survival factors for an organization in trouble. I work now primarily in
strategic planning leadership, and lately because of the
intensity of tribal anger, not just on a local or
national level, but globally, I'm concerned about the intensity
of conflict communications. Why is it if we disagree, we have
to yell at each other? . But why is it if your religion
or philosophy is different, we have to hate each other. But I did try to understand a little
bit about the class warfare. Uh, so I can try to understand why different
segments of society are angry at the other segments. So the last book I read regarding
that was called Dear Hunting with Jesus by Joe Bant, which helped me understand what we
affectionately refer to as the mine of the American, the Great American redneck, and why some things just don't make
sense to, in that classification. I don't, I hate labeling people, but, uh, those who see other people as different
rather than the fact that we're all in the same boat together. The
way success and failure goes, we could be in a totally different
place tomorrow if we bump our heads. If we have a lawsuit, if we have a
divorce, if we have a sudden success, things can change in a New York
Minute or a Philadelphia minute. In the early seventies, I was
active in community service. I was a former big brother of America. I worked with the Community
Action Agency in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania at that time as a young man, competent carpenter and cabinet makers. I was called in to help develop one of
the first weatherization programs and help develop grants for wic, et cetera.
I was doing a good job administratively, but I really wasn't so good with
people having been trained in construction by a very hot
tempered Italian uncle . I really didn't understand the
people part of construction. I just yelled commands and
threw clipboards and got
upset about every little thing. I don't know why. I think I was
just modeling , my uncle who that. That's a style, right? That's
a leadership style of sorts. Well, yeah, dominance. Yeah, AB
absolutely. But the dominant personality, if we look at a rectangle
and we put dominance on one
side and permissiveness on the other side, if it's
high here and low here, there's a reason why
someone takes that position. If someone's in a dominant
position underneath that, the intention is I have to tell people
what to do because they can't be trusted to get results on their own. And in
contrast, if I'm totally permissive, that means, oh, I'd let the entire volunteer team run
out in the community and do the volunteer program and leave 'em
alone. They're two extremes. And the good manager balances in the
middle and knows when to assert and maybe throws weight around a little
bit that's appropriate. Or when it's time to lighten up and be
kind and gentle to someone, cuz you know, something tragic happened to them
in their personal life needs to be a flexibility. But I certainly was not
, I'm embarrassed to say I, I was not the the best manager and
I didn't make all the best decisions and earned the, uh, the disaffection
of some old friends because of that. But I was fortunate enough to have
a boss who was sensitive enough to put me into one of what
was called the Big five. There were only five major big
training companies at the time, and one of them was Leadership
Effectiveness training by Dr. Tom Gordon. Most people know it's parallel
program, it's sister program, parent effectiveness program, which turns screaming parents
into reasonable parents. So I was very happy that I
was assigned to a mentor, Dr. Tom Andrews, who was a psychologist and psych
teacher at the University of Pittsburgh. While I was so immersed in work, my
personal life wasn't there at all. I just wasn't there. I was work and
sleep, work and sleep. I was workaholic, to tell you the truth. But he really made a major influence in
me helping to communicate in a way that ended up with my weatherization
team being cited as one of the top seven most productive
counties in all 76 counties of the commonwealth of PA
for our productivity. With the energy conservation program. You talked about two mentor imprints, one in a kind of a youth kind of
situation, very young. And then, and then later on you got to see a little
different approach. I, I guess the. Truth is, during my high school summers, I was fortunately employed by my uncle
arm who was just an absolute wiz, one of those scientifically curious persons that man, you could just talk to him about
anything. And he taught me the trades. He taught me foundations. We jacked up a building at 6 0
1 East Gerard Avenue in Philly. We put a floor jack in the basement,
jacked up the first first floor. And then we continued to do
that. We jacked up, uh, bad pun, but we jacked up the entire building,
literally rebuilt everything. So while my high school
friends were goofing off, I was making $2 and 60 cents an hour. So I had money for that long
stringy, uh, licorice. Licorice. Oh, the licorice, yes. Yeah. And boy, at the candy
store where the kids hung out, I was the one who was buying friends. You were, you were the king. Yeah, I. Was the king of the block. And I learned a lot of different cats
cradle tricks with, uh, licorice. Bit of a show off. My goodness. Yeah. There's one other
trainer that got me started with disk, and I do wanna briefly comment on him. When I had relocated from
Pennsylvania to Colorado in the early seventies, I landed without
a support system here. So I reached back to my first
trainer, Dr. Tom Andrews, who indirectly led me to Dr. Dean Nelson, who if you're involved in disk and have
been involved with disk for a long time, recognized him as a, a pretty big phase during the
phase two of the personal profile system. And I was so impressed
by his role model. I was, uh, he was 20 years my senior,
but he came down from Fargo, North Dakota to help me get started.
And I didn't know you could do this. We just went 1, 2, 3, 4 and said
hello and made the offer and, and left. And there was no,
um, I learned something new. There was no effort at closing. It
was here if you really want this here. And we left. And that produced
some momentum with sales. So I wanna tip my hat to Dr. Dean Nelson of Performax
Systems International. Any vintage disk people
will remember. Dean Nelson. I really wanna understand what disk is. It sounds like there's a really deep
approach to organizations and how they communicate. Exactly. Disk originally started as a
theory 2,400 years ago when an AAM amens and, and les and other, uh, Greek thinkers and philosophers tried
to determine what was our essential element. They had a sense of
smaller particles, the atomic level. So each of them in turn said that
were made up in our core of earth, wind, fire, or water when
we believed it was fire. That's why medicine bled a
lot of people. And of course, a lot of people died if
there was an illness. So if someone had too hot a temper, they were said to have too much fire
in them. So let's cut and bleed, bleed the fire out of them.
Or if they're too wishy washy, if there were a doorman and people
walked over them, they were too watery. Two fluids. So let's cut them and bleed some of that
essential energy out of them. , this theory was revived at the
early stages of the development of the field of psychology and psychiatry, which was split between originally in
Austria, looking at the way people think. But here in America, uh, behaviorism,
uh, was a different take. It was, the theory was behavior counts not
just what we're thinking in our head. So there's a different take on that. Dr. William Molten Marston picked
up on this early theory, the quadrant theory, and
he developed a circumplex, visualize a circle with a cross,
horizontal and vertical. Okay, that's the very beginning. Two questions are asked
on the horizontal axis. Let's call that the ex axis. That would be the affection
or affiliation axis. So if you think the world
is peace, love, kumbaya, let's hug you're at three o'clock. But
if you think, Hmm, better be cautious. You shouldn't reveal our deepest
thoughts and feelings to others. And let's just be careful.
Cause the environment drives us. You're at nine o'clock. If you think you control and
have power over the environment, you're at 12 o'clock. If you think you're at
effect of the environment and
you're not really strong in terms of power, that you depend on
others to advocate for your power, you're at six o'clock. So those are the two questions that
form the circumplex that makes for the everything disk profile. So if your
dot, when you take the disk profile, you'll get a dot that lands
somewhere in that circumplex. Is it just a, a series of questions and
answers? Is that what develops that? Yes. Yes. Originally,
in, in the beginning, it was a series of multiple choice
adjectives that you choose, ah, the most and least option from
four adjectives that has since been adjusted to different cultures
and different countries
so that we have both the word version and a
phrase version, such as, I prefer to work alone
versus with a team or, um, independent versus codependent. So an organization would look at this
as probably a two-sided approach. One for self-reflection, self-awareness, and two for the organization in
total. Correct. Is it? Yes. Yes. How does it applied? That's a good question. Both
those things really overlap. But in order for us to have better
relationships with other people, we need to have a better relationship
with ourselves. We are so full of denial, and there's so many things that. No, I'm not, I am not . Yes. You're, you're so full of
denial. , you're so good at, at psychoanalyzing and criticizing
others and observing them, of. Course, justifying ourselves.
Right? I am justified. I, well. To the degree that we have a measure
of perfectionism versus humility, I happen to know I've made some mistakes
in my life that required forgiveness. And not because I'm a bad
guy or had bad intention, but people don't fit together.
Like perfect puzzle pieces. Even the most loving, closest
relationships have conflict. It's said now, a healthy relationship is not one that
has a false sense of harmony all the time. But that has maybe
harmony 80% of the time, maybe one of every five
interactions, results, and maybe not total understanding
or misunderstanding or hurt feeling because of a word I said.
I was angry, not mad, . So if you do have bumps in the
road, in your communication, that's why to go directly
to your question, yes, if I know what my strengths are, I
can play those strengths to the team. But any strength over
extended becomes a weakness. I'll go through that with the four
quadrant dimensions, which are dominance, influence, which Marston originally
called inducement, steadiness, which Marston originally called
submission and conscientiousness, which Marston originally
called compliance. And I'll explain the reason for
those name changes later. Okay. When we describe the colorful
personality. But, uh, the point is, by knowing what your strength
is, you could reel it in. I am actually a moderate level,
uh, d assertive, aggressive, but many people don't even
know that because having
worked with disk for so many years, and with so many people,
I'm really like a chameleon. So depending on where you met me, yeah, you might say Frank's kind of shy
and reserved and a great listener. Or you might say, Frank never shuts
up . He just wants to tell. He wants to be the one who tells
all the jokes at the party. Well, you can read the
room, right? I mean, you have the ability to know
where you need to sit. Well. Not just in the room,
but one-on-one as well. I just seem to automatically adapt. And some of that I credit
to my early study in N L P, which helped me develop a
concept of biological rapport, breathing with and pacing with someone. But disk automatically helps me to
adjust to the personality of the other person. What's. The ultimate outcome? What's the, so what, I guess if an organization wanted
to do this from sewing this, what would they reap? It depends on the application. The disk profile has several different
versions for education, for leadership, for sales, for management, for,
uh, emotional intelligence, and most recently productive conflict. The answer would be a deeper
understanding of each other, a sensitivity to what other people
prefer to improve the working relationship. A sensitivity to what are no
GOs or no starters. For me, certain things that in our working
relationship are non-negotiable. For me, I get irritated the meat and doesn't
have an agenda if it runs on forever, and if there's not some
summary to action at the end. So these three things are my little
mm, things that bug me. So in a teamwork situation, I may clear
that I clarify this right up front. Why are we meeting? What
do we hope to accomplish? Where will we document the
action plan at the end? If you're in a meeting with me and you
attended these three things, I'm okay. But other people, let me
say, for example, the high S, they typically value the relationship
and peace more than anything else. Their demands, the things that would create tension for
them would be the D style or even the eye style, which are both
highly energetic. Mm-hmm. moving too
fast, making hunches, jumping forward without explaining the
rationale for how we went from A to B. Suddenly we went from A to H to Z. To wrap this segment up, what's your advice in
approaching disk as a comprehensive, it sounds
comprehensive to me, a comprehensive adaptation
for an organization. What would be your suggestion
to them to start with first. The key thing would be, which has
been the Achilles heel of training, is that there's excellent training, but lack of follow up or lack
of discipline and practice. Many good programs and
tools out there, of course. So my recommendation would be, if
you do the everything disc profile, which is online, take time to study it. My individual podcast described
to me is 70 minutes long. It took me six months to listen to
it and to apply the suggestions, because I would listen for 15 minutes,
and then I would hear, I do that. Ouch. Ooh, ooh. And then I'd work on
that. Just like Ben Franklin, someone came to him once and told him
he was so intelligent but obnoxious with his delivery, and that's how he
developed his 13 virtues , that I would practice each of these
virtues. So I took the same idea. I I took that little alley, that little piece of correction
from the disk report. It's all about reflection,
right? I mean, it's a, the ability to reflect
of yourself and learn. Exactly. Exactly. A and
also, by doing that, oddly enough, by looking at your own profile and
learning about yourself indirectly, it gives you a sensitivity to those
exact same traits in other people. An appreciation for it,
I would hope. . Appreciation of difference,
appreciation of differences. Yes. Thanks for listening to segment
one and be in line for segment two and three. As Frank brings us more great information
and a little bit about what's going on with him in Colorado, you have just finished our latest because
you need to know a public service of Pioneer Knowledge Services. Please join us on LinkedIn
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