lloydmasters @ the Swan at the Globe

"All the world's a stage; And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances..."  As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII, William Shakespeare (1564-1616).

Many of those exits and entrances were made at the Globe theatre by the Chamberlain's Men (later known as the King's Men), the playing company to which William Shakespeare belonged. The theatre was designed and constructed in 1599 on land co-owned by the sons of theatre entrepreneur and manager James Burbage and a group of five actors including Shakespeare himself. The original Globe was destroyed by fire in 1613 but rebuilt the following year remaining the home of the King's Men until all theatres were closed under England's Puritan administration in 1642; it was demolished in 1644.

Happily for lloydmasters, a modern reconstruction called 'Shakespeare's Globe' was completed in 1997 along with a conference centre 'The Swan', which is where on 10 February we are holding our winter networking event – you are all invited! The focus is change management, and we have an excellent speaker – Justin Hughes, from Mission Excellence – who will look at change through the lens of military strategy.

But where did the Globe get it's name from? Well supposedly it alludes to the latin tag Totus Mundus Agit Histrionem – all the world is a playhouse – words that are said to have been the motto of the original Globe and a belief that Shakespeare stuck to throughout his life.

note.

How come we can have perfectly good conversations in the dark?

Just before christmas I was running a ‘change management’ workshop for a financial services client, and, helped by a professional role player we discussed interpersonal skills with our participants.

A key facet of these skills is the importance of non-verbal communication, but some recent work does question that in all cases, i.e., if 93% of communication is non-verbal (7% verbal (words); 38% vocal (tone); 55% facial (body language)) then how come we can have perfectly good conversations in the dark?

Research by Albert Mehrabian applies specifically to the communication of feelings and attitudes (like-dislike). For effective and meaningful communication about emotions, these three parts of the message need to support each other – they have to be ‘congruent’. In case of any incongruence, the receiver is likely to quickly spot the mixed message when the ‘words & music’ are different. In fact narrowing the application to the specific restrictions of Albert Mehrabian’s experiments, it only applies when: 

• A speaker is using only one word
• Their tone of voice is inconsistent with the meaning of the word, and
• The judgement being made is about the feelings of the speaker

So here’s the payoff… live with the dilemma. Common sense tells us that words count for more than 7% and experience tells us that we can spot incongruence in a flash! Celebrate it as another triumph of reality over misinterpreted research.