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Mark and Ken,

I was off to <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Atlanta</st1:place></st1:city> early today and had a couple of hours of driving time up and back to think about this issue.  One of the things that occurred to me is that often we tend to set up a situation to show the negative results of not doing something a certain way.  Essentially this is leveraging the Law of Readiness.  It then occurred to me that what might differentiate between leveraging the Law of Readiness and "violating" the Law of Primacy (and I'm not sure that I really like the word "violating," but after two 20 hour days it will have to do) is the focus of the negativity.  To exercise the Law of Readiness the focus would be on the results, but would tend to avoid a focus on the actual skills involved.  This would allow us to avoid interfering with the Law of Primacy so that we could still properly demonstrate the skills we wanted to teach and still have them be the first thing that they focused on (yeah, I know, a bit circular, but I hope this isn't too confusing and that I can make my point as I go on).

What got me thinking about this was that I realized that some of the stories that I tell in my speaking engagements do set the stage by sharing negative events.  As I went through the stories I tired to analyze them based on the Laws of Primacy and Readiness.  I discovered that neither of the stories talked at all about skills or processes, but rather were focused primarily on the emotions and end results from the person that was "being acted upon."  As you shared, Ken, there is power in the negative to illicit emotions which can help provide that self-motivation to learn.  Bob Sutton shared a research paper on this on his website and that paper can be read here:  http://www.csom.umn.edu/Assets/71516.pdf. 

I then started thinking about some videos that I had been previewing for possible inclusion in an updating of some of our programs (none on feedback).  Something that occurred to me is that many of the stories in the videos actually did start off with negative scenarios all ending with a negative result.  They then went on to give step by step recreations that would result in a positive result.  When I got home this evening I decided to watch some of these videos again, as I hadn't seen them in many weeks, to insure that I was correct in my recollection.  Sure enough, the ones that I took the time to watch did start off with negative scenarios.  One was highly superficial in regard to process or skills that the focus was clearly on the negative results.  However, I'm still unsure now how well it will fit in with the rest of the program.  The other one is also in question, and there are two more that I haven't reviewed again yet.  Basically, I'm going to have to ponder these videos in light of our recent discussion. 

As I acknowledge the power of the negative, I also recognize the power of the positive as shared in the research of Positive Psychology, Appreciative Inquiry, and the like.  Some of <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Gallup</st1:place></st1:city>'s research on this indicates that to achieve optimum performance that people should receive a ratio of five positive events to one negative event.  There is other research that seems to indicate that if there are too many positive events then when a negative event does occur then there will be a greater impact.  So obviously there needs to be a balance.

I still have concerns, however, with demonstrating skills the wrong way as a precursor to teaching those skills.  I believe that the balance needed here is to use the negative results to help encourage self-motivation.  Striking that fine line of demonstrating negative results while not demonstrating skills the wrong way is the challenge.  But I have no doubt that learning and practicing skills correctly lead to higher levels of performance, and that we should be focusing on teaching skills correctly when first teaching those skills. 

Anyway, as a result of our discussion I am going to review these videos that I was thinking about using with a different mindset now.  So thanks for this discussion.  And finally, I really hope that I didn't ramble too much tonight, but I knew that the next few days were going to be very hectic, and if I didn't share these thoughts now, no matter how tired I was, that I probably wouldn't get around to sharing them later.