Marshall Rosenberg and the Angry Luthier
It's the response, not the trigger, that tells us what we need to know.
Collaborative Communication, Marshall Rosenberg’s approach to resolving conflicts, has an interesting parallel with the concept of the “black box” in signal processing.
In signal processing, a black box is an entity that an unknown transformation on its input signal. In order to understand the transfer function, we must measure its response to an impulse signal – a short, single burst of energy.
In college, our professor Stan Tempelaars once said: “if you know a system’s impulse response, you know everything about it”.
Soon after learning about the concept, I brought my cello to the luthier for its annual inspection. When he began knocking on it, I realized he was black box-testing: using impulses to spot potential problems. It quickly revealed an invisible hairline fracture in the soundboard.
Emotional responses could be working in a similar way. In the Collaborative Communication article mentioned above, a stimulus (a project manager’s incessant talking) triggers a feeling (annoyance). Intuitively, we blame the project manager for how we feel. But in doing so, we are missing the point – the source of the annoyance could be pretty much anything. Like in signal processing, the information is in the response, not in the stimulus.
So if someone gets under your skin, they are merely “knocking” on you. The knocking has no inherent information. The information is in the response: your feelings. They reveal insights about what’s alive in you, about your needs.