Our Fall IT Leadership Series theme is based on
3-Filters Technology by Larry Nelson

The following gives a short explanation. 
More information can be found at 3-Filters Technology

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Quality is the enemy of innovation, innovation is the enemy of quality, and people get in the way of both.  A great organization needs to focus on all three, all the time and a great manager must see from all three perspectives. 3-Filters Technology offers a way for dealing with these conflicting needs.

To succeed long term as an executive you must manage these three major areas well. Doing two out of three just does not cut it.  That would be sort of like a television picture that has one of the colors missing.  It is good enough for a while, but it gets old quickly. 

Color television builds a full color image just three colors.  If you look through a magnifying glass at a white area on your screen, you will see small dots of red, green and blue lights.  Older television projectors actually had three lenses and you could see the red, green and blue lights.  You could hold your hand over one or two of the lenses to get the off color images like the ones you see here.  The yellow image in the graphic lacks blue light.  You need all 3 colors to get full color.  By the way, if your first grade teacher told you the primary 3 colors are something other than red, green and blue, your teacher obviously needed to be watching more TV.

People have a full spectrum of needs, and like the color TV, you can group these needs into several categories that when mixed together create a rich array of possibilities.  A manager leads by meeting these needs among many groups such as developers, business owners, and customers.  Within each group are individual people, each with their own filters.  You have to make sense to every person in every group if you want to keep your job and lead the organization.

We tend to develop our personalities around our needs and talents as individuals, and we tend to deemphasize other areas.  We then follow the golden rule and do unto others as we would have them do unto us.  That is perfectly fine if you are in a technical job where you get paid for doing specific things well.  Corporate executives do not have that luxury; they have to do the full job and lead everyone, accommodating all needs and personalities.  The golden rule is not good enough. Often people who get promoted into leadership positions got there because they did something extraordinarily well, sometimes at the expense of underemphasizing other important things.  This can create problems as they grow into their new roles.  Managing through 3-Filters helps you to consciously see all 3 perspectives and avoid the pitfalls of being blind to some aspects of the job.

Management Training Programs:

Text books and training programs are written by people who have their own sets of filters.  This means two things.  First, the information is likely to be colored one way or another rather than full spectrum so you will see an incomplete and misleading picture.  Second, you will like the programs that cover the things you like, and you will probably dislike the ones that are incompatible with your filters.  The only worthwhile programs are ones that pay proper respect to all three perspectives all the time.   Your filters should be validated as essential to success, and your skills should be expanded to cover areas where you could use some help.

Maslow - Hierarchy of Needs

Nearly every management textbook mentions Abraham Maslow and the hierarchy of needs.  Here is what Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, has to say about the hierarchy of needs (by the way, people with a strong Security/Quality Filter would not quote Wikipedia because it is subject to the whims of the people who contribute to it, whereas people with a strong Future Filter love Wikipedia because there are always new ideas popping up).

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is a theory in psychology that Abraham Maslow proposed in his 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation, which he subsequently extended to include his observations of man's innate curiosity. His theory contended that as humans meet 'basic needs', they seek to satisfy successively 'higher needs' that occupy a set hierarchy. While Maslow's theory was regarded as an improvement over previous theories of personality and motivation, it had its detractors. For example, in their extensive review of research that is dependent on Maslow's theory, Wabha and Bridwell (1976) found little evidence for the ranking of needs that Maslow described, or even for the existence of a definite hierarchy at all.

Maslow is interesting, but what does a manager do with it anyway?  It is fair to say Maslow identified some of our needs and grouped them together in a useful model.  The problem is that not all people are alike.  Not all have the same intensity of needs that must be satisfied in the sequence of Maslow’s hierarchy.  It is more common to see patterns where one or two of the groups of needs are motivators, while other needs are way down on the list.  Of course, the first level physical needs take precedence over other needs, but after that  the intensity of need varies from person to person and from situation to situation.

Nelson - Needs Seen Through Filters

Larry Nelson developed a model of needs based behavior by discarding Maslow's hierarchy while keeping a grouping of needs.  He grouped needs into three categories: people, security, and future.  The three categories are very much in play by every person every day, but in differing degrees of intensity.  Like three lights combining to create a full spectrum picture on your TV, the three categories  combine to paint a rich and complex picture of needs and  behavior.  Physical needs are shown as a separate set of needs that surround the 3-Filters needs. 

Nelson states that needs drive actions, but needs are not the sole source of actions.  We need to eat, but we want a certain type of food.  Actions are the result of complex interaction between our personal needs, values, talents, skills and experiences.  No two of us are alike so it entirely useless to get too structured in a model to predict behavior.  It is a much better use of our time and effort to gain a broad understanding of general principals that we can apply to specific situations.  Just as we can see a complex set of rich colors on a high definition television that has only 3 colors, we can see complex sets of behavior through 3-Filters.

The filter analogy is useful because it helps you see other people’s needs through their filters.  Hold up a green filter in front of your eyes, and you will see everything that reflects green light, and nothing that lacks green light.  You will be blind to red and blue.  At any one time, only one filter is in play and we are blind to important things.  If you switch filters, you see the blind spots.  If you switch them quickly enough, you will actually see the full spectrum of colors.

3-Filter Bias

In the digital world you can be exactly one color.  In the analog world everything is relative.  If you lean toward one color, you are seen as that color, even though you have all three colors present all the time.  Consider the following hot/cold water experiment.  You put one hand in warm water and the other hand in cold water.  Take them out and put both hands in room temperature water.  What will you feel?  To the cold hand the room temperature water will feel warm and to the warm hand it will feel cold.  Warm and cold are relative to our skin temperature, and when we say water is warm, we are really saying the water is warmer than our skin's current temperature.  So it is with 3-Filters.  Everything I perceive is relative to my current perspective.

If you have taken digital photographs and worked with color balance on the computer, you have worked with the red, green, and blue layers of the image, adjusting the relative amount of each to get the correct color.  Back in the 1900s when photographers used color film, they had to choose daylight or tungsten color film because sunlight is much more blue than light bulbs.  If they used daylight film indoors the pictures would be too yellow.  Tungsten film corrects for that by increasing the sensitivity to the blue light that is there.  If the photographer shot daylight film under florescent lights, the pictures would be an ugly green-yellow unless a correcting filter was added to the lens.  The camera records what is there whereas we see things relative to the lighting.  In our brain we do the color correction when we move from sunlight to electric light and we are not even aware of the light shift.  The image shown here demonstrates this color shift.  The center has the right amount of each color.  Every other section is missing some of the color so the picture is not quite right.

Consider our relative positions.  You and I may be somewhere in the middle on the security/future continuum, but you  lean toward security and I may lean toward future, so I see you as security oriented.  A third person may be even more oriented toward security, and would see you as future oriented.  We would call this a 3-Filter Bias.  Everyone has a comfortable position on the chart and it is perceived by others according to their relative positions.  Thus we start to label people according to the bias we see.

Every executive has a natural 3-Filter Bias, too, but to be successful working with other people, he or she must consciously think and speak the language of all 3-Filters all the time.  By switching from filter to filter, the perception will be full color as seen in the center of the chart.  Note that  you don't have to give up your 3-Filter Bias.  You are still you and there is no need to change.  All you have to do is switch filters to see the other perspectives and use your brain to act intelligently.

Let's take a look at some contrasting examples of a 3-Filters Bias.

68    24    28  Future Filter People Filter Security Filter Fred has a strong leaning to the future side of our chart.  In his career, Fred has been known as a change agent.  When things were tough and companies need a new direction Fred got promoted.  Fred has also had some downturns in his career.  When companies were not looking for change, they didn't want him around, even though he had a solid track record of success.  Using the 3-Filters profile, Fred has learned to look through the other filters and this has served him well.  He can at least speak their languages and make sense to them.  His time to shine always shows up sooner or later because there will always be activities that absolutely require a strong future filter.

15    49    57  Future Filter People Filter Security Filter Elizabeth has a strong leaning on the Security and People side of the chart.  She is a critical care nurse in a trauma unit that receives serious injuries.  She must do things the right way or people die.  While she takes care of physical injuries, she must also deal with the patient as a person, along with family and friends who are dealing with a very difficult and emotional situation.  Elizabeth is tired when she gets home from work, but feels a real sense of satisfaction from what she does.

38    38    44  Future Filter People Filter Security Filter Rob is evenly split in his use of the 3-Filters.  He has an interesting career in that he is a musician and a web programmer.  He can be somewhere in the world performing on stage with his trombone at night and working on the World Wide Web during the day.  His adaptability serves him well.

If these people were on the same team it would be useful to map the team high and low points.  If the person with the highest Future Filter did Future Filter activities, the team will be more productive than if the person with the lowest did it.  The same is true for each Filter.  Unfortunately, we often focus on people's weaknesses rather than strengths, causing low performance and predictable conflict.  The astute manger emphasizes strengths with work assignments and performance reviews.  Of course we need to learn to switch Filters, but we don't need to stay there.  We are most effective doing what we do well, letting others do what they do well.

Nelson goes on to make the point that our 3-Filter Bias changes depending on the situation.  He found that people commonly use different sets of filters in their personal space, group space, and in their day-to-day work.  For example when spending your own money, your people filter may be dominant in that you want to spend your money on fun things that you share with friends and family.  At work you might find your future filter dominates in that you want to invest money on things that have potential future value.  From this Nelson comes up with nine roles.  within each role take note of what the different people like and don't like.  From this you can build a matrix of predictable conflict because what one person likes another person may dislike.  Armed with this knowledge, when predictable conflict arises, spin the filter to see how the other person might feel.  Don't assume they feel what you feel.

9 Roles

Filter	Personal Space	Team Space	Day-to-Day Work
People Filter	Communicator	Conductor	Producer
Likes:	Get others to agree	Be an active member	Be part of the action
Doesn't Like:	Strong opinions	To be left out	To make decisions

Security Filter	Thinker	Protector	Manager
Likes:	Prevent mistakes	Avoid loss	Save the day
Doesn't Like:	Unnecessary change	Boat rockers	Rushing into things

Future Filter	Pioneer	Innovator	Leader
Likes:	Get there first	Belabored discussions	Inspire others
Doesn't Like:	Paper work	Invent things and ideas	Slow decisions

There are times to consider security, times to consider feelings, and there are times to step out and move forward.  An effective manager spends a lot of time on processes, procedures, quality, and in general, avoiding failure.  An effective manger also has to keep a close eye on the future.  If we don't innovate, we fall behind.  New opportunities are coming our way every day.  In addition, an effective manager is also very good on the people side.  In the early 1900s, scientific management was all about optimizing processes.  Scientific management hit a wall with the famous Hawthorn experiment where environmental factors like the lighting in the factory were selectively modified to produce measurable productivity improvement.  The trouble was, any change, up or down, improved productivity, suggesting that people responded in complex and unpredictable ways.  Out of this came the birth of people oriented management.  It makes a difference if you create a sense of belonging among the workers.  They want to get paid and they want to produce a product, but they also have social needs.  Human relations oriented management, however, does not replace the need for scientific management.  You just need to step back once in a while and see through a different filter.

3-Filter Blindness

Take note of color names in the above photos.  When you view the the photo through a green filter, "green" is invisible because green and white are equal.  Likewise, "red" is invisible when you look through the red filter.  When you view the world through one filter, you are not aware of it because everything becomes that color, or it becomes a mysterious shadow of the missing color.  If I have the people filter on, I see everything people related, while security and future become strange dark matter making no sense.  The only way to make sense of the whole picture is to spin the filters and build the whole image in your mind.  Sometimes we spin the filter part way and see through two Filters.  This better than one, but there are still blind spots.  Notice how "yellow, magenta, and cyan" become invisible in the photos below.  The danger of stopping with two Filters is you can mistakenly think you are seeing the whole picture because it looks better than the one Filter picture.  The only way to see everything is to spin all three filters.

There is great risk to an organization if it emphasizes one Filter to exclusion of another, even if things are looking good through that Filter.  In the year 2000, 3M, a company known for innovation, adopted a new strategy emphasizing quality and efficiency.  They hired new CEO, James McNearney, from General Electric, to lead the charge for Six Sigma, a quality management program that emphasizes process improvement and no more than 3 defects per million items manufactured.  Initially, profits jumped 22% a year.  They made $1.4 billion in profits on $23 billion in sales.  Less than 5 years later, McNearney needed to leave because 3M had lost its innovative edge and business was faltering.  The new CEO, George Buckley turned back the clock on Six Sigma to give 3M a chance at bringing back innovation.  According to a Business Week article (June 11, 2007), 3M paid a long term price dropping innovation as a core focus.  The Business Week article had a headline, "Six Sigma: So Yesterday?"   Our take on this is the Security/Quality Filter had wonderful impact at first, but when used to the exclusion of the Future Filter, the company lost is place in the world.

If you are starting to see the picture that long term success requires all 3 Filters, try using the filters that are outside your 3-Filter biase. To influence people through a presentation, written document, or Web page, keep in mind that people are filtering out nearly everything you say if it is not compatible with their filters.  The only way to get through is to be 3-Filter compliant.  This is not easy because our personal vocabularies are consistent with our own filters and it is unnatural to use words that aren't important to us.  Force yourself to use at least one word from each of the 3 lists.  You can come up with your own formula after you get the hang of it, but to get started try this set of lists.

Other Models

If you have read this far into the paper on 3-Filters, you are probably interested in this type of model and you might be wondering how this fits in within popular 4-Quandrant models.  For details on those models we have other papers including 4-Quadrant and Stop Trying to Fix people.  All of these profiles are useful for understanding behavior and the more you use them the more effective you will be with people in multiple situations.  The primary difference between 3-Filters and 4-Quadrant is focus on needs vs. behavior.  We all have the same 3 needs all the time.  How we meet our needs may be different and can be seen in the 4-Quadrant models that focus on observable behavior.

The following diagram illustrates how 3-Filters can overlay 4-Quadrants. 

• The Directing/Driving/Strategize person probably has a strong Future Filter bias, along with a good deal of people and a lesser amount of security. 
• The Influencing/Personalize/Expressive person probably has a strong People Filter bias, with a certain amount of Future and a lesser amount of Security.
• The Supportive/Organize/Amiable person probably has a  strong Security Filter bias, along with a certain amount of People and a lesser amount of Future
• The Contemplative/Analyze/Analytical person probably has a strong Security Filter bias, along with a certain amount of Future and a lesser amount of People.

This gets complicated when you consider that people often show behavior from more than one of the 4-Quadrants.   For this reason you should keep the linking of the various models fairly loose rather than seeing it as a direct map.  Nevertheless, the patterns are clear and consistent across models.  These persistent patterns lend credibility to the idea that there is not a hierarchy of needs, but rather a pattern of needs as represented by overlapping filters.

DISC Whole Brain Merrill Reid D Directing Strategize Driver I Influencing Personalize Expressive S Supportive Organize Amiable C Contemplative Analyze Analytical
DISC - American Management Association, Center for Applied Research, Inc. Personal Styles and Effective Performance by David Merrill and Roger Reid The Whole  Brain Business Book by Ned Herman

Situational Leadership

No management text book would be complete without referencing Situational Leadership theory and you may be wondering how 3-Filters overlays that model.  According to Wikipedia the Free Encyclopedia, the model is as follows:

As a leadership model, the best known example was developed by Paul Hersey, a professor who wrote a well known book Situational Leader and Ken Blanchard, the management guru who later became famous for his One Minute Manager series. They created a model of situational leadership in the late 1960s in their work Management of Organizational Behavior (now in its 9th edition) that allows one to analyze the needs of the situation, then adopt the most appropriate leadership style. It has proved popular with managers over the years because it is simple to understand, and it works in most environments for most people.

The right leadership style will depend on the person being led - the follower. Blanchard and Hersey extended their model to include the Development Level of the follower. They stated that the leader's chosen style should be based on the competence and commitment of her followers. They categorized the possible development of followers into four levels, which they named D1 to D4:

• D1: Low Competence, High Commitment - They generally lack the specific skills required for the job in hand. However, they are eager to learn and willing to take direction.
• D2: Some Competence, Low Commitment - They may have some relevant skills, but won't be able to do the job without help. The task or the situation may be new to them.
• D3: High Competence, Variable Commitment - They are experienced and capable, but may lack the confidence to go it alone, or the motivation to do it well or quickly.
• D4: High Competence, High Commitment - They are experienced at the job, and comfortable with their own ability to do it well. They may even be more skilled than the leader.

For a manager attempting to see the probable needs of the other person in these situations, you might consider the following application of 3-Filters to these situations:

Situation	Supervision Focus Filter
D1 Low Competence High Commitment	Develop competency by focusing on doing things the right way in the right order and meeting written standards.
D2 Some Competence Low Commitment	As you develop competence, integrate the individual into the team and develop stronger relationships.
D3 High Competence Variable Commitment	As you continue to develop team relationships, start focusing more on the future to develop independence.
D4 High Competence High Commitment	Encourage the person to apply the competency in new ways and allow maximum independence while maintaining quality standards.

Conclusion

3-Filters thinking goes beyond work and is a great tool to use in your personal life, too.  It can be fun to see and appreciate the differences among people in our own families.  The People Filter brings out the fun in a family and nurtures relationships.  The Security Filter keeps a family grounded in reality, avoiding situations that could be harmful.  The Future Filter encourages us to explore new territory and prepare for the future with positive anticipation.

Copyright © 2007  Steve Wille
Contains substantial amounts of information from 3-Fitlers Technology, Copyright © 1996  Larry Nelson, used with permission

3-Filters Technology (TM) was developed by the Institute for Change Research International and is backed by over a decade of research involving more than 10,000 people.  It's Powerful, Proven & People-Oriented.

Dimension graphics by icrint
Graphics by Steve Wille Photography and Web Design
Maslow graphic from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 

Permission is granted to copy this paper in its entirety provided this copyright statement clearly appears, along with the web links to www.ToughTeams.com and www.icrint.com/

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