Team Tips - 24 {Protocol Check - What do you think?}

Friday Brag (borrowed from my sweetheart Vickie)(steal from the best):

Highest number ever of page views of my blog of my last post “Team Tips - 23”. Yay!

You can now say: “You did that?”, and I can reply: “I did that!”

I also received some complimentary comments, and an offer of a reply to my Ask for Help. “All good” as they say locally.

I'm also receiving the highest volume of email spam, which probably means the evil bots are mining their way from the blog to my website and my supposedly “un-bot-able” email address. The offers of deposited funds, court action, lewd (I'm assuming) photos, follow-ups to fictitious requests for business proposals, fake billing, etc. are actually quite creative. One even claims that I've been caught speeding on a traffic camera - as if they existed here. If the spelling and grammar weren't so atrocious one could be tempted to pay attention to them. And if they didn't have the huge red warning flag of the attached zip file.

Following the line of the last post, it would be nice to scream “Protocol Check” at them.

But that isn't at all the point of Protocol Check.

While it would occasionally feel really good, and satisfying, and therapeutic to yell at someone who gets a Protocol wrong, or breaks a Commitment, that's not what Protocol Check is for. It's really a learning tool.

If I bury an Ask for Help inside a Perfection Game, or Check In angry about someone's behaviour without asking their intention, or just generally get the Protocol steps wrong, that's a great opportunity to gently, quietly, compassionately have a conversation with me about the Protocols in a spirit of shared learning.

It might go:

• Paul, Protocol Check.
• Oh? 
• I'm wondering what your intention was in that Perfection Game.
• Err .... I think I was looking for some information.
• OK; let's both look at the Core Protocols and see what it says about the Perfection Game. Were you really trying to Ask for Help?
• Hmmmm. Let's have a look. Maybe there is a better way than what I did.

In this kind of interaction both parties, adhering to the Commitments, are interested in discovering how the Protocols in question work, and the best way to use them.

For me, it is important that both parties are open to learning and teaching simultaneously. Alternatively, the risk is that one party becomes the “Protocol God” and rains fire and brimstone down on the transgressor.

Even when, as occurred in one of our BootCamps, a participant had the Protocols virtually memorized, and became Mr. Protocol Check. Happily, it all became fun: we had a Protocol Check dance, and phone ring tone imitating his specially exaggerated Protocol Check voice. But he followed “Rule Number 6” (Art of Possibility, Zander & Zander) and it was hilarious learning for all of us.

So while no one objected to my licence in writing about “screaming Protocol Check” last time, that's not how it is done.

Nevertheless, the ring tone may still be available.