Background Processing

How We Do It

Background Processes

Background Processes manage our “soft” abilities – those activities that reside outside our awareness and occur independent of our intentions. These mental processes are unfamiliar, they are habitual, and they are not teachable by traditional means.

Defining Characteristics of Foreground vs. Background Processing

#	Foreground Processing	Background Processing
1	Constitutes most of our awareness	Normally operates outside of our awareness
2	Intentional, voluntary, volitional	Not intentional, involuntary, automatic
3	Controls verbal communication	Controls non-verbal communication
4	Story based	Not story based
5	Processes novel and varied tasks	Processes familiar and routine tasks
6	Handles only one task at a time	Handles many tasks simultaneously
7	Single task at a time makes processing slow	High parallelism makes processing very fast
8	Easy to change – through new knowledge	Very difficult to change – knowledge never sufficient
9	Can initiate new background processes	Can switch story being processed by foreground

The nine distinguishing characteristics listed above form the basis of the theory and transformation processes of Complete Leadership. All our coaches have been extensively trained to leverage a deep understanding of these distinguishing characteristics.

Scope of Background Processes

Background Processes are tremendously powerful and elusive. They encompass our traits, our skills, and our contexts:

Traits of interest in the business environment are:

Blockages to action such as
- procrastination; lack of motivation or passionate action
- fear of failure, authority, success, public speaking
- dread of people actions such as social interactions, constructive feedback, repositioning, developing, or terminating
Dysfunctional behavior such as arrogance, anger outbursts, duplicity, hidden agendas, and intimidation

Skills in the business world are such automatically executed activities as interpersonal communications, public speaking, and powerful self-awareness.
Contexts are hidden assumptions or beliefs that frame what we can understand and even think about. Hidden contexts are what control such things as paradigms and cultures.

The"People Process"

The following are examples of the "people process" that is discussed extensively in Execution, The Discipline of Getting Things Done, Bossidy and Charan, 2002. The book repeatedly refers to the people process as being problematic, elusive, and hard to change without intervention and coaching. The authors further state "The people process is more important than either the strategy or operations processes" - p. 141. The people process is not elusive to Complete Leadership because it is controlled by Background Processes, which is the focus of our performance improvement techniques. We understand the people process explicitly and know how to improve it through background process transformations.

"People Process" Examples from Execution

Body Language (p. 49)	Behavior Change (p. 76)
Emotional Fortitude (p. 78)	Emotional Blockage (p. 79)
Self-discovery (p. 79)	Self-mastery (p.79)
Self-awareness (p. 81)	Self-confidence (p. 82)
Inner strength (p. 79)	Inability to act decisively (p. 97)
Tenacity; persistence (p. 84)	Out-of-the-box ideas (p. 103)
Organizational software (p. 85)	"Soft" stuff (p. 85)
Psychological comfort factor (p. 117)	Attitude change (p. 91)
People skills (p. 121)	Temperamentally unable to work effectively with others (p. 125)

Background Processing is the key to achieving Peak Performance

While such Foreground Processing activities as strategy formation and operations execution are as crucial as ever, there are excellent techniques available that can be learned through acquiring existing knowledge. Most derailments and most failures to achieve peak performance are due to Background Processing deficiencies. Turning these deficiencies into proficiencies is the highest leverage area for executive performance improvement.