The Art of Smart

Robert Easton

Founder and president
Henry Higgins of Hollywood Inc.
West Toluca Lake, California

There's one profession that requires an agility and proficiency in unlearning: That profession is acting. Actors are faced continually with the challenge of unlearning how they speak -- and then learning new accents and dialects. But it's very difficult for the ear to hear a sound that the mouth is not in the habit of producing. And it's also very difficult for the mouth to produce a sound that the ear is not in the habit of hearing. After years of working with actors, I've formulated "Easton's First Law": People in every community feel certain that the way they act, think, walk, and talk is the "natural" way. Once people learn something, they're reluctant to let it go. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the way people speak.

When trying to unlearn a speech pattern, people tend to impose their own intonation patterns and permutations of sound on the target dialect. I blast them out of this by exposing them to a realm of sounds outside of the familiar ones that they know and cherish. Only then do those habits begin to disappear. But I never approach this process by telling them what they need to unlearn. Rather, I stress what they need to learn. It's a small distinction with huge ramifications.

People learn in three different ways. Some are very "ear minded," or auditory. They can hear something and repeat it with almost tape-recorder fidelity. Robin Williams is a great example of that. For his role in "Good Will Hunting," we worked on perfecting a very subtle Boston accent. All we did was to sit together and talk. He has a phenomenal ear.

Others rely on their visual competence. Charlton Heston is a wonderful example of what I call "eye mindedness." He would send me his scripts, and I'd respell his dialogue for him in a visual transliteration that we had agreed on -- what we called "Easton's Half-Assed Respelling." He learned by seeing. And some people I teach kinesthetically: I tell them exactly what to do with their mouths, when to vibrate their vocal chords, how to move their jaws to produce a particular sound.

Everyone has a different style and approach to learning. But no matter how a person learns, it's important to remember what French physiologist Claude Bernard said: "It's what we think we know already that often prevents us from learning."

Robert Easton is known In Hollywood as the Dialect Doctor and as the Mr. Fix-it of Phonemes. He has cured accents and strengthened dialects for thousands of actors, including Bruce Willis, Denzel Washington, Natasha Richardson, Al Pacino, Jane Fonda, and Tom Hanks. Easton, one of radio's original "Quiz Kids," has also appeared in hundreds of films and television shows.

Chris Turner

Consultant, Writer, and Speaker
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Many organizations harbor an underlying assumption: Change is the province of some "official change group" that surely must exist in an obscure department somewhere in the company. In other words, it's someone else's task to create the "learning organization." But real learning and change require you to become a participant-observer in your own environment -- that you stop what you're doing, step back, look, and then challenge every thought and practice that perpetuate outdated mind-sets, from training programs to Power-Point presentations.

Xerox had a horrible process for promotion. Each year, everyone in the organization had to fill out reams of paperwork about what they wanted to be when they grew up. You had to list your one-year, three-year, and five-year goals. And you had to name specific positions that you were shooting for. Well, whose life ever unfolds according to a five-year plan -- or even a one-year plan? That practice was absurd -- but one that we all completed like mules.

Finally, I said, "I'm not going to do this anymore. This process perpetuates the type of organization that I don't want to work for." So, for a few years, my boss, a good corporate soldier, filled out the paperwork for me. Other people soon caught on to the absurdity, and eventually everyone on my team quit doing it. Then I got a call from someone in HR who admitted that only 35% of all employees complied with the process. When that HR person asked me to start filling out the paperwork again, I told him that everyone knew that being promoted at Xerox had nothing to do with all that paper. To make a long story short, Xerox bagged the process.

Thinking creates the structures that create an organization's behavior. Learn how to rethink, and you start to change.

Chris Turner (cturner@frontiernet.net) was Xerox Business Services's "Learning Person" and a key player in its cultural transformation. Turner created the innovative and experimental "learning laboratories" and a summer-camp-like experience called "Camp Lur'ning." she has just completed a book, "All Hat & No Cattle" (Perseus Books), about the nature of institutions.