One of a very beautiful movies staring Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray that I watched a few months ago ignited this thought about the continuous Deletion, Distortion and Generalization that we do on a continuous basis. The movie beautifully portrays the conundrum of a middle aged American actor who arrives in Tokyo to promote a Japanese whiskey. We see the actor trying to find connections with his new assignment yet remains disconnected because of his own view of how the work should be done – the DDG effect.
A client tells you that their contributions are not being valued. Another says, networking doesn’t work for them. A founder tells you their partner keeps overriding their decisions.
Intentional growth starts with real conversations.
Explore the art of possible, overcome your limiting beliefs and take an explorative journey with the power of coaching.
And what do we do often as coaches, instead of coaching the person, we jump to coach the problem. We might start by asking – how does it make you feel when your contributions are not valued or when the partner overrides your decisions? We often start by taking the coachee statements on face value. And we forget that each of the statements has already passed through three invisible filters before you heard them – Deletion, Distortion and Generalization.
Deletion, Distortion and Generalization can be observed in every aspect of life not just coaching. When someone says Roses are red, that is generalization. We all know that roses appear in many shades of red and other colors too. When someone states – I can’t close the sales deal – that is deletion of facts. The statement only states the problem but doesn’t explore what might be the reason behind it. And often the coachee is not even aware that they are inadvertently deleting some of the facts.
DDG is a concept that comes from linguistics and NLP’s Meta Model which describes how humans transform raw experience into language. Our brains is constantly bombarded with information that it cannot easily cope with. As a result, it utilizes these three perpetual filters to remove any unwanted information and make the rest receptible and useful. As coaches, we should remember that the map is never the territory and in coaching, where the client’s spoken map is the only territory we have access to, understanding DDG isn’t academic. It’s operational.
The Three Filters
Deletion
We as humans often tend to omit a lot of information as we speak. This is an unconscious behaviour. This often happens as we share or grasp the information with the lenses of our own experiences and biases. Our brain is a connection machine and what we focus on is what is allowed to be processed rest everything is removed from the context.
For example: Someone says 2+2=5, we would jump to counter it. Because for most of us 2+2 is mathematical statement from basic arithmetic and it should equal to four. However, that need not be always true. Since our brain already made the connection with arithmetic we tend to ignore rest of information.
Here is quick video if you want to explore this more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WPY5cfOOIM
Deletion as filter is very helpful when you have to focus on something of high importance and leave the noise out. This is the same filter that allows you to focus on your work while you are travelling on a crowded bus.
Distortion
Distortion happens when we misrepresent our experiences to fit our existing belief systems. Our own subjective realities define our beliefs. A lot of beliefs that we tend to carry around are an extension, an interpretation of our experiences.
Yuval Noah Harrari in his book Sapiens, highlights how common shared subjective reality like Money has allowed humans to collaborate across the globe. There is no objective value of money. The value of money is only in the subjective conscious of the human society.
Distortion thus can be helpful to imagine new things and plan for future.
Generalization
Generalization, typically can be explained as one singular experience becoming the rule. We often tend to draw conclusions based on our past experience and apply it to all our current or future experiences. Generalization on one end helps us to identify patterns and can save us from mishaps but on the other it also tends to create stereotypes.
For example: Walking through dark alley in night, is not safe. That generalization may not always be true but is helpful. However, if someone gets a reaction because of drinking milk once they might assume they are lactose intolerant.
Generalizations, however are not always accurate. Just because you did not do well in your past two job interviews doesn’t mean that you will fail the next one too.
Why this matters for Coaches
In coaching, Deletion, Distortion and Generalization often happens twice.
First, when the coachee is sharing their experience with their own DDG filters. Secondly, as the coach listens to them with their DDG filters on. The coach would often hear the coachee perspective and probably try to fit it into their existing framework, biases or pattern matching. Even before the coach is ready to ask the next powerful, thought provoking question, two layers of DDG is introduced into what actually happened.
The practical risk is that a coach who accepts the coachee’s compressed story at face value ends up coaching the distortion, not the person. Advice gets built on deleted context. Powerful questions get asked about generalized beliefs instead of the specific moment that created them. The coaching plan looks sound but solves the wrong problem.
This happens quite frequently if the coach is not aware about their DDG responses. When a Scrum Master states the team is dysfunctional, or the Business Leader states they don’t trust engineering anymore or a mid level career transition coachee states they are stuck; it all could be DDG. If the coach doesn’t help coachee unpack these words then they will address a vague, generalized feeling.
Overcoming Deletion, Distortion and Generalization
Active Listening as the antidote
The easiest thing to do is to practice Active Listening. Active Listening is less about nodding attentively and more about deliberately reopening what DDG has closed. Active Listening is simply asking the questions that reverse each filter:
- Against Deletion: “What specifically happened in that meeting?” / “Which parts went fine?”
- Against Distortion: “How do you know they don’t respect your decisions?” / “What did they actually say or do?”
- Against Generalization: “Always? Can you think of a client who didn’t negotiate you down?” / “Which decisions, specifically?”
Delivered with warmth and curiosity, these questions read as genuine interest, not challenge. The shift is from listening for the story to confirm your hypothesis, to listening for the gaps the story is hiding.
Other approaches that can help overcome the effects of DDG
- Clean Language: Using the language that is specific, succint and generous in order to use coachee’s exact words and replay it back to the coachee.
- Silence and Pace: DDG is often result because coachee wants to rush through the scenario. Holding the space and slowing them down to think clearly will reduce the impact of DDG.
- Non-Verbal cues: In NLP one common supposition is the we cannot not communicate. The body language, the tone often provides the missing cues that DDG omits from the spoken word.
- Checking assumption out loud: As coach call out how you are understanding the situation of coachee. This allows to make your DDG visible and gives coachee a chance to correct it if needed.
To conclude:
Deletion, Distortion and Generalization is not a flaw in our communication but it is an essential mechanism developed by our nervous system to protect itself from the overload of information.
As a coach you cannot expect that in every conversation with your coachee you will get a DDG free account of what actually happened. It is our job to notice where the filters are applied and how to overcome them.
Let's Begin
This is where it starts.
Let’s hop on to a 30 minute call to discover what is possible and if we are a fit.