Don't assume knowledge nor ignorance

When we work with others, collaborate, co-design, we don't know what other people's knowledge is, what they've experienced, what they know.

We make a great assumption if we 'start at the beginning' of a topic, or waffle on with giving people 'some context', telling 'our story' or flat out don't stop talking for 15-25-45 minutes.

What if they already know what you're talking about?

Oh but we can also jump ahead, speaking of things in ways people don't know; they aren't 'in the loop', don't know about this and can feel left out or left behind. This isn't pandering to snowflakes or patronising precious peeps. It's the reality of a world where we have incredible diversity, difference, and uniqueness - in a single group, gathering or team!

The answer is to... have a DIALOGUE, a conversation with people, rather than delivering a MONOLOGUE or preachy-presentation of information you decide to dump.

In that way you'll find out where they're at and therefore... where to begin. You can then adjust throughout the CONVERSATION, this talk between 2 or more people.

Enjoy your conversations today...

It’s not just a meeting

It’s an opportunity for consultation, collaboration, co-design. For information sharing, attitude adjusting and belief shifting. It’s an opportunity to make the workplace safer to speak up.

It’s an opportunity to have a conversation not a presentation. To turn the data show off, to pass on the PowerPoint deck and instead engage, ask questions.

It’s an opportunity to hear what would improve their experience as an employee, contractor or team member, colleague, customer, user or client. How you could support them more, better, differently.

It’s an opportunity to bring people together, not p*ss people off.

A meeting is a place and space where you can do work together, collectively. But when most meetings are poorly run, boring and unproductive, it’s up to you the leader, to get the development you need to make better work of every one of the meetings you lead.

Learn the subtle, nuanced, yet complex skills of facilitation. They’ll be so glad you did.

Working out what we think

As we cycle around something, a situation, an idea, a problem, a possible solution, we're usually trying to work out our relationship with it, to it. We're working out what we think, what we know and what we should or could do ... if anything. We exchange information with others. We try to advance the conversation.

Our opinions may not be fully formed. Our ideas may initially be hunches or hopes.

When we're in dull meetings, that perhaps should be exploring our relationship and connection to information, rather end up being status plays and waffle-fests with little if any structure to guide us through this exploration and sensemaking.

'Busy' leaders with time pressures don’t engage in or lead sensemaking activities often enough. But they pay the price later when team members are disengaged, disconnected, disinterested.

Spending some time deliberately making sense of ideas and information is engaging, exploring, discovering. It’s not time wasting but insight gathering for more swift and impactful decisions later.

Sensemaking is a super skill for today and most definitely a skill that lends itself to the uncertain future. 

The person with the most spontaneity wins

As leadership evolves from command and control to consultative/coaching and beyond to facilitative, those who can handle what happens are well placed.

We can’t predict what people will say, what will happen at a meeting, how a client will respond or what the board might ask for, so we may need to respond in the moment.

Spontaneity is a strength that's incredibly powerful in times of uncertainty. We can spend so much time though, rehearsing scenarios trying to cover all of the possibilities, to try to prepare for the future.

Do we fear we wont be able to handle things, that we will lose control?

Maybe we don’t trust ourselves to handle what happens.

But improvisers have known it for decades: we have incredible resources in us and we need to trust that we can handle so many situations. Could you be more spontaneous, you know, go with the flow? Responding to what happens rather than trying to control what happens?

🔆To build spontaneity, notice your response when things DON'T go as you hoped, expected or planned. What you do next is spontaneity. And it's a SUPER SKILL for the uncertain future. 

The value is in the summary

You know how we zone out in meetings, get overloaded, lose focus and do other things? (We check our devices for email, social media, anything to relieve the pressure of information overload.)

What do you do to counter this situation? Most people I work with initially blame the phone or device and say things like ‘put them away’ or ‘don’t use them’.

But it’s less about the phone, more about what’s going on in our heads.

Information overload is a daily, even an hourly challenge. And most of us don’t know how to cope.

It’s called 'cognitive load coping' and we haven’t learned how to do it. So we reach for our dopamine device as relief.

Rather than punishing the person reaching for their device, make the processing of all of this information easier.

There’s are more than 32 techniques I teach in cognitive load coping.

Here’s one to use often : SUMMARY. As you go through a meeting, summarise where things are up to, what’s been done, what’s yet to do. Summarise the facts, the evidence, the opinions, the key points, the proposed solutions and the discussions so far. A summary takes little more than a minute. Less. And we don’t use them nearly enough.