When things go around in circles

Have you been in a meeting recently when the discussion seemed to keep spinning around in circles, not getting anywhere?

Aaarrgggh! It’s so frustrating, time-wasting and a waste of efforts, energy and ideas.

It’s also a sure sign that people are talking and thinking about different things… and it’s something that can be remedied. Phew!

What can happen is someone launches off with data or detail, shifts into their opinion and then finishes up with their prescriptive ideas and suggestions of what the actions should be.

It's a mess of information. When things get messy and seem to go around in circles, I separate the mess into these 4 chunks:

1️⃣ facts

2️⃣ opinions

3️⃣ ideas

4️⃣ actions.

Do you see how different these are? It’s tricky for us to hold all 4 elements in our mind at once.

When someone is talking and they manage to cover all of these 4 things (in one breath) and then someone else does the same, yes it feels like it’s going around in circles - all that information, going nowhere. What do we do? Tune in, look out and listen for these 4 different types of communication and expression. Facts. Opinions. Ideas. Actions.

The cost of leaving the room

What’s the cost to your attention and cognitive load when you leave a meeting room, to step outside to take or make a call?

If we knew, we may think twice about even looking at our devices or having them near us.

Breaks are good, yes, and responding to an emergency, we have to.

But ‘just stepping out for a moment’ creates ‘Swiss cheese moments'. That yummy cheese has holes in it. So will your sense, the threads of understanding you’ve been holding together!

It’s not only that you miss content when you leave, it’s the switch of context and the impact on your attention, thinking and focus.

- A leader stepped out of a one-day workshop six times last week.

- Another leader thought they could be in 2 meetings at once: one via a webinar/online coming in through a single ear pod, but sitting at the table of the other meeting they’re trying to attend.

No wonder why:

😩we struggle to make sense and manage information overload

↩️ we need to go over information again and again, and

🐢why meetings take so long!

Leaders need to keep changing

If you've been a leader for a few years, you'd have noticed how leadership and the expectations of leaders keep changing.

The world of work changes and leaders need to adapt, flex, change with it too.

From when leaders were controllers and commanders, to an era where leaders were all about coaching their team members via 1:1 conversations, and now to today...

Today we see leaders better leveraging everyone's time and strengths by using the skills of facilitation.

My concept of the 'Leader as Facilitator' doesn't mean you become a full-time facilitator. It means you draw on the subtle, engaging and nuanced skills of facilitation to help people work together well - when needed. I wrote 'Leader as Facilitator' in 2016 to help people run better meetings, drop corny clichés (like 'I hear what you're saying' or 'Let's take it offline') and work in more collaborative, productive and creative ways.

Work still needs to get done. No matter the apps, software or systems you use, you'd do well to have the complex and impactful suite of skills that are facilitation.

Facilitation. It means 'ease' after all.

Q: How could you better build your facilitation skills?

Be CURIOUS

Being a risk taker and explorer in times of uncertainty can feel like it’s a great risk, but it can also reap huge rewards. It means stepping into uncertainty, unknown and unsure.

But go, step into it. Be intrepid. To be otherwise is to be timid, weak, pusillanimous – yep, that’s a big word that will stop you being able to work with uncertainty.

When we are fearful of uncertainty, we get smaller ideas, take smaller risks and try to stay in 'safe and same'.

Businesses that support risk taking can achieve some mighty innovative things. So to work in uncertainty, we simply need to be curious.

And if we are scared, curiosity becomes the opposite of fear. Be CURIOUS. Wonder. Enquire.

Be intrigued and interested and you'll be just fine working in uncertainty. 

Collaboration, co-creation and working with others

Co-locating, buddying and pairing people can make awesome stuff happen - learning, problem solving, knowledge sharing.

Better than if we have to face uncertainty alone.

Why do we sit in stables, stalls, pods and cells all on our lonesome? Share a desk and go co! There's a reason why software developers sit next to each other and do 'pair programming'. It's efficient, engaging and enlightening!

In the modern workplace, alone time is good, but collaboration is a benefit. It's a 'co-brainer'.

We need to be working with others at some time. I like the Agile Manifesto's: 'Choose interactions with individuals and groups of individuals, over working on processes and tools.' It's easy to bury down deep in the work of designing systems, tools and processes. But could we be more human, more collaborative... not clichéd collaboration, but engaging, productive and enjoyable collaboration?

Working with other humans enables us to find solutions we may never have found alone.

Q: What's a collaboration or co-creation you've worked on that ROCKED?