Category — Listening

Ever start what begins as a reasonable political discussion with your parents… and 15 minutes later find yourself hip-deep in a mucky, confusing swirl, dreadfully off-topic and surprisingly upset?

This doesn’t just crop up at the dinner table, on the telephone, or with your family. Sometimes it happens smack in the middle of your team’s budget review.

I recently stumbled on a post that really got my attention, about people’s ability to hold a point of view – even when there’s strong evidence to contradict it. [Read more →]

Often, when I ask clients how they make decisions, I hear, “Oh, we mostly use consensus around here.”

Danger, Will Robinson, Danger!

Eight times out of ten, these are the same people who also note that group decisions often get reversed, people say one thing and then do another, or that their team spins and spins when they discuss potential decisions, investing loads of precious time but getting nowhere. What I often see is that “consensus” means a decision process that’s unclear or a wee bit sloppy, where the boss ended things with, “Oh, we’re out of time – but we’re all in agreement here, right?” But no one dug deeply for different points of view or concerns, let alone truly addressed them. [Read more →]

Recently, we did some exciting work with James and Athena Pond, whose Transitions Global has done amazing work around the world helping teen victims of sex trafficking rebuild their lives. In light of the seriousness of their mission, the following warm-up exercise that we used might seem silly or trivial, but we found it to be as effective with this group as with others whose day-to-day work has very different stakes.

We wanted a simple but impactful experience that would quickly and stickily underscore obstacles to passing along a message consistently, even a simple one. Our choice: a game of “Physical Telephone,” where, instead of players transmitting a spoken message down a line of people, players are charged with passing along a set of gestures. [Read more →]