Archive for the ‘Communication is about relationship’ Category
Can A Question Trump A Script?
Don’t Prepare. Just Show Up. Improv Wisdom by Patricia Ryan Madson
A confession: it’s hard for me to break free from notes when speaking.
Maybe notes are a crutch. But I think there is more to it. I spend my days writing so I have an affection and affinity for words on pages. And this: there is specificity to writing that is not quite so available for speaking. It’s a specificity that allows me to work an idea and move the parts around even as I deliver that idea to my audience.
Speaking does not allow that.
Or so I thought.
Patricia Ryan Madson’s Improv Wisdom is helping me see things differently. This well-written, easily digestible book (NY: Bell Tower, 2005) is full of all manner of notes about how to move off the page. In particular I’m struck by how Ms. Madson deftly turned scripted notes into an opportunity for spontaneity. 
Check out the photo below, where she reformats scripted remarks into a series of prompts—questions—that result in something alive and conversational versus the usual bad voice-over quality that comes from reading a script.
The result of her work and approach is spot on with all we’re trying to do at Conversation is an Engine: live out loud with each other, mistakes and passions all available to each other as we show up. Day after day.
Here’s Ms. Madson speaking at Google (Authors@Google) on her notion of just showing up. I cannot help but notice that she put lots and lots of time preparing before she just showed up. Plus: I am completely taken with Ms. Madson’s willingness to make mistakes in public.
Patricia Ryan Madson may be my new aural hero.
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When will Your Mission become Mutiny?
Look Boss: It is Written
One of my favorite bosses, when privately presented with a wallet-sized card imprinted with the corporate mission and asked what he thought of it, pretended to use it to wipe his derriere.
Was my boss in open rebellion?
Not in the least.
My boss was responding to a ridiculous communication tool. At that point in the history of that particular medical device company, it was all mission and everyone knew it. Patients and physicians were front and center and no one needed reminding. We were all directly involved in the mission and to think otherwise was to dismiss the conscious and vocal choices people made to work there.
Then again, perhaps the communication tool was a bit prophetic. It wouldn’t be long before many in the firm started taking their eyes off the mission to focus instead on quarterly profit goals to the exclusion of patients, physicians and common sense. These things happen when big bonuses are at stake.
But it need not be that way and you may well be the one to say so.
Unless you simply wanted a job and any job would do, you likely joined your firm because of mission. You found yourself in some level of agreement with the firm’s vision and wanted to help move this thing forward. For many of us, the mission is a motivating and ennobling force, even if we may not think of it constantly.
We know that even the best-intentioned organizations stray from their intended goals and go rogue with evil intent. This happens at high and public levels. It also happens at day-to-day levels, in quick decisions and in small furtive meetings among colleagues. For-profit companies do it. Non-profits do it. Churches do it. Hobby clubs are also capable of it.
That’s when any of us needs to come back to the mission and openly ask whether this quick decision or that furtive meeting is accomplishing our shared mission. Sometimes our best and smartest move is to reprise the mission openly, verbally and with gusto. We all need reminding of our purpose and mission from time to time.
If you care about your organization’s mission, you may need to lead a mutiny today. You’ll want to count the cost, of course, because mutiny can be very expensive.
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The Problem with Collaboration: Can’t Touch This
You talk. We listen. (Not so) Simple.
Let’s trace social technologies backwards and watch them infiltrate the organizations that launched them. Social technologies carry with them an implicit demand to be heard—if not an outright demand for action.
That demand, from those voices, will—sooner or later—run smack into the command and control mentality: the top dogs who always delivered the monologues. The higher-ups and muckity-mucks who get their way.
This is a problem.
Is this a problem?
Because this problem may be the starting line for any company culture that wants to change. It won’t be pleasant. Because the kind of people that help facilitate the change are a different sort than the ones willing to tell everybody else what to do. There’s a happy move today, currently gaining cultural muscle, to identify the boss-bully in the corner office and make them play nice. This even as people throughout organizations are getting a vision for collaboration vs. command and control.
Letting employees and customers (and possibly congregants and constituents) into the smoke-filled rooms where big decisions are made. What a concept.
Groundswell offered the example of Salesforce.com, their Idea-Exchange and the grass-root effort to excise an annoying banner that always appeared. The company denied themselves, kept listening, and eventually removed the banner they loved and their customers hated.
Bravo!
The problem with collaboration is really an opportunity to become adept at identifying the things that cannot/must not change and holding the rest with an open hand.
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Collaborate Starts S l o w
Catch me if you can
One must slow down to understand.
Way back: I’m thinking back to a statistics class in college. The theater-seating room in the Psychology building at UW-Madison was packed with well over 200 people. And at the last possible minute the professor would make a grand entrance, rushing down the side of the room with flowing scarf, his cologne preceeding him and wafting across the room. Then he talked nonstop for the next 50 or 75 or 100 minutes. In my mind a bell rang at the end, but I may have imagined that. He took no questions. His purposes were served to assume everyone was with him.
Few were, naturally.
Teaching assistants did the actual work of slowly going through the ideas and problems sets. They were the ones taking the time to tee up concept after concept and watch as some statistics-averse philosophy student slowly worked it out. That’s how a multi-layered idea passes between people: slowly.
Today: Sometimes Mrs. Kirkistan will ask how teaching went today. I consider teaching a success when we have had a robust discussion about the central concept for the day. When people bring in stories and draw connections—usually there is laughter—that is what engagement looks like. It is satisfying. Once upon a time I thought if I got through my slides in time that was success. Today I believe slides are the least important thing—because delivering slides to an audience largely absent is one of the more vacuous activities on the planet.
Tomorrow: My smelly, scarf-toting statistics professor from way back didn’t care about engagement. But that attitude won’t get anyone very far in a culture pivoting toward collaboration. Broadcasting an aroma and putting on a costume scarf doesn’t actually carry all that much weight for those interested in slicing and dicing a subject. What does carry weight is passion for a topic that slows and shares enough to bring others up to speed. Collaboration takes time while we each catch up and synchronize our language. But slowing to a human scale of understanding is worth the effort.
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Create a Conversation Zone Today in 3 Steps
Make Talk Work at Work
If it’s been a while since you’ve had a truly collaborative conversation at work, take some steps toward that today. Collaboration is starting to register on the radar of many leaders in organizations. Collaboration is the love-child of the free speech we tout in social media and the world of work. Collaboration is freed speech working its way backwards through organizations.
Create a conversation zone in 3 easy steps:
- Acknowledge the human in front of you. “What?” you may say. “That’s pretty obvious stuff.” Not so fast: how many times a day does your mind go dark when the janitor says something, or the clerk—or the boss? It’s the automatic assumptions that run ahead of those conversations that poison the water. Start with this basic thought and you may be able to strip away some of the power distance that ruins conversations before they even begin
- Listen with your eyes. Eyeball to eyeball. No listening happens when my eyes are focused on my Samsung Note II. Don’t fool yourself that you are listening—you aren’t. Not really. Multitasking does not count when it comes to human relationships. I’ve taught enough college students to know instantly who is paying attention, and 93.2% of that is eye contact (6.8% of students have mastered the art of eye contact while entirely absent).
- Expose yourself. Really: tell what you honestly don’t know and what you wonder. Stupidity is endearing when offered without guile. Be the stupid guy. Ask the dumb question. Let it be known that you don’t know.
Good things will happen if you take these three steps today.
Oh, and report back, will you? What happened in your conversation today?
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Philip Seymour Hoffman and the Human Character
How To Bring Words Alive
Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death over the weekend is one of those shocks we’re both used to and entirely powerless before. Any death is a shock, but for an actor at the peak of his powers, his sudden absence seems a stunning reversal of expectations.
I watched films where Mr. Hoffman appeared partly because of the topics and partly because he was in them. I knew his powerful portrayals would be riveting. And they were. How he could play both the higher-ed slacker David Davis in “Twister” (1996) and then authoritative but ultimately corrupted Lancaster Dodd in “The Master” (the 2012 Scientology send up) boggles my mind. His list of films and other work is extensive—far larger than I imagined.
As writers and communicators we think a lot about how to pull an audience toward and ultimately into a story or argument. It seems Mr. Hoffman’s answer to that question would be to explore the character beyond the monochrome rendering. Lancaster Dodd seemed good until he was clearly not. Doubt’s Father Brendan Flynn had diabolical layers and was a chilling portrayal given the current round of scandals. David Davis was an exact portrayal of many of the meteorology graduate students I’ve known.
Playing out the full-color, full-orbed, fully human version of a character remains an elusive goal. Fully illustrating a notion so it comes alive is something Mr. Hoffman was gifted in.
I’ll miss Philip Seymour Hoffman.
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conversation is an engine 