How to help your teammate hatch an idea (Dummy’s Guide to Conversation #22)
The satisfying work of relating
Some of us find great joy in the work itself: left alone to turn the block on the lathe or write the intro paragraph—we get a tad giddy. Like we know what we are doing (more or less) and this process is stimulating and fun and I can see stuff taking shape.
A friend with a VP-of-Meetings type brain would often jab me with his love of meetings:
Meetings are great. I don’t know why people hate them so. We get so much done.
When he said this I assumed they were great for him because he enjoyed telling others what to do. And his lackeys went and accomplished real stuff. Were meetings great for his lackeys? I have my doubts.
But for many of us, it is difficult to get that sense of getting stuff done with people. Conversation is a messy business that seems to typically lead into a wilderness of tangents and false starts rather than to a place where real stuff happens. Washington is the current poster child for conversation thwarted at every turn.
Must it be that way?
Can you see how a lot of freight gets shifted in a conversation?
I can’t prescribe a cure for Washington (though targeting the removal of big money would be a positive first step), but here’s a few suggestions for helping each other hatch big ideas and get stuff done:
- Listen. For real—really listen. And repeat back what your colleague says to make sure you get it and to give yourself time to process what your colleague said. Resist the temptation to formulate a counter-argument while appearing to listen. Listen for potential.
- Ask your colleague to say more. Gain clarity for yourself and your colleague. Work out the idea together through a volley of responses.
- Breathe. That’s right, take a breath so you can stay in the moment and hear your colleague. They might just do the same for you.
- Use your words to precisely parse an idea. It’s easy to get sloppy and quickly dismiss ideas (and people, for that matter). Instead, tease out the potential idea you saw. Give it some kindling and fan it and get the fire going.
- Say it out loud to get something done. Pulling together an idea that is scattered before a team is sort of like nailing it to the wall for all to see. Once everyone sees it, they can respond. Grabbing the idea and saying it aloud can often feel like work accomplished. It feels that way because it is exactly that.
We do well to pay attention to what our colleagues are saying. And the more attention we pay, the more wealth of ideas and practical insights we might just find. In fact, some people work this way all the time:
When we toss things back and forth, there is no compromise at all. That is when it is magic.
–Millman, Debbie. How to think like a great graphic designer. (NY: Allworth Press, 2007). From Emily Oberman & Bonnie Siegler/ Number 17, p.96
Also: consider returning to David Rock’s Quiet Leadership and check out his tidy six steps
- Think about thinking
- Listen for potential
- Speak with intent
- Dance toward insight (Permission + Placement + Questioning + Clarifying)
- CREATE New thinking
- Follow up
People are never tools or things we manipulate to achieve our desired end. But honoring each other by listening and talking—that’s how real stuff gets done in the real world.
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
What do your interruptions say?
What are you listening for?
–Adam Phillips, Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014) 10
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Image Credit: Kirk Livingston
Here’s a note to excuse my absence
I’m sorta here and please carry on without me
It’s Monday so I’m sitting in my work chair.
But honestly, I’m sorta still sketching tombstones in the peaceful, cool graveyard. And I’m sorta still walking Dayton’s bluff above the Mississippi thinking how little control we exert over this force of nature overflowing the boundaries we set.
I’m sorta still at the party commemorating an 83-year-old’s deeply human connections and I’m sorta still cycling through Northeast Minneapolis marveling at the fancy systemic alternative to internal combustion. I’m sorta still reclining in an armchair sorting through Robert Sokolowski’s argument for how little time we’ve spent exploring the notion of absence.
So—yes—I’m here.
Just put your post-it reminder on my forehead. And when I return I’ll send you that copy you wanted yesterday.
Or was it tomorrow?
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
Submerged: Harriet Island
You shall not pass, Mississippi.
Well, not much further, anyway.
Strolling the levee with cops and other disaster-tourists.
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Image Credit: Kirk Livingston
I dare you to watch this entire video.
Just so.
Did you do it? I did.
And life on this side of the video is…astonishing.
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Via Kottke.org
People hate me. Immediately. (Dummy’s Guide to Conversation #21)
Can I have a conversation even if I’m in customer service?
Q: Help: I’m in customer service and my conversation partners are harried, angry and nasty. The moment I speak, they hate me and the company I speak for. Conversation is no engine for me most days.
Am I my company’s keeper?
A: I’m sure you’ve found that a quiet, buoyant response to explosive negativity is a good first step. It is nearly always good to avoid matching anger and volume with anger and volume. If you can help your conversation partner feel heard you’ve accomplished a huge thing—especially when your company really wants to hear (your firm does want to make things right, yes?). Repeating what the person said is common in customer service circles these days and is a useful tactic in the rest of life as well. Repeating what someone says without any rhetorical or sarcastic flourishes is a useful moment in saying and hearing.
What other tactics do you practice? I’d be curious to hear them.
But don’t despair: conversation can still be an engine for you, despite each day’s avalanche of problems. Here’s how: consider each conversational event a moment to serve rather than looking for “Thank you.” Because that’s exactly what this is about: how can I (company representative) help you (respected customer) get some satisfaction? There can be immense joy in helping someone. You can create your own meaning by adopting that purpose. And it really works best with no strings attached: you can derive meaning whether or not your hear “Thanks!” or “You changed my life, Mr. Customer Service Guy!”
Some of my favorite people routinely live in this subversively helpful way and their attitude is infectious, possibly even life-giving.
See also #6: Listen to other people’s stuff
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
Are You In—Or Are You a Loser?
Is club membership really that critical to you?
Sometimes we observe similarities between work and church. Here’s a way work and church similarly lose momentum with every conversation: making club membership their most important feature.
At work VPs and managers and employees speak in Dilbertesque code. Acronyms are just the beginning. In the medical device world, there are shorthand words for landmark studies, shorthand words for device features and benefits, shorthand words for certain technological functions. Shorthand words for the management focus of the quarter. Unless you’ve been around the team for a time, you wouldn’t understand 60% of the conversation. That’s why advertising agencies routinely hire translators when they get projects with medical device firms—they just don’t get the gibberish these smart people are talking.
At church we put on holy language and use words that make us seem like we are in the know. We deliver these words calmly as if they were on our minds all the time. The language of doubt is mostly unwelcome in this setting—this is where the faithful come for their weekly booster shot. And so language becomes subterfuge.
The problem with insider language at work or church is that it sets up participants for failure again and again. In both settings, many of the folks in the conversation don’t understand the very words they are saying—and don’t even realize they don’t understand. Or maybe they realize it but the insider current is so strong they are afraid to admit their lack.
Plain speech is a subversive force. Not only does plain speech out those not in the know, it actually forces those who think they know to explain or realize they know less than they thought. Plain speech is a force for progress because it breaks down hidden barriers and destroys a primary rhetorical tool for those who want to sit on their knowledge and keep it for themselves and to protect their kingdom.
This is why…again…no question is a dumb question. The simplest questions often carry great power.
As organizations (like work and church) realize they need to evangelize and draw outsiders in as a matter of survival, insider language must die.
Insider language is dead!
Long live language!
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Image Credit: Kirk Livingston
Should You Make Your Boss Cry?
Just draw me a picture
In a conversation yesterday my new friend self-identified as one who enjoys the “messy work” of helping groups get on the same page. To that I say: may her tribe grow. Because that is messy work indeed—fraught with bruised egos, sullen colleagues and cross-purposed tasks.
I maintain there is a fair amount of artistry involved in helping a group begin to move forward. Those who help others catch a vision for a project or cause have a knack for painting pictures. These pictures help team-mates understand just what is at stake. Those pictures may be dumb sketches or verbal images. The word “picture” here is important because an image conveys emotive content often missing with words alone. Without the emotive content of a picture, we are back to just using our intellect. And intellect only carries us so far. We can know the reasons behind a purpose, walk through spreadsheets and examine data without ever getting our emotive selves involved.
For many of us, real meaning has an emotional nexus. Pushing forward together springs quite naturally from that place where reason and care have linked arms.
The picture my new friend painted drew people from different business units in her organization—each armed with very different purposes and possibly their own rhetorical axes to grind—into a shared objective. The painting of the picture and telling of the story helped gradually align those cross-purposes.
What pictures are you sculpting for those around you today?
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
Team Leader As Artist: Let Your Team Crop Your Problem
What does your team see?
Photographers routinely crop and display just the section of the photo they want their audience to attend to. Cropping—possibly the easiest, most straightforward thing a photographer can do—changes the information the photo provides. Cropping also changes the feeling the viewer gets.
The right crop can stir emotion.
Most photographers work at getting composition right and so avoid cropping. Henri Cartier-Bresson famously accomplished that. Alec Soth gets this done too—though his process seems mysterious. The success of their composition looks like an invitation into another world, something frozen in time. Something clearly different from our own daily life.
That is the memorable artistry of the photographer.
Teams can be very gifted at cropping. Since we all naturally see a problem from a different perspective, collecting those perspectives in an open discussion can do a lot to reframe a problem into a most excellent opportunity. For a team to function this way, there needs to be a premium on open discussion. It helps if team-mates learn to value each other’s opinions. Listening and assigning value to each other’s contributions can be learned. I would argue it starts from the team leader (or manager/VP/CEO) and work its way down. Valuing each other’s perspectives (or not) is very much a part of corporate culture. But value can also move from the other direction: I’ve had teammates who valued different perspectives and taught the rest of us to find great joy in listening and considering.
Seth Godin routinely reframes art to include “making connections between people or ideas.” Some reading this will create art today by running a meeting that will make it possible for all around a conference table to hear a new thing. Their process for creating this art will be an examination of a problem that gets cropped from five or seven different perspectives. The result will be a well composed opportunity that has emotive power for each of the people at that table.
What art will you create today?
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
Rock The Garden
Just another conversation in Minneapolis
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Image Credit: Kirk Livingston
conversation is an engine 