The Awkward Elephants
If you’ve been reading my articles/posts for quite a while, you might have noticed that I like to flip perspectives and play with the intensity of the depths, so to speak, in the way I look at things. Too much of a depth might be… too much at times, just as too much of paddling in shallow waters would inevitably entail a longing for a more profound adventure. I keep flipping those perspectives because my belief is that we learn better from interesting stories. A simple statement of a fact or a truth is less likely to stay etched in our psyche, to be truly learned, that is, than a story or a perspective which has been presented to us in a certain compelling way.
.. and, here’s an example. Myriads of posts have been written on how meetings can be toxic, unproductive, and a waste of time. In my previous article (Meetings: The PGP Conjunction) which was an attempt to give another answer to the question “why some meetings turn out that way?” I used more of a “technical” approach to this exploration. That’s why, today, to level the balance, I would like to suggest a very simple technique to detect bottlenecks in meetings based on visceral human response. The technique is this: turn on your empathic scanners and sensors and register the moments of awkwardness when at a meeting.
Of course, those moments of awkwardness can vary in their magnitude. Some might be quite innocent, and some might massively dominate over the audience’s energy as would be the case with the ill-famed elephants in the room. If one works to trace the origins of the awkwardness (chain-asking “why”, for instance), they might be rewarded by uncovering clues, subtle or not so subtle, which would eventually help solve some organizational bottlenecks!
This approach has certain distinct advantages over e.g. using formal questionnaires or meeting appraisal techniques. There’s no way to fake visceral reactions, because it’s just the way they are. They are either felt, or non-existent. And, if some interaction at a meeting produces an awkward moment, one can rest assured that a mini- or maxi- organizational “monster” has been detected, authentically.
And… what if you’re witnessing how, at your organization, those moments of awkwardness have ongoingly been ignored, shunned, and shoved under the rug? Uff… you might consider hiding under the table next time, because the longer those visceral clues from the collective remain unattended, the more disastrous the eventual “explosion of the bottlenecks” could be. We wouldn’t want to let the “hidden killers” thrive, would we?
Related:
Dissecting Dysfunctional Meetings
