Category: communication

Collaboration, communication, Decisions, Leadership

Get them to start talking

marcusdegerman

 But more to the point, it was another suggestion, and the crowd in the reading room was breaking up into small groups along preferred language lines and starting to argue and discuss, to come up with ideas. Trying to help. I didn’t care that all the ideas were useless; we’d literally only just started thinking.

By Naomi Novik – The Last Graduate

Working with new groups, the important thing is to get them to start talking, sharing perspectives and ideas. Don’t focus on quality, reinforce the act of talking and listening. Each new group needs to learn  and decide how they want to talk and act. They need the chance to get to know one another both how people act and what knowledge, skills and experience they bring to the group. 

The biggest challenge to get a group going is not if people are quiet, it is if you have one or two people dominating the conversation. If they have more experience with the problem and use that to push their ideas forward too quickly then the group might get too dependent on them. I have often tried to identify these people beforehand and either talked to them and asked them to let people in or I divide the group into smaller groups where I either put all the talkative people in one group or try to place them in a group where there are people who can manage them.

Collaboration, communication, Learning, Personality

What are you passionate about?

marcusdegerman

 But what if science isn’t your world? I admit, I don’t know whether people outside of my social sphere would care about this at all. I’ve spent my entire adult life embedded with scientists and the people who love them. I take it for granted that this sort of knowledge is cherished, is yearned for. And I am keenly aware that in order to tell you what we found, it required a thousand words of explanation before I could get to the crux.

by Becky Chambers – To Be Taught, if Fortunate

What are you passionate about? What have spent so much time thinking/working/reading/playing with that you know “everything” about it? I love to watch someone talk about their passions and what they find interesting. You can see how excited they get, and how they feel more alive. It’s amazing to see how a person or a group of people can get stuck in the small details that for outsiders feel completely irrelevant but for the people who care is the most important thing in the world.

It also has its downsides. If you are new to a group and just getting started. It can be hard to get in. You don’t have the history, the knowledge nor the language to fully take part in the discussions. This means that the group needs to work extra hard on how to include them. Let them make mistakes or say the wrong things without getting ridiculed. We all need to start somewhere. I think the language is especially important to teach to new people. Words have a history and a special meaning in organisations and they might not mean what you think when you get started. 

communication, Complexity, Learning, questions, reflection

Conviction kills

marcusdegerman

Doubt begets understanding, and understanding begets compassion. Verily, it is conviction that kills.

R. Scott Bakker, The Thousandfold Thought

When we get too certain of what is right, what we know, and how things should work then we stop asking questions and trying to learn. We need to question ourselves and our situation to grow.

When we try to understand ourselves, others and their situations then we start to empathize and connect.

It’s not about questioning everything, but to keep reflecting. Especially when we feel most certain or when someone says or do something that seems stupid to us. To ask ourselves, why does this make sense to them and not me?

As a side note: I had to check what begets mean before I understood what I read and maybe you do to: begets mean to cause or to produce an effect.

Brain, Collaboration, communication, Conflicts, Meetings, Trust

Same reality different views

marcusdegerman

 

There is but one reality; that is true—but the two of you experience it in slightly different ways.

-The Cinder Spires by Jim Butcher

Based on your experiences, goals, and personality you will experience the world in a different way than all other people you meet. The difference might be really small or very big. But we all focus on, see, and remember different things. This will cause a lot of conflicts and frustrations. But it will also create amazing solutions, make us learn new things and see problems in a different way.

We often need the similarities to start collaborating and getting to know one another. Then we need the differences to creates something unique.

 

Coaching, communication, Leadership

Are you really asking a question?

marcusdegerman

“Would you like to come inside,” she said. It wasn’t a question. For a sentence to be a question, you had to care about the other person’s answer.”

–Full Fathom Five by Max Gladstone

Lots of leadership courses focus on teaching people to ask more and better questions. The challenge with asking questions is that you first must want to listen to the answers, and then you have to have the time and will to use it.

Many people have already decided what to do, but still try to include people by asking for their opinion. Other people don’t want to hear the feedback and will change the questions to make it very clear what they want to hear: Was the presentation good? Do you like it here?

You first have to make it ok to fail and be wrong in your organization, before people will start asking better questions.

communication, Mindfulness

Leave if you would rather go all in somewhere else

marcusdegerman

“I think I was afraid to go all in,” she says. “Because all in is terrifying. With all in, you lose everything.”

– Dept. of Speculation, Jenny Offill

It can be a project, a meeting, a coffee break conversation, playing with your children, or talking to your loved one. You can try to be fully present in that moment or you could check your phone, read your emails, or plan the next day. There is something scary about being fully present in most things, because if you are then you might miss out on something else. You might not respond to that email fast enough, or be the last one to share a funny video on Facebook. What else is scary about being present it that it might require a bit more of yourself to stay present; that you actually speak when you don’t agree, and that you actually take the time to really think about and feel what is happening with the people around you.

And that you leave if you would rather go all in somewhere else…

Coaching, communication, Leadership, questions

The most important thing

marcusdegerman

“You could find out most things, if you knew the right questions to ask. Even if you didn’t, you could still find out a lot.”

– Iain M. Banks, The Player of Games

The important thing is not that you ask the perfect question that will reveal everything or that the person you asked the question completely changes their view of the world. The important thing is that you ask questions, and listens to the answers. Then based on the answer you could ask another question and slowly get to the heart of the matter. Or you could choose to go and ask someone else questions.

communication, Learning, Personality

The circle of life?

marcusdegerman

“it had been briefed that when Culture people didn’t speak Marain for a long time and did speak another language, they were liable to change; they acted differently, they started to think in that other language, they lost the carefully balanced interpretative structure of the Culture language, left its subtle shifts of cadence, tone and rhythm behind for, in virtually every case, something much cruder.”

– Iain M. Banks, The Player of Games

What we say and how we say it shows who we are and also makes us more of that person. Our brain will focus more on the things we talk about and then we will see more of those things and then we will talk more about them. Is this the circle of life? 🙂

Action, Collaboration, communication, Decisions, Meetings

What is perfectly obvious might not be the same thing for everyone there

marcusdegerman

“Sometimes what goes without saying is best said anyway.”

– Iain M. Banks, The Hydrogen Sonata

One of the most common mistakes that I see other people do, and my self quite often as well: It is to end a meeting or a conversation without summing up what was decided upon. It might seem perfectly obvious to you, and it probably is perfectly obvious to all the other people there. The problem is that in many cases what is perfectly obvious might not be the same thing for everyone there.

Collaboration, communication, Failing, Love, Uncategorized

Who will love you regardless?

marcusdegerman

I know that when ye think o’ love you’re supposed to think of kissy faces and scented soap and hummin’ happy songs together, but there’s another vital part to it that people rarely admit to themselves: We want somebody to rescue us from other people. From talking to them, I mean, or from the burden of giving a damn about what they say. We don’t want to be polite and stifle our farts, now, do we? We want to let ’em rip and we want to be with someone who won’t care if we do, who will love us regardless and fart right back besides.

– Kevin Hearne, Staked

There is nothing else to add. The quote explains love perfectly! 🙂