The product of your meeting leaves the (virtual or physical) room in the minds of its attendees. In their understanding, their attitudes and their intentions.
The purpose of your meeting is to add value in some way, to make a difference. To do this the understanding, attitudes and intentions of its attendees need to change. Read More
Making this change is significantly easier when people’s attention is fully focused on the potential of what is evolving in the meeting. When their thinking is open: curious, compassionate and courageous (see diagram below left).
The problem is in the other side of the diagram. Closed thinking (judgmentalism, cynicism, …) tends to focus on the negatives, and to close down ideas, and the people generating those ideas.
And closed thinking tends to be contagious, closing down people’s capacity and willingness to adopt the perspectives they need to develop and make progress.
People’s attention then shifts away from the potential of what is actually happening (the green side of the diagram). Instead it comes to focus almost exclusively on its risks to their concerns and their baggage (the red side of the diagram).
Facilitating openness is about maintaining an environment in which people can keep their thoughts and emotions on the green side of the diagram. It is about enabling people to work openly and constructively together. And it is about nurturing trust and relationships that enable new possibilities to emerge.
Listening
Listening with an open mind, and an open heart, is key to making efficient shifts in attitudes and intentions.
But listening is often the first casualty of a ‘shift to the red side’ as described above. What may appear to be ‘listening’ may be more accurately described as simply ‘reloading and waiting to take your next shot’. Read More
When this is the case, the discussion is often taking place around a few people who are heavily involved. The rest are often disengaged by this, simply waiting to see who the winner is. The exchanges are more intense. There are virtually no pauses to either reflect on what was said before responding, or to let other voices into the dialogue.
The protagonists are talking and not listening or seeking to understand other viewpoints. And because of this it is common for arguments to become circular with points repeated multiple times.
Facilitating openness is about recognising this is happening, and then getting others to recognise this is happening. It is then possible to flag up the need to all move back toward green. And, once there, to unpick the nature of the tension and gradually work through how to resolve it. This, as everyone will discover, is a lot easier when you can see that everyone is listening.
Do your meetings have a bit too much of what is described above? Or perhaps they have a tendency for unbalanced engagement for other reasons. If so, you might like to consider the potential of the suggestions available through the clinic: https://meeting.toolchest.org/tag/attention/
Access further support in Section 8 of the ToolChest
Leadership
Facilitating openness is about creating an environment in which real listening can take place. It is about resolving the issues described above.
Key to this is ensuring that each point gets fully heard (once) and that everybody accepts that it has been heard.Read More
Effective meeting leadership is about keeping things ‘green’ through facilitating openness. Within this, it is down to each individual to monitor their own internal condition. However, this becomes increasingly difficult for them as the conversation itself adopts a red bias.
It is the leader’s role to keep track of this, and to flag this up to the group in a way that they can work together (and individually) to do something about it. There are some useful tools to help with identifying this shift, and putting things back to green.
Taking a ‘more facilitative’ approach to meeting leadership is increasingly necessary. However, it is not uncommon to find people who run meetings who are not actually sure of exactly what facilitation is. Nor are they aware of the range of tools that are available to support them in doing this.
You can access a range of tools and techniques to support you in adopting more facilitative approaches in Section 7 of the ToolChest . However, facilitation is predominantly a skill set rather than a knowledge set. We would therefore advocate that application of these tools would benefit from good hands-on training programmes to develop those skills and build the confidence to apply them.
Strategic Improvement
Use the model below to develop a vision for how you want your meetings to be different going forward, and then research the resources above to develop a coherent plan for how you plan to bring about improvement.
For a complete copy of the Maturity Model, click here.
For a selection of resources which support ‘attention’, please go to: https://meeting.toolchest.org/tag/attention/
