Checking In — About to Become Sport
August 3rd, 2003 by Hal
I suspect we've all had the experience of attending meetings where there wasn't full participation of those in attendance. A few weeks back I proposed the notion of a listening workplace for the project setting. Essentially, the notion is to create a clearing for listening and attending to the everyday concerns of project team members and the project.
After a 10-week blogging absence (where have you been?) Jeffrey checked in at Jeffrey Cufaude-Idea Architect with these thoughts on the no listening zone of meetings and conferences.
Increasingly I find myself working with individuals who often have yet to "check in" to whatever session or meeting they are attending. Their minds seem to be elsewhere, they appear unclear on why they are in attendance, and they frequently do not make any effort to engage themselves in the proceedings.
"Not checked in" to me means paying attention to ones own concerns. It is the phenomenon of listening to the "voice in ones head" rather than the speaking in the room. Jeffrey suggests meeting organizers take some responsibility for getting and keeping people checked in.
I believe meeting facilitators and workshop presenters have to challenge participants to accept responsibility for remaining checked in and to take "corrective action" when they find themselves checking out. If we try to own more of this responsibility than is our appropriate fair share it puts us in the position of being performers for an unwilling audience we are trying to win over. That's a contest we are unlikely to win.
Perhaps there's another way to invoke the desired listening than by being performers for others in attendance at meetings. How about tapping in to the existing listening in the room? Sound difficult? It only takes listening to the listening of the room, then adjusting what we do. This can happen by producing alignment of the speaker's concerns with the attendees' concerns. We can keep the listening not by entertaining, but by continuing to engage the listening using questions in place of statements and entertaining alternate opinions to our own.
If there's any doubt about the usefulness of this, then take a look at this NYT article In the Lecture Hall, a Geek Chorus where the emerging practice of two-track meetings and back-channeled conversations are described. Not only will speakers need to worry about attendees checking in, they'll now be competing with instant messaging, blogging, and chat among those in attendance. Getting the room to check in is about to become sport!
Related Posts
- Set Ambitious QnEK Goals Are you getting more than 3 QnEKs per person per month? Why not? Make QnEK team sport....
- Project Kaizen Is Team Sport I started working with teams on improving operations in 1985. For 10 years we called this group work SGIAs, small gro...
- Welcome to Lean Contruction Congress 2006 The Congress has begun in San Francisco. I'll blog the presentations, as best as I can. Keep checking back... Slide p...
- Project e-Tip 037: Peter Drucker Advises Us to Ask a Great Question I have the pleasure of attending many project meetings. Some are well-run; others seem to just go through the motions. ...
- A Rationale and Structure for A Project Management Body of Knowledge Max Wideman's Project Management Wisdom is always worth checking out. (He claims more than a million visits/month to hi...
August 5th, 2003 at 2:06 am
Eruditie is Curious
My mind has a couple of images rocking around and this seems like the perfect home to hone my ideas. I’m standing on and balancing this board atop the point of a delta - a teeter-totter plank of my own curiosity.
After reading Hal, Jeffrey, and Don’s postings and thinking back to my experiences of people in organizations I’ve been a part of, the teeter-totter image hit me. The teeter-totter model is Volition – the delta is State of Mind, the plank is Level of Engagement, and the seats are Checked-In and Checked-Out.
In all of the postings the underlying theme seems to point to an individual’s level of engagement – facilitator or participant. My comments really go to the level of the participants’ engagement. For over ten years now, I’ve worked with colleagues who have been completely checked-in. Checked-in looks like: high curiosity, fascination with what could be described as mundane problems, and a willingness to connect and become immersed in the project(s) at hand.
What I’ve think I’m reading in the postings [and I have encountered this behavior too] describes working with individuals who are Checked-out which looks like: low to no curiosity, apathy, and boredom – disengagement.
So now I am faced with the question: how do organizations create legions of curious people (perhaps Jeffrey’s true challenge). It’s probably part of what defines high-performance – this level of engagement. I’m teetering.
If this is on the right track then what we might be dealing with isn’t even in the room. We are meeting with [in the room] the symptom of the real beast. But the problem we as facilitators [or managers] face is how to ‘re-engage’ a disenfranchised group who have had the curiosity beat out of them – tottering.
More later on the state of relationship,
Eruditie
August 11th, 2003 at 9:48 pm
My image of beating the curiosity out of them is the game Whack-A-Mole. I think there’s a posting in that!