Can Broadcast be Personal? Exploring New Ways to Connect with Others

Can broadcast be personal? An image of a happy woman looking at something we cannot see. In the blurred background is a screen with another woman's face on it.We prize personal moments of connection, moments when we are moved. But today, broadcast messages bombard us. This leads to the question: Can broadcast be personal?

Occasionally, the answer is “yes”.

  • A paragraph in a novel unexpectedly hooks your heart.
  • An inspirational speaker says something that totally resonates with an audience member.
  • The meditation teacher on Zoom looks right at you as they deliver a perfect piece of wisdom.
  • A political slogan captures your imagination at the right moment.

And yet, broadcast being personal happens relatively rarely.

  • As George Orwell remarked, “In much more than nine cases out of ten the only objectively truthful criticism would be ‘This book is worthless …'”.
  • I once heard a motivational speaker whom I found inspirational at the time. Three months later, I couldn’t remember a thing he said.
  • The meditation teacher was looking at their camera, not you—and there were 500 other people listening too.
  • Millions of people heard the slogan that high-priced consultants crafted to appeal to them.

When people come together at a meeting, an event, or a social, we usually default to broadcast-style experiences. We listen to speakers. We’re assigned to large tables where we can’t quite hear the individuals three chairs away from us. We use formats like theater seating that minimize interpersonal contact. Broadcast modalities like these breed a passive experience. And they are so engrained that we default to them unconsciously.

Which leads to a better question.

Are there better ways of creating personal moments of connection?

Yes, there are. We can gently steer people into opportunities to connect one-to-one, or in small groups. And it’s easy to do. Here are three examples:

David Adler’s Jeffersonian dinner

David Adler, the founder of BizBash, loves to connect people. One of his favorite approaches is to host a Jeffersonian dinner, where guests take turns sharing their answers to a question the host offers.

David often uses the question: What was your first job, and what did you learn from it? Each participant broadcasts their answer to everyone, but only for a few minutes, and the sharing moves around the group. Each story provides opportunities for personal connection, as many of the stories involve common threads and learnings.

Pair share

Pair share (or trio share) is such a simple and effective way to create personal moments of connection I don’t understand why it’s not more widely used. Announce a topic or question to a group, ask people to find a partner, provide a little time for everyone to think of their response, and then give each pair member a minute or so to broadcast/share their thoughts with their partner. Maybe add another minute for the pairs to talk to each other about what they just shared.

Voila! You’ve created an opportunity for everyone in the room to have a short, focused conversation, and maybe a moment of connection with another person (whom they may have never met before). Pair share is quick, so you can run it multiple times while people are together, each time with different partners to create new connections.

The Three Questions

I often use The Three Questions to open a peer conference. (See Chapter 18 of my Event Crowdsourcing book for a full description of this core meeting format.) Like the Jeffersonian dinner, each participant has a short-broadcast time to share their answer to a question—in this case three questions—with an entire group.

There are three things meeting participants really want to know about each other. These three questions allow each person to share their past, present, and future in a way that is appropriate and safe for them with everyone in the group. This sharing provides the foundation for connections to deepen during the conference that follows.

Can broadcast be personal?

Traditional broadcast formats are rarely personal because one person dominates the time. But by breaking broadcast into small segments where many people get to talk, broadcast can become personal, while also fostering multiple moments of new connection.

Try it, you—and the people in the room—will like it!

The ultimate in social listening

Social listening: A black and white photograph of a hall containing a seated audience listening to something happening in front of them.Since 2004, social listening—the practice of monitoring and analyzing online conversations and social media mentions related to brands, products, services, events, or industries—has evolved significantly and grown in popularity.

social listening
Popularity for the search term “social listening” over time, via Google Trends.

Initially confined to sentiment analysissocial listening tools can now identify trends, analyze competitors, track influencers, identify crises and potential issues, and monitor reputations.

A wider perspective on social listening

With this recent emphasis on social listening as something done on social media, it’s easy to forget what it was for all of human history prior to 2004. Just because we now have tools that quantify awareness and sentiment, we shouldn’t discard older methods of finding out what audiences think and feel.

Indeed, quantification of what has historically been seen as subjective may be misleading. Traditional meeting evaluations turn out to be unreliable. Motivational speakers rarely have a significant long-term impact, even though audiences often rate them highly immediately after their speech. And, with the majority of social media traffic now occurring on dark social channels like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and TikTok, who knows how accurately numbers derived from Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn reflect reality?

A different way to think about social listening

Last week, I facilitated the second BizBash Leadership Summit, an unconference I designed for “30 executives across experiential, event tech, and other corporate verticals”. During one of the sessions, BizBash’s founder, David Adler, asked, “What does social listening mean in the context of understanding the impact of an event?”

And then, during my closing session, he answered his own question.

I typically close unconferences with a simple process, plus/delta. Participants first publicly share their positive experiences. After they’ve aired them, they also suggest changes that they think might make the event better in the future. The beauty of plus/delta is that it rapidly builds a collective experience of the conference. This widens individual perspectives of what happened and builds community around the shared collective experience.

The Leadership Summit was clearly successful. Many participants wanted to meet again, even suggesting ways to do so. We also heard great feedback on how the event could be further improved (making it longer was a popular suggestion), giving the conveners valuable ideas for future gatherings.

It was then that David said, “Isn’t this what we’re doing right now, the ultimate in social listening?”

I think he was right. We weren’t quantifying sentiment. There were no ten-point-scale smile sheets. Rather, we’d been having intimate conversations for three days, getting to know each other and building community around our shared experiences. And now, we were listening to each other in important ways and making plans for our group’s future.

Our experience together changed us and inspired us to make changes in our lives, both individually and collectively. I think that’s the ultimate goal of social listening—creating change that matters.

Image attribution: Flickr user iguanajo

Facilitation listening as meditation

Most weekdays, my wife and I join a fifteen-minute online meditation offered by teachers at the Insight Meditation Society. The other day, teacher Matthew Hepburn introduced a dharma practice of meditating, not on one’s breath or body sensations, but on another person. As Matthew talked, I realized that I experience good facilitation listening as a meditation.

Matthew Hepburn, sharing about listening as meditation
Matthew Hepburn

When I’m listening well, I’m practicing a form of meditation where I focus my awareness on the person who is speaking. Not just what they are saying but the totality of their being in the moment.

I believe that being truly heard and seen at meetings is a gift, because someone to tell it to is one of the fundamental needs of human beings.

Giving the gift of listening is hard work—until it isn’t. Sometimes, facilitative listening is simple because it’s all that’s going on. The speaker has my full attention. That’s it.

Distractions

At other times, unfortunately, I’m feeling hungry, wondering if we’re on schedule, noticing that the carpet is ugly, etc. A myriad of possible distractions seduce me from full attention, and I succumb to them over and over again.

This is just like meditation.

In doing either, there are moments when you’re just here, and then all the moments when your attention wanders. Facilitators and meditators do the same thing: we notice that our attention has wandered and then bring it back to the object of attention. Over and over again.

Practice

Of course, facilitators don’t have the luxury of devoting their entire allotted time to meditative listening. We have other responsibilities: bringing sharing to a close, breaking on time for lunch, and framing the next segment of our work, to name just a few. Preparing for these transitions requires us to leave listening as a meditation.

But when we’re listening to people, treating such time as a meditation with the speaker as the sole object of our attention is a great practice to practice.

If you’re a facilitator, do you experience facilitative listening as a meditation? Feel free to share your experiences in the comments below.

Connection, attachment, and meetings

John Singer Sargent's painting, A Street in Venice. Image courtesy Clark Art Institute. A man looks at a woman in a Venetian alleyway. Is there connection or attachment between them?A teacher recently advised our daily meditation group to seek “connection free from attachment”. This is a wise practice for me. But what does it mean in the context of meetings? Surely we sometimes become attached to people we meet? Isn’t creating and strengthening attachments one of the desirable functions of meetings? So what is the relationship between connection and attachment when people come together?

Last week I was exploring paintings at The Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts when this work by John Singer Sargent caught my attention.

Although Sargent is chiefly known as “a portrait painter who evoked Edwardian-era luxury“, this painting of Venice shows something different. Instead of “focusing on iconic views of Venice”, Sargent “offers a glimpse into everyday life”.

I see this painting as a depiction of an event about to happen: two people meeting, a foreshadowing of connection. I could be wrong because what we see is ambiguous. It’s possible that the man will turn away and continue his walk. But perhaps the woman is about to turn towards the man looking at her; they will connect in the alleyway. Perhaps they are about to enter the wine cellar and connect there.

My fanciful, though perhaps plausible, interpretations of Sargent’s painting illuminate how I think about the relationship between connection, attachment, and meetings.

Connection and attachment

Connection is something that happens in the moment. As another meditation teacher put it: “Nothing to get. Nothing to get rid of. Just this.”

In contrast, attachment is a description of a complex fusion of past, present, and future connections. It’s a historical construct. Even if we connect with a person once, that only creates attachment through our continued memory of the experience of the moment. Attachment is about our relationship with others. Our attachment to people is created and strengthened by one or more moments of connection with them over time.

Traditional meetings and connection

At meetings, as in life, connection happens with another person or, sometimes, in small groups. Not while someone is lecturing in a room full of people.

At traditional meetings, connection happens almost exclusively outside the formal lecture-style sessions. It’s inefficient and random. Even if someone asks a question at the end of a session and you want to talk to them more about it, you have to hunt them down in the hallways or socials.

Traditional meetings offer minimal opportunities for connection, attachment, and ensuing relationships.

Luckily, we can do better.

Creating connection and attachment at meetings

For decades, one of my core goals for participant-driven and participation-rich meetings has been to facilitate connection around relevant content. In our meetings, we need to provide plenty of opportunities and support for moment-to-moment connections around relevant learning. The resulting connections lead to attachments, and to valuable relationships between meeting participants that endure into the future.

Someone to tell it to is one of the fundamental needs of human beings

Someone to tell it to. A photograph of two young girls looking at and listening to each other. One has her arm around the other's shoulders.

“Someone to tell it to is one of the fundamental needs of human beings.”
—Miles Franklin, Childhood At Brindabella: My First Ten Years, 1954

Miles Franklin, the Australian writer and feminist best known for her novel My Brilliant Career, wrote the above words in her autobiography. Like Miles, I believe that all people want and need opportunities to share how they’re thinking and feeling.

Meetings of every kind offer these opportunities. When I walk into our tiny town rural post office, I sometimes see folks for whom a conversation about almost anything with the sole postal worker is clearly important. Perhaps that customer will have little or no other human contact that day. What is talked about is far less important than the act of telling.

Personal meetings like these, whether brief or extended, between good friends or strangers, are fundamental. Many of us are lucky enough to have “someone to tell it to”, though some do not.

Someone to tell it to at conferences

Conferences, whether in-person or online, are also potential arenas for conversations. They are places for participants — who have something in common with each other — to find someone to tell it to. Even if the teller believes that they weren’t fully heard, the act of telling is valuable. (Otherwise, people wouldn’t journal and practice self-affirmations.)

But some conferences offer better opportunities than others. Traditional events relegate conversations to the hallways, to breaks and socials. No conversations occur during lectures. Even post-presentation Q&As rarely evolve into a conversation, which is always between the presenter and a succession of audience members.

Given the fundamental human need to tell, meeting stakeholders owe it to participants to create opportunities and environments for rich conversations in the sessions, rather than just the gaps between them. I have been doing this for 33 years, and it’s clear that meeting designs that integrate meaningful conversations into sessions have a transformational effect on almost all participants. (Read any of my books to learn specific techniques and designs that create meaningful and valuable conversations during meeting sessions.)

In 2006, Cory Doctorow wrote: “Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.” Content is everywhere, but conversations require tellers and listeners. While telling something to ourselves is better than nothing, it doesn’t compare to telling it to and being heard by another human.

Let’s give attendees the priceless gift of someone to tell it to at our events.

Children listening to each other image (cropped) by J. Verkuilen, licensed under (CC BY 2.0)

The hallway of learning

hallway learning: a photograph of a crowd of people talking in the hallway at a meeting. Attribution Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons license Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)Have you attended in-person meetings where your hallway conversations were the highlight of the event? I’ve certainly experienced my fair share, and I bet you have too. Don’t get me wrong. Hallway learning and the connections made through conversations struck up between sessions are often valuable and important. But I see meetings where hallway learning trumps a majority of, if not all, conference sessions as failures of design, rather than a fact of life.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could improve the quantity and quality of hallway learning, conversations, and connections throughout an event?

Well, we can. Here are two ways.

1—How to improve conventional hallway conversations

We can increase the quality of conventional hallway conversations by designing a physical meeting environment that encourages and supports them. Create an architecture of assembly: spaces outside the session rooms where people can talk comfortably. Provide a range of spaces. For example, chair pairings, small group furniture arrangements, standing areas with places to park food and beverage, covered outdoor spaces, etc.

“…people, even very smart people, are unable to anticipate the benefits of in-depth interaction with colleagues until they have experienced it for themselves”
Nancy DixonThe Hallways of Learning

Read Nancy’s article to learn how an office redesign strengthened connections amongst a group of formerly loosely connected peers. [And she gets a hat tip for inspiring this post!] Similarly, your design layout will affect the likelihood and value of hallway learning conversations. And participants most likely won’t even be aware of it!

In addition, be sure to schedule enough time for hallway learning to occur. Give your attendees plenty of breaks. Then they can rest and recuperate, consolidate what they have learned, and have time to engage in conversations that matter.

2—How to significantly improve hallway learning and connection throughout events

By far the best way to significantly improve hallway learning and connection is to build it into our meeting sessions.

Why should we do this? Here’s Nancy again:

“Typically, a presenter offers what happened in his or her own situation, but that is not what learners need to hear. Learners are interested in knowing how to adapt the lessons to their situation and for that they need to have a conversation so that the other person can understand their context, and they also can understand the context of the other.”

The trick is to use session designs that blend short useful pieces of content with conversations among participants. In effect, you’re providing structured hallway conversations about the content that’s just been delivered. There are many different formats you can use for such conversations (described in detail in my books): pair and trio share, facilitated small group breakouts, fishbowls, etc. You can create conversational groupings at random (“pair up with someone you haven’t met yet”) or use human spectrograms to assign attendees to like-minded folks.

Building hallway learning opportunities into our meeting sessions has additional advantages. Once a session is over, and traditional hallway conversations are about to begin, attendees are ready to continue or start new conversations with the people who were in their session. They are primed to continue to explore and deepen their hallway learning.

Conclusion

I’ll close with a final Nancy Dixon quote from a different post:

“Before people can learn from each other or collaborate on issues, they need to build connections – that is, gain some understanding of who the other person is, including their skills, depth of knowledge, experience, and attitude toward others. People are unlikely to ask each other questions or ask for assistance, until they have built a connection that allows them to learn that the other person is knowledgeable enough and respectful enough to engage.”
—Nancy Dixon, Connection before Content

To maximize useful connection and learning at our meetings, optimizing hallway learning throughout the event is the way to go!

[Cropped] image attribution Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons license Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Mediate connection in the Age of Entanglement

mediate connectionWhat do we need to understand to mediate connection effectively today? Inventor and computer scientist Danny Hillis gives us some helpful context:

“We humans are changing. We have become so intertwined with what we have created that we are no longer separate from it. We have outgrown the distinction between the natural and the artificial. We are what we make. We are our thoughts, whether they are created by our neurons, by our electronically augmented minds, by our technologically mediated social interactions, or by our machines themselves…

…We are our perceptions, whether they are through our eyes and ears or our sensory-fused hyper-spectral sensors, processed as much by computers as by our own cortex. We are our institutions, cooperating super-organisms, entangled amalgams of people and machines with super-human intelligence, processing, sensing, deciding, acting…

…Our networks of commerce, power and communications are becoming as richly interconnected as ecologies and nervous systems. Empowered by the tools of the Enlightenment, connected by networked flows of freight and fuel and finance, by information and ideas, we are becoming something new. We are at the dawn of the Age of Entanglement.”
Danny HillisThe Enlightenment is Dead, Long Live the Entanglement

Mediating connection via technology

People usually think of technology as “anything that was invented after you were born”, as Alan Kay put it. But it’s much more useful to think of technology as anything made to solve a problem. Defining technology in this way opens our eyes to technologies that we all unthinkingly use every day, technologies that are essentially invisible because they have always been part of our lives.

We’ve been creating and using what I call human process technology — which includes language, writing, and science — for a very long time. Language, in all its forms, is the oldest human process technology:

“Every culture and tribe has its own language it has invented to solve the problem of real-time communication between its members. These technologies are so old that they are invisible to us. They are part of our culture, the human air we breathe. Language, writing, and science are tools outside our conventional, narrow-scope view of technology. We instantiate these tools using invented conventions: sounds, gestures, and symbols. These sounds, gestures, and symbols, however, are secondary features of these ancient technologies. Ultimately, language, writing, and science are primarily about human process.”
—Adrian Segar, Meetings are a mess—and how they got that way

Clearly, we are groping our way towards mediating connection with each other via technology. The COVID-19 pandemic provides a dramatic example. In a few months, we moved from meeting primarily in person to meeting online. Our connection became mediated by screens showing live videos of others and speakers broadcasting their voices. Printing, telephones, fax machines, email, and messaging have all impacted how we connect, but nothing has been swifter than our switch to meeting in real-time online.

In addition, technology is increasingly creating rich data that are useful or necessary to mediate connection. Automatic speech technology (ASR) systems caption meetings and translate into other languages in real time. Software routinely writes news reports, and can now generate accurate summaries of articles for more efficient human review. All of these technologies have become feasible and commonplace in the last decade.

Mediating connection in an increasingly entangled future

If artificial intelligence systems can perform the above tasks now, it’s not fanciful to predict that they will progressively take over human activities that currently mediate connection.

For example, future systems might be able to moderate group meeting conversations. (Imagine a Zoom breakout where an intelligent virtual assistant facilitates a small group’s conversation on a topic.)

Or consider meeting curation: a task that is taxing, if even possible for humans. Perhaps it will eventually be possible that an IVA for real-time meeting curation could do a comparable job to the crowdsourcing human processes I’ve developed during the last 33 years.

Ten years ago, the idea of speaking to your phone to tell it to do something was laughable. Today, the development of deep feedforward networks for acoustic modeling has made such technology invisible to my grandchildren. They just use it—and it (nearly always) works.

So let’s keep in mind how Danny Hillis concludes his article:

“We can no longer see ourselves as separate from the natural world or our technology, but as a part of them, integrated, codependent, and entangled.”

As our technology advances, it will become, more and more, a normal and largely invisible contributor to how we mediate connection. Its benefits—and drawbacks—remain to be discovered.

On our different responses to adversity

responses to adversity: black and white photograph of two elderly men hugging in an airport loungeWe all have different responses to adversity, and none of them are “wrong”.

I write this post a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, sparked by the personal experience of an old friend, psychotherapist, and author Nancy Leach. She shared the following:

This was the journey

I thought I had successfully managed my emotional wellbeing through almost a year and a half separation from my daughter and grandson, who live in California. I was deeply sad at times, but phone calls, texting and FaceTime usually took the edge off and so I carried on. I was grateful that I and my Toronto family were safe and well, and that I not only love my husband but like him and enjoy his company. The addition of an 8-week-old puppy just before Christmas kept us both incredibly busy and provided many moments of unbridled joy.

Then there was an emergency in the extended California family and in response I hopped on a plane. Twelve hours and two flights later, my daughter and I fell into each other’s arms. I was not surprised to feel a tsunami of love and relief; I was well aware that I was suffering without physical proximity. But I expected the pain of the past year to resolve itself quickly. I’m someone who feels intensely, and I tend to mine feeling for insight, so I figured I was pretty-much in touch with my inner state.

It therefore took me by surprise, when a few days later we stopped on the road to talk over the fence with a neighbour. “You must be so happy to be together after all this time” said she. A lump suddenly appeared in my throat and tears came to my eyes. “How was it to be in airports?” she asked, to which I replied, “It was a little crazy, but I didn’t care…” Deep breath as I struggled to let the grief move through me. “I would have walked here.” Sheltered in the soft and deep silence of a redwood forest and in the company of the two I had missed so much, my very cells were releasing the cumulative sadness of more than a year.

It wasn’t until at least a week later that I felt I had fully “metabolized” the loss of a pandemic shutdown. My daughter is of very similar sensibility and often conceptualizes and better articulates an experience we share. She commented that it was almost as if she had been gaslighting herself, telling herself she was okay when she was not.

Of course, we need to “carry on” even when conditions are far from optimal. But I’m sharing this because I wonder how many of us have convinced ourselves that because no family member has been incapacitated with Covid or we haven’t lost our job or aren’t devastated at the impact on a vulnerable child we are doing okay. My “suffering” was but a small fraction of what so many people have endured, and I simply didn’t realize how much ground I had lost.

Well, what is ground but an illusion? The deeper message is one that is always with us, but we don’t always want to acknowledge. When we investigate the nuances of our suffering, we come face to face with the reality that any certainty we feel about life is an illusion. Throughout our lives, our hopes, dreams, plans, even parts of us that identify with a certain narrative or condition must die. In these small deaths is a reminder of the fragility of the “self” we have so painstakingly built over this lifetime – and the reality of the impermanence of all things.

We don’t like to be reminded of our death and despite the passing of each moment, sadness or joy, we cling to all vestiges of what seems to endure. But in the end, we cannot change the law of impermanence; we can only strive to make peace with it. As the worst of the pandemic restrictions ease, I hope I won’t be too quick to put that insight behind me.

This was the journey

“I thought I had successfully managed my emotional wellbeing through almost a year and a half separation from my daughter and grandson, who live in California. I was deeply sad at times, but phone calls, texting and FaceTime usually took the edge off and so I carried on. I was grateful that I and my Toronto family were safe and well, and that I not only love my husband but like him and enjoy his company. The addition of an 8-week-old puppy just before Christmas kept us both incredibly busy and provided many moments of unbridled joy.

Then there was an emergency in the extended California family and in response I hopped on a plane. Twelve hours and two flights later, my daughter and I fell into each other’s arms. I was not surprised to feel a tsunami of love and relief; I was well aware that I was suffering without physical proximity. But I expected the pain of the past year to resolve itself quickly. I’m someone who feels intensely, and I tend to mine feeling for insight, so I figured I was pretty-much in touch with my inner state.

It therefore took me by surprise, when a few days later we stopped on the road to talk over the fence with a neighbour. “You must be so happy to be together after all this time” said she. A lump suddenly appeared in my throat and tears came to my eyes. “How was it to be in airports?” she asked, to which I replied, “It was a little crazy, but I didn’t care…” Deep breath as I struggled to let the grief move through me. “I would have walked here.” Sheltered in the soft and deep silence of a redwood forest and in the company of the two I had missed so much, my very cells were releasing the cumulative sadness of more than a year.

It wasn’t until at least a week later that I felt I had fully “metabolized” the loss of a pandemic shutdown. My daughter is of very similar sensibility and often conceptualizes and better articulates an experience we share. She commented that it was almost as if she had been gaslighting herself, telling herself she was okay when she was not.

Of course, we need to “carry on” even when conditions are far from optimal. But I’m sharing this because I wonder how many of us have convinced ourselves that because no family member has been incapacitated with Covid or we haven’t lost our job or aren’t devastated at the impact on a vulnerable child we are doing okay. My “suffering” was but a small fraction of what so many people have endured, and I simply didn’t realize how much ground I had lost.

Well, what is ground but an illusion? The deeper message is one that is always with us, but we don’t always want to acknowledge. When we investigate the nuances of our suffering, we come face to face with the reality that any certainty we feel about life is an illusion. Throughout our lives, our hopes, dreams, plans, even parts of us that identify with a certain narrative or condition must die. In these small deaths is a reminder of the fragility of the “self” we have so painstakingly built over this lifetime – and the reality of the impermanence of all things.

We don’t like to be reminded of our death and despite the passing of each moment, sadness or joy, we cling to all vestiges of what seems to endure. But in the end, we cannot change the law of impermanence; we can only strive to make peace with it. As the worst of the pandemic restrictions ease, I hope I won’t be too quick to put that insight behind me.”

Responses to adversity

Nancy’s experience resonated with me. Over the previous couple of weeks, I’d noticed feeling sad in a way I couldn’t quite put my finger on. After all, I was about to be fully vaccinated, and the future of our pandemic-beset world seemed a little brighter. Why was I now feeling sadder than during much of 2020?

Nancy’s post helped me understand that I, too, had delayed getting fully in touch with how I had been feeling about the effects of the pandemic.

I shared Nancy’s post and my reaction with my wife, Celia. We had a good discussion that illuminated for me our different responses to adversity. Throughout our 50 years together, Celia tends to respond emotionally more in the moment. While I, like Nancy perhaps, tend to bottle up feelings to some extent until some triggering experience brings them up.

Different responses can strengthen a relationship

Interestingly, Celia and I find that our different responses to adversity strengthen our relationship.

How? Well, I am better able to support her when something upsetting happens and she feels upset right away. And she is in a better place to support me when I am eventually able to fully experience feelings I’ve denied for a while.

In my experience, people often process their experiences unconsciously over time. I certainly do, as I shared in It wasn’t the lobster. We are more likely to remember the moment when we become conscious of our processing than in the preceding weeks or months.

We all process experiences differently. There is no “right” or “wrong” way to do this, certainly regarding when we do the processing. Though, of course, if we never process a significant experience, its effect on our health and well-being may stay hidden, sometimes to our long-term detriment.

My response to Nancy

I wanted to thank Nancy and let her know how her post had affected me. Here’s what I wrote:

“Dear Nancy,

Thank you. You helped me focus on and understand better some of the sadness welling up in me recently. Like your daughter, I had been telling myself I was OK when I was not.

I read your eloquent post to Celia, and we talked about how each of us has different responses to adversity. She responds to it more as it happens, and sometimes feels guilty about sharing her feelings about it, while I am trying to reassure her (and, to some extent, myself). You and I are similar, perhaps, in telling ourselves “This too will pass” and, perhaps, only allowing ourselves to fully get in touch with how we feel if or when it seems a respite or a less fraught future is on the way.

I’m moved to write a post about dealing with adversity that quotes your piece. Would that be OK with you?”

To which Nancy replied:

“I’m touched that you were so moved and of course you may quote freely! As I’ve read through some of these responses it just affirms how much each of us is carrying, individually and ultimately as a culture or even a world. A lot to get one’s heart around!! Love to you both…”

Thank you Nancy for helping me, and letting me share what you wrote with others.

Readers, if the spirit moves you, check out the other comments on Nancy’s Facebook post.

Image attribution: Government Press Office (Israel)

Trust, safety, and learning at meetings

Trust safety learning: photograph of a young girl learning springboard diving at an outdoor pool by Jacob Lund from Noun ProjectIf people come to meetings to learn, how can we create the best environment for them to do so? It turns out that trust and safety are prerequisites for optimum learning at meetings. Let’s explore why.

How we learn at meetings

For over twenty years, we’ve known that adults learn 90% of what they need to know to do their job via informal learning. Only about 10% of adult learning involves formal classroom or meeting presentation formats.

Unfortunately, traditional conferences are poor places for this kind of learning to occur, since they’re filled with broadcast-style lectures, during which no interpersonal interaction takes place.

At well-designed meetings, however, participants have plenty of opportunities to engage with peers about topics that are personally important. The key learning modality at such meetings is peer learning.

Peer learning allows anyone to be a teacher and/or a student, with these roles switching from moment to moment. Potentially, everyone has something to contribute and learn. Peer conferences first uncover the content and issues people want to discuss. They then facilitate appropriate peer learning around topics of interest. My books and this blog provide plenty of information on how to do this.

Of course, in order for peer learning to occur, participants need to share what they know.

And this is where trust and safety issues impact learning.

The importance of trust

[A tip of the hat to Harold Jarche‘s post trust emerges over time, which provides the quotes for this section.]

Harold quotes philosophy professor Åsa Wikforss:

“It is important to stress that we are all connected through a complicated net of trust. It is not as if there is a group of people, the non-experts, who have to trust the experts and the experts do not have to trust anyone. Everyone needs to trust others since human knowledge is a joint effort…It is well known that low levels of trust in a society leads to corruption and conflict, but it is easy to forget the very central role that trust plays for knowledge. And knowledge, of course, is essential to the democratic society.
—Åsa Wikforss, Why do we resist knowledge?

Why people may not share their knowledge

Knowledge management author Stan Garfield shares sixteen reasons why people don’t share their knowledge. Here’s a key one:

“They don’t trust others. They are worried that sharing their knowledge will allow other people to be rewarded without giving credit or something in return, or result in the misuse of that knowledge.”
—Stan Garfield, 16 reasons why people don’t share their knowledge

So, when trust is absent, knowledge fails to flow. But when knowledge flow is stemmed, opportunities for trust are reduced. This is a positive feedback loop that guarantees low trust and knowledge sharing.

Trust safety learning

This breakdown of trust can happen anywhere. Between individuals, in organizations, and at a societal level. And it is easy for it to happen at meetings.

Designing for trust, safety, and learning

In general, the more meeting attendees trust each other, the safer they feel. The safer they feel, the more likely they are to share their knowledge.

So when I design and facilitate meetings, one of my most important goals is to provide a maximally safe environment for sharing. This maximizes the potential for consequential learning.

That’s why I:

  • introduce group agreements upfront, one of which has participants keep what individuals share confidential;
  • create an environment where it’s OK to make mistakes (or where mistakes are impossible);
  • provide ample opportunities for group discussions, rather than lectures, around appropriate content; and
  • give people the right to not participate at any time.

The last condition is important. An attendee’s level of trust and feeling of safety may vary from moment to moment during a meeting. Giving attendees the freedom (and responsibility) to decide not to participate and/or share at any time allows them to determine and control what is personally safe to do.

[For more on creating safety at events, see Chapter 17 of my book The Power of Participation.]

Image attribution: Young girl learning springboard diving at an outdoor pool by Jacob Lund from Noun Project

A life story exercise for groups

life story exercise: A blurred black-and-white photograph of a group of people standing apart from each other in a large hall.In 2005, I joined a men’s group. Eight of us get together for two hours every fortnight. One man chooses a topic and leads the meeting. A couple of months ago, Brent offered the following life story exercise via a preparatory email sent in advance.

The life story exercise

Please read this short bit about Nabokov from the New Yorker:

‘Butterflies have extraordinarily short life spans, and Nabokov seems particularly intrigued by this quality of ephemeral metamorphosis. As he considers the frailty of the natural world, Nabokov also delves into the brittle nature of memory—how some paths remain vivid in our minds and others are lost or hidden. Memory, he notes, can be elusive, like the fragile creatures he pursues. Often, the stories we tell ourselves about the past happen to be superficial ones—and there is another central story that lies underneath, waiting to emerge.’
Vladimir Nabokov’s “Butterflies”, The New Yorker, June 12, 1948

Can you tie together any memories of summer with this idea of Nabokov’s that “the stories we tell ourselves about the past happen to be superficial ones—and there is another central story that lies underneath, waiting to emerge?”

On reading the life story exercise, I immediately thought of my story “It Wasn’t the Lobster“. Though it took place twenty-five years ago, it seemed a perfect fit for Brent’s request. So that’s what I shared at the meeting.

What happened

To my surprise, other members also shared older stories. All the men in our group are over sixty years old, but we heard several childhood stories on a wide variety of topics. The exercise turned out to be unexpectedly and delightfully revealing.

We are the stories we tell about ourselves. We all enjoyed the evening and learned more about ourselves and each other.

If you meet in some kind of small peer group, try Brent’s exercise. Consider expanding it to any memories or stories of the past rather than a specific time period. Brent won’t mind…

Image attribution: Flickr user paolobarzman.