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Make your next meeting a Silent Meeting
What's the matter with meetings?
We ask this question at the beginning of our 'Mastering Meetings' workshop (you can book into a coming one here). Two of the most common responses are 'dominant voices are always heard' and 'more junior colleagues are less likely to speak up'. There's a bigger idea at work here - the concept of 'anchoring' — meaning we often group, and create momentum, around the idea we hear first; an idea quite likely to have been contributed by someone more confident or senior.
Facilitator Daniel Stillman (who also wrote this excellent book on 'designing conversations') calls this 'first speaker syndrome', and has pointed out some unhelpful consequences of it.
"When someone shares their first thoughts and opinions on a particular idea, we frame what we say next based on a response to what the first person said. We agree or we don’t. We offer a “Yes and…” or a “No, but…”"
"One person’s opinion can easily (and quickly) send us off into a tangent or in a certain direction. What about all the other good ideas that are suddenly pushed off the table to explore the first person’s tangent? First Speaker Syndrome doesn’t always let us explore the best ideas, just the ones that were brought up first."
"Speaking up in a meeting can be hard. Extroverts have had more practice. Introverts are often more reserved, calculating their thoughts while the discussion rages on. The problem is: there’s no diversity of thought if we’re always listening to the people who are always talking."
"We think too fast. Researchers have clocked inner speech at a pace of 4,000 words per minute — which is about 10 times faster than verbal speech. That kind of inner speed means that most of us can’t possibly be listening to everything someone else is saying…we’re already thinking about what we could say next."
Could silence be the answer?
Daniel invites us to consider, "What if there was a better way to meet? What if we didn’t talk at all? What if the meeting was actually…silent?"
And this doesn't mean sitting silently on Zoom or in the meeting room for 45 minutes — there's a format that packs some serious purpose, and is already pretty proven with big businesses.
A silent meeting offers a structure that encourages reading, writing, thinking and considering ideas with an equal amount of participation before sharing conversationally in a group. The idea is that all minds will be mined, everyone will feel engaged and more inclusive participation will have been achieved.
Giving it a go
We know it can feel a big leap to move from a conventional (albeit possibly dysfunctional) style to meetings to something that feels quite unorthodox to implement. But if you frame this to the team as something to try in the spirit of greater inclusion and better output, you'll be surprised by an enthusiastic response. After all, we all know deep down that we're not doing meetings as well as we might.
Here are simplified steps to follow if you're up for experimenting with a silent meeting, and to get the feel for its impact.
Whoever is leading the meeting (that's likely you in this instance) will share a document that summarises the core of what's to be discussed. This can work well as a G Doc or a Miro/Mural board. And this should be on individual screens, even if you're all in the same room together.
While reading this shared doc, add in comments notes and builds in writing. Remember you're still in the silent reading part. You should allocate up to 15 minutes for this opening bit.
As the meeting lead, you can now facilitate conversation around what's been read and added to the doc — confident in the knowledge that everyone has taken in the same information, and able to ask people individually to build on the notes and comments they've added.
Keen to dig deeper?
• Lots has been written about the power of the Silent Meeting, and there are far more ambitious formats that you can play with too.
• Our Mastering Meetings workshop is a great experimental place to pick up tools and tactics, like this one, to take away and try among your teams.
• Keen for more participatory meetings? Why not try Round Robin Brainstorms next?