The brainstorming session was going full tilt; the CEO was participating on one of the teams, and they were considering the question “What should we stop doing”? It’s a sneaky, consultant-style question, and to give credit where it’s due, he was participating in the spirit of the affair. So when the CEO suggested: “stop spending”, nobody batted an eyelid, and the facilitator wrote the suggestion down; the brainstorming rule of ‘list first, edit later’ was in play.
The teams finished listing and edited their lists; who knows why ‘stop spending’ made it through to their short list? Maybe it was because the CEO suggested it, perhaps each team member found their own way to rationalise it - maybe both. Clearly ‘stop spending’, taken at face value, has the near-term consequence: ‘go out of business’. If you’ve ever seen a business mess up their procure-to-pay process, you’ll get some idea what ‘stop spending’ means – within months, the business will grind to a halt. ‘Stop spending’ means ‘no supplies’, ‘no marketing’, ‘no travel’, ‘no expenses’ and ‘no salaries’, and it would have the same effect – but dramatically quicker!
We gathered the teams for the feedback session, and when the CEO’s team proposed this suggestion, the workshop descended into confusion. The consultants tried to qualify the statement: “Stop unnecessary spending”, they tried…“Stop discretional spending”, they suggested…“Stop non-direct spending”, they proposed. The roar from the CEO came from the back of the room: “You see, everybody puts words into my mouth! I said ‘stop spending’, and that’s what I mean!”
Let’s be charitable and assume the CEO was making his points intentionally:
One principle of brainstorming is that you should list first and edit later; this helps to include creative, off-the-wall, ideas into the mix, and to stimulate further ideas – in this context ‘stop spending’ was perfectly acceptable. Of course it should never have survived the editing process, and perhaps it exposes another problem of group work – the absence of cogitative, reflective thought that can occur, where all members of the group rely on each other. (Perhaps it also reveals how politics exists in all organisations.)
This anecdote also shows how hard accurate communication is: People often discount, or re-interpret things that don’t fit into their own expectations; the primary function of our neural networks, the structures in our brains, is pattern matching. The difference between language’s ‘surface meaning’ and ‘deep meaning’ allows this confusion: deletions, distortions and generalisations being the primary culprits; assumptions created by the need to fill-in deletions and generalisations being the other major culprit. In our time-constrained world, everyone uses these three linguistic tools in order to be efficient, or in meetings, to gain a share of the voice, but often the results are the opposite! They lead to loose communication, and loose communications allow easy pattern matching to fill-in the blanks…and our pattern matching is correct frequently enough to easily fool us into believing that it’s correct all the time.
The solution, we’re told, is to communicate at the level of the audience – which implies, to some extent, that mind-reading is possible. But of course we read minds all the time: When people speak, they also observe their audience to understand whether their messages are received and understood, and responded-to - some more than others; this is the key skill of the excellent communicator: Know your audience, and seek active feedback.
— Philip Greenwood
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