Ember: Courage
There are meetings where everybody contributes, the agenda is covered and the conversation appears perfectly constructive. And yet something important is missing.
Perhaps everyone knows the proposed timetable is unrealistic. There is a concern about a decision that nobody quite wants to voice. Two people disagree but carefully talk around the disagreement. Or the person with the most authority has expressed a view early and the rest of the conversation quietly rearranges itself around it.
Nobody is necessarily being dishonest. Often, people are doing something much more ordinary: working out what is safe, useful or appropriate to say in this particular room.
For me, this is where facilitation becomes interesting.
Listening for what isn’t being said.
When I facilitate a board or leadership team, I’m obviously listening to what people say. But I’m also paying attention to the conversation itself.
Who speaks first? Who hasn’t spoken? Which subjects generate energy and which make the room go strangely flat? What gets joked away? Where does someone start to say something and then retreat? What does everybody seem to know without anybody actually naming it?
Sometimes the most useful intervention isn’t another question about the agenda. It’s helping the group notice what’s happening while they’re having the conversation.
There are different ways of understanding what makes it easier, or harder, for people to speak.
Chris Argyris
He found a gap between the openness leaders say they value and how they actually behaved in important meetings.
Amy Edmondson
Her work on psychological safety helps us understand why capable people sometimes choose not to speak.
Nancy Kline
Her Thinking Environment puts attention and equality at the heart of better thinking.
Different traditions, but there is a common thread: the quality of a conversation isn’t simply about what people have to say. It is also shaped by the conditions in which they are being asked to say it.
The facilitator can’t manufacture courage.
My job isn’t to force people to be brave. It’s to make the conversation that needs to happen a little more possible.
Sometimes that means slowing things down. Sometimes it means asking the person who has spoken least what they’re noticing. Sometimes it’s reflecting an observation back to the room: “We’ve talked quite a lot about the benefits. I notice we’ve said very little about what might make this fail.”
And sometimes it means allowing silence to last a few seconds longer than feels comfortable.
The point isn’t to create disagreement for its own sake. It’s to help the group have more of the conversation it actually needs to have.
Something to try.
At your next important meeting, resist the urge to improve the conversation straight away. For ten minutes, just notice it.
- What is being said?
- What isn’t being said?
- What seems to be difficult to say here?
Then experiment with one small intervention. You might ask:
What haven’t we talked about that might matter?
And then resist the temptation to fill the silence. See what happens.
About this Ember.
Courage
Courage in a meeting doesn’t always look dramatic.
It might be saying:
I’m not sure I agree. There’s something here we haven’t talked about. Can we go back to that? I don’t know.
Or simply asking the question everyone else has decided not to ask.
Sometimes a single word is enough to shift how we enter a conversation. Courage might be the Ember you need today. Or perhaps another word will open up something different.
Take one with you. Turn it over for a while. Notice what it brings to mind, and what changes when you carry it into the next conversation.