Brain food: Speaking last and the human need for collaboration
Welcome to this week's brain food. These editions aim to be short and easy to digest pieces that enrich your work and life with simple ideas and principles.
Consistent tiny progress beats erratic perfection
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2023 year progress: 11% complete
Speaking last
During a coaching session, someone asked, how they can contribute succinctly when we're exploring complex ideas and solutions in group discussions, and wanted to know what's helped me with that specific skill. I didn't really consider this before, and when I thought more deeply about it, I realised that it's the principle of speaking last.
In most discussions, people tend to want to be heard over providing real value. Speaking last means:
- Absorbing what everyone has to say: Everyone has different perspectives, experience, and knowledge. By taking in all view points, you have more information to digest and make sense of. Jot down notes as the discussion progresses. Not to look at after, but to help you grasp it all in the moment.
- Filling the gaps and distilling themes: With everyone's point of view in mind, you have an opportunity to fill the gaps in what has been said to create a more complete picture and mental model for the group. This also allows you to find themes within the shared body of information.
- Finding patterns to and relating past experience and/or knowledge: With a complete mental model and the identification of themes, you can relate the information with your personal experience and knowledge to contribute insights, and usually powerful action points and next steps.
Speaking last is a simple and powerful technique that will help you bring value to discussions and earn credibility over spewing empty words. Practice it in small increments instead of trying to perfect it at once.
This principle and many more has helped me create Interacts, to make everyone an exceptional facilitator, teacher, and leader. More about this at the end of this update.
Collaboration is intelligence
Learning about where we came from can shape our minds to help us get to where we want to go. As a human race, why do we cooperate over being lone wolves? What do you think collaboration will look like 100 years from now?
Download the full "Ideas everyone should know" eBook here.
I hope you enjoyed and was enriched by this edition!
Try my apps
I'm dedicated to building solutions that make people more productive and happy. I'd love it if you tried my apps, and appreciate any feedback you have! You can email me here.
Interacts: A remote and hybrid collaboration tool for engaging workshops, retrospectives, team building and more – InteractsApp.com
FancyGPT: A Chrome extension to save and share beautiful ChatGPT snippets as images, searchable PDFs, and text files – FancyGPT.com
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