305: Silence Ain’t Always Golden

Dear Friends
 
I love silence. The Karoo’s stillness. Early morning Okavango broken by a Fish Eagle’s call. I wake most days at 05h00. Frequently, I’ll wake at 03h00 to listen to the ocean breathe. I love silence.

Yet silence can be catastrophic, personally and professionally. Post-disaster assessments frequently uncover that people spoke up but weren’t heard. As companies flounder, surpassed by new technologies, we discover they had invented the technologies years before, but their people weren’t heard. Relationship expert John Gottman identifies stonewalling as one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – the things that, if present, predict divorce. The New York Times tells us The Silent Treatment is Ruining Your Relationship. Silence is not always golden.
 
/strategy
If you read only one strategy book in your life, make it A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin’s Playing to Win. Read it once a year.  Playing to Win tells the story of how Lafley turned P&G around and makes visible the processes by which he (with Martin’s coaching and advice) did so.

Central to their success was the creation of a culture committed to strategic dialogue. They knew that strategy can never be a once-off event. Strategy must be constantly revisited and shaped based on learning from the actions taken in the organisation. Read that sentence again: strategy; revisit; constantly; learning; action. They’re an ecosystem.

In Lafley and Martin’s words: “We wanted to create useful dialogue in place of a one-way, bulletproof presentation. Instead of burying the issues, we wanted to talk about them openly… to create a framework of what a strategy discussion is and isn’t. A strategy discussion is not an idea review. A strategy discussion is not a budget or a forecast review. A strategy discussion is how we are going to accomplish our growth objectives in the next three to five years. We really wanted to engage in a discussion.”

Drawing on the work of organizational learning theorist Chris Argyris, they aimed to create a culture of appreciative inquiry which, “… blends the explicit expression of your own thinking (advocacy) with a sincere exploration of the thinking of others (inquiry). In other words, it means clearly articulating your own ideas and sharing the data and reasoning behind them, while genuinely inquiring into the thoughts and reasoning of your peers. To do this effectively, individuals need to embrace a particular stance about their role in a discussion. The stance we tried to instill at P&G was a reasonably straightforward but traditionally underused one: ‘I have a view worth hearing, but I may be missing something.’ It sounds simple, but this stance has a dramatic effect on group behavior if everyone in the room holds it. Individuals try to explain their own thinking — because they do have a view worth hearing”.

Amazingly simple: I will prepare and advocate for my position. I accept that I may not have, probably won’t have, indeed cannot ever have, the full picture, so I will listen intently, learn and adjust.

Get that right and strategy stops being a two-day event. Get that right and every day offers the opportunity for strategic learning and action-enabled adjustment.

(If you want to get into the detail of how they did it, read Chapter Six: Manage What Matters. These letters explore other aspects of their work).

//self
Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀’s 2017 extraordinary debut novel Stay With Me tells the story of a marriage’s tragic collapse. Her protagonist Yejide reflects, “But the biggest lies are often the ones we tell ourselves. I bit my tongue because I did not want to ask questions. I did not ask questions because I did not want to know the answers.”

We may think it’s obvious: if we want to know something, we ask. Except we don’t.  

///soul
I’ve occasionally wished I’d studied literature in some form, but reading the reviews of Ben Lerner’s Transcription, I am pleased I haven’t. I’d never heard of Lerner before reading this book. I have no view on the novel, its form, what it should or shouldn’t be, whether it is dead or alive. I like them; that’s enough for me. And, for Lerner’s book, that was more than enough.

Yes, he does a great job of bringing alive the insidious nature of technology, the ways in which we’ve all developed default tics around phones and tablets, but that wasn’t what I found most important.

Most important, for me, are the ways in which we seek and fail to understand each other.
At a point, the narrator’s mentor, Thomas, says to him, “The question is” Do we have ears to hear?” … There is listening beyond the cochlea, yes?”

In the moment, he is speaking about music and also the fact that, among other creatures, we can’t hear bats and elephants conversing – “The air is alive with messages”, messages we don’t even know we’re missing.

Colleagues misunderstand each other. One tells a story with what he thinks is transparency and humility. Others hear disregard and contempt. He, in turn, does not hear them. Nothing resolves, except relationships fray and in the silence, mistrust deepens.

Lerner leaves us with loss; relationships diminished by lack of listening.

Thomas spends time with son Max. Max, a father and adult, acts out – rebelling against childhood hurts, finding petty ways to fight his father, because beneath is a conversation not had.

COVID nearly kills Thomas, and as he hovers on life’s edge, Max finds the words to explain, to connect, to seek healing. He says it all. Thomas recovers. He doesn’t remember Max’s words, and Max can’t say them again.

It is a tragedy that, I think, transcends our generation and our technologies, that the conversations we need to have are excruciatingly hard to initiate; sometimes we don’t even know that we want to have them, we act in ways we don’t understand,  and then even when we understand and when we do find the courage, they can get caught in the brambles of ancient hurts and contemporary codes, and we retreat in fear and confusion and protection, so we never really hear, and never get to live on the other side of connection.

Speaking, it turns out, takes courage. So too does listening.
 
With love,
 
Karl
PS: If this is your first time reading, you can subscribe here. If you’d like to learn more about me as an advisor and coach, click here or follow me on LinkedIn.