I make my living helping people make sense of complicated, complex, and often contentious stuff. Yet, of all the presentations, workshops and coaching I’ve done, one exercise stands above them all.
I call it Talking to Humans.
It’s a deceptively simple premise that is surprisingly difficult to practise.
It goes something like this.
- Think of an idea or a question you want answered.
- Go find three people.
- Ask their opinion of your idea or question.
- Listen to their answer.
- And now here’s the tricky part, regardless of what they say, follow up by saying, ‘Huh, tell me more.’
- Listen to what else they say.
- Repeat steps 5 and 6 at least two more times.
That’s it. Ask a question, listen, and follow up with, ‘Huh, tell me more.’
This simple exchange sits at the heart of how humans learn, and when we practise it, we get better at learning how to process and use that information.
But how do we practise civil exchange in an increasingly uncivil world?
With great difficulty.
We have fallen out of practice with the skill of listening to understand another person’s point of view.
Instead, we listen for a chance to offer our perspective, interject our pearls of wisdom, fact-check the speaker, or offer a counterpoint.
If we’re honest with ourselves, we are masters of the ‘Yeah, but…’, even though we all hate it when it happens to us.
It’s annoying when it happens in a conversation, but when we scale it, the real problems begin.
Amidst all the Silicon Valley-inspired rhetoric about world-changing technological innovations, the digital network is the one piece of technology that has lived up to the hype. Like Gutenberg’s printing press and Marconi’s telegraph, digital networks have irrevocably changed how we communicate and, in the process, have changed us too.
On the one hand, it’s given us access to so much information and connections that we’ve been able to do more with the stuff we like, but it’s also exposed us to a lot of information and perspectives we don’t like and that exposure has hardened our opinions.
Before digital networks and the Internet, talking to humans was decidedly easier.
Pre-Internet, we were limited by geography, which meant we tended to communicate with people in our communities and places of business. So while we had our disagreements, we generally could agree to a basic shared set of values and cultural norms.
Digital networks changed that, bringing a world of perspectives into our lives and, in the process, causing information overload.
Some days it’s hard to know what to think, and we don’t like that.
So, we’ve naturally retreated, preferring to hang out with people who don’t challenge our perspectives and biases.
It’s the certainty we crave in a time of great uncertainty.
Unfortunately, we can’t stay here.
It’s tempting to look around at all these conflicting perspectives and real-world conflicts and tell whoever is in charge to call us when it’s over, but the problem is we’d be talking to ourselves.
Network technologies have handed power to the people, and we are unsure how to use these new tools and the flood of information they have released.
Success will come to organizations and places that can share information that broadens our perspectives, reframes our problems and lets us see the whole picture.
Only then will we be able to develop the creative new approaches, processes, products, services, and policies we require.
It’s a lot to think about, and we’ve got some learning to do.
Huh, tell me more.
