When I’m asked to work with a group on their shared problem, a problem so difficult that they seek outside help, the common next question is: “Should we gather in a meeting to talk about it?” I’ve learned to respond with: “Yes, at some point. First, let’s have a slow meeting.”
Have you felt the tension of meeting-calculus, the hurry to understand and to be understood? Let’s do the calculus of meetings; let’s discover the source of our tensions. Imagine this scenario:
Our problem is important, impactful, with complex details. Ten of us gather around one table. Each of us brings our personal stories. Every person’s story intersects in a relationship dance with each other’s story, 45 pairs of relationships among ten people, and each story intersects with the problem we’ve come to resolve. We dedicate two hours to our meeting; twenty valuable person-hours in total. We’ve waited a week for our negotiated, common, meeting time. If everyone speaks once, each has twelve minutes to make their case and respond to any questions. If when each of us speaks, each of the others asks one question, 90 questions will need response. Do you feel it now; the tension of hurry, the confinement of meetings?
The complexity grows quickly. If twenty gather, there are 190 pairs of relationships in the room. I’ve never been in a group larger than three people, including groups who have worked together for several years, where every person had engaged in focused one-on-one conversation with each of the others for two or more uninterrupted hours. Yet, we gather in large groups to “hear each other out”. It’s an unwittingly tragic formula for stress and distress, a hurry to hear and be heard sans the time to speak, to think, to care.
With each shared problem comes a hidden and deeper meta-problem; the problem and opportunity to build community around our shared problem through resolving mutual trust. We resolve trust when we grow confidence that each of us wants to mutually meet the needs of the other, that each of us is interested in hearing the other’s needs and feels motivated to discover mutual resolutions. I believe trust resolution is the invisible glue of community. We gain it in the process of co-creation of a shared story. As we create and contribute to the shared story we mutually meet our communal needs.
Community creation, our shared story co-creation, is thwarted by meeting calculus. It’s difficult to listen before we’ve been heard; it can be physically painful to listen when we’ve spoken and still feel unheard; and it’s difficult to hear the unexpected, especially when it’s also inconvenient. The calculus of meeting tensions overwhelms our needs to hear and be heard.
When I’m asked to work with a group on an important problem, I start with a slow meeting. I talk individually with each person. Each person invests two hours or more, a similar amount of time required by each in a group meeting, and each is deeply heard in the context of their shared problem. When I do this, I see myself as a surrogate listener for each of the other participants. As surrogate listener, I listen deeply and synthesize the input into an accumulated shared story that I pass along, and share with everyone after all have contributed.
It helps when the surrogate listener is an interested outsider, where their investment is in the mutual hearing, in the communication, rather than in a specific outcome. Deeply and accurately listening is much more difficult when we feel the potential threat of specific outcomes, when we are in, or feel responsible for, the problem.
When I listen with each member, I reflect what I hear in my own words to check that I’m hearing both their content and their heart. I gather their contributions: their story about how we got here, about where we are, and about where we would like to go. Only after each has been heard, we gather to discuss the accumulated shared story.
Often, a partial second round of one-on-one discussions is needed to work through some of the more difficult details, and then another group gathering. Usually, this is enough to create the connection and momentum to resolve the more difficult parts of the problem.
Shared understanding is most of the resolution; it brings critical awareness to the problem, it creates community around the problem. When successful, each person can describe the space, each can convey the shared context, mutual desires, mutual challenges, and how each person’s needs are reflected. When successful, the needs in each personal story are in some important way met by the shared story. The successful shared story resolves needs from individuals’ stories with the shared story.
Our problems are opportunities to form community, and community is the only meaningful way to mutually resolve problems. Our fast meeting strategy is born from our kind intent to hear, and it tragically undermines this kind intent. A slow meeting is an offering of trust resolution, a mutual investment in our kind intent to hear, and to be heard.