Creating Culture Change

Caroline Homfray and I worked together on an international away-day and these are her thoughts about it. The picture above is Caroline's work too.

It is hard to accept you don’t know how to listen, as an adult with plenty of life experience and knowledge. We all think we know how to communicate well, right? Imagine how much harder it is to accept that one might have something to learn about such a simple skill when you are a leader in your field, from one of the world leading institutes in an emerging science.

I love to tell people new to the Thinking Environment? about the recorded observation that the average time in daily life someone gets to speak without being interrupted is 30 seconds. If you get longer to think and verbalise your thoughts than that, you are lucky. Our patterns of communicating and listening are set by our culture; we rarely examine them. In many professional walks of life, the emphasis has been on getting yourself heard, learning to thrust forward in meetings and debate because that’s the only way you will stand out. Your personal success depends on it.

Shirley and I were invited to facilitate a round table of scientists, who were coming together for one day, from around the world, to generate ideas about collaboration between their institutes and industry, how to get funding, how to attract and retain talent. We asked for their co-operation with our method of attentive listening, based on the principles of everyone matters and everyone gets a turn.We know that it is an excellent way of generating lots of ideas in a short time.

It isn’t easy to impose a new culture in one day when people have had to learn to fight for their view to be heard, over years. It is hard to interrupt people and prevent them from speaking out of turn. It required some energy and reiteration of the principles to carry out the meetings. As they began to understand, and feel reassured that they were going to be heard, the atmosphere relaxed and the ideas flowed.

There was some astonishment about how many ideas we generated. Every delegate identified a concrete step to take to further their emergent field, and the final round created an uplifting energy of positivity, and a sense of moving forward as everyone in the room, in turn, and waiting for each other to finish, shared their next step and when they were going to start it. 30 ideas for moving forward.

Off they went, in a hubub of talk, to their conference opening ceeremony. I went home and had a long sleep.