I will set the stage. You are in a large group, talking about a subject about which you consider yourself well informed. Someone lays out a hypothetical scenario, turns to you, and asks, “What would you do next?” You freeze.
It’s not nerves, per se—you don’t have stage fright. It’s just a feeling that, with everyone looking at you, you don’t want to say the wrong thing. Suddenly, the knowledge you were so confident in seconds ago seems rather dubious. Are you sure you have all the facts? As you pause, not even ready to stammer uncomfortably, someone else jumps in, confidently making the same points you would have (although, truth to be told, you would have put it much better). The group nods in agreement, and the discussion flows on.
Frustrating, because perhaps you now realize that you knew the “right” answer all along. But you aren’t alone. I often present workshops with people who are incredibly expert in their subjects. I toss hypothetical scenarios out for discussion, setting up a basic situation (e.g., roommate one is disturbed by roommate two’s total disregard of quiet hours), and ask, “How could roommate one share their concerns?” or something similar, and get silence in return.
I think that two things stop people from speaking up in these situations. First is the tendency some have to assume that others know more than them; this is a (just) slightly less harmful version of imposter syndrome that, too often, deprives us of wonderful insights from intelligent people. The second is the basic fear of saying the wrong thing, or at least saying something that others interpret as the wrong thing.
The antidote to the first conversation-stopper must, I think, come from within, through either positive or negative inferences. The first is more self-assured: “Because I have know a great deal about this, I can surely speak my mind.” The second requires less self-confidence but, perhaps, a realistic assessment of your peers: “I know I’m not going to say anything as dumb as that!”
Taking either of those two routes, one can have the sufficient confidence (or disdain) to speak assertively.
The second conversation-stopper is harder to get around, simply because most of us have been conditioned to dread few things more than being found out to be a fraud. There’s a reason that the saying “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt” (which, apparently, neither Abraham Lincoln nor Mark Twain originated) has the ring of truth: it speaks to that gnawing fear that we are going to make a fool of ourselves.
So my facilitating/workshopping and even ombudsing method to cut through the Gordian knot of self-doubt is to make saying the wrong thing the whole point.
Scenario one: I’m at a workshop, and I have just sketched the hypothetical mentioned above (quiet-hours crossed roommates heading for conflict). The crowd seems a bit skittish. Instead of asking “What’s the right thing to do next?” I might ask, “What wouldn’t work here? Like, what is absolutely the worst way to respond?” That usually breaks the ice, because now no one is afraid of saying the wrong thing, since that’s it’s now actually the right thing. And it helps that wrong things are usually so far outside our social norms that they get a good laugh. Once we’ve gotten a few wrong things out of the way, we can focus on some right things. Now that the tension is broken, people are usually quite voluble.
Scenario two: Someone has come to the ombuds office to discuss an interpersonal conflict. After they share their issue and we’ve discussed the outcome they would like, I might ask, “What could you do to get to that outcome?” When someone says that they have no idea, I usually counter with, “Well, could you do that wouldn’t get you there?” From here, we can move into exploring better options: “So if those are out, what’s next?”
I can’t guarantee one way to start a productive discussion about options, but I can offer one method that will prevent anyone but the most self-confident (and possibly least-informed) from speaking up: asking “What should be done here?” The word should locks us into a process of evaluating all possibilities and determining which single one is optimal on either moral or pragmatic grounds. In other words, asking us to make a firm commitment.
Asking what could be done, by contrast, opens up universes—no, make that multiverses—of possibilities, where anything can happen. I’m too focused at the moment to link to “Pure Imagination,” but hopefully you can use your own fertile imagination to imagine that it’s our soundtrack for the moment. There is a ton of power and potential in asking “What if?” without any limits.
That being said, queuing a conversation with “What could we do?” is a great start, but to really overcome residual diffidence, framing it in the opposite way: “What absolutely wouldn’t work here?” can start the volcano percolating (yes, I’m aware that volcanos don’t, strictly speaking, percolate, but I think you get my drift), leading to an engaging discussion.
It is said that we can learn as much from failures as we can from successes. If that is the case, why not spark learning by drawing on ideas that are sure to fail? If nothing else, soliciting bad ideas gives us some room to laugh, perhaps loosening us up and making it easier for new connections and insights to be made.
We can even use the “wrong answers first” idea when we are by ourselves to deduce (or is in induce?) our way out of a jam. “When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth,” Arthur Conan Dolye said through Sherlock Holmes,” and one doesn’t need a deerstalker cap to see where I’m going with this: by crossing off all those ways we shouldn’t proceed, we are one step closer to imagining ways that we might move forward. Starting out wrong can be equally fun in groups or while alone.
So until next time, expect the unexpected, stay informed, and I’ll stay informal.
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