February 2018 - Page 4 of 4

I am always on the lookout for useful mental models, protocols and habits to improve the quality of dialogue and I discovered this little acronym to improve participation.

W.A.I.T = Why Am I Talking?

One of my favourite maxims and something I wrote down when I started Dialogic Learning is to “Listen twice as much as you talk.” This is based on a quote by the Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus:

We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.

One of the strengths of this and the Why Am I Talking? protocol is that it encourages us to carefully reflect on what we are sharing and think about our thinking.

Any habits and protocols that encourage us to slow down a little are really valuable at improving the quality of our dialogue and discussion.

It was hard to find the original attribution for the idea but I did come across some useful questions that you can use to elaborate further.

Questions for Reflection

The following is from a post on the The Power of TED* website.

Am I talking for approval and to be overly helpful? (Rescuer)
Am I talking to control and take charge of the situation? (Persecutor)
Am I talking to complain and whine about all I don’t like? (Victim)
What is my intention behind what I am about to say?
Is there a question I could ask that would help me better understand what the other person is saying and perceiving?
How might I simply listen and let go of my urge to talk at this moment?

Perry Holley posted last year about the WAIT habit encouraging us to ask the following questions:

Is this the time to share? Is what I want to share on the topic? Don’t divert the conversation away from what they are speaking about just because “that reminds me of a time when…”
Is it my turn to share? Are you mastering the pause?
Is what I want to share going to add to or subtract from what they are sharing? The temptation here is to divert the conversation from them to you.
If you do interject, be concise. Add value and then shut up.

Strategies to Try

Perry goes on to share a few other strategies which I have come across before and are well worth including in the mix. His titles in bold, but my explanations:

Dare to be Dumb – This is all about asking questions and being open to new ideas. Often a dialogue or discussion can falter because we halt, cut down or stomp all over other people’s ideas. When we ask questions we are also much more likely to challenge assumptions in a group setting. Our curiosity should be a guide.
Master the Pause – This one reminds me of running interviews during design thinking processes and also during coaching sessions. Just because it is quiet does not mean we are not thinking or engaged. Every second does not need to be filled with talk. Pausing allows others to extend their stories and contributions and sometimes reveal new ideas. Also pauses and lower volume time encourages reflection and thinking.
Don’t top someone’s story – My favourite. I have been a victim of this so many times. The other person is simply waiting for their chance to speak. This is the antithesis of high-quality participation and nowhere close to a behaviour associated with rich dialogue. Story topping is the closest thing to competitive conversation.

Why Am I Talking Chart

If an acronym is not enough then here is a handy flow chart to keep us straight from Alan O’Rourke over at AudienceStack.

When I just reviewed those questions above I wondered if you can practically be referencing those in the midst of your interactions with others? I suppose you could be but it might slow things down too much and reduce everything to an internal reflection process.

However, these structures and protocols are not meant to be explicitly used ad infinitum – I have seen groups internalise and normalise similar structures over time and with practice. That is the goal here – to have high-quality dialogue and discussion by normalising reflective participation.

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Strategy has been a key area of my work over the last 12 months. Planning and developing it, reviewing and critiquing it. I know this year will be the same. I stumbled upon the work of Freek Vermeulen on strategy and I want to share a few key provocations with you that resonated with me.

Your organisation’s strategy might be called something different – in education, these are typically

School Improvement Plans
Annual Improvement Plans
Strategic Improvement Plans

You get the idea. Anything that is laying out goals, actions and strategies for the future of your school or organisation is ripe for this critique.

If you are one of my school partners, watch out! We will be using these provocations and ideas to explore your plans for 2018 and beyond.

Freek Vermeulen has 5 provocations for critiquing strategy documents, or as he puts it:

Let me present you with five such common excuses for a strategy or, put differently, five examples of why the things on the PowerPoint are not strategy.

Are you really making choices?

Straight of the bat, this is my favourite of the five. It forces us to carefully consider what it is we are choosing as a result of the strategy. Or do your plans just include everything? “We are focusing on everything”, means you are focusing on nothing.

I enjoy the fact that strategy is seen by Vermeulen as a choice about what to do, and what not to do. Of course, this reminds me of the Pareto Principle and how we should know what has the highest impact. I am looking forward to having conversations with teams about what they have chosen not to do!

Or do you just stick to what you were doing anyway…?

An extension of not making choices is that you write a strategic plan that just describes what you are already doing. The mental model of Path Dependency is a good one to learn about here because it refers to a bias towards past events.

We have issues about letting go of past programmes and we tend to collect and compress new ideas. When previous commitments have been made we err on the side of historical preference. This means that strategy documents, like the ones you have where you work, just describe what is already happening.

more often than not, strategies adapted to what you were doing anyway results in some vague, amorphous statement that would have been better off in a beginners’ class on esoteric poetry, because it is meaningless and does not imply any real choice.

Your choices have no relationship with value creation (you’re in “The Matrix”)

Again the emphasis here on high value or high impact strategies. Everything you are choosing to implement needs to be closely related to the change you desire.

In schools this is all about improving the learning experience for students, ultimately improving learning. If an idea or programme does not relate to creating value why are we doing it?

Without a proper rationalisation of why your choices are going to help you create value, I cannot call it a strategy.

You mistake objectives for strategy

This is a really common issue that makes reading organisation-wide plans and documentation quite a challenge. Put simply an objective or goal describes a future state you are aiming for. A strategy is how you will get there.

Objectives typically have something that you can measure. You might use SMART goals to help craft them effectively. Objectives should be

Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Realistic
Time-bound

An example objective from my business this year is:

3 new long term partnerships in Melbourne / VIC by the end of 2018.

You can see it is quite specific and time-bound, despite it being a long period of time it is realistic and achievable (I hope!)

One of my strategies for how I might achieve this is to:

Speak at local events

Pretty straight forward. But surprisingly we often get all these things muddled.

You need an idea and a rationale – a strategy – of how you are going to achieve all this. Without it, they [objectives] are an aspiration, but certainly not a strategy.

Nobody knows about it

Who normally writes your strategic improvement plan? Who checks and critiques it? Normally this group can be quite small – typically the leadership team, plus outside consultants, might craft the plan.

But what good is a great strategic plan if nobody in the organisation knows about it!? What goes hand in hand with the imperative to make a strategic plan accessible is the language used. Too verbose or nuanced and it becomes a barrier for others to access.

This is a nice example from Oakleigh State School who have created an infographic for their plan – and I can imagine that this makes it much more accessible to a wider audience.

I always remember strategic plans just being a box to tick when I first started experiencing them as a subject coordinator. If they are accessible and written in an open jargon free way they should be actively used throughout your work. They shouldn’t just be a box to tick or to fill a folder.

Ultimately this is about changing something and how your strategy impacts on the day to day behaviour of those in your organisation. I will leave you with this final provocation from Freek Vermeulen about this:

A strategy is only really a strategy if people in the organisation alter their behaviour as a result of it.

There you go five great provocations to help you improve your strategic planning

#28daysofwriting

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Month: February 2018

Why Am I Talking?