What to do when everyone's eyebrows are glowing

Photo by Suzy Hazelwood.

Last week, we were keynoting at a tech conference. They initially asked if we wanted to facilitate a fireside chat with just the two of us. Married co-founders can go one of two ways in that setting. Either we agree on everything and it makes for a dreadfully boring discussion. Or we don't agree but are then processing that in real time and that's just awkward for everyone involved. We said absolutely not.

Can we do something a bit different? Are you open to something more interactive?

These days, no one wants to sit through a 60-minute keynote. And, to be totally honest, no speaker wants to stare out at a room of glowing eyebrows while the audience responds to their work email. It's the in-person equivalent of speaking to a zoom grid of black boxes. Blerg.

We finally settled on a format. They would give us 15 minutes on stage. And we could do whatever we wanted, provided we stuck to the theme of the program. Credit to the organizing team, they were on board with us getting creative. And we were elated.

There's not enough room to go into the specifics of the talk here. But the important part is that for fully a third of our time on stage, we had the audience talking to each other.

After we wrapped, we headed for the doors to get some fresh air. On our way out, an alum stopped us to say hi and offer some very kind words about the talk. And then they paused.

"Wait, but how did you know they would play along?"

Oh. There's a trick to it, we said. It goes something like this...

Zero people attending a talk want the talk to be bad. For self-interest as much as anything. And zero speakers want their talk to be bad. For self-interest as much as anything. But that fear causes most speakers to conclude that they shouldn't take risks. Because if it flops, that will be mortifying. And without any risk, a lot of talks sounds like, well, every other talk at the event.

Nearly every audience is rooting for the person on stage. Those folks have already given up their time, the most valuable and scarce resource for busy professionals. And most people who show up at a conference, to some degree, want to meet and connect with other people. Which means they will generally play along if given the opportunity. They don't want to be bored any more than you want to be boring. And, suddenly, you've got loads of permission to build a different kind of keynote.

It turns out, this isn't just true for keynotes and conferences. It's true for every aspect of work where you need to rebuild connection.

Welcome to your new job

Ask anyone working retail, or food service, or a reception desk. People are coming in wild right now. A lot of folks have had their dials messed with in the last few years — like their brain is a rental car, the last driver fucked up the audio settings, and the small-talk button is jammed. For some of us, the small-talk button has never really worked properly, to be honest. But even still, things are stranger now.

And it's one thing to be, like, unspeakably awkward bumping into a neighbour at the grocery store. Sure, you said, "FINE THANK YOU!" slightly too loudly after they said "Hi." That's weird, but recoverable. But at work it feels like the awkwardness is higher to begin with, and the stakes of tragic weirdness feel higher, too. A lot of people just aren't taking the risk. They'll do their work, and answer questions about it, and it'll be fine. Sometimes they'll joke about being more anti-social lately, but that's not exactly it.

They know that they're disconnected from each other as people, and they want to fix that. But it's like there's a stair missing. They're not sure how to make it go, which feels foolish to say but it's true. The activation energy of picking up a real conversation feels too high, and so it doesn't happen. Like, what if you try and the other person doesn't come along?

Bosses, this isn't a curious and tender-hearted observation about the state of the world, this is a direct threat to your ability to get shit done. Teams that don't talk to each other outside of transactional topics are barely teams at all. High-trust, high-engagement teams outperform, and those teams live and die on their ability to talk to each other. If that's broken, your team is broken. And when your team is broken, it's time to get to work.

What doesn't work and what does

We've heard from several bosses recently who are feeling the pain. Their team is doing good individual work, but the connective tissue is missing. The individual work is supposed to culminate in discussion and handoff and integration. It used to. But now it's culminating in delivery. Of that individual work. Without any of that connection.

Some leaders try to be the glue. Everyone gives you their pieces, and you put them together, and rewrite this bit, and fix that thing, and make it all make sense. If you're selling that service, you'll certainly be very popular these days. Other organizations we've talked to give that work to the interns. Take all the pieces and glue them together. If you're in either of these spots, you already know how it's going.

You can't outsource interpersonal connection to the interns, and your team can't outsource it to you. Being everyone's connection to everyone else is a burnout gig. When we say that you have a new job, this ain't it.

Your new job is to get better at spotting, and activating, the opportunities for re-stitching. The places where (a) your team members (b) could be talking to each other (c) about work. And then, this is crucial, this is very nearly the whole damned thing: as you find each of those opportunities, build enough structure for it to actually happen. Give them the seed, something time-boxed and concrete, to get the conversation started. You don't have to overthink it, but it's not happening on it's own so, you know, some thinking will be required.

Let's try an example. It used to be that you'd have an all-hands meeting, give an update, and people would discuss it afterwards and come to you with questions. But the stitching is broken, so that discussion isn't happening. You can help them repair it. After the update, give people five minutes to talk about it in small groups, live. Give them a few prompts to get things going: what does it change about your priorities? What might have to drop? What information do you need to get started? And then bring them back together to talk that through as a team.

You can do this with project check-in meetings. You can do this with stand ups. You can do this with client kick-offs, postmortems, onboarding, and goals reviews. Any meeting that's become mechanical or automatic — where people are saying words but not talking with each other — is an opportunity for some new facilitation. What is a version that gives your people a jumping-off point and gets them talking to each other?

We're not telling you to organize play dates for your team. But we do want you to recognize the design challenge in front of you, because it might not have been obvious. Not everyone on your team needs this lattice for discussion, but some of them do. And designing your team's work to support that discussion is going to have strong curb-cut effects.

Thinking about when and how people might need a minute to interact, or discuss, in order to integrate what's happening? That makes every meeting better. That helps every team communicate. Yes, there's a risk that they won't play along. But they probably will.

- Melissa and Johnathan