Time to Think by Author

Author:Author
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-03-04T16:00:00+00:00

If I don’t interrupt them, I will never get to say my idea.

I know what they are about to say.

They don’t need to finish their thought since mine is an improvement.

Nothing about their idea will improve with further development.

I am more important than they are.

It is more important for me to be seen to have a good idea than it is for me to be sure they complete their thought.

Interrupting them will save time.

I almost gasped when I heard a senior manager say while interrupting one of his direct reports in a meeting once, ‘Steven, let me just develop the idea you were about to have.’

Finishing people’s sentences for them should be studied by epidemiologists. It is a behaviour that has taken over our relationships. We do it to each other all the time. What is the rush? Why is it so difficult just to breathe out and let the person finish their own sentence for themselves?

Tailgating in this way is an insult. When you finish someone’s sentence for them you are assuming

1 that they cannot finish it themselves before the world ends;

2 that your words will be their words or better;

3 that it won’t hurt them if you do and waiting another giga-second for them to finish will damage you.

Silly, isn’t it? None of these bears out.

In fact, most of the time we are wrong about what the person is going to say. Usually they come up with a completely different word or phrase. Often they find in their own mind a much more rich expression. They nearly always come up with a word or phrase that is more precise, more colourful, more theirs.

A friend illustrated this point dramatically. She said, ‘I am stumped about Larry. As his manager I think I should recommend that we fire …’ She stopped mid-sentence. I waited a polite three seconds, started to supply the word ‘Larry’ just as she said, ‘… up his imagination and natural talent a bit more.’ I was glad I had not spoken; I would have been not only pedestrian but wrong.

However, what really matters here is not just that the chances are high that you will be wrong when you finish the person’s sentence for them. The important thing is what happens for them because you let them do it themselves. Even if you are right about the word they are looking for, which you rarely will be, it does not matter. What matters is what happens in their mind, in their own understanding of what they are saying, because they say it.

So sit back and let them search. The search and the saying add to the quality of their thinking, to their process of understanding, of sorting things out, of gaining insight. The point is not the word. The point is their internal experience. Only they can do that. Like almost everything in a Thinking Environment, you cannot do it for them. And ‘staying out of their way’ nearly always takes less time and produces more.

To be interrupted is not good.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.