Missed opportunities

What are the consequences if you miss stuff?

Like most things, it depends on the context.

I’ve been having fascinating conversations with people from a range of professions and roles about observation and how they read a room. I’ve talked with a County Court Judge, a stand-up comedian, an early childhood educator, a traffic controller (a ‘lollipop man’ in Aussie slang), a circus performer, a tango DJ, a university lecturer, a waiter and a gardener.

Observation is vital to all of them but not all consider themselves ‘first class noticers’, a term coined by the Nobel-prize winning novelist, Saul Bellow.

The tango DJ told me that she is notoriously unobservant. She has been forced to learn – otherwise, the dance floor would be embarrassingly empty.  If she misses stuff in her day job as a university lecturer, the quieter students miss opportunities to participate and learn. Consequently, her student engagement score – a key performance indicator - might suffer.

For the Judge, it could make the difference to a Jury’s perception of a defendant and influence their verdict.  

For the traffic controller, cars could have accidents or colleagues injured. 

The consequences for a child’s development are significant if the early childhood educator misses stuff. “Observation is my job,” she told me. “If I’m not observing the children, I’m not doing my job.”

There are parallels for those of us who work with groups. Observational skills are vital for facilitating a team meeting, a project workshop or a stakeholder consultation. If we misread the room, the group misses opportunities:

•    To connect
•    To build trust
•    To learn, build on knowledge and skills
•    For breakthroughs

The circus performer I interviewed summed it up well. She said that to ‘..miss stuff was to miss an opportunity to engage the audience’, which could take her in another, possibly more entertaining or poignant direction. 

Some of my interviewees winced when they recalled how they felt. Both the performers I interviewed seem to shrink before me when they recalled the times they had ‘died’ in front of the room – or seen other performers ‘die’.

In a workshop last week, a group of mediators, facilitators and coaches told me that if they misread the room, they felt mortified, paralysed and, ‘…like they let everyone down.’ One wanted to ‘…jump in and remedy things.’

How the comedian responds to misreading the room is instructive for anyone working with groups.

‘I’ve got to acknowledge it, and move on. Everybody knows it happened, so it is best to ‘own’ it rather than pretend it didn’t happen,’ she said. 

Next week, I’ll talk about the consequences of misreading the room outside the room. A hint: it has to do with reputation, but it’s not the facilitator’s.

There is no list of what to look for to be able to read a room. But all the research shows that we can get better at looking. Join me at my monthly walkshop to try a cool way to do this. Last Tuesday of every month and the next one is at 2pm on 30 June. Book here.