4. Don’t Underestimate the Power of Silence

Try silence in your meetings…. at times. Silence can promote inclusion incredibly well. 

This sounds a little crazy I know, Let me unpack this one: 

Research supports the benefits of silence in meetings as a way of gathering more ideas, perspectives, and insights from attendees.  For example, if you compare groups brainstorming in silence (e.g., typing directly into a document) versus those brainstorming with their mouths, silent brainstorming groups yielded nearly twice as many ideas and those ideas tended to be even more creative.  

Why would silent brainstorming result in more and better ideas? 

When communicating via writing, all can “talk“ at once.  There is no waiting for your turn.  Additionally, there is less filtering of ideas given the simultaneous generation of ideas.

Here is the good news: silence can be done very easily in a virtual meeting by just sharing with attendees a Google document during the actual meeting or there are great apps like Shuffleboard to incorporate into your meetings. 

The document contains key questions that need to be answered or prompts for brainstorming.  All participants are encouraged to contribute to the document for, say, 15 minutes or whatever makes sense for the task at hand. During this window, attendees are actively generating ideas, commenting on others inputs, and basically collaborating actively via writing. Once the time period is up, the leader has a few options. The leader can debrief identifying themes, conclusions, and next steps.  Or, if outcomes are not fully apparent, the meeting can end for now. The meeting leader can then take time to go through the document, see what emerged and circle back with attendees.