Government Executive - Authors - Gideon Lichfield

Meetings Create a Commodity No Organization Can Function Without

Gideon Lichfield, Quartz — Mon, 25 Sep 2017 10:37:17 -0400

You might laugh at the notion that the UN general assembly has anything to teach the business world. The “world’s biggest meeting” can also, with its fetish for arcane procedures, interminable declarations, and impenetrable jargon, seem like the world’s most dysfunctional one.

But what businesses sometimes miss about meetings is that they are not just tools for getting things done. Meetings signal status (who gets to go, who doesn’t). They create shared language and culture. They let people feel heard, so they can then go along with decisions they disagree with. They create shared responsibility—if you were at the meeting, you can’t claim you didn’t know.

Most of all, though, meetings create a commodity no organization can function without: trust.

It’s a modern paradox that, while we can now transmit megabytes of information in an eyeblink, our brains still absorb it at the glacial baud rate set by evolution. Unless (or until) we invent the neurological equivalent of broadband, you’ll still need other people to do much of the knowing for you, and so you must be able to trust them to get it right.

Trust relies, ironically, on the one type of information our technology doesn’t handle well. It’s the information encoded in smiles, frowns, gestures, postures, verbal tics, facial micro-expressions, even smells—all the friend-or-foe signals our big brains evolved aeons ago to send and receive, often without our even knowing it. Even in video calls, most of that data gets lost in transit.

So that’s what meetings are, above all: not decision-making bodies, but ancient data-transfer protocols for trust creation. And it’s why meetings at the UN, a body created specifically to try to forge trust out of distrust, are so important. Perhaps the way it holds them can even teach a thing or two to anyone who needs to bring warring tribes together.

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The Complete Guide to Getting What You Want With Body Language

Gideon Lichfield and Siraj Datoo, Quartz — Fri, 08 Nov 2013 15:00:00 -0500

If conference calls and even Skype conversations never feel quite the same as sitting in a room with someone, it’s because we communicate a vast amount of extra information with every part of our bodies, from the arch of our eyebrows to the movements of our feet. Researchers have devoted a lot of time to studying body language, and Quartz turned to some academic papers to compile these explanations about the impact of various body positions.

1. While expansive and open postures suggest power and confidence…

A 2010 paper by Columbia University’s Dana Carney and her colleagues looked at what people infer about your social power from your body language. It found that people considered more powerful speak faster; interrupt more; have more vocal pitch variation and more relaxed voice; have lowered brows; nod more; and use more hand gestures. In addition, “high-power individuals were believed to have more erect posture, lean forward more, have open body position, and orient their body towards the other.” To express high power you should also avoid touching yourself, whether to scratch your head or just to quickly sort out your hair.

2. …and can even lower your levels of stress…

Testosterone and cortisol are some of the hormones most affected by posture—and they are both affect your mood too. Both men and women who spend more time in “power poses” such as the one described above can decrease their cortisol levels and increase their testosterone levels (pdf), according to a 2010 paper by Carney and another group of colleagues. Combined, this means that you will be more attentive, while also being less stressed. Here are the two power poses that the researchers used in their test:

We Are Losing the War Against Email

Gideon Lichfield, Quartz — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 13:24:00 -0500

Cue, an app for organizing your online personal information, collects data about its users and has come up with a number of interesting discoveries, among them: it is taking people around 10% longer, on average, to answer their email than it did a year ago.

This is probably partly because people are just getting more email. The Radicati Group, a market research firm, estimated in 2011 that the average corporate email user would be sending and receiving about five extra emails a day each year from 2011 to 2015—or a 4 percent -5 percent annual increase.

But then there’s all the extra time people spend on every other form of communication, like text messages, instant message chats, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat… all of which are frankly a lot more fun than email. And quicker too. And given the increasingly tiny increments of time into which our days our divided, it’s amazing we answer email at all.

Read more at Quartz.

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