In the last blog I shared an experiment with you. We looked at ways to read the room and tune your antennae – with a view to making positive changes starting with your meetings or interactions with others.

I shared an experiment to help you do just that.

Here are the kind of things you might notice now that you hadn’t really noticed before (or if you had – you’d not done anything about it).

People committing to things and then not doing them. As one person said ‘When I did the Reading the Room experiment it became obvious to me that commitment was lacklustre at best. I realised we need to understand why we’d got into this pattern and what we need to do with it. It’s almost become accepted that people won’t deliver on time’.

‘It made me realise how much people talk for the sake of it and don’t add anything new to the conversation. This is seriously adding to overwhelm and time wasting for everyone. It also made me realise how much I do that too’. Ooops! Work to be done.

‘I’m embarrassed to r...

You don’t influence change by starting with furious activity.

You start by observing what is.

Here’s something to get you started.

This experiment is best done in a small meeting that you are not chairing. (It can be virtual or face to face). Ideally it would be a meeting that you attend regularly.
Your role in this meeting is to watch and observe AND as we coaches like to say a lot… ‘to be curious without judgement’. The purpose is simply to tune your antennae and to practise reading the room – so that you start to notice things that would normally pass you by.

The 80/20 rule applies here.

You need to listen for 80% of the time and speak only for 20%. Here are ten things to pay attention to:

• Imagine you are looking down at the meeting in your helicopter. What do you notice? Is everyone there on time? Are people prepared? Who is quietly texting or sending emails (they think we don’t notice – but we do!)

• Look at each person in turn. Notice their body language (but don’t assu...