Life is a silent disco
Have you ever been to a silent disco? It is an event where you have multiple (think 5 or 6) DJs or music stations playing that can only be heard through headphones. So in order to hear the music you need to have your headphones tuned into the relevant music channel. You could be tuned in to a pop station, one click later listening to some old school R’n’B, and in the next breath jumping breathless to some EDM.
I love silent discos!
The very best part of a silent disco is arriving. If you haven’t been to one picture a scene where you get to a party with dozens of people all dancing in complete silence. Not only are they dancing in silence it is a seemingly random and nonsensical collection of dance moves. It is such an unexpected scene that you cannot help but look and laugh and your laughter gets larger with the number of people you know in the crowd. And then you get your headphones…
As soon as you get your headphones, you’re compelled to start toggling from one station to another and as you hit each new station a sub section of the crowd and how they are dancing starts to make sense (note: there are some people that will never make sense). So you toggle some more, do a little shimmy, observe the crowd, toggle, shimmy, observe and so on till you find yourself in your party. I love silent discos!
Have you ever noticed how life is like a silent disco? We get to constantly observe what people are doing without knowing what soundtrack of thoughts is driving their actions. This is life and as a result we’re tempted to do one of three things:
We don’t like not knowing and so we assume what other people are thinking, e.g., people are motivated by the next job promotion
We don’t like doing the work to find out so we assume they think what we think, e.g., the most important email to respond to is the one from the most senior person
We like people to do what we want and so we tell ourselves we know what people should be thinking, e.g., good team mates should be willing to ….
If you pay attention you’ll find we do these three things constantly - with our partners, kids, team mates, the man on the motorbike at the traffic light who left like 10,000 feet in from of him, and even with ourselves (put your hands up if you feel you should be someone/somewhere/something that you aren’t quite). And the implications of this are enormous in life and at work and you'll see what I mean if you think about them in terms of what would happen if you went to a silent disco assuming everyone was listening to the same music:
You’d be frustrated at how slow or fast people were moving
So much miscommunication about the content & disagreement about what to do with it
There’d be an in-group and out-group and there’d be some people that would look like they did not fit in on the team
You would need so much time to organize, align, realign, and engage people to make sure they did what they were ‘supposed’ to
It would ultimately not feel like much of a party!
So the question for you as a manager or leader is maybe how much fun is the disco you're hosting at work? If you don't think it is too much fun at the moment I'd offer that in my experience the core ingredients to fun at work and the silent disco are the same... self awareness & curiosity about others. I could say a lot about both and in particular, the often complete lack of curiosity us managers have about the way other people are thinking about the circumstances they face (note: curious about what they're doing is not the same thing). But those are posts for another day and today is just a little bit of a pause to remind us all that life is a silent disco and maybe when next you’re working through something with your team (the bigger, the harder, the better) that you pause to recognize that and try one of the following questions:
Can you help me understand how you are thinking about this?
Do you think they’re thinking about it in the same way we are?
Let me tell you how my brain is thinking about this, is that the same as you?
And when you do you will find that ever so helpful ingredient to winning as a team - richer perspective