Greg McKeown:
Welcome everyone. I’m your host, Greg McKeown, and this is the Greg McKeown Podcast, where we delve into the deep and into the essence of what it means to live and lead as an essentialist, and how to live a meaningful life. And today we’re joined by a remarkable guest, Jeff Wetzler, author of Ask: Tap into the Hidden Wisdom of People Around You. But that’s the idea, ask, and that’s the theme, and there’s a recent HBR article which is well worth reading for anybody who is curious to be able to find the information, the answers, the insights that aren’t readily available in everyday conversations.
Jeff’s career has been driven by a fascinating desire to create learning experiences that are deep and powerful. In 2015, he co-founded Transcend, a pioneering organization dedicated to supporting communities in the creation and dissemination of extraordinary, equitable learning environments. That’s a mouthful, but it’s important. This work builds on a rich tapestry of experience, including a decade in senior leadership at Teach for America, which is non-trivial in and of itself An amazing organization doing amazing work. He served as their chief learning officer, the EVP of teacher preparation, support and development. I mean those are serious roles for those not familiar with those organizations and an important position, and so he comes at this idea of ask from a well-positioned place.
He’s a scholar in his own right. He has a doctorate from Columbia University. He’s beyond his impressive career, Jeff’s inspiration and urgency in his work, continually fueled by his life in New York with his wife, his two children and a puppy, to my knowledge. Drdication to creating impactful learning experiences is not just a professional pursuit but a personal one, deeply rooted in his values and beliefs.
So, with that, if you want to improve your art of asking the right questions, the power of tapping into the wisdom of the people around us, if you’re interested in practices that can help you transform and rapidly your understanding, your relationships and, ultimately, your impact on the world, Jeff Wetzel is just the right person to be with today.
Welcome to the podcast, Jeff.
Jeff Wetzler:
Thank you for that very kind introduction. It’s great to be with you, Greg.
Greg McKeown:
Let’s just start at the beginning here. You’ve written a book called Ask. What problem does this book try to address?
Jeff Wetzler:
It addresses a problem that II think we all face, which is that the people around us in our lives that might be our colleagues, our bosses, the people we manage, our clients, customers, investors, whoever it may be are walking around with ideas, insights, perspectives, feedback for us that far too often we don’t hear because they don’t share it with us. And what is particularly pernicious about this problem is that we don’t even know we have the problem because we don’t know what it is that they’re not sharing with us.
I’ve seen this all over the place, whether that is as a consultant, whether that is a leader in my own personal life, with my family, et cetera. So what motivated me to write the book was not just how painful the problem is, but really how pervasive it is. It’s everywhere.
Greg McKeown:
In your Harvard Business Review article, you cite a study where 85% of employees admitted to staying quiet about an issue that would have been important for their boss to know. 85% of people admit to that. Talk to us about that.
Jeff Wetzler:
I mean it’s staggering If I just think about the organization that I run and think about anyone who’s got a problem and they’re not sharing it. That’s an issue. To think that 85% of people are saying there was a time when there was a significant concern that I didn’t raise. And a further statistic from that study is that in that same study, nearly three quarters of them said that their colleagues were also aware of that issue and also felt uncomfortable speaking up. So we’ve got this reservoir of insight about a problem, about tensions, about issues that are going on that is not getting tapped into. I mean, think about the collective intelligence of an organization that is dormant because these kinds of communications and questions are not being asked.
Greg McKeown:
Absolutely, and I think one of the problems, as I see it in organizations and I don’t think it’s obvious how to solve it structurally is that the further up you go in an organization, it’s like the information is like a two-toned tree. The leaf color on the tree is two-toned, so from above maybe it looks green, but underneath it looks red. Of course there are trees that have that two-tone leaf design, but as you go up in the organization you just see the green above you and you don’t see the color everybody else sees underneath. And so there is such an inherent limit to be able to see things right, and if you can’t see them right, you can’t set them right. You’re going to make poor decisions and take poor action because you simply don’t have the information.
Jeff Wetzler:
That’s exactly right. I love that metaphor, and I think the further up you go in the organization, the harder it gets to really get the information. I think CEOs have it the hardest because everyone around the CEO is dependent on the CEO for something, and so the CEO is wondering who’s really going to be able to tell me the truth in a situation. How can I really find out? In writing the book, I studied some of the most iconic CEOs and learned some very powerful practices that they use to overcome this problem. We can talk more about that, but in terms of the problem itself, I agree it gets more severe the further up you are.
Greg McKeown:
And there’s another study that you cited where you suggested that 2.6% so that’s just 2.5% of participants offered up feedback that would have spared another person embarrassment. So that’s a tiny fraction of people that were willing to speak up compared to the people that were silent.
Jeff Wetzler:
This was a fascinating study done at Harvard Business School by Nicole Abiesper and her colleagues, where they went around and they pretended that they were doing a survey on a topic of people around them, but what they actually did is they planted on their face a very blatant and very embarrassing smudge. In some cases it was lipstick, in some cases it was chocolate, in some cases it was a smear from a magic marker, and they literally counted up the number of people who said, “Hey, I think you’ve got something on your face that you could just rub off real quickly.”
They then said to them, “Did you notice something that was on my face?”
And 100% of the people said, absolutely I noticed, but less than 3% actually said something. And what that says to me is, if there’s something as trivial as a little smudge that with one second could get wiped off, and still people didn’t say anything because they don’t want to embarrass the person, imagine really what someone’s thinking when there’s a fatal flaw in your business plan or when there’s something much more severe that they actually are thinking is wrong, no way are they going to say anything.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, that’s an awful piece of research, you know. Just think of how true that is. Everybody listening how you yourself. You’re having a meal with somebody and maybe you don’t know them well enough, and so then they have something on their teeth. You don’t want to be the one to say it. It’s awkward. I’m not sure and I’m curious about this whether the reason you don’t want to say it is saving their feelings or whether it’s just uncomfortable enough for you that, out of a self-interested way, you’d rather not say it. I’m not absolutely sure. Do you know in the research whether they went to understand why people don’t give the feedback, or are they just assuming it’s the embarrassment factor?
Jeff Wetzler:
No, they asked. People basically said the number one reason was they didn’t want to embarrass the person who had that smudge. But a broader set of research, looking at a variety of different studies, says that the top reason people don’t share something difficult is because they’re worried about the impact more broadly, that could be the impact on the other person, the impact on themselves, the impact on the relationship.
There’s another piece of research which I find also fascinating, which has to do with information about oneself, where between 60 and 80% of people depending on the demographics of the people have admitted to withholding a critical piece of information about their own health to their doctor because they are afraid that their doctor is going to judge them for it. So think about that it’s our own health. It literally could be a matter of life and death for ourselves. And yet we’re not letting our doctor in on that information because we’re afraid of the impact of what that’s going to happen. Our doctor in on that information because we’re afraid of the impact of what that’s going to happen.
Greg McKeown:
At some level. That speaks to me, to the let’s say something like the universal human weakness, the fault in our stars, like the primary fault in our stars, which is, to my view anyway, self-deception, that there is a human capacity to not look at the truth, to not speak about the truth, to not want to hear the truth, so that we can, I suppose, continue in our current course. There’s no requirement for change. If you live in such a way that you say current course, there’s no requirement for change. If you live in such a way that you say, well, the way I see things is the way things are, well, you can just carry on doing what you’re doing, there’s no need to change. And it seems like often we would rather live in a state of self-deception than we would face the truth so that we can grow and make the correct decisions. What are your thoughts on that? What research have you found around that subject?
Jeff Wetzler:
So, I think there’s a lot of truth to what you’re saying, and I think you are ascribing a motivational reason for why people keep ourselves blind to important things, which is that we don’t want to find out the truth, we don’t want to hear the truth. There’s an additional body of research that doesn’t even require you to go to the motivational explanation, but simply goes to the cognitive explanation, which is the way that our brains think. This draws on research from a professor named Chris Argyris, who was an expert in the field of organizational learning, interpersonal learning. He studied the question of why is it that smart people, successful people, are sometimes the worst at learning from other people, and he talks about how we essentially carry around a pre-existing set of ideas, assumptions, beliefs about the world and whenever we encounter a situation. That essentially serves as the filter by which we select what parts of those situations we’re going to pay attention to. And he uses a model called the ladder of inference, which essentially says that the moment we select that tiny snippet of information, we immediately race up the ladder to reach conclusions about how the world is, and those conclusions are shaped by our pre-existing stuff that we bring to it, and so we get this sensation of “Here we go again. Of course, that’s how the way of the world is.”
And in many ways it’s adaptive, because if we had to stop and think about every single data point that’s around us, and what might that mean and what would be an? We would never get anywhere. I mean, think about a toddler walking down the street who stops and looks at everything and ponders it. It’s kind of magical and beautiful, but you can’t walk down the street with a toddler and get very far quickly. So we’ve evolved in this way to essentially come to very quick judgments based on what we believe in a preexisting way. But we fall into what in the book I call the certainty loop. Essentially, the way we perceive the world simply reconfirms exactly what we already thought about the world, and so what is there to be curious about in the first place? We can talk more about how to break that certainty loop, but in many ways we all just walk around selecting things that just tell us, “This is how I know, things already are.”
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, I sometimes think about this as the stuck in their head problem, and it has an acronym which I can’t work out if I like or not, because it’s a Star Wars kind of acronym, but it’s like a SITH, right Stuck in their heads. And I might be wrong about this cognitively, but it just seems that one can observe that you can actually see it in people.
It’s almost like you can divide the world into two kinds of people. There are people who are stuck in their head and then there are people who know they’re stuck in their heads. You know that for some people it really hasn’t yet occurred to them in a serious way that the way they see the world is not how the world is, that they really do think that the way they’re seeing it is accurate, correct, and so of course you’re not interested then in… Well, what would you say as soon as you interact with somebody who sees something different to you, you’re like, “Wow, that’s just a sort of strange person over there, thinking that. You think they’re wrong. They’re wrong. They’re obviously wrong.
Jeff Wetzler:
Yeah, totally. And I think that you could also divide the world or ourselves into situations when we fall into that and situations when we don’t fall into that as well. I know for myself and I know for a lot of people when we become emotionally triggered, we are much more likely to forget that the way that we’re seeing the world is just one way of seeing the world. When we are under stress and threat, when we’re rushing that metacognition to say wait a minute, this might not be the only way to see the world goes away and a lot of the act of choosing curiosity is about how do we increase the percentage of the time when we have the kind of awareness that you were just describing?
Greg McKeown:
I want to stay for just a moment longer on the problem. Why does somebody care? Why should somebody care about this solution? I agree that it’s a problem, but in a self-interested way. Somebody listening or watching this, what’s in it for them?
Jeff Wetzler:
Basically, what’s in it for any of us to find out what others might be thinking, feeling and not telling us is what we find out or we don’t find out. And in the research for the book, I discovered the top four things that people are walking around too often not telling us. I’ll give you a couple of examples, and I think the stakes are very high for this.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, I want all four. Yeah, no, give us all four.
Jeff Wetzler:
I will give you all four. The number one thing is one of the top things people don’t tell us is the challenges and struggles that they’re up against.
If I’m a leader and there’s somebody on my team who is struggling with something maybe they’re struggling with do I belong here? Maybe they’re struggling with how am I going to actually get over this major hurdle that I’m facing and they’re not telling me that I’m completely missing the opportunity to actually make it right and help them.
When I was at Teach for America and I had a in one of my early operating roles, I had a team of several hundred people. We were putting on major events. One of the teams was struggling with an event to such a point that it almost imploded, and I discovered this almost at the very last minute. I had been asking them questions all along. It just wasn’t working, but they didn’t safe to tell me this. If I hadn’t found that out, we would have had major consequences, and so the failure to find out what someone around us is challenged by, is struggling with, is, I think, one of the major reasons why we should care about this. So I would say that’s number one.
A second thing is feedback they have for us. So if someone around me that could be again someone on my team or my boss or, let’s say, my client is thinking, “Gosh, it’s just not working when Jeff does this.” Or it is really, “He could be so much better if he only changed this one thing.” And they’re not telling me that. Think about the missed opportunity. I have to actually level up and raise my game.
Second one, third one is and this is a really interesting one their truest ideas and where those ideas come from. So oftentimes, as leaders, we think we know what our teams think, but so often they actually aren’t telling us either the full view of what they have. Maybe they think there is a hole in the strategic plan, maybe think there’s a different way forward that would be better. And if we do find out that, we often fail to find out really where those views are coming from, what are their experiences, what are the stories that they have, et cetera.
And the last one is their best and wildest and most creative ideas for how things could change, for what we could innovate, for how we could do things better, which people often think this is going to be too crazy, they don’t want to hear this, et cetera. That’s really where the magic, I think, can come from in terms of breakthroughs for organizations. So all four of those things, I think are like gold and if we fail to learn those things from people, we are basically passing up major opportunities.
Greg McKeown:
I mean, I think what you’re saying is that the self-interested reason to ask is that you will just become either irrelevant or you’re going to get it wrong. Or you’re going to get it wrong, or you’re going to start to plateau in your leadership and in your decisions. And so what you want is not just that information, you want it as early as possible.
Jeff Wetzler:
That’s right, Exactly.
Greg McKeown:
You never want to be in the situation, personally or professionally, where you’re in, where you’re like the captain of the Titanic in the moment, when he knows that they’re going to sink. He knows they’re going to that he can do nothing about it. You got seven minutes. He has the information now. You know the information’s going to come eventually. You’ll find out eventually, but not when it’s helpful.
Jeff Wetzler:
The last thing you want to do is find that out when it’s too late to do anything about it, and the best thing is you want to find out as soon as possible so that you can act on it. But I want to point out one other reason why it’s so important. It’s not just about extracting the information. There’s also a relational dimension to this too, because when we are in a relationship with someone who is not telling us what they really think and feel, they are not self-expressed and there’s a block in the relationship as well. And so, from my perspective, the informational benefit is only one part, and the relational benefit is just as important, because when we actually truly give someone a chance to tell us what they know, what they think, what they feel, we are so much closer, we can collaborate better, our partnership is so much deeper.
Greg McKeown:
Right. People have a need to be understood.
Jeff Wetzler:
Yes.
Greg McKeown:
People want to feel emotionally connected and and and you know the whole idea of emotional responsiveness as being perhaps the most important single skill in an authentic, healthy relationship you’ll be there for me If I call. You’ll be there for me. It doesn’t exist if people can’t share what they actually think.
Jeff Wetzler:
That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right, yes.
Greg McKeown:
Before we get to the solution. Still, I want to hold off for a moment. Here’s a tough question for you Do you think over the last five years that people in organizations feel safer to speak up or less safe?
Jeff Wetzler:
I have a hard time making a general statement about that, but what I will say is that in periods of time over the last five years when there is high stress in organizations and I would put COVID as one of those periods when people feel like there is more polarization in society around them, when people feel like the organization’s future might be in jeopardy, all of those things contribute to people feeling less safe in organizations. To speak up, the only reason I’m saying I can’t just say therefore, it’s harder is that I do think over the last five years there is an increasing appreciation for what Professor Amy Edmondson talks about as psychological safety, and so there are organizations where leaders are being more vulnerable, where they are making it safer, and so I think that countervailing force makes it a more complicated answer. But I think all of those trends are at play.
Greg McKeown:
Like which organizations do you think have had a higher appreciation for psychological safety? Is it a company that comes to mind that’s been particularly good at that over the last five years?
Jeff Wetzler:
I want to think about that question. I’m not, I want to. I actually would want to ask Amy, because she has done that work most deeply, but I don’t, I don’t have a good, I don’t have a good answer to that right this second.
Greg McKeown:
So I had Amy on the podcast and we talked about this not this exact question about the last, about which organizations? But I think it’s worth just revisiting for a second, because when she first was doing that research, so of course she didn’t coin the term psychological safety, but she’s done more than any other person in in popularizing it, in bringing it into the organization and making it relevant. And and then that research I mean I think probably most famously was picked up by Google and sort of built into, spiced into their DNA. What we want is people to talk.
We want smart people to say what they think, to say what is true, even if that’s inconvenient, of course, for all the reasons we’ve talked about, because of course that makes for good, fast quality decision-making, which leads to great results, and so on. Right. So there’s this primary argument.
And when she was first doing that research, she found that the primary obstacle to psychological safety was hierarchy. In the same way we’ve been talking about. Over the last few years. She acknowledged that there seems to be an increase in obstacle to psychological safety, but from a different source. I’m not a political activist at all. I’m politically independent. I am someone who’s trying to understand the truth and observe, and it does seem so politically sensitive now that it’s scary even to talk about the subject now, even right now, in this conversation and you’re nodding your head for those that aren’t going to watch this, or before I publish it in a video. Why? Why is it so psychologically unsafe even for you to talk about this subject right now?
Jeff Wetzler:
Well, I think there’s really interesting observation by someone named Tim Urban. I don’t know if you’re familiar with his work or not. He writes the great blog Wait, But Why, which he turned into a book, and he talks about how this is actually not limited to the left or the right. There’s actually extremists on both sides who are unwilling to challenge themselves, to look at what they might be missing as well, and I do think that we have seen a rise in that on both sides, on both extremes, and I think that’s become toxic in many organizations and in our culture.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, I mean, I’m so with you on the idea to distrust the extremes and in almost all situations, to distrust the extremes to to at least hold it up to a filter of like, well, that seems like an outlier position. Let’s, let’s be careful about just assuming that an extreme position is is the truth, and I do think there’s something like that going on. But I’m thinking specifically of Google, because they have been such a such like. Google is to management what Hewlett Packard was to management in their sort of 10, 20 years of dominance. You know, when I traveled to India, people are still quoting the HP way. I mean, it is part of the thought process of what best management looks like, and Google has been one of I would say, just basically one of two companies that holds that rare position.
Google and Apple, I would say, have been the equivalent of that over the last 20 years that you can almost cite them. It’s like you can always cite them as authorities. Well, at Google they’re doing this. At least that’s how people do cite them as if it’s authoritative because it’s from these organizations, and for good reason. But I just read an article about Google just now about how there is that the current culture within Google is described as fear, and I think it’s worth an exploration, at least for a moment because that’s not what the brand was just a few years ago. It is polar opposite, and even if that article is itself not a fair description of the whole culture now, you didn’t have an article written like that five years ago about Google. That’s right, so what changed?
Jeff Wetzler:
Yeah, I don’t know. I’m not an expert in Google so I don’t know. I do know that Google, like many tech organizations, is undergoing economic challenges. There is, you know, many tech organizations are having restructurings and layoffs and that alone, I think, can create a culture of fear in any organization. Whether there’s additional political dynamics at play, I know, I’ve read about things like that as well, but I’m just not, I would say I’m not enough on the inside to know for sure.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, give me your most truthful answer about what you think is going on there and we’ll move forward.
Jeff Wetzler:
In addition to what I said about the general economic environment, I imagine that Google may, like many organizations may, be internalizing the broader societal forces that we’re seeing that are polarizing people that are leading people to say, “If I step out and say what I truly believe, I’ll get labeled as an X, Y or Z.”
And insofar as that is playing out broadly culturally, it would not surprise me at all if that’s also playing out inside many organizations, including Google.
Greg McKeown:
I had a very raw conversation with 250 women inside of a branded company, globally known company. We spent probably two or three hours together. We had one agenda, but because well, frankly, because I was listening and asking questions and in the moment, and because people were also speaking up and being open, I thought that they managed to express what a lot of organizations are feeling right now, which is something like a spiral of silence, that there are things you can and can’t say safely now that didn’t exist five or so years ago. And it is really concerning to me because of everything that you’ve written about in Ask, because of all of the reasons you’ve just described for why we want fast, honest, open, accurate information. If you have, which it seems to me that we do have the risk of new rules of what we can and can’t speak about, you produce a spiral of silence where people speak less candidly and there’s a greater threat to speak that’s somewhat independent of the hierarchy.
Anyway, it’s an interesting theme that I think is so risky. Even now, I can feel it talking about it with you and I think, yeah, but if you and I can’t talk about it, if the author of Ask can’t talk about it, if we’re in positions of relative independence, I think the average employee inside of organizations will feel an enormous pressure Don’t speak, you know. Don’t get in trouble. Don’t say what cannot be said, but it’s not exactly clear what can’t be said. It’s just don’t even go there. I think if it is successfully taking down the culture at Google, it can take down the culture anywhere because I think that that’s a company that has built in, or at least intended to build in, antidotes to that exact problem from its beginning.
Moving on, there are some things people think they can do to get at this information that apparently doesn’t help. What are some of those things?
Jeff Wetzler:
Probably the number one thing is to assume that they will get it, to assume that people will simply tell them. I can’t tell you the number of times someone will simply make a statement and not get response to it and assume, “They must agree with me.”
So I would say that’s the single biggest thing. And, by the way
Greg McKeown:
Silence is agreement.
Jeff Wetzler:
Silence is agreement. I mean, what we were just talking about, I think, is essentially people fearing the impact of what they’re gonna say. What impact is it gonna have on themselves, on the other person, on their relationship, et cetera. But that is not the only thing that keeps people silent. One of the other things that keeps people silent is simply they don’t actually think that we want to know what they have to say. They assume that we’re not interested. And that is another huge contributor.
And I’ll just say one other that I think is to me personally quite fascinating, which is that they just don’t have the words to say it. They actually may want to say it, but they don’t have the words, and sometimes they may not have the words literally for mathematical reasons. So just to say what I mean by that in doing research for this book, I came across neuroscience research by Ned Sahin, who basically said that the human brain thinks at 900 words per minute, but the mouth, on average, can only speak at 125 words per minute. So think about that. There are, you know, 700 plus words going on in our head every single minute that we can’t even get out just because our mouths can’t spit the words out fast enough. And so you don’t even have to necessarily go to fear of the impact or anything else. There’s a lot going on in the other person’s head that just aren’t getting out because the math doesn’t work as well. So I would say that the factors that are holding people back are overdetermined.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah. And then there’s another factor that made me think of, which is there’s data to suggest that people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds hear something like 5 million words less in their early developmental years than somebody from a higher economic background. That’s non-trivial.
I have had the experience. I’m sure almost everybody listening to this has had an experience where they’re speaking to somebody Maybe it’s now in a customer service type environment You’re on the phone with somebody and they don’t have the language. And I don’t even mean maybe because English isn’t their first language or something that the English can still be someone’s first language, but they simply don’t have the full vocabulary necessary to have a nuanced, specific conversation about what you’re dealing with. And so, whatever the reason is that somebody doesn’t have sufficient vocabulary for all of those thoughts in your head. If you take the Ned research and you say, well, maybe it’s not even 900 words, but it’s 900 thoughts, it’s just unnamed noise in their heads, and then they have to push that through a straw of words, even if it’s the 120 words per minute, or maybe it’s just. Well, these are the words I have.
Jeff Wetzler:
I totally agree. And if we don’t take account for that and we’re the ones across the table talking to them and they don’t say it to us, we could be thinking, oh, they’re good, they don’t have something to say, they don’t have an objection, et cetera, when really inside their gut, they know that whatever they want to say is important to be said, but they don’t have the words.
It reminds me of a situation many years ago when I was working with someone more junior and I was helping that person navigate a tough leadership situation and at the end of the conversation, after we walked away from the client, she said to me, “I was thinking the same thing that you said, I just didn’t have the language of leadership to say it.”
And I think that’s a perfect example of what you’re saying which is that she knew it, she just didn’t have the words to say it.
Greg McKeown:
That is very interesting to me. So I’m a huge proponent of Carl Rogers’ work on empathy and his research on empathic. Restating, I think even now, 50 years later, it’s still not talked about very much as a thing that you can do, and it is done almost never. That is my literal experience. It’s almost never done that somebody puts into words accurately and precisely what somebody else is saying before they respond. It is the rarest thing and it’s not really the skill that so interests me. It’s all the cognitive development that has to take place before you can do that accurately and helpfully to someone you know, because you have to. In order to be able to do that, you have to say, “Oh well, my thoughts aren’t the only thoughts in the world. You know, I have a way of seeing the world, they have a way of seeing the world. Oh, I need to make sure I even understand their way of seeing the world, rather than me just jumping in and so I see it all the time.”
It is an extremely frustrating thing for me, and so, anyway, that just came to my mind as you talk about this idea of not having the language of leadership. If you restate for somebody, you are giving somebody language, exactly, they can accept or deny it. They can say, well, no, that’s not really what I meant, which is part of the value of it, but at least you’re giving language to encourage them to try to name what it is that’s going on in their head.
Jeff Wetzler:
I think one of the most satisfying and fulfilling interchanges is when I listen to someone and I say back to them this is what I heard you say, and they say exactly. And then they will sometimes say no, you just said it.
Greg McKeown:
Go on, I’ll tell you why I’m reacting.
Jeff Wetzler:
Yes, exactly, and sometimes they will say and I didn’t even have the words to say that that’s what I was thinking, but you played it back to me with new words, that you actually gave me a different way of hearing what I was thinking myself. I find that so fulfilling because it means I’ve actually managed to hear and connect with them.
Greg McKeown:
Now, we just had a moment. We’ve had a moment. You don’t even realize it, because that’s the word, that’s the dream word, it’s the word that’s exactly. My experience is, it’s in and even in our family. Here we, if you can get an exactly out of someone, it’s 10 out of 10 restate. That’s the goal.
And that’s fine to get it wrong, there’s no problem with that, because that has value too. “Well, no, that’s not what I’m saying, that’s what you think I’m saying, but let me try and be more clear.”
But when you get it spot on, that is the word people say. There’s other versions of that word, but that is the most common word and typically, if you can get an exactly, it’s an enthusiastic moment. Exactly, I have suddenly connected, someone has entered my world, I’m not alone in the universe. It’s an important moment and extremely rare.
Jeff Wetzler:
I agree, and it’s so satisfying on both sides of the interchange. For the person who has been heard so well that they said exactly. They are actually seen and felt and heard and then validated in the world, Sometimes even helped because they’re given words to express what they might’ve even been struggling to express. And for the person who got “the exactly” and, by the way, I love that term, got the exactly it’s a sense that I really have understood someone else. I’ve reached across that threshold and connected, and it does bring us closer.
Greg McKeown:
In a sense, what else is there? We don’t live in a telepathic world, let’s state the obvious. So that’s a serious obstacle that we don’t. I mean of course we don’t. None of us do so. Maybe it’s odd that I would say it, but the idea that we’re biologically separate, that our brains are separate and that we’re having different experiences to every other person because of the cognitive processes that are going through and because we’re physically in different places, so of course that isn’t the same thing, I mean this is a serious obstacle.
I mean one can frame this question in two different ways. One could frame it from “Well, why can’t people understand each other?” And then eventually you can come to a different question which is like “How does anybody ever ever understand each other?”
And that seems to be a more accurate way of looking at the question, because such a chasm of biological separation between us. And then we have to try to express the experience we’re having in something akin to caveman levels of sophistication, because we have to go, you know, I have to hear it through physical elements in my ear, the sounds, and then I have to put them into vocal cord and share. Like that is such an inefficient system. I mean that’s not a great input-output system. If you wanted to really understand at its speed what someone means. That’s not a meaning channel, that’s a noise channel. You know that’s not a meaning channel, that’s a noise channel, that’s a symbolic channel. Meaning is way bigger.
I mean you talked about this 900 words per minute in our mind, 120 words per minute out of our mouth. Then you sort of think about how much smaller the meaning channel is in a lot of this interaction and how much bigger the meaning is in our heads. You know, that’s more than the 900 words per minute. It’s everything it means and you think, “Well, yeah, this is of course, we have challenges, Of course this is a big problem.”
And you’ve described to some extent how big the problem is, particularly within an organizational context, as you have. But I think it’s a much bigger question than organizational. It’s a much bigger problem than an organizational problem and it goes to the very heart of the human dilemma, which is that we’re desperate to be connected with each other, but the tools we have are terribly bad for the purpose.
Jeff Wetzler:
Yeah. At the start of the book I cite a poll where Americans were asked if you could have any superpower in the world, what would you want it to be? And the top two answers for that were number one, time travel, but number two, reading other people’s minds. We want that telepathy, and we know we’re bad at it. We don’t know how bad we are at it. There’s amazing research by a professor at University of Chicago, Nick Epley, who shows that people just consistently overestimate their ability to actually know what’s going on in people’s heads, and the most common advice doesn’t work. Like, put yourself in their shoes Nope, doesn’t work. Try to read their body language Nope, doesn’t work. And even for people that are like our closest relationships, our spouses, our partners, no better. And so it’s just that you know, with the way that we’re wired and all the things you just referred to, we’re not good at it. But there’s one thing that his research shows reliably allows us to know what’s going on for the other person which is asking him questions.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah Well, what’s so funny about Epley is to me he’s a man absolutely obsessed with the idea of being able to read minds. I don’t know if I know anybody who’s so academically interested in that subject. How would we read another person’s mind and his marvelous book where he gathers all of his research, you know, over the years, into that question has I think. Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems to me a disappointing end for him, which is “Well, we can’t, you know, but it would be great, but we can’t.”
Now, that doesn’t mean that paying attention to body language, that paying attention to tone of voice, to trying to understand by observation, that none of that matters. It obviously matters, but it seems that that observation, increasing our observation capacity and awareness, is key, so that we will then ask.
Jeff Wetzler:
Exactly.
Greg McKeown:
What was the thing? What did you say? Why did you say it that way? What does that mean? Help me understand. I saw something there, and so you know his term, of course, which you will know, but in the book is is is not perspective guessing, but perspective getting. That that he’s trying to encourage. Well, that’s what his research has definitively found is don’t guess people’s perspectives, you get it, and of course, that means asking questions. Give us the final word on part one of this conversation.
Jeff Wetzler:
So what I would basically say and I think what you just said sums it up is despite how painful this problem is, despite how pervasive this problem is, it doesn’t have to be a problem. There’s something that we can do about it. We can overcome this problem if we understand that it exists and if we understand why it exists and if we know what we can do about it, which I think takes us probably to part two of the conversation.
Greg McKeown:
Everybody listening to this. What is one thing that has stood out to you in today’s conversation? Pause for a moment to think about that. What did you hear? And maybe it’s not what’s actually been said. Maybe it’s something else that you heard that came to you. But take a moment to think about that. What is one thing that you can do immediately about that? And who is somebody that you can share this conversation with, now that this part one of the conversation has come to a close?
