Some people think out loud in meetings while others need time to process internally. Asking quiet people for input only at the end treats their ideas as afterthoughts, so one facilitator starts each meeting by inviting the ruminators to share thoughts from the previous discussion, giving their insights room to surface.
Chapters
If you look at a meeting, like the tenor of any meeting, there's different personalities in a meeting. There are people who think out loud, people like me. I have to generate thoughts by talking. And there are people who ruminate. They sit there quietly the whole meeting. And the problem is, is people like me, the think-out-louders, are often accused of stealing all the air and dominating the meeting. And if you take a dozen people or 10 people in a meeting, there's going to be 3 or 4 that do all the talking. There'll be a couple of people that talk a little bit, and there'll be a few people, probably 3 or 4— it's probably going to be a bell curve— you know, who do no talking. And so we— and we— you can't go at the end of the meeting to the quiet people and say, so what do you think? Right. Because it's all been done already and it's unfair. And now they feel like and are treated like the afterthought. Right? So what I've started doing, and plus they're ruminators, they need to think. The think-out-louders are doing their thinking in the room. The ruminators need a day sometimes. So what I do is when we reconvene the following week, I start the meeting with the ruminators. I say, okay, all you ruminators who said very little in the last meeting, tell me what you think about the last meeting. And I do go to the ruminators at the end. I shouldn't say that I don't do it. Because sometimes they do have some amazing thoughts. But I always make sure to say to the ruminators, I want your thoughts, and I start meetings with them now.
