Whoever Talks Most in a Meeting Loses
My old friend S has a father who’s a university professor, and apparently, while telling S how brutal power struggles inside a university can get, he also taught him that “whoever speaks first loses.”
It’s a fairly unique lesson, but I see some truth in it. If it were me, I’d tweak it slightly: “whoever talks the most loses.”
“Whoever speaks first loses” holds water because in the typical tug-of-war of an argument, who comes out on top ends up decided largely by impressions. As I mentioned earlier with the peak-end rule, humans have this sad tendency: the “correctness” of an argument gets swayed not by the logic built up point by point, but by the impression left by the most heated moment and the final summary.
In other words, when winning or losing is the priority, the most important thing is not giving your opponent an opening to seize on. To do that, the first move is to get the other person talking. Then, by criticizing what they say or pointing out contradictions, you take the upper hand in the overall flow of the discussion — creating the peak — and afterward push through your own claims or proposals — creating the end. That seems to be the standard playbook.
Coming back to the actual subject at hand, the in-house meeting, things probably aren’t always such blatant positioning battles. What’s actually needed is preventing positioning battles from arising in the first place and steering things toward a fair discussion.
Every team has members who are good at discussion and members who aren’t. The ones who are extremely good at it sometimes use their own version of the technique described above, whether intentionally or not. They guide the discourse. You could call it controlling the mood of the room. Reading the room is a kind of felt-presence grasping rooted in empathetic projection: treating something that isn’t there as if it were, and trying to grasp it. Running a company or a project can’t be entrusted to something so vague.
So what needs to be done is to cut that off.
If a mood starts forming that could sweep the discussion along, or if someone is trying to create one, cut it off. If a conclusion is about to run ahead without sufficient discussion, throw in a sharp, essential question. If someone’s mistake creates a mood where all the logic that has almost nothing to do with that mistake is about to get dismissed too, pick back out the points that can still fairly be evaluated and put them back on the table. If anger or impatience is about to trigger a snap judgment, ease the mood for a moment and buy some room to think.
I imagine that sounds like a very high level of skill. To pull it off, you need to listen to everyone’s opinions, separate solid facts from mere impressions, and, after observing and organizing things accurately, find the holes.
That’s not something you can do while you’re the one doing all the talking. So the person who talks the most loses. Steamrolling through and forcing things along might succeed in controlling the room in the moment, but doubts remain: was that judgment actually sound in the end? Did you simply steer things toward whatever was convenient for you? Did you end up silencing someone with a better opinion? Coming out on top in an argument feels good, and having your own opinion win out is satisfying. But there is no ultimate victory at the end of piling up actions warped in that way.
The content of this post is an excerpt (original text) from the following book. If you’re interested, please pick up a copy.
The Shape of a Happy IoT Startup
The Shape of a Happy IoT Startup
Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2022/09/1172/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.