Fast Break was at Vibewire and featured 5 of us talking about Creativity, Connection, Collaboration, Commercialisation & (drum roll please) Conversation.
Here are the notes to support the slides (which I didn’t really use):
- A key challenge to innovation is noticing. Or the willingness to be surprised.
- Conversation plays a key role here – in conversation we can allow ourselves to be surprised.
- Lovely quote from Theodore Zeldin’s book Conversation: The kind of conversation I like is one in which you are prepared to emerge a slightly different person.
- Finally, 3 suggestions to improve the process:
- Find people who are not like you to converse with. The more alien, the better.
- Listen as well as talk.
- Do something about it afterwards.
4 responses so far ↓
re: turn on // May 10, 2009 at 7:40 am |
The Zeldin quote certainly had an impact.
This definition of conversation (online or otherwise) reminds me of childhood, playing with different colours of play-dough. They can be formed separately, stick together as a single shape yet remain distinct in colour, or mash together and form a new colour and shape.
Adam // May 13, 2009 at 1:41 am |
Matt, this great insight! the importance of conversation and communication. in today’s organisational context interpersonal skills such as communication allows us to meet the demands of both our employees/employers.
my own recommendations for improving conversational skills would be:
1. utilising verbal and non verbal cues such as body language
2. a degree of cultural awareness to avoid any chances of conflict
2. consider the other person: communicate with them in terms of their interests, values and backgrounds.
innotecture // May 13, 2009 at 2:05 am |
Adam – Very interesting. Thank you for commenting. Can you give me an example of where this has happened to you?
Adam // May 13, 2009 at 2:28 am |
gladly, i find that at work i’ll exercise a great degree of self awareness especially when communicating with my manager. i’ll tend to change my register, jargon and body language if i want to come down to their level (empathise) or i’ll consider their values and interests before i voice my own opinion.