All Conversations Are Not Equal

The other day, I had one of my team members come to me on how to handle talk with a specific person. The issues was that this team member felt that they felt pressured into agreeing to something they did not fully understand. The root issue was in the conversation they had with a different engineer.

I'll call this issue, the Fast -vs- Slow thinking syndrome. This is where one person speak fast, thinks fast where the other person processes information at a different pace.

This type of conversation leads the "Fast" engineer to drive the conversions, without giving the "Slow" engineer time to think about all the facets of the topic at hand. This can lead to the feeling where a decision has been fully vetted when it has not.

A possible solution to this is to slow the conversion down but using email, documents, etc.

Look around and see if you can spot this in your meetings.

* By Slow, I do not mean dumb or simple. By Slow I'm referring to the processing and expressing information over a larger amount of time. This could also be a cultural, style or polite issue that could be mis-interrupted as not understanding an issue. This would not be a correct assumption!

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