Johnnie Moore

Musing on a coffee table conversation

Johnnie Moore

Johnnie Moore

I’m Johnnie Moore, and I help people work better together

I had some friends over yesterday. All four happen to be involved in social work and care in the community. While I pottered they gathered around my kitchen table. They started talking shop, and I enjoyed just watching from afar and listening in.

It struck me that my kitchen table is very like the kind of round table we’re often saddled with at conferences. But the quality of my friends’ chat was very different from what you might expect at a conference. It was relaxed and playful, moving from periods of laughter to expressions of deep concern about the difficulties they encounter on a daily basis. Some of it related directly to work, and some of it didn’t.

How nice, I thought, that they don’t have someone prowling around to tell them they have 10 minutes to wrap their conversation up and present some action points to a larger meeting. Had such constraints been in place, they would have had a different conversation. I am pretty sure it would have been less satisfying and less valuable.

I wonder how much gets lost in organisational efforts to “make conversations productive”. As I’m fond of saying, it’s the effort to be effective that makes us ineffective.

Share Post

More Posts

Fluke

There’s more potential in each moment than we realise

More Updates

Emotional debt

Releasing the hidden costs of pent up frustrations

Aliveness

Finding the aliveness below the surface of stuck

Johnnie Moore

Talking straight

Thanks to Hugh for highlighting this insight from Kathy at Headrush: Your user’s brain wants a conversation: When you lecture or write using conversational language, your user’s brain thinks it’s

Johnnie Moore

links for 2010-08-30

Being Weird – Only Dead Fish Neil Perkin points to research suggesting much of popularly accepted psychological research is limited by the worldview of western industrialised democracies and misleads us

Johnnie Moore

Comment feed

I seem to be provoking more comments these days. So for the real enthusiasts I’ve added an RSS feed of comments. (RSS feeds are a way of getting the content