Ever since the pandemic started and we've embraced being fully remote, the hand-raise feature has become a fixture of most meetings.
If you're unfamiliar, there's a button you can press in Google Meet that notifies everyone that you have something to say. As people raise their hands, a queue forms in the order hands were raised. When the person is done talking, people have a chance to speak their mind.
I've noticed some interesting effects as a result of this...
It helps the "loudest voice gets the most airtime" issue, and helps the people whose voices are often drowned out.
It comes at the cost of flow. There's a slightly awkward pause between speakers, waiting to make sure the person is really done talking.
Some people don't respect it, and it can really throw off the tone of the meeting.
It puts a slight amount of friction into the process of speaking your thoughts. When you have to raise your hand it makes you consider if it's really worth taking a turn for it. This is probably a good thing for most meetings 1 .
Sometimes you'll raise your hand for one thing, and then the conversation will move on, and you'll have to revisit it.
That last point comes up a lot for me. I have a lot of thoughts, especially in meetings where the point is to have thought-provoking conversation, and I collect them while I'm waiting my turn. Sometimes I'll even write them down if I have more than one or two.
When it's my turn I spew them out one by one. I say spew because sometimes it feels like I'm speaking just to make sure every thought that came up makes its way from my brain out my mouth. I'm not sure it's actually benefiting anyone to bring up more than one topic in the same breath. Am I moving the conversation forward, or holding it back? Am I making it more fragmented? Am I saying all these things for them, or for me?
Maybe I can let go of that comment about the sunk cost fallacy from four topics ago. Maybe the world doesn't need to hear that I agree with the last three people who spoke 2 . Maybe just pick the most relative thought and keep the conversation flowing in one direction.
I'm going to think harder about what I want to say before I bring the conversation back to previous topics. Maybe some editing would do me (and the conversation) (and the group) some good. The power of editing is strong, you lose clarity by saying too much. Kill your darlings, as they say!
1: Brainstorming is one type of meeting where you want very little friction for ideas to circulate. Even then, my preference for brainstorming is to generate ideas separately and then talk about them as a group.
2: What can I say? I like to be supportive.
