When we do our best listening and talking together, our thoughts flow together to create new ideas that work. We experience mindflow.
Mindflow is the lively and productive playing with options, perspectives and curiosities. This when everyone feels free to voice considerations, clarifications and concerns. Mindflow raises the collective IQ of the group and leverages the group's capacity to be optimally creative, realistic, mindful, discerning and aligned in action. It does this because it engages simple listening. It creates understanding which opens possibility space.
We simply practice the 3 what's of mindflow:
Considerations: What if...
This is suggesting ideas, alternatives, options, additions and enhancements.
Clarifications: What are you thinking about...?
This is asking for more details and examples on anything that emerges. It's curiosity assumption testing.
Concerns: What about...?
This is describing potential issues, problems, downsides, exceptions and questions about implications.
In any conversation aimed at agreement on anything from easy to complex, all we do is engage the 3 what's.
When we're not engaging with each other in mindflow, we're presenting ideas as undebatable, defending ideas, taking sides, demeaning or dismissing what others think and wonder about, dominating or disappearing in the conversation or going along in pseudo-civility. Each of these lower the collective IQ of the group and diminish the group's capacity to be optimally creative, realistic, mindful, discerning and aligned in action.
Mindflow is ideal for any conversational context.
*from the upcoming “Simple Listening” due January 2019