Silence
NOBL Collective is a new 'organizational design, management consulting, and leadership development' service company. They're a bunch of smart folks. I try to read a lot of their stuff. Their latest newsletter has an interesting take on silence and its value in an organization & meetings in general. Here's an excerpt:
“The key to better discussion? Silence.”
One of your most important jobs as a leader is to make sure that everyone in your team has the opportunity to contribute—but too often, meetings and brainstorming sessions are dominated by the same voices. To encourage more people to join the conversation, one of our favorite techniques is alternating rounds of silent, independent writing with open discussion. It’s so simple it seems obvious, and yet, every time we’ve done this at a client offsite, participants have thanked us for introducing this type of facilitation.
p.s. I'll add that: if compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world, silence has to be the ninth one.