Please, Meet Me in the Middle

I attended a conference this past week and was surprised by the experience in one of the sessions. Although the topic was a good one, the speaker seemed knowledgeable and the audience was enthusiastic, the outcome was basically a train wreck.

I have given a lot of thought as to what happened and tried to analyze where things went wrong – after all, I spend most of my time working with groups of people and my goal is to build business and nonrpofit partnerships. How could a seemingly positive setting with positive participants have a negative outcome?

Here’s what I think: the speaker couldn’t find middle ground with his audience because he didn’t give enough thought to WHERE we all started. Let’s take my train wreck analogy a bit further. Assume that you are driving a train on the tracks and you want to have a successful trip. Maybe you even want to add more passengers to your train along the way. Well, both goals require that you know the LOCATION of other trains and potential passengers – right?

In this session, the leader had a very clear perspective on his topic and, as it turned out, it was not the same perspective as most of the people in the room. He started right in with his material and laid out his “tracks” to success. The problem is that the other people were coming from other directions and his “tracks” didn’t reach them from the start. We couldn’t catch up becuase he didn’t give us the resources or guidance to make the trip.

Lesson learned? Any partnership, whether a learning environment or a business partnership, begins with a roadmap (or train map) and maps only help you to find the place where you can meet others and find agreement if you know from where each participant starts the journey. Ask questions, do your research and know your environment – then we can find common ground.