Item 14: Allow for Silence

I was in a meeting once, and we were chatting about a particularly complex implementation detail within a system. At one point, someone asked a question about the system. The person who was primarily doing the explaining paused for a few moments, and clearly looked like he was thinking. After only a few seconds, the person who asked the question followed up with more information. While this lead to additional conversation, the original question never got answered. It's unclear whether the asker ever got clarity on the answer to their question. And this means that understandings could be misaligned, which is bad.

Allow for silence when asking a question, proposing an idea, or awaiting a response. Silence is usually indicative of thinking, much like a loading screen, or a processor when it's doing work. Silence is healthy, because it allows for reflection.

It is also okay to feel uncomfortable when there is silence, because sometimes it can be "akward silence". A good way to distinguish between okay silence vs. "akward" silence is whether or not there's active thinking about something going on. If so, it means the silence allows for reflection and contemplation so that the question/problem can be best answered/addressed. However, if there's nothing being actively thought about, then it may be unclear how to proceed, or there could be some static, and that could be unhealthy or unproductive.

Reflection and contemplation leads to effective distillation of thought. Allowing for silence will facilitate this.