How long should you wait for questions?

When you check for understanding, how long do you wait for questions?

Let’s backup for a second. Before “how long to wait”… how often do you stop and check for understanding?

Is it more important you get out everything you have to say, or say less and have it understood?

When it’s not understood, do you blame the listeners for not hearing you or take responsibility for not communicating?

Okay these are all pretty typical questions with maybe obvious answers.

Answering in reverse order:

• it’s your responsibility to have your message heard
• it’s most valuable that important messages are understood
• stop after every important point being made
• wait about 30(!) seconds when you ask “any questions?”

It takes time to form good questions. If you actually want engagement and good questions. Instead we often bias for quick responses, which we then need to eventually massage into getting to the point where we get to the real question and can move forward. It’s not faster to have people respond faster.

It also shows you care, you actually want to hear what they think. And, spending the time thinking about the situation increase retention and understanding of the information.

30 seconds probably seems like a long time to wait. 30 seconds. A long time. That’s strange, right?

I’ve also noticed worse communication in remote settings. It’s harder to read the room, especially to read the body language. As a result, we move on even faster.

There’s also a diversity angle here. Don’t merely value the fastest response time — response time is rarely a value-add. And, yet, it’s often all we allow time to hear. If you come from privilege or certain backgrounds (e.g. schools) that teach you to respond fast, you’ll be more likely to be heard.

30 seconds seems like ages to remain silent. I’d like to experiment more with normalizing it by saying something like “I’ll pause here and I’ll answer any questions in 30 seconds”.

If you want a small step towards better collaboration, engagement, and understanding, maybe try starting with 30 seconds for the least informed person to digest and process new information. (e.g. instead of having the 2nd most informed person just pile on)

A bigger culture change for many, but an alternative that covers a lot of the ground would be to prepare and require document review ahead of all meetings. Give everyone a chance to read before the meeting and prepare questions. I’ve seen this go wrong a lot (changed information between document and meeting, valuing nitpicking over collaborating, least privileged/status still have too much work to review docs, etc.), but obviously works for companies like Amazon.

So many different things go into good communication. This is simple one that many of us can do better.

… later we can discuss how most meeting content shouldn’t be a meeting anyway.