by John J. Walters
Last week I shared with you my secret for making everyone else shut up and listen to one person at a time. But what about when you need to make one person shut up and listen while everyone else talks?
This became very important to me when I was working on my first book, which was a team effort of six authors in total. Each of us wrote two chapters and we would meet once a week to discuss our progress.
Getting people to shut up when their work is being criticized is a difficult thing. While we may think that responding to each individual critique with a well-reasoned explanation of our intent would be helpful to the discussion, really all we’re doing is defending our work and making the whole process take forever. And it’s not like well get to sit there as everyone in the world reads our book, pointing out to them what we “meant to say there.â€
Because we wanted to discuss everyone’s work each week and we didn’t want to be there all night, we instituted the Infamous Egg-Timer Rule. This one is pretty much as simple a concept as the Talking Stick. You give each person a certain amount of time. Say, 15 minutes. You allow them to make some introductory remarks about what they think the conversation should focus on that evening,and then they must open up the floor to everyone else and keep their mouth shut until the timer goes off.  Simple as that.
This works quite well for creative work; I would imagine it would work just as well for other things. It’s amazing how much can actually get done when you eliminate people’s ability to defend their efforts (no matter how much room there may be for improvement) and force them to listen, even for 15 minutes at a time.