Hey there Reader,
Have you ever experienced this?
Someone has not replied to you.
And you have already decided what it means (btw, it’s not good 😕 ).
I had that happen recently.
I sat on a video call this week with nobody in it. The clock rolled past the start time. Two minutes. Three. I had the whole story assembled before four: he had changed his mind, something better had come up, I had not been worth showing up for.
Then an email landed. He had been trying to get in the whole time and could not find the link.
We had been sitting alone in the same appointment, each of us telling ourselves a different sad little story. It took one message to end it. He sent it. I did not.
He was the one locked out, and yet he was still the one who checked.
Most of us are far more willing to explain a silence than to ask about it.
And the explanations we reach for are almost never generous.
I wanted to understand what this really meant, so I went to the research. There’s a great article by Jenni Kantola and Ward van Zoonen that asked knowledge workers about the times they had gone quiet on someone at work, and sorted what they heard into four responses. One was irritation. The other three were: (1) a workload being triaged, (2) a thread genuinely lost track of, and (3) a conversation somebody was dreading. Only one of the four had anything to do with the person left waiting.
And here’s some more. Lauren Min and her colleagues conducted some experiments and asked people to guess how their unexpected message would resonate with another person. Almost all of them thought it would land smaller than it actually did (hmm). And when it did, it was when the contact came out of nowhere, and the other person wasn’t someone we speak to often.
So what does this tell us?
Maybe, just maybe, silence does very little damage on its own.
I think about the leaders I coach who are three weeks into a story about a stakeholder who has gone quiet, or a boss who seems to be acting a certain way, or a client who never came back. Three weeks of interpretation built on nothing, when one sentence would have settled it.
So here are two experiments for you to try this week.
Option A: Write down the worst version. Take the silence that has been nagging at you and put your bleakest reading of it in writing. Then read it back and mark every line you could not prove to another person.
Option B: Send the message. Not a clever one. “Thinking of you, how are you?” or “Did my last note reach you?” Six words is plenty. The research says you will underrate what it does.
So what have you already decided about someone’s silence, without ever asking them? And what will you do today?
– Megan
