The Room Is More Important Than the Rule

The Influence Every Day Show with Dr. Ed Tori - Episode 073

Before you rehearse what you're going to say in your next hard conversation, ask a different question: what has the room already decided?

Dr. Tori has been running back-to-back (Not So) Difficult Conversations workshops, and the first skill every room learns is setting the stage... the environment, the time, the timing, the messaging that lands before anyone arrives, and the first few moments after they do. In this episode he makes the case that rooms are more important than rules, because the environment shapes behavior whether or not anyone remembers the rule.

He travels through eight spaces designed to change how people show up:

The Dogon toguna (Mali) - the elders' meeting shelter with a ceiling about four feet high, where the traditional account is that anger, expressed by standing, has nowhere to go
The nijiriguchi (Japan) - the tea-house "crawling-in" door, about two feet square, that samurai couldn't carry a sword through; lord and merchant enter the same way
Floor-sitting cultures - Japan, Korea, and much of the Islamic world, where no seat is higher than anyone else's
The Paris peace talks (1968–69) - ten weeks spent deciding the shape of the negotiating table before substantive talks could begin
Finnish sauna diplomacy - Cold War negotiations in towels: no insignia, no rank, no weapons
Hajj - millions of pilgrims in the same two white cloths
Quaker meeting houses - no altar, no pulpit, facing pews, silence as the default
Topkapi Palace - the "Eye of the Sultan," a carved grate over the council chamber where the sultan might or might not be listening
The UK House of Commons - benches that face each other, so the opposing argument always has a seat

Most of these rooms do one thing: they shed status before the conversation starts. And some do the opposite on purpose... because if every meeting you run ends in full agreement, that's a red flag for potential groupthink.

The episode closes with the part that stings: we set rules for ourselves, break them, beat ourselves up... Never once do we ask whether we designed the room to make the rule easy. You're already deliberate about the room when you want to chill with a friend or family. Be that deliberate when the stakes are high.

Context is more important than content.

Key takeaways:

Rooms are more important than rules. The environment shapes behavior with or without the rule.
Setting the stage has multiple levers you control... including environment, time, timing, messaging before, and the arrival.
Most deliberately designed rooms across cultures shed status. If a conversation matters that much, it's more important than your ego.
Some rooms should be designed for disagreement. Full agreement in every meeting means you've designed out honesty.
Before you blame your character for a broken rule, look at the room you keep breaking it in.

Quotables:

"Rooms are more important than rules."
"If it's that important to you, it's more important than your ego."
"If I get full agreement of everyone in the room, that is a bad sign."
"Sometimes we break the rule and beat ourselves up, but we never designed it so it was easy to carry out the rule."
"Context is far more important than content."

This week's action:

Pick one conversation you've been avoiding. Before you rehearse a single sentence, change one thing about the room... where, when, or what they hear before they walk in. Then see how much rule you still need.

Mentioned in this episode:

Setting the Stage - the first of five moves in Not-So-Difficult Conversations (Dr. Tori's card-deck workshop)
The Core Influence Framework™ - this episode lives in the Contexts pillar
Rule 6 of the 7 Simple Rules of Influence: Make It Easy

Links:

How well do you listen? Take the quiz: https://listening.scoreapp.com
Apply for 1-on-1 influence coaching: https://DrTori.com/coaching-application-1on1
Bring the Not-So-Difficult Conversations workshop to your team: https://DrTori.com/speaking

Episode Transcript

073 The Room is More Important Than the Rule

The Influence Every Day Show with Dr. Ed Tori

influence-073-the-room-is-more-important-than-the-rule-01-audio.mp3

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I am not sure exactly what it is, but it turns out that over the past several weeks I've had to do multiple workshops on having difficult conversations. Now, many of you may know that I have card decks that I use to run the workshop, to have people run through scenarios and change roles and practice different skills and techniques in having difficult conversations.

And one of the first techniques or skills that the room learns when we do one of these workshops is how to set the stage that is how to prep before the actual conversation occurs. How do you actually prep the context? So there are many things that go into context. There's the environment, there's the time, there's timing, the messaging that occurs before anyone arrives there.

There's the arrival in the very first few moments. All of these things feed into how a stage is set for a conversation to occur. And one of the things that I sometimes bring up when I'm talking about setting the stage is that we can learn from other cultures as to how they have changed the environment so that they get a certain behavior.

And in fact, sometimes that is the best way to change someone's behavior, is to redesign the room or to think about the design deliberately. The shape of the room. The layout, the time, the timing, the messaging beforehand, all of that stuff sets a stage, but the environment sometimes shapes the behavior.

In fact, I would argue that rooms are more important than rules. *Rooms are more important than rules.* Why? Because the environment shapes the behavior with or without the rule. So let me give a few examples that come from different cultures. And the one that I cite the most, it happens to come from my undergrad degree, which is Africana studies.

I studied the history of West Africa. I studied African American history and the history of the African diaspora. there's one thing that really stood out to me when I was studying the history of West Africa, and that is there's a tribe called the Dogon people. They have a meeting place for their elders.

It's almost like how a boardroom might be in our context, in this case, if you were to see this structure, you might really wonder like, what is up with this?

It's only four feet tall. It's only four feet tall. So how is it that the elders are all getting together to meet in a structure that's only four feet tall? Well, the ceiling is four feet high, so how is it, how are they able to meet there and why is it designed that way? Other structures in their culture have high ceilings, but why this one?

Why four feet? Well, it turns out that in their culture, expressions of anger are to go from sitting to standing. So you stand up when you're angry. That's an expression of anger. So essentially by making the ceiling only four feet high, they have actually designed out the cultural expression of anger from their meetings.

Now, it doesn't mean you don't get angry, but it probably doesn't accelerate or, amplify within oneself or within the group nearly as much because of the built environment. There, there are many other examples of this and many other cultures, the nijiriguchi tea houses in Japan, the way their entrance is shaped, it's, imagine you're going to go into into a, to have a, to, you're going into a Japanese tea house.

So you have to go through a door. The door is about 30 inches by 30 inches. two and a half feet or so by two and a half feet. What does this mean? You actually have to crawl in, right? So you're entering in kind of a humbled position. You can't enter with swords or any kind of weaponry or bulky gear or anything like that.

You have to enter on your hands crawling into the space, head down, bowed. In order to even enter the space. So you can't enter in a haughty, proud kind of way. So they've designed the space in such a way that it sheds status, and how beautiful is that before you sit over tea

Now of course I don't necessarily know or have ever experienced the full context of nijiriguchi or having tea in a Japanese tea house. I don't know what that means culturally because I haven't experienced it. But I can tell you this, the design of the door is very deliberate.

And it changes behavior and emotions and how someone shows up. It sets the stage. There are all kinds of floor sitting cultures, Where people sit on the floor. This happens in Japan, in Korea, in most of the Islamic world. They sit on the floor and that is also a status shedding

kind of behavior, right? Oftentimes thrones and other types of seats are above the people. But in this case, culturally, everybody is sitting on the floor. And what does that do? So think about this, about how you design the room.

Now, let me give some other examples. The Paris Peace talks in the late 1960s. It's interesting as all of the diplomats were gathering to have the peace talks in Paris there, there were actually ten weeks of deliberation before the peace talks to decide on the shape of the tables.

Now you might think what isn't? Peace isn't stopping war. More important, yes it is. But they knew the importance of the shape of the table and what that would mean to successful negotiations and deliberations. In other words, the shape of the table was so important it was worth the ten weeks of being deliberate about it so that they could negotiate peace.

ultimately they, they decided on round tables with two side tables that were rectangular. You can imagine a rectangular shaped table with two sides on opposite sides of that table could be more adversarial. So they deliberately used round tables for these peace talks.

And there are many other examples, in some acts of diplomacy, like in Finland, acts of diplomacy were conducted in a sauna. They were conducted in a sauna. This became particularly well known during the time of the Cold War because if you think about it in a sauna, all you're wearing is a towel.

You don't have any kind of insignias, you don't have your flag on your shoulder, Everyone is wearing the same thing, Everyone is at the same status, sitting at the same level, wearing the same thing, which is almost nothing. No weapons, no insignia. That's where they had their deliberation in the sauna.

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Now there are other examples that, take on a religious context. For example, the pilgrimage or hajj. When people go to Mecca as they make that journey, they're wearing two white cloths. Everyone's wearing the same thing. The status is completely shed. In Quaker meeting houses, there's no altar, there's no pulpit even for someone to stand on.

Everyone is at the same level. And not only that, they're facing each other in pews, and the default in that setting is actually silence, which lends itself to, the reflection and meditation and prayer that the Quaker meeting house, you know, what you, the exact behavior you want in it, now there are other examples where the the design of the environment is deliberately done so that it affects oversight in a way. So in Topkapi Palace in Turkey, there is a section where the councils and military leaders and, community leaders would meet, but it was. It was next to or beneath a sort of ornate carved grate that went from one room to the next.

And on the other side of that was the sultan's quarters. So the sultan was on the other side of there. He may or may not have been there, no one knew, but the sound of the room was such that it was easily heard through that thing. And that was called the eye of the Sultan. So you can imagine that affects behavior, because if you know you're being listened to or there's a chance you're being listened to by the leader, that might affect how you behave, what you talk about, what you say in those meetings.

Then in a couple other examples, like the deliberations of parliaments and Congress and things like that. In some cultures, the parliament is a semicircle. In other cultures it's adversarial very deliberately. One side and the other, like the UK Commons. One party's on one side, one party's on the other, they're facing each other.

It's deliberately adversarial. And some might wonder why would you want an adversarial environment? Yeah, well, the fact is, sometimes you want to hear the opposing argument. You want to hear the challenges and things from other perspectives. And so this is important for, to think about in terms of leadership, in terms of parenting.

Sometimes the way we have our conversations, we design out people being honest because it's not safe to be honest. If you design in safety, if you design in a deliberate, we want to hear the opposing view, we want to hear something different, I, I don't want full agreement of everyone in the room.

If I do, that is a bad sign. Like, we're not thinking of everything. We're at high risk for group think. So you can imagine the design, the built space is very, very, very important.

If you look at these cultures and how they've deliberately shaped the environment, many times it's to shed status. Now, think about that. How many times in our own work, in our own conversations, would it be great and wonderful and beautiful if we just shed the status for a moment and actually have the conversation or the interaction about whatever is at hand.

If it's that important to you, it's worth it to shed the status. If it's that important to you, it's more important to you than your ego. And so whether it's the Dogon people eliminating expressions of anger, or the nijiriguchi entrance, shaping the status, shedding the status as you enter, or if it's the deliberations in a sauna, like all of these things.

Are status shedding deliberate designs of the environment so that people's behaviors are affected accordingly. So as you prepare for a high stakes conversation or even if it's not a high stakes conversation, I mean, think about it. What do you do when you like want to chill? You, you don't go to some rigid cold, all marble room.

Like you, you go somewhere where it's soft, it's warm, it's cozy. You're with friends or loved ones, or there's a fire, or there's like you, you, you're deliberate about that space. When you want to chill, be deliberate about the space. When you're going to have a high stakes conversation, be deliberate about the space that you design for your workplace.

It'll affect your productivity. It'll affect how you show up. The room is more important than the rule. And what's funny is sometimes we break the rule and then we beat ourselves up, but we've never designed it so that it was easy to carry out the rule. So all I'm asking you in this episode is simply to be a little more deliberate about the space, be a little more deliberate about the context.

You're really good already at shaping the content for your next discussion or meeting or difficult conversation. I'm just asking you to take a little more effort into designing the context, because context is far more important than content.

The room is more important than the rule.

I'll see you in the next episode.

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