Seminar at the Canadian Chamber of Commerce

Yesterday I delivered a talk at the Hong Kong Canadian Chamber of Commerce. The theme was SILENCE. We measured the ammount of talking compared to silence in a normal two way conversation. There is a very excellent tool to do this. It is called Dexster. It measures noise as spikes and silence is 'flat lines'. The audience was amazed that, in a normal two way conversation, there is about 30% silence. We then measured a very good speech. There was almost 60% silence!

The evidence is conclusive. When we get it right we allow the listener one third of the time to speak and between us there is a further one third of silence while we think about what each of us has said.