Make three seconds your floor
Use a minimum three-second wait after substantive questions.
The move: make three seconds your minimum wait after a substantive question. Most meeting pauses are shorter than they feel. The person asking the question feels exposed, so one second can feel like a long time. But the people answering are doing several jobs: decoding the question, searching for an example, checking whether disagreement is welcome, and forming a sentence. What Wait Time Protects Wait time protects cognition. It keeps the leader from turning a real question into a performance test for the fastest talker. It also improves equity: people who process more slowly, translate internally, or avoid interrupting get…
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