Because the presenters knew their material forward and back, they experienced what social psychologists call “the curse of knowledge”—the cognitive bias that makes it difficult for them to remember what it’s like to be a beginner seeing the content for the first time. That’s why they assumed the room could quickly grasp all the salient points as they flipped from slide to slide.

But if the goal of the meeting is to make decisions or give feedback, it can be tough for stakeholders to understand the material well enough in the span of a single meeting to arrive at thoughtful conclusions.

The solution is to help everyone come prepared. The change we made to our decision and review meetings was to ask the organizers to send out any presentations or documents the day before so that everyone got the chance to process the information in advance. This meant that I could spend as much time as I needed to understand all the charts and graphs, which allowed me to be a better contributor in the meeting.

But those two or three words made a big difference. Rather than hurting their motivation, praising the students’ process, or how hard they had worked, encouraged them to keep going.

One of the big turning points for this project came when he asked me to do the whole book as a PowerPoint presentation. (I think he was a little fed up with wading through my prose—one of the downsides of being a really fast typist.) The requirement to boil everything down into short presentation snippets was incredibly powerful. We got into a rhythm in which he would give me “assignments” and I would do my best to complete them, and eventually after more than a year, we had something he felt comfortable moving forward with.

[Carly] Fiorina, who in fact had done such an in-depth study of the company and the situation that she had many of the answers, probably meant to reassure people by her knowledge. But by not asking questions and by not failing to have some answers, she scared many of the employees. Fortunately, when this feedback was delivered and received, Fiorina adapted her active listening and allowed her natural gift for communication to flourish. This increased her credibility and at the same time deepened her insights into the company, its challenges, and its opportunities.

Their best shot at it would be to work closely on the revisions in a focused way without interruption.

Morrison had just moved into her new home on the Hudson, and Bambara joined her there for three days as they went back and forth with edits and revisions to ready the book for publication. “She’d write and I’d edit some,” Morrison recalled

She would go upstairs and work, then she’d run down the stairs and say, “What about this?” Then I would sit down and go over that, then she’d run back up the stairs. It was the most amazing— but certainly extremely efficient, for us— way to do it, because she was so clear. She could focus immediately. I would just have to grunt and point and she knew exactly what I was suggesting.