My Pispective on the Echo Chamber

(A pispective is where you write about something in 314 words)

I've been having some really interesting conversations with people on LinkedIn. The topic is about the importance of managing your own echo chamber.

We all have one. If we're in a room full of people agreeing with each other, we're in an echo chamber. If we're in a room with a senior leader who says something that gets everyone's heads nodding, we're in an echo chamber. If we're in a room full of peers and one solitary person stands out with a different view, we're in an echo chamber.

Like any social platform, we curate our LinkedIn feed. It fills up with the posts of the people we're connected with. The feed becomes like a mirror. It reflects an aspirational view of ourselves.

The posts are by people we agree with and we accept the opposite, that they agree with us. We reinforce this agreement with likes and comments. This is our own custom echo chamber.

I work in the risk domain, specialising in business risk in digital transformation programmes. Because these programmes are all about change and because change means someone in the status quo loses, management teams leading change journeys have a strong tendency towards an echo chamber.

This is no great secret. There's a name for it: narrow framing. The issue is that, like any small room, the air in an echo chamber changes over time but those in the echo chamber don't notice it. It's only noticeable when someone leaves or enters. If there's no change within an echo chamber, there seems to be no problem. We just don't notice.

I knew this about the people I advise. But I didn't see it in my LinkedIn feed. It was only when my writing started to take off that I met people outside my own echo chamber.

The good news: there's less of an echo if you just open the doors.

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