Posts Tagged ‘conversation’
Are You In—Or Are You a Loser?
Is club membership really that critical to you?
Sometimes we observe similarities between work and church. Here’s a way work and church similarly lose momentum with every conversation: making club membership their most important feature.
At work VPs and managers and employees speak in Dilbertesque code. Acronyms are just the beginning. In the medical device world, there are shorthand words for landmark studies, shorthand words for device features and benefits, shorthand words for certain technological functions. Shorthand words for the management focus of the quarter. Unless you’ve been around the team for a time, you wouldn’t understand 60% of the conversation. That’s why advertising agencies routinely hire translators when they get projects with medical device firms—they just don’t get the gibberish these smart people are talking.
At church we put on holy language and use words that make us seem like we are in the know. We deliver these words calmly as if they were on our minds all the time. The language of doubt is mostly unwelcome in this setting—this is where the faithful come for their weekly booster shot. And so language becomes subterfuge.
The problem with insider language at work or church is that it sets up participants for failure again and again. In both settings, many of the folks in the conversation don’t understand the very words they are saying—and don’t even realize they don’t understand. Or maybe they realize it but the insider current is so strong they are afraid to admit their lack.
Plain speech is a subversive force. Not only does plain speech out those not in the know, it actually forces those who think they know to explain or realize they know less than they thought. Plain speech is a force for progress because it breaks down hidden barriers and destroys a primary rhetorical tool for those who want to sit on their knowledge and keep it for themselves and to protect their kingdom.
This is why…again…no question is a dumb question. The simplest questions often carry great power.
As organizations (like work and church) realize they need to evangelize and draw outsiders in as a matter of survival, insider language must die.
Insider language is dead!
Long live language!
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Image Credit: Kirk Livingston
Should You Make Your Boss Cry?
Just draw me a picture
In a conversation yesterday my new friend self-identified as one who enjoys the “messy work” of helping groups get on the same page. To that I say: may her tribe grow. Because that is messy work indeed—fraught with bruised egos, sullen colleagues and cross-purposed tasks.
I maintain there is a fair amount of artistry involved in helping a group begin to move forward. Those who help others catch a vision for a project or cause have a knack for painting pictures. These pictures help team-mates understand just what is at stake. Those pictures may be dumb sketches or verbal images. The word “picture” here is important because an image conveys emotive content often missing with words alone. Without the emotive content of a picture, we are back to just using our intellect. And intellect only carries us so far. We can know the reasons behind a purpose, walk through spreadsheets and examine data without ever getting our emotive selves involved.
For many of us, real meaning has an emotional nexus. Pushing forward together springs quite naturally from that place where reason and care have linked arms.
The picture my new friend painted drew people from different business units in her organization—each armed with very different purposes and possibly their own rhetorical axes to grind—into a shared objective. The painting of the picture and telling of the story helped gradually align those cross-purposes.
What pictures are you sculpting for those around you today?
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
Guns & God & GOP: Why Listen Beyond What I Know? (Dummy’s Guide to Conversation #20)
Why listen to a different viewpoint?
Q: I’m a passionate guy. I have strong beliefs and I know what’s true about the world. And yet coworkers and neighbors blather on with their ill-founded stupidities. Why won’t they listen to reason?
A: I’m glad you ask because we all fall into this state from time to time—often without realizing it. What stands as a clear and obvious reason to me looks like wishy-washy BS to you. And your clearly developed opinion looks like ideology-driven, fact-picking to me.
One guy in the Bible talked about an opportune time for everything: birth and death, crying and laughing, speaking and shutting your pie hole. Maybe there is a time to shout your opinion and maybe there is a time to listen to what someone else has to say.
We do a lot of shouting in this country.
What if we experimented with listening?
If there were a time for listening, it would happen in a conversation where we truly wanted to hear what someone else wanted to say. Perhaps we’re talking with someone we respect a great deal. Maybe we’ve purposefully sought out a friend with a different opinion—just to try to hear it clearly.
What if we listened intently to the pieces of reason and fragments of story our friend uses use to tell her side of things? What if we intentionally entered a conversation with the purpose of listening rather than doing battle or proving our point? We all know that the purpose we bring to a conversation has a big bearing on the outcome. We’ll get a fight if we want one. We may get an interesting eye-opener if we listen properly.
Note how different that intention is from the half-listening we typically do while we form our rebuttal. We’re all guilty of preparing a torrent of words to combat the wrong-headed notions spewing from our worthy debate opponent.
But what if it was not a debate we wanted? What if, after listening we tried to summarize what our conversation partner said to see if we could get it right? And only then, after hearing and summarizing, we formed a response. And what if we didn’t reach for the phrases we heard on TV or trot out the canned responses our club’s magazine produced? What if we stayed in the moment—with this friend—and voiced our disagreement even as we continued to listen?
Here’s what can happen: You and I can remain passionately eloquent about what we believe. But we also can say with certainty what our friend believes-though we disagree.
That kind of talk can feed your passion, feed a relationship as well as make for an interesting and engaging few moments of human connection.
That’s why we listen to a different viewpoint.
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
Help: My Friend Talks Past Me! (Dummy’s Guide to Conversation #19)
Vary Your Response to Train Your Friend
Q: My friend and colleague stops by many times a day to chat. We do a similar job but in different areas so it’s helpful to compare notes. The interruptions are mostly welcome, save for this one habit of hers that drives me crazy: she cannot seem to hear me. It doesn’t always work this way, but when she gets agitated, she keeps saying the same thing over and over. She doesn’t seem to hear my answer and then she just keeps repeating herself. Sorta endlessly. I want to thump her forehead with my index finger to get her attention, but that seems improper behavior between two adults. What to do?
Wait–let’s talk.
A: It’s good you hold off from thumping your friend’s forehead. Treating each other as adults is a top-notch approach to human interactions and is definitely the right way to go. Your friend gets stuck in an endless anxiety-driven loop she cannot escape. The loop and anxiety are so strong she gets a little lost.
Help you friend by coaxing her off the endless merry-go-round of anxiety. Start by slowing her down—you are trying to break into the endless loop and it may take more than words. Stand. Look into her eye. Hold her shoulder. Speak slowly. Do what is necessary to get her attention. Bring the kind of attention you reserve for those serious situations where you might be delivering bad news, say.
Mind you: you are not talking down to her. Try not to say, “Calm down!” as you might a child who has lost control. This is not a time for condescension or disparaging or ridicule. Your adult friend just needs another perspective to intervene, that’s all. And that’s what you are going to provide. We all need another perspective—probably more often than we realize.
Deliver your response in slow, measured tones. Your point is not to solve the anxiety loop, but just to engage in conversation. Your goal is to work through the problem together, to discuss and sort out next steps. It’s the conversation that is the remedy.
That’s what friends are for.
Keep that up and—just possibly, given time—your friend may see the anxiety loop before she steps on.
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
Today I’m Listening
What can you hear between the lines—and where will it take you?
I’ll start by listening to a set of phone conversations my medical device client fields constantly. I want to hear the questions. I want to hear the responses. But I especially want to hear the tone of the questions. I’m listening for urgency and for actual language used. I’ll write down the words and note the flow and capture quotes. These notes and my listening will guide the communication that takes place next.
Listening goes places.
I’ll spend the balance of the day listening between the lines for another client. But this time I’ll be listening to the text I am creating for them. And I’ll listen to the process they use to serve their customers. Listening and revising and re-jiggering and re-listening.
Listening is required to know where to go next
What—or who—are you listening to today?
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
Think “Plant” Not “Preach” (Dummy’s Guide to Conversation #18)
Monologue is dead. Long live dialogue.
You’ll be much more effective if you give up telling people what to do and instead invite them into an idea.
It’s more work on your part, of course.
Inviting your conversation partner into an idea has the advantage of letting the notion grow in their native cerebral soil versus boxing them about the ears and head with your command.
Planting seeds can also change the shape of your internal discourse. And that can become a fresh, personal beginning point.
Check out the other 17 tips from the Dummy’s Guide to Conversation.
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Image Credit: Kirk Livingston
Try “Yes, and…” Today
Let there be a Science of Deep Collaboration
When I hand out a group project in my writing class I hear audible groans.
It’s because we’re trained to work at things on our own—that’s how scholarship and schoolwork and academics have worked for a long time. The groans come from all the extra work of communicating and all the expectations around not knowing if others in the group will keep their end of the group-work bargain. The groans come from the anxieties that hover around roles and responsibilities and knowing you’ll have to sell your ideas.
I am eager for new and deeper research into collaboration. Let’s call it a Science of Collaboration. Maybe it is a social science. People like Keith Sawyer and Edgar Schein are moving this science forward—along with many others. I am fond of the work Patricia Ryan Madson has done around Improv, which seems the perfect gateway for anyone to learn the fun of collaboration. And Keith Johnstone seems to have spawned many thinkers along these lines.
I’d like for this science to do (at least) two things:
- Invite people in who have been working alone for forever. But gently, and independent of the introvert/extrovert divide. I want the invitation to show the fun of the process. I want that invitation to promise more aha moments and then to quickly deliver on that promise.
- Show next steps to working together. What can an ad hoc team do to quickly get grounded enough to toss ideas that build on each other? There are techniques out there, certainly, but I’d like this to be second nature, part of our emotional intelligence, something we come to expect. Something we’ve grown up with.
“Yes, and…” seems a perfect place to start. This is the old improv notion of building directly on what the last person just said. And quickly, without lots of deliberation. It requires a certain fearlessness.
What if “Yes, and…” was built into our educational DNA from grade school up?
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
Ratcheting Expectations in World that Demands Viral
Again: what does success look like for my project?
Do you have outsized notions of what is important?
Of course you do.
We all do, because we assume (wrongly) that what is important to me is important to everyone. Turns out that is not the case. For all the videos or stories or songs that go viral, there are countless that arrive stillborn—at least as far as numbers go.
What shadow will your project cast?
It’s easy enough to see that not everyone shares our passions and drives. Not everyone is fascinated by Star Wars or Wes Anderson films, for instance. Not everyone longs to spend hours tinkering with their lawn, or building perfect pectorals or diagramming the stars in the night sky. Not everyone asks “Why?” Not everyone asks “How can I do that myself?”
So if we are looking for our idea to go viral, we had better negotiate together what we consider viral. Will my idea get 3 million views? 3000? 30? And which am I satisfied with? What can we be satisfied with? That’s worth talking about before a project goes out the door.
I’m reminded of that bit of faith that writing will find its audience. As we prepare to launch our idea, and as we talk about who is open to hearing/acting on the idea, some frank talk about what success looks like will help immensely. Realistic expectations at the beginning of the project will help set the stage for the eventual self-scourgings or pats on the back, in a week or month or year, when you see how the project did or did not do.
And for the artist or writer—just doing the work may be enough.
And maybe that is not a bad place to dwell.
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
“The readiest way of working on understanding is often through talk…”
Douglas Barnes on Exploratory Talk
The readiest way of working on understanding is often through talk, because the flexibility of speech makes it easy for us to try out new ways of arranging what we know, and easy also to change them if they seem inadequate. Not all kinds of talking (or writing) are likely to contribute equally to working on understanding. A great deal of the writing that goes on in school is a matter of imitating what other people have said or written, and the same is true at least in part of the talk.
–Douglas Barnes, “Exploratory Talk for Learning” in Exploring Talk in Schools, edited by Neil Mercer and Steve Hodgkinson (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2009) 5
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Image Credit: Kirk Livingston
Listening has an Ugly Step-Sister: Waiting
Surprise: She Has a Lot to Say
The problem with listening has always been the other person talking. When will they stop talking so I can talk about myself and my interests? You know—the important stuff.
And so we wait.
Turns out there are lots of opportunities to wait in life. Beyond waiting for our turn to talk or the sheets to dry, there are lines at the grocer, lines for on-ramps, waiting for Netflix to load, waiting to get a job/spouse/house/liver/reprieve/break/two-bedroom spot in the nursing home.
What we do while we wait—that’s key. Some say stay busy. Some say pray (seems a good strategy to me). Some say stay curious. Some say pursue your passion.
And then there is listening
Listening while you wait.
Intently.
Deep in the spinning cogs and meshed gear-works of waiting there is a mechanism that also tunes interest. If I listen intently I may just see my desire shift ever so slightly. I scraped and saved for years for a new car but when I had the money, I realized desire shifted: I didn’t want to spend it on the new car. A used car does fine, and I’ll spend that savings for the other thing that became important in the meantime.
Is this partly how prayer works: deep desire and constant asking followed by shifts in desire and asking that turns to listening?
When we wait we are ripe for deep listening.
What are you hearing while you wait?
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
conversation is an engine 