If you look at my list of favorite books of 2003, you’ll notice that over the past year I’ve been a student of conversation and relationships. I’ve been especially interested in how we can make our conversations more rewarding for ourselves, for others, and for our relationships.

Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When the Stakes are High

by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler helped me to make a big leap in that direction, and that’s why it is my favorite book of 2003.

A few years ago my friend Kay Pentecost, knowing of my deep interest in communication and relationships, recommended Crucial Conversations very highly. I bought the book a few months later, and finally read it in September, 2003. Of the ton of helpful ideas in Crucial Conversations, I found four most helpful: starting with heart, filling the pool of shared meaning, safety, and stories.

Starting with heart means clarifying your purpose in the conversation. Before starting the conversation, ask yourself, What do I really want for myself? What do I really want for others? What do I really want for the relationship? If a conversation becomes difficult, return to your purpose by asking the questions again, and by asking, How would I behave if I really wanted these results?

Filling the pool of shared meaning. The authors define dialogue as the free flow of meaning between two or more people. We each enter a conversation with a personal “pool of meaning”, the combination of our opinions, feelings, theories, and experiences about the topic. “People who are skilled at dialogue,” the authors say, “do their best to make it safe for everyone to add their meaning to the shared pool.”

Safety. What makes safety important? “At the core of every successful conversation lies the free flow of relevant information.” When people feel unsafe in conversation, that flow is blocked. “As people begin to feel unsafe, they start to move down one of two unhealthy paths. They move either to silence (withholding meaning from the pool) or to violence (trying to force meaning in the pool).”

Crucial Conversations offers many ways to test and maintain safety. One key idea is that if we want to maintain safety, we must attend to two “safety conditions.” The first is mutual purpose. We can maintain mutual purpose partly by “starting with heart.” The second safety condition is mutual respect. “In essence, feelings of disrespect often come when we dwell on how others are different from ourselves. We can counteract these feelings by looking for ways we are similar.” The authors say that in many cases, “If you simply realize that your challenge is to make it safer, nine out of ten times you’ll intuitively do something that helps.”

Stories. Like several other books I read in 2003, Crucial Conversations emphasizes the importance of stories in our communications and relationships. “Just after we observe what others do and just before we feel some emotion about it, we tell ourselves a story. That is, we add meaning to the action we observed. To the simple behavior we add motive. Why were they doing that? We also add judgment—is that good or bad?”

This sequence is very similar to Virginia Satir’s Ingredients of an Interaction, the model of communication that I describe in my article “Untangling Communication.” I like the author’s use of the word story here, because it gives me a richer, more dynamic way to talk about how we make meaning.

My review has only scratched the surface. I highly recommend Crucial Conversations.
And Kay, thank you so much for recommending this book so strongly.

Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When the Stakes are High
by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler.

As you can see from the list of books below, over the past year I’ve been a student of conversation and relationships. I’ve been especially interested in how we can make our conversations more rewarding for ourselves, for others, and for our relationships. Crucial Conversations helped me to make a big leap in that direction, and that’s why it is my favorite book of 2003. [Full Review]

Other favorites:

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most
by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen.

Difficult Conversations shows that any conversation that matters is really three conversations: one about what happened, another about how we feel about what happened, and a third about how all of that affects the way we think of ourselves. When we try to talk about all of these important things at once, each conversation confuses the other, and we derail the overall conversation.

The second half of the book describes how to conduct a learning conversation, a conversation in which we learn the other person’s story, express our views and feelings fully, and solve problems together. These ideas are very similar to the concepts in Crucial Conversations of dialogue and the “shared pool of meaning,” and also to the approach I describe in my articles “Resistance as a Resource” and “Untangling Communication.”

Difficult Conversations and Crucial Conversations complement each other nicely. The books cover similar content, and express compatible ideas about how to make challenging conversations work.

Don’t Be Nice, Be Real: Balancing Passion for Self with Compassion for Others
by Kelly Bryson.

How to move beyond understanding each other to empathizing with each other. Expands on Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication (below). [Full Review]

The Flawless Consulting Fieldbook & Companion: A Guide to Understanding Your Expertise
by Peter Block.

Peter Block and colleagues describe lessons they’ve learned from their experience of practicing the principles of Block’s
Flawless Consulting
.

Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World, Revised edition
by Margaret J. Wheatley.

Wheatley applies principles from the “new sciences” of chaos, complexity, and self-organizing systems to leadership and human organizations.

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time
by Dava Sobel.

The story of how clock maker John Harrison solved the problem of longitude. The difficulty Harrison experienced in gaining acceptance for his solution, despite the gravity of the problem, makes this a fascinating case study of resistance.

The Illustrated Longitude
, by Dava Sobel and William J. H. Andrews, has the same text as Sobel’s original book, with the addition of 180 marvelous photographs and illustrations, each described in detail.

Loving What Is: Four Questions that Can Change Your Life
by Byron Katie.

Katie describes “The Work,” a set of good questions by which we can identify and inquire into beliefs that cause stress and interfere with our communications, relationships, and happiness. Includes transcripts of many sessions in which Katie facilitates many people to inquire into their beliefs to resolve a wide variety of painful situations.

A CD version of Loving What Is includes live recordings of people doing “The Work.”

Narrative Therapy: The Social Construction of Preferred Realities
by Jill Freedman and Gene Combs.

Narrative therapy invites people to make visible the stories that create and sustain the problems with which they are struggling, and to create alternative stories that better support meaningful and fulfilling lives.

It was from this book that I began to understand the importance of stories and the influence that stories wield in our interactions and relationships. Also enlightening for me was the chapter about helpful questions.

Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life, 2nd Edition
by Marshall B. Rosenberg.

How to move from moralistic judgments — judgments that imply wrongness or badness on the part of people who don’t act in harmony with our values — to clearer, more effective ways to express our needs.

Rosenberg’s
Speaking Peace
is an audio version of these ideas.

Open Space Technology: A User’s Guide, Second Edition
by Harrison Owen.

Open Space Technology, a simple and powerful way to organize meetings and conferences, encourages passion, commitment, and personal responsibility, and taps the capacity of a group of passionate, committed, responsible people to self-organize to address complex issues.

See my earlier article about Open Space Technology and Owen’s book.

Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future
by Margaret J. Wheatley.

Wheatley encourages us to hold conversations about what matters most to us. Nothing fancy; just simple conversation. Simple and powerful. [Full Review]

Over the past few months, I’ve been hearing more and more about Open Space Technology, a simple and powerful way to organize meetings and conferences. Open Space Technology encourages passion, commitment, and personal responsibility, and taps the capacity of a group of passionate, committed, responsible people to self-organize to address complex issues.

A few months ago, the Extreme Programming mailing list had a brief conversation about Open Space Technology. Wanting to know more, I asked people who had experienced Open Space Technology to share their experiences. My friend Cem Kaner said, “Dale, you already have lots of experience. Consultants’ Camp is Open Space Technology.”

Consultants’ Camp community of consultants who meet yearly in Mount Crested Butte, Colorado to share ideas and support. Consultants’ Camp was started in 1988 by Jerry Weinberg. I first attended in 1995, and Camp is now the one event that I most look forward to every year.

I’ve always loved the format of Camp, which I’d thought was unique. Two or three dozen consultants come together on Saturday evening with no pre-defined agenda. Our first task is to decide what topics we want to address over the coming six days. Each person with passion for a topic proposes a session, and, often, checks to see whether other members have an interest in the topic. A session might be a topic that the convener wants to teach others, or a topic that someone wants to learn more about from others. A session might be an learning exercise that someone wants to test, or a sticky problem with which someone wants help. Sometimes people see synergies between two or three proposals, and consolidate them into one. Other times, someone is stimulated to split a topic into two sessions, so that we can delve into the details of a complex issue. After we have proposed all of the sessions, we quickly (in about five minutes) fit them into a schedule of time slots and meeting places. The entire process of creating the schedule takes about an hour and a half.

Several years, I have wondered, before arriving at Camp, whether we’d have enough interesting topics this year. I need not have worried. Every year, my biggest challenge is choosing among the two or three fascinating and helpful sessions scheduled in each time slot.

The day after I’d asked people on the Extreme Programming mailing list to share their experiences, and the day before Cem replied, I read “Opening Space for Emerging Order,” an article by Harrison Owen, the originator of Open Space Technology. Several weeks later, I read Owen’s book Open Space Technology: A User’s Guide. Owen’s writings confirmed what Cem had said. Consultants’ Camp is an example, with minor variations, of Open Space Technology,

Earlier today, I had my first experience of Open Space Technology outside of Consultants’ Camp. A number of people took the initiative to revive the dormant local (Sacramento, California) chapter of the Organization Development Network (ODN). Today, 45 of us held our first planning meeting, using Open Space Technology as the format. This was a two-hour meeting, and I was intrigued to learn how Open Space Technology would work in such a short timeframe.

The meeting was wonderfully energizing. In 15 minutes, we created an agenda of nine half-hour sessions, focused on such topics as training, OD and music, mentoring each other, sustaining a group, and engaging the spirit at work.

One of the principles of Open Space Technology is that whoever comes is the right people. The one law of Open Space Technology is The Law of Two Feet: If you aren’t getting what you need from a session, use your two feet to move to a more productive place. These two tenets ensure that the people who attend any session are passionate about the topic, and take responsibility for their own learning and participation. In this ODN planning meeting, as in every Camp session I’ve ever attended, passion, commitment, and responsibility combined to create a great deal of energy, and at the same time a great deal of respect and mutual support. I left the meeting energized and excited about the Sacramento ODN.

Given my experience today, I am starting to see the possibilities for using Open Space Technology in organizations. For example, Open Space Technology would be a very valuable way to begin a process improvement effort. I’m imagining that it would be a wonderful way to kick off a technology project, bringing together every stakeholder who has passion for the project. I can see possibilities for defining an organization’s strategy and vision, or for planning a re-organization.

I highly recommend Harrison Owen’s book Open Space Technology: A User’s Guide. Though no book can give you a vivid experience of the power and simplicity of Open Space Technology, Owen’s book does describe how to make Open Space Technology successful.

Experiment: Attend or convene a meeting or conference based on Open Space Technology. In what ways could you adopt or adapt Open Space Technology to your organization’s or team’s work?

Through several recent conversations on the Resistance as a Resource mailing list and other places, I’ve realized that I’ve written little about two enormously important factors that affect resistance: emotions and relationships. My article “Resistance as a Resource” barely mentions emotions and feelings, and offers only a few ideas about improving your relationships with the people you are asking to change. Emotions and relationships are two key areas in which I want to improve my approach to resistance.

My first improvement is to highly recommend the book
Don’t Be Nice, Be Real
, by Kelly Bryson. I’ll leave it to you to discover why Bryson recommends against being “nice” (those quotes around “nice” are a clue). I want to focus on just one of several important themes that run through the book: empathy. The theme of empathy weaves together the threads of emotions, values, needs, and relationships.

When you’re responding to resistance, relationships matter a great deal. Your relationship with each person affects how you and the person interpret each other’s words and actions. When you change your relationship, you change the conversation.

Bryson offers this idea about changing your relationships:

If I can change my image of you, you cannot help but change your image of me. (p 196)

So how can I change my image of another person? One way is to explore the needs behind the person’s actions and to empathize with the needs.

Almost all the power to inspire compassion comes from expressing the need, and only a little from expressing the feeling. Also when I am listening to someone, it is much more powerful to demonstrate that I understand the other’s need than it is to just show that I have heard their feeling. (p 99)

When Bryson talks about needs, he is talking not about specific behaviors or results that one person might want from another, but about universal human needs, such as honesty, connection, peace, physical wellbeing, autonomy, play, and meaning. (For a more detailed list of needs, see the Needs Inventory on the Center for Nonviolent Communication web site.)

Resistance expresses needs. If I can understand the universal human need that someone is expressing through resistance, I can empathize with it. And if I can express my empathy for the person’s needs, I’ve taken a big step toward creating a relationship that supports trust, respect, communication, and collaboration.

How can you understand the needs that people are expressing through their resistance? My articles “Resistance as a Resource” and “Untangling Communication” give many ideas about that. Bryson offers an additional idea: guess.

You do not have to guess right. Just guess human. Just imagine a human feeling and need that might be behind their words. Guessing feelings and needs at least puts us in the camp of humanness, instead of judgment. (p 122)

The main focus of my “Resistance as a Resource” article is understanding the other person’s point of view. Bryson has helped me to see that we can do even better than understanding. We can empathize.

In

Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future

, Margaret J. Wheatley encourages us to hold conversations about what matters most to us. Nothing fancy; just simple conversation. Simple and powerful. Wheatley says, “All change, even very large and powerful change, begins when a few people start talking with one another about something they care about.”

The book has three parts. First, Wheatley describes why she thinks conversation is critical now, and why she is hopeful that conversation can help us create a world of rich, healthy, living communities and relationships.

My favorite passage from part one gives me a way to do something that’s always challenging for me: expose my assumptions. Wheatley says:

Noticing what surprises and disturbs me has been a very useful way to see invisible beliefs. If what you say surprises me, I must have been assuming something else was true. If what you say disturbs me, I must believe something contrary to you. My shock at your position exposes my own position. … If I can see my beliefs and assumptions, I can decide whether I still value them.

Part two is a short set of aphorisms that capture the themes elaborated the rest of the book, each illustrated with a gentle drawing. “There is no power for change greater than a community discovering what it cares about.”

Part three offers ten conversation starters, questions that, Wheatley says, can lead a community or organization into “conversations about their deepest beliefs, fears, and hopes.” For each question, Wheatley tells a story about the value that can come from the conversation, and provides a short poem (most written by her) woven around the question.

As I was reading this book in bed, my wife Lisa asked me what I was reading about. At that moment, I was reading about the second conversation starter: What is my faith in the future? Not knowing exactly what the question meant (which I think is part of its value), Lisa and I talked for a while about our faith in the future. It wasn’t a question we’d talked about before, or even thought about (again, part of the value of the question). Our conversation was gentle, hopeful, and quiet, and we surprised ourselves with where it took us. Very, very nice.

I would love to have a conversation about that same question with a larger group—maybe a dozen people, or maybe four.

I attended one of Wheatley’s workshops a few years ago, and I’ve listened and re-listened to her audio readings of her books, so I was able to read this book in her voice. The combination of her voice and her words make this book, for me, simple, gentle, hopeful, and powerful.

What simple, powerful conversations do you care to convene?