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.
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]
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.
How to move beyond understanding each other to empathizing with each other. Expands on Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication (below). [Full Review]
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.
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 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.
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 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.
Wheatley encourages us to hold conversations about what matters most to us. Nothing fancy; just simple conversation. Simple and powerful. [Full Review]
At the AYE conference last week, I attended Johanna Rothman’s and Naomi Karten’s excellent writing workshop. During the workshop, I mentioned some of my favorite books about writing. Several people asked me to post a list of books that I’ve found helpful. Here’s the list.
First, here are the books that have helped me the most.
How our choices of words, and our choices for arranging words, affect readers. How to revise your writing to better fit those expectations and make your writing clearer and more coherent.
[Full Review]
“The purpose here is … to help you understand the structure of sentences so that when you write you will understand the choices that are available to you — and the effect of those choices on your reader.”
A painfully funny book about a thousand and one ways to make sure you never write a book. I can add a thousand-and-second way from my own experience: before writing your book, read all of these books about writing.
I learned three important themes from Peter Elbow’s Writing with Power: freewriting, energy, and experience. Elbow describes freewriting:
Freewriting is the easiest way to get words on paper and the best all-around practice in writing that I know. To do a freewriting exercise, simply force yourself to write without stopping for ten minutes.
You can see that freewriting is a simple idea. It is also powerful. When I write without stopping, I don’t have time to pay attention to my inner critic. I almost always delve past my surface thoughts (the ones it’s “okay” to write about), and find ideas that surprise me in their energy, clarity, and “truth.” Much of what I write while freewriting is junk (as I later allow my inner critic to tell me). But I can find a single idea that has energy, I’ve spent those ten minutes well.
Freewriting is one way to create energy in my writing. Another is revising: Discard any word, sentence, or paragraph that isn’t carrying its weight. As Elbow says, “Every word you throw away means another unit of energy preserved.”
About experience, Elbow says:
If you want readers to breathe life into your reading so that they get a powerful experience from it, then you must breathe experience into your words as you write. I don’t know why it should be the case that if you experience what you are writing about — if you go to the bamboo — it increases the chances of the reader’s experiencing the bamboo. But that’s the way it seems to work.
I’ve rescued more than one piece of limp writing by setting it aside, closing my eyes and revisiting the experiences that made me want to write the piece in the first place, and writing from that experience. In some cases I fold the new writing — which always has more energy — into the original piece. In most cases, I throw the original piece away and continue with the new.
Being a Writer, by Peter Elbow and Pat Belanoff, is a gold mine of activities and assignments for exploring variations on your writing process.
One activity introduces “Sondra Perl’s Composing Guidelines” (available online in an excerpt from an earlier version of Being a Writer). Perl’s guidelines, guide you to explore your thoughts by focusing on a number of aspects one at a time. What draws my attention right now? What do I know about this topic? What makes this topic interesting to me? What’s missing? Moving back and forth from one focus to another helps you to explore your topic both broadly and deeply.
Another activity is “The Loop Process.” First you freewrite for ten minutes, letting your thoughts go wherever they will. Then you revise what you’ve written, shaping it and focusing it toward your topic and audience. Then you loop again and again, repeatedly diverging and converging. The authors offer several strategies for diverging during freewriting:
Simply write whatever comes to mind, your first thoughts.
Quickly list the moments or situations that somehow seem connected to the topic, or the stories or sequences of events that come to mind, or the people who seem central to the topic. Then choose one and write about it for five or ten minutes.
Write a dialogue about the topic.
Write as if you are another author, or as if you are writing to a different audience, or as if you are writing at another time and place.
Write lies about the topic, or errors (statements that are almost right — tempting, but wrong), or “sayings” (real or invented) about the topic.
Elbow and Belanoff recommend keeping a process journal. After a writing session, journal about what you are experiencing and learning in your writing process. What happened as you wrote? What worked well? What was difficult? What led to the difficulty? How did you feel as you were writing? Process writing can be especially helpful, the authors say, “if you do it after two sessions — especially two sessions on the same piece — and compare what happened.”
I’ve barely scratched the surface of Being a Writer. There is plenty more, including ideas about freewriting, clustering, writing collaboratively, giving and receiving feedback, and the open-ended writing process. And that’s just the first section, on “Creativity and the Writing Process.” Other sections cover revising, researching, interviewing, and persuading and arguing.
My favorite quote from the book (hidden in a writing exercise on page 47): “The two main skills in writing are making a mess and cleaning up the mess.”
Being a Writer and Joseph M. Williams’s Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Graceare my two favorite books about writing. While Style focuses on structure and content, Being a Writer focuses on the writing process. The techniques I learned from each book gave me not only the skill to write, but also the confidence to write.
Of all the books in my writing library, Joseph M. Williams’s Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace, helped me to make the biggest leap in the quality of my writing. Williams focuses on how our choices of words, and our choices for arranging our words, affect readers. One key idea is that readers they expect to find certain kinds of information in specific places, and that if we revise our writing to better fit those expectations, our writing will be clearer and more coherent.
For example, readers expect sentences to begin with familiar information, and to end with information that is newer. Also, readers look to the ends of phrases and sentences for information that is more significant. So we can make our writing clearer by shifting familiar, less important information to the beginnings of our sentences, and shifting newer, more important information to the ends. By applying this one tip, I improved both my writing and my confidence that I can write well.
Style and Elbow and Belanoff’s Being a Writerare my two favorite books about writing. While Being a Writer focuses on the writing process, Style focuses on structure and content. The techniques I learned from each book gave me not only the skill to write, but also the confidence to write.
Near the end of Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg says, “Everything I say as a teacher is ultimately aimed at people trusting their own voice and writing from it.” Much of this book is about what happens inside us as writers, and how to bring what’s inside into our writing. Woven throughout are simple, powerful exercises for writing and for exploring ourselves as writers.
Goldberg offers five rules for writing practice(similar to what Peter Elbow calls “freewriting“):
Keep your hand moving.
Don’t cross out.
Don’t worry about spelling, punctuation, and grammar.
Lose control.
Go for the jugular.
As Goldberg says, it’s important to adhere to these rules, because:
[T]he aim is to burn through to first thoughts, to the place where energy is unobstructed by social politeness or the internal censor, to the place where you are writing what your mind actually sees and feels, and not what it thinks it should see or feel.
Early in Writing from the Inside Out: Transforming Your Psychological Blocks to Release the Writer Within, Dennis Palumbo says, “All good writing starts from where you are now.” What if “where I am now” is filled with loneliness, doubt, fear of rejection, and writer’s block? Palumbo says that we can use those feelings to serve our writing:
Invariably, once a writer fully experiences and integrates the lessons a block has to teach, his or her work deepens in richness, emotional truth, and, often, personal relevancy. … You can get there from here, not despite your writer’s block, but because of it. It means you’re ready — or, probably, more than ready — to make that important next step in your writing. [Emphasis mine]
How can we benefit from writer’s block? By writing about it!
If you’re frustrated at being stuck, or angry at yourself for your artistic limitations, write about that, as a journal entry, pure stream of consciousness.
I was feeling stuck as I was writing “Untangling Communication” for STQE Magazine (now called Better Software Magazine). I wanted to write about the “acceptance” step of the Ingredients of an Interaction, but I was also fearful. The acceptance step is not only about feelings, but about how we feel about our feelings! I’m going to write about a touchy-feelie subject like that? In a technical magazine!?
I had been reading Writing from the Inside Out around that time, and decided to write about my fears. In the process I discovered what, for me, was the most important point in that article: “The most powerful thing I can do to keep my communications straight, and to untangle them when they get tangled, is to accept what I feel.”
Palumbo also writes about the power of personal details:
[I]t’s one of the paradoxes of writing that the more particular and personal a detail in character or story, the more powerfully its impact generalizes out to the audience.
If, as I’ve argued throughout this book, you are enough, then wherever you’re at, moment to moment, becomes the crucible out of which your writing flows. Accessing this subjective space, and wedding its range of colors with craft and perseverance, is the writer’s daily job.
Gabriele Rico’s Writing the Natural Waycenters on clustering, a technique for quickly making explicit the ideas and associations we have about a topic:
To create a cluster, you begin with a nucleus word, circled, on a fresh page. Now you simply let go and begin to flow with any current of connections that come into your head. Write these down rapidly, each in its own circle, radiating outward from the center in any direction they want to go. Connect each new word or phrase with a line to the preceding circle. When something new and different strikes you, begin again at the central nucleus and radiate outward until those associations are exhausted.
Clustering, like freewriting or writing practice, is another technique I use frequently to move ideas out of my head and onto paper. Often I will “cluster” about a topic, then freewrite based on the cluster I’ve created.
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?