The Conversation

How we need to reach into the heart of people to connect. 

Harry Caul, the surveillance expert in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1971 film The Conversation, claimed that he didn’t care what the couple were saying. He just wanted a nice, fat, clean recording of their surreptitiously recorded conversation in Union Square, so he could get a nice, fat, cheque in return. 

Harry was kidding himself. He soon found that a man who guarded his privacy like a fortress could be seduced into not only caring about what was being said, but into trying to prevent the action that was being discussed - a murder. He moves from being a passive observer to an active participant, called to act upon what he has heard.

It is through the lens of learning design and strategic storytelling that we view how conversation can lead to action, and so, naturally we were drawn to participate in the sixth Kitchen Table Conversation on facilitation: “How can we facilitate conversation to better drive performance outcomes?”

Kitchen Table Conversations are the brainchild of Rick Wolfe, who is recognized internationally for the animated conversations he produces using his unique approach. The goal is to “create a comfortable environment for communication and information sharing.” For this online event, Rick and his colleague Jim Carfrae invited a select group from their deep pool of leaders, consultants and facilitators to sit at the table. They wanted to explore how “to help people make the journey from ideas to action” and the group was keen to deliver.

For one recovering advertising man, conversation had been his complete focus for the last 20+ years. He helped businesses find workable solutions to tricky problems – a positive psychology practice that adapted Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) from its family therapy origins to getting bosses and union leaders to talk.

Another participant, who is working in change management, found that people were not conversing, not at all. They were accusing each other; they were curt and reluctant to share; and they took it to eleven before they even started.

Have we lost the art of conversation? Are we so totally frustrated by a lack of action in this pandemic? Or are we simply not practicing enough and are losing our ability to converse? 

People crave the opportunity to speak to one another, to connect, as the Kitchen Table demonstrated. But the desire often comes out as aggressively misplaced messages and an unwillingness to commit. Are we projecting our internal angst on everyone within earshot? 

Probably. But let’s focus on the solution and not the problem. What did the people around the table think works? What can we build on?

 Safety 

Learning design teaches us that learning can only happen in a safe and supportive environment. Conversation is no different. The power dynamic in most office cultures is toxic; it stifles conversation faster than it can be kindled. Creating a safe environment for conversation ultimately became a theme that was returned to throughout the Kitchen Table. It is not only a prerequisite for conversation, but it is the constant required for ongoing conversation. As one participant recounted in her forthright Maritime way, “once when I was facilitating a conversation, employees showed up with their resumes thinking they were being fired.” Such is the paranoia in our business cultures. So how do we create safety in a world when everyone thinks the axe is going to fall; that conversations are only directed one way and that they are on the short end of them?

Trust

A former serial CEO told the story of transitioning a corporately held trucking company to one that was employee owned. He decided to get close to the employees, to explore this big change with them directly. He rode the semis with the drivers, talked to them over the dashboard lights, then reaching a destination, changed to another cab at a truck stop and rode back with a new driver. This was a curiosity for the drivers. A CEO in my cab! In the end, what did it do? It built trust and the company successfully transitioned to an employee-owned one. 

In this case, trust was established, but the conversation can end when a CEO leaves. CEOs are more the itinerant workers than the employees; they often move onto other challenges while the employees stay put through all the transitions. It is the employees who are the company, not the leadership; they have to trust the C-suite even though 35 years of their service can be wiped out in a flash.

Trust is an earned thing; it comes from action and acceptance and then more action. It is not just built with words. So, action is really another prerequisite of conversation – prove it, then we’ll talk. That was certainly the case with the trucking firm. Trust was only built through the CEO showing up and showing he cared. 

Common Ground

Our recovering ad man comes from the old country, a long time ago, but you wouldn’t know it. The accent is handy. In applying his solution-focussed therapy to an industrial setting in Sarnia, he sought common ground with the union leader. He explained what the industrial town of his birth was like, and he thought that Sarnia was similar. It is, agreed the union leader. Through the discussion of multiple similarities, common ground was found. Only then was it agreed to focus on solutions and only then was the union boss asked to lead the town hall, which he did, very effectively. Only then did the new German owners of the plant uncross their arms and smile, ever so slightly.

A real conversation is permission to speak without judgement or consequence. You cannot engage while looking over your shoulder. We need a common ground of understanding, a point of connection unrelated to the task at hand. We will be more successful with common ground laid before us. And we will flatten the hierarchy, coming together to solve the problem. This focuses the conversation and leads to action.

Listening 

The Kitchen Tablers pointed out the need to listen. Conversation may not be so much about speaking, but about hearing. A reminding look at a Tom Peters post brought this home. The author of In Pursuit of Excellence disdains MBA programs and does not trust strategic planning, but if he ever were to start an MBA program, it would be focused on strategic listening. 

Peters tells the story of a Jerome Groopman, who holds a chair at the Harvard Medical School, a doctor who needed a doctor when his hand was hurt. Groopman went to six different, well-regarded surgeons and got four different opinions about what was wrong. He discovered that most doctors, within the first 18 seconds of seeing patients, will interrupt them and generate an idea of what's wrong. They fix on that snap judgment and make a mistake that they cannot shake off - an anchoring mistake.  

It’s the same for any conversation. We are 18 second listeners; we are seizing upon diagnoses before we know the full story. If we shift our focus to strategic listening, if that becomes our work, our way of seeing our own worth, we more highly prize what is being said by others, yes, but we also place more weight on what we say as well. It is more considered and more considerate. Ultimately, we have more empathy, just by focusing on listening.

Validation

In learning, we use the maxim: tell me what you know, then we can start. People need validation of who they are, where they come from, before they can engage. So, we ask questions, as many as necessary to allow participants to be validated in their own right. Learning is a risky business. So is conversation. The validation of the Kitchen Table conversation motivated the writing of this blog.

 In a real conversation, people put themselves on the line. They state what they think or try to. Our change agent leader cited Clotaire Rapaille’s book, The Culture Code, where Rapaille would conduct focus groups using three rounds of completely dissimilar questions. It took the third round for people to say what they really thought. They had to get used to expressing themselves, they had to practice digging through the layers to get inside.

 This led to a discussion of what kinds of principles of conversation bring out the truth. Of course, what is the truth? We only remember what we remembered last, not the real event itself.

 In the end, emotional truth is the only truth that matters. That is where the story lies and what motivates action. Conversations are, essentially, an exchange of stories. It is the enteric brain that we respond to – our gut.

 Conversation is hard, maybe harder than ever, in this isolating, “lonely century”, as Noreena Hertz calls it.  It takes an exhausting amount of work to meaningfully engage in human interaction. It is a journey. As over-used as that metaphor is, it says you cannot pre-determine the destination, nor can you control how you get there. But you can make choices when you hit a fork in the road. That’s were facilitation comes in. It’s a way to continue the conversation, to gently guide it, to pick up on a thread and see where it goes. It is ultimately talk therapy. A real conversation is a surrender - to serve others, to get to the heart of people. That’s the truth.