Introduction: If conversation is going to become a value-producing process in your company, you’re going to have to bring focus and discipline to the process.
The idea isn’t to create a sober, robotic environment where the only sound is that of clipped, terse speech exchanging only necessary data. In fact, high-performing teams are known for their sense of humor and camaraderie.
More than being an informal system of social exchange, conversation can become a tool for producing valuable outcomes. Artful conversation can result in extraordinary execution.
Throughout this work, focused, deliberate conversations have been identified as vehicles for working across boundaries, developing strategies, making and keeping brand promises, rigorous thinking, learning, and extraordinary execution.
Since we live in a social world, like fish in the ocean that don’t really notice that they’re wet, we can underestimate the power of conversations. We do and we don’t. We certainly don’t pay as much deliberate attention to them as we could.
I am not thinking of a conversation as an exchange bounded by the start and end of a specific verbal exchange. Rather, I think that conversations can extend over time, survive interruptions and continue until the participants feel that there is nothing else to be gained by continuing the dialogue.
We can get more value out of our conversations if we have some conventions that we use deliberately, when we are looking to create some specific outcome.
What’s offered in this tool is a framework for focusing a group, team, or even a pair of people, in value-producing conversation. The steps for the leader of the conversation are:
| 1. Pose a question – focus in on a critical concern – what is our goal for this conversation? |
| 2. Provoke a conversation – draw the participants into a common focus. Why is it important to have this conversation? Help the participants understand the importance of the question. |
| 3. Probe assumptions – be alert to the assumptions that everyone brings to the start of the conversation that shape your contexts, your thinking, and your apparent options. |
| 4. Possibility-generation – what new ideas, strategies, knowledge or actions can we generate that enable us to serve our purposes better? |
| 5. Path making – finish the conversation by identifying a path forward. Who will do what, by when? Be clear about the expectations everyone carries away from the conversation. |
Instructions: Simply work the steps and practice the process.
Posing a Question: The first step in a focused conversation is to create the focus. What do we want to think about? A question is a form of communication that can provoke thinking. Engage peoples’ curiosity around an issue that’s important to them.
One caveat – while “why?” questions may generate a lot of conversation, they seldom lead to a solid answer. Looking for the whys behind a problem often leads to volleys of blame, followed by cycles of defense, excuses and the blaming of others.
Instead, “how?” questions --- How to be different? How to create different outcomes? What may happen if we do this instead of that? When may we see a difference? --- are the types of questions that focus us on the task of generating options and exploring assumptions and perspectives.
The goal is to focus peoples’ attention productively.