In this episode, we dive into "Crucial Conversations" by Patterson, Grenny, McMillan, and Switzler, exploring essential techniques for handling high-stakes discussions in both professional and personal settings.
Whether you're a team leader, product manager, or looking to improve your interpersonal skills, this episode offers practical strategies to transform challenging conversations into opportunities for growth and collaboration.
Listen as we discuss:
- Creating safety in dialogue
- Managing emotions and stories
- The STATE method for persuasive speaking
- Decision-making processes in teams
References:
- Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler
- Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
- Empathy: A Handbook for Revolution by Roman Krznaric
- The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
- INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love by Marty Cagan
#CrucialConversations #CommunicationSkills #LeadershipDevelopment
crucial conversations, communication skills, leadership, team management, conflict resolution, emotional intelligence, decision making, agile, product management, workplace communication
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welcome to the Arguing Agile Podcast, where Enterprise Business Agility Coach Om Patel and Product Manager Brian Orlando argue about product management, leadership, and business agility, so you don't have to. Welcome back to arguing agile. It's not much arguing is going to happen today because we're going to be taking a look at a book that I think is very important for people in their careers, in their personal life, all around their communication skill. We're going to be talking about crucial conversations, tools for talking when the stakes are high. Thanks for coming. Patterson, Graney, McMillan, and Switzler. today's podcast really came about from A need which we're going to get into. And anybody who's worked on a team or anybody who's had any kind of relationship with another human being would benefit from this. We hope. So that's the idea behind today's podcast. There are very few topics left on the original topic list from when we sat down before we launched the podcast. This was one of them and for some reason we delayed on doing it until now. I think we were waiting for the perfect guest until one day I just woke up and I was like, there's no perfect anything. Yeah, we're just gonna do it. I'm previewing the 20 years in tech podcasts that will come out very soon. Where I see the same bad trends, repeating over and over. This is one of them. Threre are good people with good intent that just have poor communication skills but I've seen a lot of people that make the same mistakes over and over again. Yeah, I definitely agree with that. I've been around in tech for a bit longer and I can certainly agree with it. I would say this though crucial conversations, how to hold these, et cetera.. We don't get taught that anywhere. So people come into the workforce and they just simply are folding into their traditional roles without this. So this isn't about any kind of specific role no matter what role you're in. If you're speaking to someone else, if you're communicating, collaborating with anyone, This is the podcast for you. I almost want to say this to the end that, where do you learn this skill? Where do you learn this skill? Yeah. that's another reason why I think this book is very important to people because if you don't have strong mentors you don't have strong sponsors in your life. People that lift you up grab you and bring you up And you have to do it on your own you may get some of these skills, right? And especially if you weren't in a place where the you know your parents had this type of skill or they try to teach you Why it was important to interact With people in a certain way and they didn't teach you that or worse, they had a bunch of bad behaviors that they weren't aware of, didn't really care about and you don't understand why this invisible force is holding you back. The very few people in my professional career can accept critique with a level headed Hey, this person trying to help me kind of attitude. First of all, second of all, are actively seeking and asking, Hey, how did I do? What can I be doing better? That kind of stuff. Yeah, on the first point, I'd say it's very easy to just get stuck in the swing of things and not realize your shortcomings here in this specific case, right? You go in, you say I bring a bunch of skills to the table. This is what they hired me for. And I'm going to go do that. However, you are not a, not a single Individual contributor to a team. And hope to succeed. You can try that. It doesn't work. You also do not have a And number of teams of one individual each on the team. You have a team of individuals. So you have n factorial type of conversations going on at different vectors and so forth. Yeah, I agree. It takes a person to recognize that this is something they need to work on. That's the first step, right? But hopefully what we're going to talk about today may prompt some of you to say, wait a minute. It's 2025. I haven't thought about this and maybe there's something I need to pick up. Yeah. So what makes a conversation crucial we're gonna start at the beginning of the book. there's two things it says. First, opinions vary. So obviously our opinions are different. And then second, stakes are high. What does it mean stakes are high? So It says the result could have a huge impact on your quality of life. That's what it means by stakes are high, and I'd say when emotions are strong. So when you're having these conversations and everybody just simply is just going along with the flow. That's one thing. But when emotions are strong. Those emotions come from somewhere, right? Usually from various individuals, maybe one individual, one or more. So when you have that, it makes it truly a crucial conversation at that stage. Just to touch on what you just said, it's funny. Cause when your emotions are involved, it says one of the claims it has in the book, it says we're really designed wrong for where we're at in evolutionary perspective is when the conversation turns from routine to crucial, meaning it's going to have a big impact like suddenly adrenaline hits and your brain starts diverting blood from your body starts diverting blood from your brain. To your extremities so you can run and fight and do other things., that's exactly the opposite thing that you need right now, right? Cause you need the blood in your brain. So when you're under pressure, you can think and be more calm. And you don't need this shot of adrenaline so that everything gets heightened yeah. And so ultimately on that net, these crucial conversations really do impact the quality of our lives and our relationships. it leads to acting in self defeating ways. The key that I was trying to make in the introduction is I would like to see people develop these better skills. So that they're not acting in self defeating ways. It's disheartening, especially when you're somebody supervisor to see them acting in these self defeating ways. there are some examples at the introduction here that I figured I'd throw out some of these examples that we could just talk about and laugh about together and say, boy, it'd be nice if we weren't dealing with any of these. Example number one giving the boss feedback about his or her behavior. Ooh, now who hasn't done that, right? If you've been around in the workforce for a bit, you've had to say something to your boss, or maybe you wanted to, and you didn't. Approaching a boss who is breaking his or her own safety or quality policies. The belligerent boss. Critiquing a colleague's work. Yeah. A lot of us have had to do that. That's an everyday thing in development teams. Dealing with a rebellious teen. So I'm like, this is where we're talking about it from work purposes, this book does not hold it solid. There's a lot of. Stuff about relationships and intimacy and stuff like that in the book that are great examples of confrontation. Yeah, listen, absolutely, I agree with that. I think when I first read the book, it was some time ago. Might have been one of the early editions, if not the earliest edition. I came away from that book experience reading it thinking, this is great for Teams, et cetera, professionally at work, but it goes way beyond that. It actually goes towards your day to day relationship with your loved ones. Or anybody for that matter. You can tell your neighbor, it doesn't matter. More stuff that they give in the introduction high performers, meaning high performers that know how to deal with crucial conversations, how to engage in them and how to move forward with them. They know how to stand up to the boss without committing career suicide. We've all seen people that hurt their careers by ineffectively discussing tough issues They point out that in the corporate world, the most common complaint of executives and managers is that their people work in silos meaning and that close to 80 percent of the projects that require cross functional cooperation cost more than expected, produce less than they hoped for, and run significantly over costs but in organizations where people were able to candidly and effectively speak up on concerns, those projects were less than half as likely. To fail. We have another word for this. This book doesn't use the word. I'm going to drop it real early in this podcast. It's called psychological safety. Yeah. Two words. It's not in vogue anymore. It's not, we don't say that, but really that's what it is ultimately. You want to make sure that everybody is open to speak and remove the barriers to them voicing their opinions.
It also says:most leaders get it wrong. They think organizational productivity and performance are simply about policies, processes, structures, and systems. So when the software product doesn't ship on time, they benchmark others, development processes. When teams aren't cooperating, they restructure. This is classically what I've seen, especially in medium to large organizations where when they encounter issues like this, they don't deep dive to figure out truly what the cause is. They will simply do the minimum necessary they believe, which is these teams aren't very effective. We're going to redistribute them, reallocate the work, reallocate team members across different teams. Reorganize and hope for the best. That's right. It says, In the worst companies, poor performers are first ignored and then transferred. In the best companies, everyone holds everyone else accountable, regardless of level or position. And that includes the leaders. Absolutely. I would add my own nuance to this and say, in the worst case scenario the worst companies promote these individuals to their highest level of incompetence. Sure, yeah. That's what they do. That's what I've seen. Let's move on chapter two starts with Kevin's story. It says they were looking for people They were looking for people who were considered highly influential in the workplace at this particular workplace, which may or may not even exist. It might be a proverbial workplace. I don't know. And they settle on Kevin! Yeah, Kevin! Sorry, I'm gonna put my my minions are gonna be on the screen. And so it says they followed Kevin around and Kevin was a meeting where Chris, the CEO, these are totally like these, this is VP and CEO first names, by the way, Kevin and Chris, totally believable. They say of this story the mistake most of us make in our crucial conversation is we believe We have to choose between telling the truth or keeping your friend So like most of those executives when they don't obviously don't believe in what is being said or you know They just stay silent when someone says something they don't like Because that's how they got that executive spot, and that's how they're keeping that executive spot, right? Yep. But the more effective communicators here know that they don't have to make that choice. They will call this the fool's choice. The choice between candor and kindness, they will call that a fool's choice because those are not the only two choices. Like anytime you get backed into a corner, then you are forced to only make two choices. Like those are false choices. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. And also those are the easiest choices to make if you're not vested in the conversation, right? You're either going to go in one camp or the other and say, I don't really care. There'll be more on this a little bit later in the podcast. This chapter is all about definitions. So the first definition that I threw out is the fool's choice. That was the first one. It's either A or B. You're either with me or against me. And more than often they're They're your emotions messing with you right? The next definition I want to throw out is dialogue. Okay, when it comes to risky, controversial, and emotional conversations, skilled people find a way to get all the relevant information from themselves and others out in the open. This is on page 23.
It's called Dialogue:the free flow of meaning between two or more people. This book's going to talk a lot about being in dialogue or out of dialogue and the book also will point out that is, A good way for you to know in the future, whether you're in a crucial conversation, you can identify: I feel like we've fallen out of dialogue. Let's refocus on what we want. And that book we'll talk about that. The other one that the book talks about is the quote pool of shared meaning. Sounds fun to swim in. It's a great term. Pool of shared meaning. What does that actually mean? Pool of shared meaning says people who are skilled at dialogue do their best to make it safe for everyone to add they're meaning to the shared pool as a pool of shared meaning grows. Individuals are exposed to more accurate and relevant information and can make better choices. So this really talks about the fact that you don't just have one item that you're going to force the as an agenda item, right? You're going to listen to everybody. And co create the agenda. That's very powerful. And in my experience as a coach, that has been really effective. Cause that gives you buy in and commitment at the same time. There are organizations that can do this. They can create shared pools of meaning, the discussion forms around, and then they get their conclusions, their takeaways, their action items, their new ideas things to try. Product discovery, basically. They get it when that pool of shared meaning is formed, basically. But when that pool is just like someone telling you things to do or forcing ideas into it, everyone shuts down. That's a whole different culture. I feel this is a key component of true psychological safety. Can you actually establish that pool of shared meaning? And have people contribute evenly fairly to that pool, pull things out, talk about it, inspect things, put things back in. This is a definition we're going to talk about a lot more in this book says when people feel comfortable speaking up and meaning does flow freely, the shared pool can dramatically increase a group's ability to make better decisions as a result of the free flow of meaning whole, the final choice was truly greater than the sum of the original parts. I don't know what else to say on that. They've summarized it perfectly. They used the term synergy in the book because obviously most of these people were probably educated in the 90s. Yeah. Yeah, that's when synergy was the one thing you had to get out. Synergy. Yes. Conversely, let's go to the dark side of this one, Oum. Let's talk about conversely when people aren't involved. When they sit back quietly during touchy conversations, they're rarely committed to the final decision. Since their ideas remain in their heads and their opinions never make it into the pool, they end up quietly criticizing and passively resisting. They may say they're on board, but when they walk away, they will follow through half heartedly. Yeah, and I think pretty much everybody who's worked on a team has experienced this before. Can I give you a confession, Om? Yeah! This was me earlier in my career right here. Like I did not want to start fights. I would just say, yeah, whatever, dude. So you got some stupid ideas, but I'm not going to start a fight with you. I'll just say, okay, just to get out of this meeting, go back to my desk and do whatever I was doing before. It's very easy to fall into that trap when you have people that are, type A type of personalities. They will exert themselves into a, Team, and they'll say this is my way, right? But they won't say it explicitly, they'll just say this is the only way. Surely whatever else you have to say can't be real. They call that forcing your ideas into the pool, that's what they call it. So I think pretty much everybody on the team has come across this before. And then they've given up passively. It's fine, what's the point? I know whatever I say is going to have no bearing on this. It makes total sense. But at that point, you need someone to stand up to say hey you're obviously you're trying to force your ideas into the pool to say, listen, it sounds like you have this one idea. We've discussed it. It's not the way we want to go. can we consider other ideas? And that person not taking it very well. I can't even count the number of times I can think of so many sorry, I was trying to one particular disagreement out of my head for one of my teams, but I just thought of three different development teams I'd been on that had this kind of one person is trying to take control of the decision in the discussion yeah, what are the techniques you could deploy in this situation is to say this is a great idea. Acknowledge it, put it down on paper somewhere in a document that's being shared with everybody and say, What other ideas do you have that might be as good or even better than this? And ask that person if they come up with nothing, which often is the case. You open that question up to everybody else and then solicit their ideas and put them down. Putting them down is a crucial step, right? Because you put them down as a facilitator, you're automatically combating that person's, overbearing onto the team saying this is it my way or the highway, it's, yeah, this is a great idea. But. There's these other ones that the teams come up with and then you can get into some kind of democratic prioritization of We'll get in that. This book does talk about how teams make decisions. Yep. It goes through several modes and how to make decisions and some of them are not what people think. So we'll get into that. But since we're still in the dark side, I'm going to get the rest of the stuff on the dark side out of the way. It says when we do resort to silence, when we do not get our ideas in the pool, it says sometimes we rely on hints. Sarcasm, caustic humor, innuendo, and the looks of disgust to make our points. We play the martyr and then pretend we're actually trying to help. Afraid to confront an individual, we blame the entire team for a problem, hoping the message hits the right target how many times have we seen that with development teams? For leadership especially, or management. Yes, yeah. When stakes are high, opinions vary, and emotions run strong. We're Often at our worst in order to move to our best We have to find a way to explain what is in each of our personal pools of meaning Especially our high stakes sensitive and controversial opinions feelings and ideas to get the others to share their pools The first couple of chapters don't have a solid summary. we were looking at more of an intro, especially this one, more of a definition. That's what you're trying to accomplish in this chapters. Stop all this fighting and this kind of stuff back and forth what are we trying to do? We're trying to accomplish this goal, do this thing, whatever as a team. We have this shared pool of ideas, even just the two of us. We both feel completely confident and free that we can put ideas in the pool. They'll be taken seriously. We don't have any of these bad behaviors. And dialogue, the free flow of meaning between people. Is the default, that is the path of lease resistance. And when someone steps in and tries to domineer over our conversation, whatever, that should be the exception. They should stick out. Yeah, absolutely. Listen, again, some of this stuff is just so fundamental to teaming basically. And there are been other authors that have written something like this, but this book is. It lays it out nicely and it's a very easy to read book. It is very easy. Yeah, it's pretty easy because they will state some principles and then they'll go into a story And then they'll reinforce the principles that you just heard from the story in a different way than they stated earlier. And it's pretty, that basically the whole book is in that format. Yeah, it's pretty easy. I agree. All right. So chapter three is start with heart, how to stay focused on what you really want. All right. When I was a QA manager, and we didn't report to development. Everything was great when I was a QA manager and we reported to development, I would tell my people, when you go into your skip level with the director of development, he works for development. So he only wants to hear about when things are going to be done. And he only wants to hear that he's great. And like how great he is and he wants to be praised because that individual was a special person. my advice for people in that situation was first of all, keep their resume updated. But my other advice. Was always write down what you want. Like when you go into your like one on one career sessions or whatever with the direct, you basically your skip level, right? Write down what you want because you're a skip level. They have a whole host of other things on their mind can they actually clear off of their calendar, all their little minutia and actually truly pay attention and listen to you as an individual and really be out there. To help and look for sponsorship where they can put you up in the company and move your career along. Like you let lots of corporate America people like to say that and set up these skip-level things and feel like they're really making the difference. In reality, it's just checking them off. It was ticking a box and trying to browbeat people into doing extra work. That's what it was. So what I would tell people is no matter what the discussion is, you write down what you want on a sticky and then just keep it in the palm of your hand. And keep looking down and be like, what do I want? Because often the conversation would go all around the world and sidetrack you because that particular company, that individual leader wasn't very good at listening. So you would have to keep beating him down over and over about this thing that you really were interested in and you have to keep bringing it back to it before he would hear it and process it. This is just one story about one person at one company. Who wasn't even a very good leader, but it's a good story I think because this is reality. a lot of people are not going to read this book, right? So this story could apply to pretty much anybody the point of this chapter, start with heart. Is oh boy, like I feel that there's a lot of this book does a lot of like backflips to not use normal terminology that you and I would use like psychological safety, which is good. And the start with heart like the term I would just use is empathy. I would just use empathy. That's all I would say. Absolutely. That term is misunderstood as well. Start with heart, know what you really want, focus on it, write it down. Great advice. Write it down, but also right underneath that statement, write down what is the minimum that you're prepared to walk away with from that meeting? Because you may not always get what you want. Then again, it's not all or nothing, right? this is what I want. And you fight for it, right? Yeah. In discussions and you don't get that, you are gonna feel pretty bad.. So if you write down underneath that, this is the minimum that I can accept out of this meeting. Start with what you really want. And then come away hopefully with what you want, but if not, at least something that you can live with. So check in there and start singing. Yeah, what do you want? What you really want? Chapter three starts with how do you encourage the flow of meaning in the face of differing opinions and strong emotions? It says you start with heart. That is, your own heart. If you can't get yourself right, you'll have a hard time getting dialogue right. how do how do you convey to others if you're confused about what it is that you want? I hate to spoil this chapter, but if you don't know what you want and you also have no empathy, like you can stop listening. Now you can like, as described, thanks for coming to the podcast. Cause I look, cause the rest of this podcast is not going to help you. This chapter starts by saying you can't fake this. That's right. Yeah. So all of you who say fake it till you make it kind of thing. Not this fake, everything else. It says skilled people start with heart. That is, they began high risk discussions with the right motives. And they stay focused no matter what happens. First, they know what they want. Second, they don't make fool's choices. Which again, we know is either or choices. Those two things together already, like we just talked about in the intro to this chapter, to chapter three. We in chapter three, we're just in four now, but chapter three, we're in chapter three with three now. Yeah. Okay. Those two things right there so many people fail already. Already, like what is my goal in this conversation? I'm out. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of people are tagalongs, especially some of these QA members or development members like you tell me what I need to work on. And then I'll go do my part. Those people will not necessarily say anything but at the same time they have feelings they have certain attitudes towards what's being discussed You need to get that out of them in an environment where everyone listens and they feel you know safe to contribute, right? Without that to your point, you're not going to get that full commitment from people it says when faced with Pressure and strong opinions. We often stop worrying about the goal of adding to the pool of meaning and start looking for ways to win Punish or keep the peace so it gives three bad behaviors now with this category, so we're talking about empathy. I'm sorry. We're talking about studying start starting my heart Only I could sell a book by inventing new terms anyway they start with three behaviors three bad behaviors Let's start with the let's start with these. So when we start asking for what we want and somebody else pushes back or we try to outline a situation that we would like resolved. And someone else pushes back You And we start arguing, we have changed our goal from correcting mistakes or trying to get what we want, we've now changed our goal from that to trying to win. And this is the first mistake in this category. That Oh boy. Oh man. If I could. It's like hashtag winning like if I might put that on the podcast like I might waste a hashtag on that just I can't believe how prevalent this has been in the career I don't think it'll come up in the 20 year because I the agenda for the 20 year is already so packed I don't know if i'll have time for this, but I really hope it makes it into the 20 year career podcast of man There are so many people that they're conversation techniques are so uncouth? Unrefined. Even if all their facts are correct and their assumptions are correct and their suggested course of actions are correct. Believable. Feasible to the team all of the marty Cagan four categories, right? They can nail every single one of those but because of the way they brought it up in this trying to win executives and product managers often get into this Fight where somebody's trying to win. Yeah. Oh, we can't let the product manager get one over on the executive team. We said, this is strategic, it's gotta happen. How dare you product manager say that it's not technically feasible, yeah. This stuff, the sink at it. Yeah. A lot of this stuff is about turf protection and fuel by their egos. Everyone's seen this, I'm sure. The authors call this out and say, if you're doing this, I what are you really gaining from this? You have other people in the meeting, in the discussion that witness this. And so if you're winning and you get your way every time, One of the things that's really bad that can happen is people emulate your behavior, right? And so you're going to get these people go, Oh, this is how you get ahead here, right? And if you're all culture is such where you get promoted, they can emulate more because they want to get promoted. Absolutely. That's definitely a way to get one of these behaviors to become like ingrained culturally in a corporate culture. The next one, I got to say, personal favorite of mine, The next one is punishing. When we move so far away from adding meaning to the pool and all we want to do is see others suffer. And the quote here is, I can't believe that you're accusing me of squandering good money on a perfectly fine office. Now we're in a dispute about spending too much on office space. I can't believe that you're accusing me of squandering good money on a perfectly fine office. Now, if nobody else has an intelligent question, let's move on. Yeah, punishing behavior. The other punishing behavior is you ever been in a workplace where where you, like somebody brings up grievances from like months and years of projects that are gone. Dude, that was like two projects ago and you're still like, remember when you did that bug or whatever, you missed that test. That was a big thing in QA about, remember when you missed that one thing we can't have that, yeah. It can, yeah, it can be director of his product as well. You missed the requirement, remember that? Totally. So missed requirements. Yeah. The opposite side. The opposite side o of that is oh yeah, you're bringing that up now. But what have you missed? And then people start retaliating in this discussion and that's terrible. Oh, you punishing winning, right? Yeah. A classic punishing phenomenon I've seen is. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Let's take the offline and then there's no way they're going to take it up offline They don't they have no intention to they're shutting you down. Oh, man, I did that's punishing. That's so good I've seen it so often and when leaders do it Nobody objects right punishing everyone immediately clams up and looks at the floor. The silence is deafening. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah punishing The last one here is keeping the peace, we're so uncomfortable with the immediate conflict that we accept the certainty of bad results To avoid the possibility of an uncomfortable conversation. We all stay quiet when somebody questions something or the directed VP of development or whatever walks in and is I can't believe that you're talking about this story. It's so apparent. It's so easy that why do you have to talk about that? Why do you have to talk to a customer? Why do you have to demo this or a customer Om? Yeah. You just do this, do X and Y and Z, and then you're done. You don't need to talk to people. Why you have an hour and a half for your retro Om? You can do that in 20 minutes. I don't understand. You live the dream code. And everyone's quiet. I know. Because nobody, everyone just is not, doesn't want to say. Some very strong product people do that too though. So why do you have to talk to customers? I'm telling you what they need. Oh yeah. Let's just move on. Oh yeah. a great review of three things that you will encounter in software development, I would imagine every other sector every other sector of every other job ever is a human behavior, winning, punishing, keeping the peace. Three, three, three different types of behavior. Page 41, we go into how to break the cycle. How to break the cycle requires you to refocus your brain. Okay. So refocus your brain. Even if you're caught in one of these discussions, like it's not too late. You can stop refocus you can step away from the interaction Look at yourself, ask yourself, what am I doing? And if I had to guess, what does it tell me about my underlying motive? They give you three questions to ask yourself. Whenever you find yourself slipping out of dialogue again, remember we called that, we called this thing dialogue. So if you're in one of these punishing modes, silence modes, right? If you're, if you realize, if the next time you find yourself like being silent, cause you don't want to start a fight or whatever you realize Oh no. I'm reverting to the silent mode. I am actually engaging in one of these bad behaviors. Now, let me ask myself one of these three questions. What do I really want for myself? What do I really want for others? What I really want for the relationship. So it says, once you've asked yourself what you want at one more equally telling question, how would I behave if I really wanted these results? that last question though what do you want from the relationship? That, or for the relationship, not from. What do you want for the relationship? That one, oftentimes people they gloss over it. They don't really think through that. But every time you're interacting in any kind of setting, you're actually either forwarding or regressing on a relationship. What you're getting out of that relationship. It's never a constant, right? So you'll, if you want to catalyze that, pay attention to that last question. Be mindful about that. How are you going to rub off on people, right? What kind of example are you really setting? Do you, are you leading by example? Are you setting an exam? Are you showing shortcuts in just to meet a deadline? Like those kinds of things actually do matter because people will see that. And then they, some people will say it's okay to do this, right? Cause you're doing it. So they'll emulate you well, it says Just even if you can't remember all these like just asking what do I really want? Like obviously it says is it to make the other person squirm like to see them? Yeah To see them like made a fool in front of the crowd Like is that what you're looking for? Is that what's going to be the best for the relationship between you and yeah, is that what's gonna be best for the crowd? Like probably not all those things if you can Step back and really think about it for a second You know, even count to five, ask yourself these questions or write them down, have them on card. I don't know how you begin to employ these things. There's some suggestions in the back of the book about how you begin, which is the same as any of like, how do I begin being agile? Like any of those things? How do I begin Deming? You begin small, whatever you can start in this segment of the organization. That's how you begin. Exactly, and that is most people, like a lot of people are working remotely. So one of the things I suggest is before you get into a meeting like that, where you ?Anticipate these things happening, Think through that. Take a bit of time to plan your approach in that meeting and write down things that we talked about earlier. What do you hope to get out of it? What do you really want? What's the minimum you can accept? Write them down on little stickies and stick them on the side of your monitor. So they're right there in front of you. So you don't have to Fumble for them and you can read them without feeling awkward about it. No one's going to know that you're reading them. You don't forget them. They're in the right sequence, et cetera. So yeah, definitely you can deploy tactics like that. So I'm going to zip through some of this stuff here in in chapter three. Starting on page 45, it says those who are skilled at crucial conversations routinely ask what do I want for myself, the other person and their relationship. So you can write that. One sentence down put on a little sticky under your monitor or whatever if you're remote like great Let's just keep yourself on track bare bones super easy Refuse the fool's choice when you require your brain to solve the more complex problem more often than not it does just that You'll find there's a way to share your concern Listen sincerely to concerns of others and to build a relationship so that everything we just talked about Yeah, so like when you start developing those things you can do all those things together You It's like a life changing skill that you've just acquired, right? And that's why I thought this was, again, another reason I thought this was a super interesting and important podcast and we're getting to the main, my main idea of why I think this is a really great book. Okay, so the next section next section says the best at dialogue. Refuse a fool's choice. But setting up new choices, so they, they turn either or choice into a search for the all elusive and I like to make fun of yes and, this is basically the core of yes and, so it says first clarify what you really want, second clarify what you don't want, Third, present your brain with a more complex problem. Finally, combine the two into an And question that forces you to search for a more creative and productive option than silence or violence. I haven't used silence or violence until now, purposefully, because I don't want to inject new terms into this discussion, but you clarify what you really want, you clarify what you don't want, and You put them together and now you're searching for options. And the book says page 47, it says, watch what happens when people are presented with, and questions after being stuck with fool's choices, their faces become reflective, their eyes open wider, and they begin to think of ways to accomplish both. When we review the Deming book, this is 198, the very next episode will be the Deming book. In the Deming book, there's a lot to be said about forcing people to think critically so much of corporate America is about not thinking it's about just do what I say. there's a lot to be said about like the human mode of thinking that the whole, if you ever read, like thinking fast and slow the two modes of thinking, the mode one, mode two, mode one is like the immediate judgment, quick judgment, like pattern recognition brain. suppressing the snap decision brain and forcing yourself into mode two thinking for everything. That's really what we're talking about here, but it's not everything. It's just mode two thinking in the conversation we're in at the time. And then you can go back to whatever, like eating Cheetos and playing video games on the couch or whatever, the cerebral equivalent thereof if it's so that's basically the whole chapter. Chapter three ends with a summary and the summary at the high level is you work on me first, us second, right? Because you can only directly control yourself, your responses, your emotions, and then number two is focus on what you really want. And then number three is refuse the fool's choice. So focus on what you really want also includes cutting out the three different modes, the winning, punishing, and withdrawing, but what was the third one? I can't remember. Winning, punishing, and keeping the peace. Keeping the peace. That's right. Chapter two is about the definitions of everything we're gonna talk about. Chapter three was about empathy, like how to actually. Some techniques to actually employ empathy and didn't use empathy at all to talk about it. Great I do later in the book. But yeah, let's pick up with chapter four. Chapter four is called, Learn to look, how to notice when safety is at risk. We're still calling it safety, Om. We're not calling it psychological safety, because that's so 2012. Psychological safety is all in the head. It's talking about an interaction between you and your co worker. It says, I watch the content of the conversation, the topic under discussion, along with the conditions, what people are doing in response. I look for and examine both what and why, if I can see why people are becoming upset or holding back their views. Or even going silent, you can do something to get it back on track. The sooner that you notice that you're not in dialogue, the easier it is to get back and the lower the cost. So the opening of this chapter of chapter four, learn to look has a little story that the takeaway is the sooner you notice you're not in dialogue, like the easier it is to get back on track and the less it costs you To get back on track. We don't, again, this is having bad discussions. Souring relationships is not on the balance sheet. So in corporate America, we don't value it home, but we value it. Yeah. Yeah. The crux of the matter here in this opening piece is no matter what we do, the heart still finds a way to try to defend itself. Right? And it takes only a split second for us to. Switch from acknowledging and understanding to reacting and the adrenaline starts flowing and we immediately fall into that. Fight or flight, right? And that's what they're saying is if you can recognize the signs of that and jump on it as soon as it happens, you have a very good chance of turning that around and just not let it deteriorate basically from where it is currently, put it back up to pull it back up to the point where everyone's engaged again. We're all focused on what the issue is that we're trying to solve. The book says to help catch problems early, reprogram your mind to pay attention to the signs that suggest you're in a crucial conversation. And there are three signs. They're actually a lot easier than you might be thinking. They're physical signs, emotional signs, and behavioral signs. This is on page 54 and 55. I will tell you, they're self explanatory. The physical signs, you feel funny. Your heart races, right emotional signs. You feel hurt angry Like this is early brian in his career me too who couldn't take feedback like this is you know you start getting so upset I not and actually I know some people that i've worked with the people that were my employees when I was a manager that when they find themselves in a crucial conversation, they become so angry that they can't even speak, because they know that everything they're going to say Is going to be hurtful, or come off in this clunky kind of manner, so they say nothing, right? They're forced between violence and silence, they're forced to silence themselves, because they know that they become extremely emotional. The other one is behavioral, and the person can perceive their own behavior, like pointing fingers and raising their voice, that kind of stuff, behavioral. Only when you are self aware enough to realize these cues, can you begin to disengage. Self awareness is the key. Point one, I think the very first point in becoming empathetic. And if you're not self aware, you can't really react quick enough. It says, people who are gifted at dialogue keep a constant vigil on safety, signs that people are becoming fearful, and a constant watch for signs that people are becoming fearful. When you fear that people aren't buying into your ideas, You might start pushing too hard, which is what we talked about, the overbearing person in the earlier podcast, when you fear that you may be harmed in some way, you might start withdrawing or hiding. So those are two completely understandable responses, right? The difference here is, you're looking out for them, understanding that people are engaging in behaviors, and that's not the way they are. Or the way they think, it's, they're just, these three signs, behavioral, emotional, or physical signs. Yeah, and if you're a team member, or even a facilitator, you can actually be observant about these things by seeing the body language that people are exhibiting. You can see that people lean back in their chairs, fold their arms. Stare at the ceiling, raise their eyebrows. These are not good signs. That's an interesting one that we'll pick that one up in the career. The as you are arguing agile 200, podcasts. Because very few times is there someone who is, does not have a stake in the conversation, that is facilitating the meeting, that is just a neutral arbiter. Just wants the pool of shared meaning to be as, as wide and as broad and as deep as possible. And for everyone usually that's not we don't have enough money for that. We don't have enough money for someone to make sure that our discussions are, are good. So you don't have a neutral facilitator. You have somebody else that plays the role. Playing the role. Boy, we haven't said play the role in a long time. corporate America. Why they're the worst. That's a, that should be the podcast title. Another interesting one People rarely become defensive simply because, Of what you're saying, they only become defensive when they no longer feel safe. The first challenge is to simply see and understand that safety is at risk. The first Sorry, I was like the first duty of every starfleet officer is to the truth that's what I heard in my head when I read that statement When you don't feel safe, even well intentioned comments are suspect. When it's unsafe, you start to go blind. Yeah, you start to go blind or you react. So when someone shouts, you shout back without even really meaning to. It just happens because you're triggered, right? And that happens in a split second. A facilitator or someone else on the team could spot that and address it right away before it festers into something terrible and it spirals into this. This whole escalating aggression situation. But that's what I'm saying very few teams have a skilled facilitator with them to help them to realize. So in the book it says, so instead of taking your it's talking about a story here. It says, instead of taking their attack as a sign that safety is at risk, you perceive an attack as an attack. Whereas a facilitator would perceive an attack as an indication that safety is at risk and they would try to step out of the conversation and. And re not really reapply, but they would try to help reframe the conversation in a way that that safety is a paramount in that. Exactly. So that, that skill is a pivot point. If you don't have it, you're never going to get past a certain barrier. And you're never going to evolve past a certain The scary thing for me in this conversation is your career will never evolve past a certain point without these skills It's like you may be excellent in your role. You may be the developer It's like just give me the thing I want to do and i'm just gonna go hide in a corner in the dark or do It or whatever okay. That's cool But you'll be that guy forever that you want to be that guy forever if you're lucky You'll be that guy forever because you won't yeah even then you won't be maybe subject to you know Receiving feedback from the stakeholder if you're not good at taking that you Yeah, it can now evolve your career. Let's move on to one of the other core claims of this chapter. As people begin to feel unsafe, they start down one of two unhealthy paths. They either move to silence, withholding meaning from the pool, or to violence, trying to force meaning into the pool. Those are the two paths. We break silence and violence into two subcategories with three bullet points each. i'm going to throw each of the three out. Yeah, i'm gonna start with silence i'll get your reaction then i'll move to violence. I'll get your reaction. The Three most common forms of silence are masking, avoiding, and withdrawing. Masking is the understanding or selectively showing of our true opinions. Sarcasm, sugarcoating, and couching are some of the more popular forms. You already said, let's take it offline, right? Avoiding involves staring completely away from sensitive subjects. We talk, but without addressing real issues. That's avoiding. And then withdrawing means pulling out of the conversation altogether, We either exit the conversation or exit the room. So masking, avoiding, withdrawing. All three of those are interwoven sometimes, and it can be difficult to pull them apart. But they are real and a skilled facilitator, a skilled, Participant even, needs to be able to see that as it happens. It's almost like you want to see it in real time if you can, right? But if you can't see it in real time, feel free to put up your hand and say, can we just go back to that before we move on, right? Ask for forgiveness. Just say, I missed something there, even though you didn't. But you could do that. You could say I missed something there and go back and touch on it and reframe the conversation. As far as avoiding right if it's written down somewhere and you're showing that In its printed form so to speak written form if people Go around it They go on tangents, you can bring them back and say, that's very valuable, but maybe we could talk about that some other time. This is everything you're saying of solid, absolute liquid gold time, times two, like a skill facilitator is not going to let somebody get away with these things the sarcastic comment. And moving off and not dealing with the thing not dealing with the conflict. A skilled facilitator is not going to let them get away with you said this sarcastic comment, but it sounds like this is what you mean by that. There, there are other, there are tactics later in the book that we'll talk about that actually dig into that. But from the teams that I've been on that actually have a skilled facilitator I'm talking about a scrum master at this point, I have a skilled facility, a skilled one not a junior or beginning or a project manager relabeled, a actual person with facilitation skill. They will not let these things go unheard. They will address them, bring them to the front, and get the concern that is underlying out into the open. In this book's language, into the pool, so it can seriously be considered. And and that, boy, that's just not, that's, to me, that is a skill that is just so advanced. It's just unreal. It's advanced but also critical, I feel, right? Because at the same time when you bring that person's idea into the pool, you don't want to offend them, necessarily. Sure, yeah. You can turn that around and say, what a fantastic idea, let's just add that to what we're talking about, right? When they talk about things that, like these comments, that are sometimes off the cuff. They know, they just kinda laugh off things sometimes. You have a choice. You have a choice where you could say, why would you say that? Or you could just laugh with them Sure. And immediately discard it, put it aside, and go back to what you're talking about. But again empathy. You like, you can't fake it. No. No. You can't call, there's no one that, you can't call someone and say Brian why did you say that thing? What do you really mean? If you're seeking to punish me I'll just say silent. Exactly. But if I truly know that you care about me and that you truly are coming from a perspective of actually caring about me and you're not hiding that, maybe that'll be the impetus. Oh boy. I don't say that often. Maybe that'll be the impetus. That I need to contribute to the pool, whereas I was staying out because whatever, I was feeling that I couldn't contribute because whatever reason, whatever, I don't know what reason it was. Maybe you weren't felt welcome to contribute. Maybe the act of just drawing me in, you don't even need to discover the reason. Maybe you'll just draw me in by just asking me, maybe, you know what I mean? I don't know. Yeah. Or just appreciating that that's a pretty good idea or nobody started that. Thank you for raising that. Little things well speaking of little things. Let's move on to a little thing called violence They define violence as any verbal strategy that attempts to convince control or compel others to your point of view Otherwise known as corporate america, and there are three Sorry, that was super. That was a super clunky there are three subcategories of violence we will and Controlling consists of coercing others to your way of thinking through either forcing your views on others or dominating the conversation. Cutting others off, overstating your facts, speaking in absolutes, changing subjects, or using directive questions to control the conversation. Oh boy. This is every appeal to authority ever. The second category is labeling, putting a label on people or ideas so we can dismiss them under a general stereotype or category and the third sub item here is attacking, which speaks for itself. You move from winning the argument to making the person suffer. Tactics include belittling and threatening. Wow that's covering a lot of ground right there between those three, I think. It is. It is a good swath of what you'll deal with, though. For sure. There's no doubt. And if you've been in the workforce for a little bit, I'm sure you've come across it. You may not recognize and label it as this, but you have come across it. I'm pretty sure about that. The last thing in chapter four is you understanding your style under stress, like the, what behaviors you revert to under stress. I'm not going to go into that. You can read the book. Like it's, it basically, it says pay close attention to what you're doing. the impact it's having, and then alter your strategy if necessary. Specifically, watch to see if you're having a good or bad impact on safety that's all I'll say about that. Which we normally will sum up when we're talking about empathy. Be self aware. Okay, just understand how Your behavior is affecting other people. Are you the type of person that yells I'm not mad. I'm not yelling. I'm not angry. Yeah. Oh my God. We've seen people like that. I'm not yelling. I'm not angry. I'm just. Or turn it on. It says, why are you like me? Yeah. Why? No, you're the one doing the yelling. Why won't we start yelling? Do we sound German? Why is that? I don't know. Like I did the Spotify recap or whatever. It's like your number one country is Germany. There are number one. Yes. Yes. Our number one. Our number one, most listenership is out of Germany. Believe Berlin land, Berlin. I don't think, I don't think the translation comes through properly. I don't think it's actually called Berlin land, Berlin. Maybe it is. Oh, I don't know. I don't know about a place called Berlin land. I, yeah, I don't know either city of Berlin. That doesn't sound right at all. Yeah. But yeah, that was our number one. Wow. Yeah. So everyone in Berlin. Thank you. Yes, indeed. Wait, what's the German word? Danke Oh, okay. That was my southerner dunk shot. Don't show. Don't get shot, but I don't know any Sean's. Duncan Peter doesn't matter. Oh chapter 5 is make it safe how to make it safe To talk about almost anything. So what do you want to hope? Sorry. What do you do when you don't feel like it's safe to share what's on your mind? The key is to step out of the content of the conversation. Don't stay stuck. In what's being said the first question is what I really want. We're going back to this question again. We're Slowly building on the body of knowledge that we've started with in the book, which is what do you want out of this conversation? What do you want? And then this there's other cars. There's other questions. I wish I could remember now. What do you want? What do we want out of this conversation? And then what do you want? Yeah for the relationship even if you're a neutral facilitator, there's something you want out of that, and that might be the most amicable outcome based on what each party has to say. That's what your outcome is, your own personal outcome. Or in the Deming podcast that we're about to do, like you want a win, you want something where we both win. Out of the there's a lot in the management realm that could really revolutionize the management, if some kind of framework came out that sort of helped you negotiate toward a win rather than I get everything I want and I don't care about you, you know what I mean, like something like without empathy baked in, boy, that would revolutionize business. It says the good realize that safety is at risk, but they fix it in exactly the wrong way. They try to make the subject more palatable by sugarcoating the message. The best don't play games. Yeah, exactly. So that sounds like a hard stance, but it's really not. So if you're a facilitator or just a participant, right? And you see anything going like this, like we've talked about thus far in the podcast, any of those signs that you perceive try to figure out if people are Are they expressing their opinions or are they expressing fact? Are they expressing their interpretations of the facts or just the facts? Okay, we'll get there. You're already, you're jumping ahead. I like it. We'll get there, okay? I'll start moving faster through the material here. Once safety is restored, we can talk about nearly anything. That's the claim they make here in the book. You need to understand that safety is at risk. Or not. And when you're pressing, you need to step out of the conversation and stop addressing the direct thing. So we're gonna talk about some ways to do that, right? Sorry, where am I? Chapter 5 Step out, 76. In, in one of the examples they give, the person When they come into a disagreement and the conversation doesn't look like it's going well, they say, hey, can we change gears for a minute? I'd like to talk about what happens and they bring it up to a higher level. And they say, listen, my goal is not to do this. My goal is this, or where I want to get to is this. And they refocus. So that's a mutual purpose. We, I'm going to get to mutual purpose. That's one of the big. Bullet points of this chapter is the first condition of safety is mutual purpose. Mutual purpose means that others perceive that you're working towards a common outcome in the conversation. You find a shared goal. And you both have a good reason and a healthy climate for talking. So here's two crucial questions to help us determine when mutual purpose is at risk. Number one, do others believe I care about their goals in this conversation? And number two, do they trust my motives? So again, you just like number two right there. If you really are faking this, you don't have empathy. You already failed number two. And number one probably is on shaky ground as well. It's all divided by zero at this stage, I think, right? It's just not going to work. So you can't fake it, period. So if our goal is to get our way or manipulate Quickly becomes apparent in this line of reasoning because again, we come back to what I want for me, what I want for others, what I want for the relationship. If you're asking those three questions, and I feel if you're trying to manipulate, you're not going to be asking those three questions. You're going to be asking me some kind of like deviation. You lost the first one. Yes. And that's it. Yeah. Yeah. It gives an example in this chapter. About trying to argue with your boss. And again, if you can't argue with your boss, you need to find a new boss. That's keep that resume updated. Keep that resume updated. I don't remember what podcast we said that on, but it was a zinger and I love it. It says you need to find a way to speak in the boss's language. And a passage in this book says the boss's behavior is causing you to miss deadlines that the boss cares about and incurs a cost that the boss frets over. It loses productivity that worries the boss, and then now you found some kind of common ground where you can establish some kind of mutual purpose, right? To attack the subject to talk about we're talking about the boss's bad behavior in this case, it could be a lot of different things in that. I only bring that example up because it's pretty relevant to software development, but that's mutual purpose, establishing it. So you basically you're elevating yourself out of the disagreement. Of like the low level disagreement you're in and you're trying to get a mutual purpose that you both can agree on you're trying to get to a a level of agreement and then that never spilled the difference Goes into this get back up to yes, it never split the difference I think they use no to get to yes, but a little bit different than this the next section talks about mutual respect It says it's equally true that you can't stay in the conversation if you don't maintain Mutual respect. The instant people perceive disrespect in a conversation, the interaction is no longer about the original purpose. It's now about defending dignity. So congratulations. You just messed up the crucial conversations by not actually respecting the person you're talking to. Exactly. And listen it's like we're saying these things, but in real life, sometimes you just don't respect somebody. And that's it. No matter how you think about it, you come back to that and you're like I don't really care for that person. I don't respect them. If that happens, what do you do? First of all, keep your resume updated. That's true. Second of all, why are you talking, like you shouldn't be talking to that person at that point. Exactly. Step out of it. It says, ask the following question to determine when mutual respect is at risk. And the question is, do others believe I respect them? Does the other person believe I respect them? that is a painfully simple question to ask to get through this question. But in practice, though, it's hard to get around that because most people do the other thing, which is do they respect me? How dare they not? That just all goes down the downward escalator really quick. This is hard, but I think it's very rewarding if you can think of it that way. Again, the undertones here are all empathy if you want respect, you need to give respect. You can't, I'm gonna, Where is the slippery slope of how many people you're gonna not respect that you work with to get why wouldn't just start by respecting everybody. How about that? How about we're all good kids and play well with others. How about we start with that rather than where does this come from? It's born in several places, but more, mainly egos. I think we're about to get into something that I think we'll get in later, which is, You know where you start with assuming positive intent and respect for people. So I want to move into the next chapter because again, we could stay on that one with that whole one right there, like mutual respect. Like we could do a whole separate podcast just on that. Sure. In fact, most of these the three different types of winning Punishing and keeping the peace we could do a whole podcast just on that one But I want to move on to the one one what to do Once you step out page 82 It has three skills. They call it skills And the three skills are apologize, contrast, and create a mutual purpose. Three things to do once you still be like, Hey, things are going off the rails. Let me step out for a second and consider which of these three that I should employ. Setting getting hooked and fighting back, break the cycle, see a person's aggressive behavior for what it is. Oh, sorry. I just slipped into apologize, I think. Where were you? I think we need to go into each of those three just for a sentence or two. Yeah, let's, so the three categories. So let's talk about apology. Apology is a statement that sincerely expresses your sorrow for a role in causing the Or at least not preventing pain or difficulty to others. Now, an apology isn't really an apology unless you've experienced a change of heart. So it says, when your behavior has given someone cause to doubt your respect or commitment to mutual purpose, your conversation is likely to end up in a silly game playing and frustrating misunderstandings until you offer a sincere apology. Yeah, exactly. And a sincere apology can help repair the trust damage that's there, right? And open the door for constructive dialogue. The funny thing is like I had I worked with a person years ago many years ago that was, they were in a leadership role and they were a master of just clearing the air. And moving the conversation towards a solution by stepping up and saying, listen, I don't know how things got this way, wrong or whatever. I should have stepped in earlier. I will take all the blame and responsibility. You sent everybody to me. I apologize for this. Let's come to a conclusion. And I still remember it years later of how effective of a tool it was to have a member of leadership step in and just clear all this pettiness, and many years later in my career. Really what they were saying in retrospect was, I don't care how things got messed up. Let's move on. Let's move on. Yeah. That's what they were saying, but they were saying Anybody who wants to label blame, send it to me. I will take the blame. Sorry, everyone. My bad. That takes. Yeah. So Brits are very good at apologizing. They always apologize. And when they're told not to apologize, their response is sorry. But I think if you go in with that attitude into a discussion that especially if it's a heated discussion where people are trying to lay blame It can be very effective at extinguishing the the sparks that are about to go up in flames, right? Because you're owning up, you're saying all of these bad things, it's my fault. I'll take the blame. But immediately you're saying let's move on. How can we make this better, right? What can we do next? That's a very effective and a powerful technique. It's a learned thing though, because people aren't necessarily, Innately, prone to apologize and say what's now my fault. Sure. Why should I say? Sorry? Yeah, there's ego involved for certain They don't use ego in this book at all Actually, that's right But it but again, it is a tool and much like the person I described, you know in my story Employ the tool where it will be most effective, right? To get you to the next level because again in that organization that leader was responsible for most of the people They were apologizing too. So like To the executives and again to the customers, whatever, they really didn't care who did what or whatever, like they only care that like success was the outcome and if that person could lead the team to success by apologizing, that is still a leadership technique and a technique in this book that anybody can employ it was great in the moment I knew it was happening and I, it was like, I observing it, I knew what was happening and I couldn't stop it even if I wanted. It was like, he's slowly moving train wreck. I couldn't stop it even if I wanted to. The next section is contrasting. Contrasting is using don't and do statements. For example, addressing other's concerns that you don't respect them or that you have a malicious purpose. The don't part. You're saying I Hey, I do respect you. I don't have malicious purpose. This is like a, Hey, I don't, I'm not saying this because. Whatever, right? Yeah, I want to hurt you or because whatever and then the second part is confirming your respect or clarifying your real purpose I do think that you're a great coach or whatever home or I do think that you have a great role to play or Whatever, so it's a don't statement followed up by a do statement very effective especially during like appraisals or when you're evaluating somebody, right? How to give a good honest feedback on somebody is using contrasting where you're really what you're doing when you do this is you're clarifying intentions right and avoiding ambiguity misunderstandings so that they have an example here just to make it crystal clear for everyone says example is the don't part The last thing I wanted to do was communicate that I don't value the work you put in or that I don't want you to share it with the VP. The do part. I do, I think your work has been nothing short of spectacular. That's a weak example, but we'll get into it later in the book. Contrasting is not apologizing. They put it here. It's important that you understand that contrasting is not apologizing. It's not a way of taking back something that we've said that hurt others feelings. It's rather is a way of ensuring that what. We said didn't hurt more than it should have contrasting provides context and proportion So the book goes out of its way to say don't take back what you said, you know Put your remarks in context. It says don't apologize for what you said lay out the context. So we're very clear Yeah the last thing is create mutual purpose. Sometimes we find ourselves in the middle of debate because we have clearly different purposes. The worst ignore the problem and push ahead and roll over others. All right. And then the good at dialogue move immediately towards compromise, but the best use the skills to create a mutual purpose. And they use an acronym in the book. They have this CRIB crib acronym, acronym commit to seek a mutual purpose, which means we're going to commit to staying in the discussion until we have a solution that satisfies the both of us as a win recognize the purpose behind the strategy, right? We can break the impasse by saying, why do you want to do that? You, you step out of the conversation when you're not being productive, right? Invent a mutual purpose, which is you find an objective that is more meaningful and more rewarding than the ones that divide the various sides. Again we've talked about that earlier and then brainstorm for new strategies because if you're not willing to give creativity a try, it'll be impossible to jointly come up with mutually acceptable options. Yeah. The creating a mutual purpose is really that the earlier comments we made about forging a win situation, so you're not capitulating. You're also not steamrolling. It's a, it's almost a throwback to. Parenting like if you have little kids that you're raising or have raised you can have your dessert He's gonna finish your vegetables, right? So create a win So the we're moved on to chapter 6 How to stay in dialogue when you're angry, scared, or hurt. I think this will probably be a big, a quick chapter for us. By learning to exert influence over your own feelings, you'll place yourself in a far better position to use all the tools we explored thus far. Take this note out of the book because that's where we stopped. All right. So it says emotions don't just happen there's several claims claim more claim one claims claim one others don't make you mad You make you mad and claim to you can act on your emotions or be acted on by them You either find a way to master them or fall hostage to them. Wow, that is so powerful Yeah, that's a rough statement To someone who is yeah, that's a rough statement. Yeah, it did One of the quotes in the book is our stories are one way event we concoct our own personal interpretations of what we did or what, sorry, what, who did and why. And first we observe, then we add meaning to what we see. So maybe they didn't say those things. We're interpreting it that way. The highlight that our stories are often influenced by our past experiences, right? So you know and the bad examples that you had again, if your parents. We're chock full of bad examples for you all your life. Yeah. That's the template that you're copying as a human being. And now you don't even realize that all you have is bad experiences that you've copied. So you're starting from a negative position. That, that's a tough one, coming in, coming into your first job and trying to be in a position where you have to accept critique. So really like critical advice to help you from a purpose from a position That is someone actually caring with empathy that actually cares for you. You will perceive it in the worst way possible, just because that's just the way you were raised and you have no experience in the work world in the, you're working with other people, basically. Yeah, of course you'd react negatively in that situation. Congratulations. You just described me at the beginning of my career. There's someone I think of all the time when I want to do podcasts like this, that I want to invite on the podcast. Because I remember a conversation that real early in my career it was I can't even say and I remember a conversation like this, that I just couldn't take critique, because I'd never taken critique before, yeah, you're not taught this in school, in college. No, absolutely not. How to listen and accept criticism. Which is bananas, because dialogue What we're talking about dialogue it's a basic level building block course that every other course builds on top of it. Crazy. It's crazy. It's nuts. It says the worst at dialogue fall hostages to their emotions and they don't even know it. The good of dialogue. Realize that if they don't control their emotions, matters get worse. So they try something else. They fake it. This is what we were talking about earlier. Unfortunately, once these emotionally choked folks hit a rough spot in a crucial conversation, their suppressed emotions come out of hiding. This is what I was talking about mutual respect. You can't, that fake it till you make it is not a good strategy here. Not having empathy and just trying to get your way and hiding it, that will not work. The best of dialogue do something completely different. They have strong feelings. They influence and often change their emotions by thinking them out. People that keep their frustrations in this way, bottled up, it's akin to like basically a volcano bubbling, right? You don't know. It's going to one thing it's going to erupt. You just don't know where it's going to erupt. You don't know where and when it might be in your professional life. It might be your personal life or vice versa. So yeah there's a lot of benefit in , understanding this stuff. So they start on page 107, There it is with the feel to act cycle. So the way you feel starts influencing the way you act, right? And it starts left to yep. They will expand on figure six one, how feelings drive actions. And they start adding steps as they go further in the book and make this kind of this kind of arrow diagram. They make it a little more advanced. So they start with this simple one with feelings, drive actions. And then in figure six two, they give you the path to action. So in the path to action, they say just after we observe what others do, just before we feel some emotion about it, we tell ourselves a story. So they, they put C in here as the first step. And then they say, tell a story as a second step. That's this one right here. And then after you tell yourself a story, then you figure out how to feel about it. Then you act out. Okay. Again, not necessarily in healthy ways. I just thought I'd throw that out there. Yeah. Yeah. we observe, then we tell ourself a story, then we feel since we, and only we are telling the story, we can take back control of our own emotions by telling a different story. So you can see and hear things. And then when you start constructing a story in your brain, because again, this is that thinking fast and slow mode one mode two thinking thing that this is mode one thinking, I see and hear some things I see a fact, I see people's behavior, whatever, and immediately start constructing a story in my head. That's mode one thinking that's quick snap decision Oh, I saw a lion on the plains. Yeah, quick mode. One thinking it doesn't serve you in here. The what this book is trying to get you to do is shift out of that mode one thinking and to change gears in the mode to and to analyze Oh, is it? What is this? What story am I telling myself here? Yeah, they go on to cover three. I think the three things that you know that's the three strategies. To challenge and reframe the stories we tell ourselves under this master my stories heading, right? So they talk about separating facts from interpretations that people say things and then it's not necessarily based in fact to have politicians specialize in this but in discussions, we should really always come back to what does the data say? Instead of what you interpreted the data and you're saying this, And you're imposing that thought pattern on everybody else, right? Go back to the raw data. If you don't know enough you're jumping ahead of where the book's going because the book says it's walking through figure six, three they tell him the book from Maria. There it is right there. Do you see there's more words in here from Ray's story? But they're basically just adding some words as Marie tells her story to see and hear, and then tell a story and then feel, and then act. It says you just feel angry. The feelings came first, and then the thoughts came second. Storytelling typically happens blindingly fast. Again, that's that mode one thinking I was saying. Any set of facts can be used to tell an infinite number of stories, and stories are just that. Stories. Once they're told, stories control us, and until we tell different stories, we can't break the loop. So the idea is, once you start constructing a story in your brain, the story here, the Maria story is, He doesn't trust me. He thinks I'm weak. If I speak up, I'll look too emotional. He'll think I'm super emotional. That's a story you've told yourself. Yeah, now you need to back up to the facts and we'll get there in a second. We'll get to the facts. Yeah because the story you're telling yourself is basically undermining Any ability for you to have a crucial conversation to make meaning out of the conversation get what you want Ask all the questions, you know What you want out of the conversation what you want out of the relationship? It's sabotaging everything. Is there a better story? Are there other stories that fit the facts? Have you thought about any of those? All of that is in this section. It's very deep. They call this retracing your path. Okay. So it says, slow down, go figure. Slow down to speed up. Yeah. Slow down, retrace your path to action. And it says, here's how to retrace your path. Act, notice your behavior and ask, am I in some form of silence or violence? The second one is feel, get in touch with your feelings. What emotions are encouraging me to act this way? Number three, tell a story, analyze your stories. What story is creating these emotions? And then the last one is see and hear. Get back to the facts. What evidence do I have that supports this story? Wow. Yeah, absolutely. Listen, in real life If you were to do this though It might take you a while to get good at it because you're supposed to do this In the moment like as it happens sure and initially you might not get all the way through right? You might just say Wait, I'm trying to recognize this. The conversation's moved on. That's okay. Keep at it. Keep at it. You will progressively get better and better at it. Again emotions are very powerful. They might overcome you in any of these steps oh, I'm gonna get through act and feel and tell a story about, oh, it's such a good story. I can't, I'm gonna quit here or whatever. Sure. I'm like, you but you at least tried to get through the steps the more you do it's It's like the way I think about product management, it's like you can't read books about product management and you can't listen to stories about product management. And expect that you're going to be a great product, that you have to do product management every day. Yeah. It's the same thing, like team development, everything that you do you have to do it. You do. Somebody there's a quote out there, I'm trying to figure out who said this, and I can't come up with his name. It was me. Somebody, you take it. Yeah, somebody said, You cut. You can't talk to fish about water. That's a great quote. Yeah, you're right. You have to do it. And you won't get there in in a jiffy it'll take time, but constant improvement. Keep at it. Here we are about halfway through the book. Page 113. Many people are emotionally illiterate. Individuals say they're angry when in fact they're feeling a mix. and surprise, or they suggest they're unhappy when they feel violated. So again, like what we just talked about, when you're retracing your path, most people are very bad at naming the emotion or emotions when there's a complicated, Mix of emotions that are bothering them, that they're swelling up, changing the way they're feeling, like clouding their judgment, right? And oh boy, like all this stepping away all this, engage, stop your mode one thinking, get to your mode two thinking, think deeply on these things. All that stuff it's very difficult. It is. If you're in a team setting one of the things you might want to do is just create something like a Nico calendar for your team, because there's no context there. It's just feel the day went? And then you look for patterns across the board and say, was there a specific day or some days during the day? The sprint, let's say, where people were feeling particularly frustrated, angry, down, etc. And start to you could use techniques like the five Ys, whatever. Just try and get to the bottom of it. But that's a starting point. So it says on page 114, The first step to regaining emotional control, is to challenge the illusion that what you're feeling is the only right emotion. In 115, when you generate stories in the blink of an eye, you can get so caught up in the moments that you begin to believe your stories are facts. We get lower on that page, we say, Can you see or hear this thing that you're calling a fact? What is it? And was it an actual behavior? They, there are things between this and page one 16, 17, that they try to help you understand the little clever stories that you tell yourself. And when you're hiding facts and telling yourself stories and thinking that they're facts, they give you a couple of different modes here. One is victim stories of, it's not my fault, right? It's, these are sad facts, but not not stories the things that you tell yourself, where you make yourself the victim. The villain stories where you put all the blame on somebody else or some situation or something like that. Yeah, right? These are the villain stories and then the helpless stories that there's nothing else I can do. Helpless stories often stem from villain stories and offer us nothing more than fools choices. So it says. Clever stories they can match reality. Yeah, there's a lot here for for teams to get to grips with. There's three things they say about clever stories. Clever stories, they can match reality, so they seem nice, right? Because they match reality. They can get us off the hook, and they can keep us from acknowledging our own sellouts. An example of a sellout in the book, it says you're driving in heavy traffic. A car tries to pass you and cut in, you drive forward and cut him off. Like he's trying to pass you so you speed up. Yeah. But then he like gets in front of you and cuts in and now you're angry at him. But you could have just slowed down or whatever you basically sold yourself out. That's right that's the idea of a sellout. It's like the book says sell outs are not big events. Some common ones are you believe you should help someone and then you don't, you believe you should apologize, but then you don't. And then if you become the sellout Yeah. You become basically the cause of your own issue there and then you make up excuses or whatever. It has a whole bunch of on page one 122 has a whole bunch of sellout Situations some of which In software development, you'll recognize I'll read you two or three of them. It says you should say yes. When you know, you should say no. And then no one falls up to see if you can keep your commitment. You believe you should listen respectfully to feedback, but you become defensive instead. You fail to complete an assignment on time, and believe you should let others know, but you don't. Yeah. They're all very common. Very common, all of them, and I'm sure pretty much everybody listening to this, watching this, have seen this in their own lives too. Telling the rest of the story, the dialogue's smart, recognize, That they're telling clever stories. Stop and then do what it takes to tell a useful story. One that creates emotions that lead to healthy actions, such as dialogue. They turn victims into actors. If you notice that you're talking about yourself as an innocent victim, you have to ask, am I pretending not to notice my role in the problem? It says the first step is telling the rest of the story. The first step in, in telling the rest of the story will be to add these important facts to the account. So basically you're turning villains into humans. You're not leaving things out. You're turning the helpless into the able you're killing. The fool's choice is either this thing or the other thing. And and you're not taking easy outs out of the conversation, right? It takes a lot to get to that point though. It's being vulnerable. It's, yeah, there's a lot there. Chapter seven is state my path, how to speak persuasively, not abrasively. So we're ready to open our mouths and start sharing our point of view. Now what? this chapter is about improving our advocacy skills advocacy skills. Wow. That goes back to even before we started. The podcast. I remember like a pre episode one and we talked about airlines and advocate inquiry versus advocacy. Oh boy. Advocacy. We probably didn't do that as a real podcast topic because I can't say the word advocacy, but we can do, we can't so adding information to the pool of meaning can be quite difficult when the ideas we're about to pour into the collective consciousness can contain delicate, unattractive, and controversial opinions. This chapter is about the way you speak. Yeah, there's a, I think the authors proposed that we speak with I, contrarian to a lot of. Other thoughts. A lot of people say talk about we, there's no I right in team. However, here it's a different angle. This is about communication style. How you go in leading with I I statements rather than you statements. They carefully blend three ingredients, confidence, humility, and skill. Confidence speak to yourself, right? Yeah. You just saying what you want to say, right? That's confidence. People skilled at dialogue. Have confidence to say what needs to be said to the person who needs to hear it like that's you know They have confidence to speak Another way to say this is a courage to speak. Yeah humility again that goes back to empathy. You can't fake it humility and then skill is avoiding the fool's choice. Basically. Yeah, exactly Don't take the easy way out. So they have an acronym S T a T E state. Okay. And the acronym goes, share your facts, tell your story. Ask for others paths, talk tentatively, and encourage testing. Those are the, that's state. Share your facts. In the story they tell in share your facts for S, share your facts for state they say, the best way to share your view is to follow your path to action from beginning to end. Your path to action, remember, is this. Path action. So you're sharing this with the other person that's what they say in this section. So the C in here is Hey, this is a fact that I've observed. This is a fact that I've observed and then they're outlining a story They're outlining how they feel about it. And then we and then act as the last thing So what they're starting with is sharing your facts Okay These are things I feel the facts are the least controversial thing that should be thrown out So it should be the most safest to start with. And facts again, I'm in product management, so maybe not every workplace this way, but the facts should be the least controversial thing on the table. Yeah. This is solid. This is absolutely solid. They also say avoid absolutes, in your communication, when you argue your point of view, it's better to say in my opinion or the way I see it as opposed to you say this, here's how I understand it rather than actually this is how it is because that's enforcing your viewpoint even on 139 they even say facts are the least insulting if you do want to share your story don't start with your story Start with the facts. Yeah. It says begin your prayer with facts lead them to experience your path from beginning to the end not from the end Back to the beginning which is where most people do start. They start with hey, here's my accusation or hey Here's my big blow up or whatever. Yeah earn the right to share your story by starting with your facts lay the groundwork for all delicate conversations The second one in state is t tell your story In addition, if you simply mention the facts You The other person may not understand the severity of the implication so it takes confidence to be honest, to throw the facts out there, and then don't pile on, , once you've mentioned the facts, the other person might not Understand the severity of the implication. That's where you will bring them into your story for the first time. And while you constantly look out for safety problems, this is where you would employ contrasting for the first time. Hey, I don't want this. I do want this. Here's what I think the story is. Let's talk about it. And then we're not going to get ahead because I'm proposing the story to you. Basically. I do this in product management all the time. Proposed stories. Sure. I pitch goals. I could change the direction. I say, I don't want things. I do want other things. I do this all the time without knowing that it has a name, which is called contrasting. The a in state is ask for others past. So once I provided my fact in my story, I'm trying to sync with you. See if you have a different opinion, different idea of the future, basically. And then it goes into the house skills, which is the T of state, the second T of state, which is to talk tentatively. Talking tentatively simply means that we tell our story as a story, rather than disguising it as hard. Yeah, I, this is where you said, in my opinion. Yeah. This is exactly that. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. And again, this is something that you'll see some skilled people do this all the time, like especially the rare leadership person who will come in and say help me understand, or as I see it, as I understand it, do I do I understand this correctly? Look for affirmation. Exactly. It says speaking in absolute and overstated terms does not increase your influence. It decreases it. The converse is also true. The more tentatively you speak, the more open people become to your opinion. tentative, not wimpy. So there's a subtle but very important distinction there, right? Tentative is not overtly stomping on one side or on someone or anything like that. You're basically coming from a position of fact driven, right? If the facts bear out what you're saying, then we can pursue this avenue. As opposed to if it's that bad WIMPing is just a very slippery slope. Yeah, it is, but also they're we're now getting into the last part of the state acronym. The E, Encouraged Testing. And this is where as a product manager, I make all my money Because I am willing to put my ideas against everybody else's ideas into Thunderdome and By the Patron Saint of Tina Turner We will find out who wins in Thunderdome and I am perfectly confident putting all my chips on my ideas Because they're well researched and thought out before I propose them So others need to feel safe sharing their observations and stories. Otherwise, they don't speak The only limit To how strongly you can express your opinion is your willingness to be equally vigorous and encouraging others to challenge it. This is what a lot of people get wrong about Jeff Bezos and stuff like that. When they watch, like when they watch the way Amazon works and stuff, when they have to like, they have to be concise about their language and stuff like that. It was like, it's a thunderdome of ideas and ego is not going to help you. No, it will actually, I'd say it will harm you. It'll say a lot. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So if they have different, if people have different facts or stories, you need to hear them and help them complete the picture. Yeah. You need to actively seek to ask, does anyone see it differently? Does anyone agree? You need to actively play devil's advocate. You need to do it until your motives become obvious to everybody. The real test is the final one 47. It says the real test of whether your motive is to win a debate or engage in real dialogue is the degree to which you encourage testing and, Oh boy, here we are in the product management field of I wish as a framework product management could create a company wide framework that where people could just, anybody around the company could throw ideas into the pool. And have a quick framework for testing those ideas against the market real quick. You know what I mean? Like a real true Eric Ries lean startup, MVP type of true, instead of whatever MVP has become. So people could really see without ego in the equation. Things just like this idea is not good. Yeah. Yeah. Because I feel that's where a lot of, in product management, that's where a lot of things go wrong, for sure. The initial idea, the initial, or as Marty Cagan says in it transformed because apparently some people need to read Marty Cagan and buy his book to believe it in the first place. The initial business case was bad. The initial idea was bad, and because you've never tested it. You went and you spun up this whole project and wasted all this money. Yeah. In that case, it doesn't matter how well you execute. It really doesn't matter. It says, how do we change? One, one 51. How do we change when you find yourself just dying to convince others that your way is best. Back off your current attack and think about what you really want for yourself, others, and their relationship. Again, we come back to that principle, then ask yourself, how would I behave If these were the results I really wanted. Yeah, this is where I say putting those three stickies on the side of your monitor can be really key because anytime this happens, it's just a little glance away, right? And you go back to that and reorient yourself back to where you were. Yeah. And again, just to reiterate, because we're going to keep, we're going to keep beating this issue until ?Everyone understands. The more you care about an issue, the less likely you are to be on your best behavior. It says, when our emotions turn our ideas into a harsh and painful stream of thoughts, our honest passion kills the argument rather than supports it. So what can you do? Back off your harsh and conclusive language. But don't back off your belief. Catch yourself and be self aware, is basically the takeaway of everything we just talked about. So that was chapter 7, right? That was chapter 7. so chapter eight is explore others paths how to listen when others blow up or clam up, it says when others do damage to the pool of meaning by climbing up or freeing to speak their minds, blowing up, communicating in a way that is abusive or insulting. Is there something you can do to get the dialogue back on track? That's what this chapter is all about. So you can't force others. But you can take steps to make it safer for them. To be in dialogue. Okay. We're going to explore others paths in this chapter. If we can find a way to let others know that is okay to share their path to action, maybe they will. Yeah. And some of the ways maybe you could try to do that is invite them into the conversation by making it participatory, right? Listening to what they're saying, actively listening, not just hearing them. And then. Mirroring back using that as a technique mirroring will be a it will be a technique in this chapter I will tell you the chapter starts With start with heart, which we've started with different category before, which means essentially you need to have empathy. If you invite people to share their views and then you call them ridiculous or whatever, like you don't really, you don't really empathetic, but you're going to fail at this. You're not even going to start. It'll be a non starter. I'll put it that way. It says, When you ask people to open up, be prepared to listen. So be curious is the first suggestion in this book. Constantly be looking for opportunities. To be curious. If you're not an empathetically curious person, this may be hard for you. It will be hard for you. Definitely. Yes. So it's the first step is be curious. The second step it says is stay curious. So that's funny. And then the last one is be patient. So start with curiosity, stay curious, right? It's it's rarely fun to hear other people's unflattering stories. We begin to assign negative motives to them. So you don't do that when you're staying curious. It's a journey, basically. To avoid overreacting to other's people's stories, stay curious. And then the last advice is be patient and encouraging. Encourage them to share their path, and then wait for their emotions to catch up with the safety that you have created. This is tough. This is deep, man. At the highest level, it's Oh boy. Like, how are we even going to get here? Once again, the figure 8 1, the path to action it reiterates this path for us in this section to help us along. So it says, when others are in either silence or violence, we're actually joining their path to action already in progress. This path, again, I'll try to show it on the screen. Yep. Sorry, editing brain. Consequently, we've already missed the foundation of the story. So if we don't start with the here. See and hear like the facts in the story. So it suggests breaking the cycle our genetically shaped eons old Defense mechanism kicks in which makes them which makes it harder for us all these like mode one thinking type of things It makes it harder for us to break the cycle, but we need to retrace the other person's path to action with them so we can have a full understanding basically. So it gives some inquiry skills when, how, and what to walk through to, to basically work your way back to the initial steps of the, but the important part of this is that you're trying to work your way back to the initial facts that make up and then to understand why they drew the story, why they created the story that they did. And then it, it gives. A M P is the acronym. They love acronyms. AMP is the acronym that helps encourage others to share their paths. A is ask ask to get things rolling. To seek to understand other's views. We show genuine interest. So we're going to Ask about it. Some common invitations are what's going on. I really like their opinion. Hear your opinion. Please let me know how you see things differently. Don't worry about hurting my feelings. I really want to hear your thoughts, basically prompting people, asking, drawing people into the conversation. That's a. M is mirror. This is where you're going. That's why I raced head to mirror. No the, going back to the A for a second.. . So that's part of the A is really asking open-ended questions, not a yes, no type of question. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And then, yeah, the mirroring piece. Yep. Mirroring is one of the easiest to techniques to employ because all you're doing really is just simply looking for affirmation. You are also relaying this idea that. You really don't care which side of the conversation your own feelings are. You're simply saying, let me, help me understand this. Is this really what's going on? So it says in mirroring, we take the portion of the other person's path to action we have access to and make it safe for him or her to discuss. We play the role of the mirror by describing how they look or act. And it says later, I'm not going to read every single thing, but it says later, be very careful with your tone and your choice of words. So you're not, you're basically not aggravating the issue here. Yeah. Yeah. You're also not discrediting them, by using a tone like that. A M that's the M P is the paraphrase. To acknowledge the story, be careful not to simply parrot what was said instead, put the message into your own words, usually in an abbreviated form. The key to paraphrasing as with mirroring is to remain calm and collected. So this is don't push too hard. We've asked, mirrored and paraphrased, now what others may think our purpose is merely to extract what we want from them and to conclude that we don't care about them personally. Asking people what they want helps them engage their brains in a way that moves them to problem solving and away from attacking or avoiding. That, that, I really, that, that should have been the only thing I read in the section. That's cool. Yeah. Yeah, what's the last P though? And then the last P is prime when you're getting nowhere. The last P is optional. It's like a P in parentheses because if others just won't open up and they just won't feel safe, sometimes you have to pour some meaning into that shared pool. So the other person will respond in kind so that they, there's, they give some good examples in the book where it pays one 66, one 67. It's not the kind of thing you want to do unless nothing else has worked. So you want to, you basically want to start cause it could be seen as leading. Yeah. But when like absolutely everyone is I've had this in several development teams, especially offshore teams when nobody wants to say anything. Retrospective is a great example. What can we approve? Nobody says anything. What do you think about the way we do X, Y, Z? Yeah. Yeah. People say now ideas. Yeah. Now I, Oh, maybe what if we do this differently? And now ideas come pouring out. I, I picked something that I know is painful to the team. Now things come pouring out but it's cautioning you in the book. Like you don't want to lead with that because again, they could be leading, they could be leading ideas. I think if you focus on impact at that point that might be helpful. You say, what if we did this? What would that, what would the impact of that be like? So you're not necessarily questioning any one individual, you're just simply saying the situation at hand calls for us to re examine how we're doing things. Yeah. So later on page 170, they have the ABCs of what if you disagree, and if the other person's facts are wrong, they have the ABCs. They have the agree build and compare. So agree is various parties you're observing are violently arguing. In truth, they're violent. They're violent, they're in violent agreement. They actually agree on the important points, but they're debating about like smaller things, like that's the A. The B is the the, to build. The reason most of us turn. Turn agreements into debates is because we disagree on certain points of what another person has said Never mind that it's a minor portion. So we want to build some kind of agreement On the larger points right and see as a compare start with a tentative, but can it opening? Such as I think I see things differently. Let me describe how agree when you agree, build one of those, leave out key pieces, compare when you differ. Pretty good blueprint I'd say. And that basically is all, the. Amp a ask mirror, paraphrase prime and the ABC agree, build, compare. That basically is everything that is chapter eight is just a couple of little tactics to help you. Like. When empathy is already solid in place to help you move through dialogue. A couple of things that help you move to dialogue. Chapter nine is moved to action, how to turn crucial conversations into action and results. This is an interesting one for us. So I'm going to slow down on this chapter because it says having more meaning in the pool. Even jointly owning it doesn't guarantee that we will all agree on what we're going to do with the meaning. This is also one that I think agilists get beat up a lot on because there are two points. It says they have unclear expectations on how decisions will be made. They do a poor job of acting on the decisions they do make again, two things that I think are sometimes valid of agile teams. Yeah. The chapter header 178 says dialogue is not, or sorry, the paragraph header says dialogue is not decision making. The beginning is risky because you have to find a way to create safety or else things go awry. The end is dicey because if you aren't careful about how you clarify conclusions and decisions, flowing from your pool of shared meaning, you can run into violated expectations later, how are decisions going to be made? So two things, how are decisions going to be made? Are we ever going to decide? So the, are we ever going to decide his decisions drag on forever? So you haven't talked about how decisions are made And you don't know how to actually make the decisions once you're in a place to make them so it gives you Several it gives you four in this chapter gives you four ways of making decisions. You're gonna like these. Here we go command consult vote Consensus. Wow. All right So let's let's tease those apart. Command so what is, what do they say about that? So command, with command decisions, it's not our job to decide what to do. It's our job to decide how to make it work. We don't want to do it. It's a lot of stress. We don't want to make the time ourselves to make the decision. Yeah. We'd rather let somebody else make the decision. That's command. We pick a person, they make the decision. Yeah, as long as that's done with the intent that this is everyone's decision, really. Otherwise, you could say, at the end they failed. Yeah. And so that's not good, if that's the intent. The second one, consult. Consulting can be an efficient way of gaining ideas and support without bogging down the decision making process. We make a choice and then inform the broader population. The decision maker they consult with the broader population, and then they make the choice, and then they inform the broader population of the choice. Fair enough. At least people were consulted. So that's better than just being dictated to. Voting, obviously voting is voting, right? We gather the pool together, we present them with options. Voting is a great time saver, but should never be used when team members don't agree to support whatever decision is made. Yes, that's critical. Otherwise you may as well dictate. And I feel like consulting and voting often get conflated with the final category that I'm about to read, which is consensus. This method can be both a great blessing and a frustrating curse. Consensus means you talk until everyone agrees. Everyone honestly agrees to one decision. This method can produce tremendous unity and high quality decisions. If misapplied, it can be a horrible waste of time. It should only be used with one high stakes and complex issues two issues where everyone absolutely must support the final choice. I feel a lot of people conflate voting and consulting with a consensus decision the way this book handles it is a unanimous decision. Yeah. Voting is just simply the highest the highest, most popular choice wins, right? And it is democratic, but that said, Voting doesn't mean everybody will actually vote, or they will cast all their votes. So yeah, you're right, people do conflate those two things. And consensus, easy to explain, hard to actually pull off in practice, especially when it's a contentious subject, right? When people have just basically got entrenched interests and they're dug in, it can be very hard to do that. So it gives you four questions to ask before you decide to vote. How are you going to choose what method would you sell on to choose? It says number one, who cares? Number two, who knows, who has the expertise? Number three, who must agree? This is a sticky one. Who has the authority, right? You have to agree. Sure. And number four, how many people is it worth involving, which is. Probably the murkiest question out of here. Those that matter should be involved in the decision making is what that's saying to me, and it's not everyone necessarily, because again, to my earlier point, you don't get to a consensus if everyone's got to agree on everything. So it is very context based. Sometimes you need that, and sometimes you need to be able to say, let's pull away for a little bit and say, a decision has to be made for the greater good. But that doesn't mean every single individual is participating in the decision. having had all these different crucial conversations through the last eight, nine chapters, eight chapters, I believe you have to have a plan for action ultimately, otherwise it's all for not if it's just you come this far and then you don't get it over the finish line. Plan for action. So who's going to do what? And it's almost like the old style assigning, right? Ideally, you'd say here's the here are all the decisions we've made. Here are the tasks coming out of the decision. Who's going to do what? And that can sometimes be like, okay who's best equipped to do these things. And then you've got the most experience doing this, Fred, Mary, and so you have individuals accountable for those things. Otherwise you're not going to succeed. And and then the last chapter of the book. Is the chapter 10. Yeah, but the device or tough cases. This basically outlines every tough case that they outlined earlier, like in chapter one or two in the book. Yeah. And walks through the scenario of how you would handle it. In the optimal circumstances, right? Yeah. If I recall, there were probably like 10 or 12 different scenarios. Some of the ones in here like a page 192 the overly sensitive spouse It's funny says the danger point often couples come to an unspoken agreement during the first year or so of their marriage It affects how they communicate for the rest of their marriage. That's scary This is a solution that this is generally a problem of not knowing how to state your path How to state your path like again that path like you facts are first and then you the story you tell yourself and why? And it says when spouses stop giving each other helpful feedback They lose out on the help of a lifelong confidant and coach. Oh boy. That's that stinks It does stink, but it's real. I feel like that's the root cause of so many disassociations between partners Like is that is that just it is it i'm gonna ask a question. I already know it's a leading question Is it laziness? Is it just like lack of knowledge? The knowledge is here in the book why? People haven't read the book. I'm not selling their book for them, a lot of people just aren't aware. Let me put it that way, right? They go into this and they're going into it more on an emotional level, especially domestically speaking here in this last example. But I think the same thing applies at the team level. People go into it with a With an outcome of forethought in their mind, this is what I want out of it. And I, earlier we said, you should know what you want out of it. But I'm saying, I'm talking about already this having decided in your mind what you want, instead of, I want the best outcome given the knowledge and the people there. That's different than I want the team to do X, right? So I'm going to start leading them toward that, right? Yeah. Yeah. Another example here is a failure to live up to agreements as the worst teams. Walk away from problems like this and good teams. The boss eventually deals with the problem behavior and the best teams, the team self manages to a resolution and it says success is not dependent on the perfect compliance with the new expectation, but on teammates who hold crucial conversation with one another, even on excellent teams. This is always a tough one to deal with. The team taking accountability for themselves. Yeah. It is, because they feel vulnerable when they're doing that, initially at least, right? They're like, okay, if we do this, we might get reprimanded if we fail. Yeah. So that fear of failure, it goes back to that whole psychological safety, right? It sure does, yeah. Yeah. Another one is deference to authority. It talks about a leader who comes in with a team that always looks to the manager to Solve their problem for them. And it says they could be living with the ghosts of a previous leader. Yeah. They could be stuck in that mode, which is interesting, a way to frame it. Cause that wouldn't be the way that I would think to frame it is it seems that you're agreeing with the leader says in this example, it seems that you're agreeing with me because I'm the boss, not because what I'm saying makes sense to the team, just like nods as it goes along. It says the solution to this is to, as the leader, to discover your part. Consult with a peer, which I thought was interesting. So with a peer to see if like you actually are a problem. And then it says another part of the solution is if the problem stems from ghosts, go public, you start describing the problem in group situations, team situations. You start asking for advice that requires a lot of courage. It sure does. And when you're at that point in management, specifically in management, you don't want to be seen as the weakling. I want to throw out another one for you before we get out of here, because I know we're already nearing time. It says, another situation, 196, failed trust. I don't know what to do. I'm not sure I can trust this person. He missed an important deadline. Now I wonder if I can trust him again. This is a danger point. People often assume that trust is something that you have or don't. In actuality, it's offered in degrees and it's often topic specific. The solution, deal with trust around the issue, not around the person. Oh, you went there super early in this podcast. Yeah. And I was like, I know this is coming up. I got to hold you back. I think in every situation, you've got to look at it and just peel back when you start to feel yourself getting triggered and say, Am I really tackling the problem or am I tackling the person? And go back to the former. Tackle the problem, not the person. Then you have immensely increased your chances of really addressing the issue at hand. Because what's gonna happen if that person gets replaced? You haven't moved on at all. You're gonna be exactly there with a different person, right? So tackle the problem, not the person. Another one is shows a pattern. It isn't a single problem. It's that I keep having to talk with people about the same problem. I feel like having to choose between being a nag and putting up with a problem. Now what? It says, some crucial conversations go poorly because you're having the wrong conversation. You talk to someone who is late for a meeting for the second time, and then the third, and then your blood begins to boil. It says, learn to look for patterns. Watching for behavior over time, then state your path. By talking about the pattern people often become far more emotional than the issue They're discussing warrants because they're talking about the wrong issue Interesting. That's an interesting example too because at face value if somebody's always late for a meeting You can't assume it's because they're lazy, right? That would be the easy way out like you say this person's always lazy. That's the pattern have you really dug deeper to figure out why maybe they have a personal situation that is causing them to be late and you could change the meeting time perhaps, so there are ways to deal with it. In chapter 11, putting all together tools for preparing and learning on page two, 14, the table, trust me. It's there. There's a table coaching for crucial conversations. It goes through all of the major principles, all the skills in each one, the crucial questions in each one. I'll try to put it on the screen while we're having this discussion. If you're looking for a quick takeaway also on if you need quick summarizations, On page 217 on it goes through each one in a little more in a little more context these are great. Takeaways from this to try to Start yourself down the journey of learning and developing the skill because again even this book they say It's not something you just pick up and do do it a little bit at a time. Start with what you can do to try to develop the skill and, it's changing your behavior from the ground up. And that is not an easy thing to do. It is not. And one of the key kind of tenets in the book, even though they don't mention the phrase is is empathy. So to cultivate empathy, it's not an easy thing to do either. But it's something you can work on over time. You'll get better and better. All of the stuff that Dan Goldman has on empathy, the first step in the path of empathy here is you actually have to care. Yeah, I mean that is quite a path to overcome. Personally in my life, I think I can draw a dividing line in my life about like when I had kids and when I didn't have kids, that was a big dividing line between Oh, these are these things, this skill needs to be evolved. It needs to be evolved and enhanced in order for me to get ahead in life, both as a parent. And and that stuff spills over, I think if you, whatever, wherever you start in your life, it will spill over to categories and make you more effective. So if you start, now my path is it started because I became a parent and then it spilled over into work and I became more effective at work. For me, that was my path. So that was part of that one. A, you start with yeah, you got to care and then one A would be become self aware. Yeah, I actually do care, right? Yeah, that's like the step in that journey to becoming more empathetic. For such a short book. Yeah. I think it's it really should be required to reading. I mean, Dialogue itself. It could be a very cornerstone one on one class at every college. Sadly, none of this stuff is taught in colleges. It's so unfortunate. It's so basic too. Just the grid at the end of the book that we just flash on the screen. Like just having that in post its on the side of your monitor could help you. Even if for nothing else, self awareness. Yeah. Even if you just start there and start with evolving self awareness and you don't even move to any of those other skills. It's a critical trait in evolving your other skills, right? It's very critical to be self aware. It's fundamental. Hopefully you've you've learned something you'll be able to have better crucial conversations with your partners, your teams. Hopefully you have some takeaways from this that you can use every day. Yeah. Yes, that was our goal. 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