Ch 2: Mastering Crucial Conversations

The Power of Dialogue

At the start of research for this book, the authors never intended to study crucial conversations. It was by sheer accident due to asking the wrong research questions; originally they sought to figure out how individuals in a business are effective in getting the work accomplished. The quest to find these candidates began by seeking different organizations and finding their most influential employee. The topic of this book, crucial conversations, was accidentally discovered in observation of an employee named Kevin, a VP at a corporation.

At first, the authors did not find Kevin to be extraordinary; Kevin did what most VPs were expected to do. Yet, it was at a meeting with the other VPs in the company that Kevin proved to be influential indeed. Unlike his peers, Kevin demonstrated his ability to hold a crucial conversation with his boss by candidly speaking about his opinion on the proposed project. The authors realized that Kevin did what most fail to execute in those crucial moments; he did not succumb to the old approach, known as the “Fool’s Choice” (22). This commonly committed offense is the believe that when times call for honest feedback, often individuals fall in the trap of feeling they must choose between option one and option two. In the former, one can decide in  “telling the truth” and in the latter, one can choose “keeping a friend”(22). The problem with this thinking is the false notion that only one can prevail. Nonetheless, Kevin proved that one is not forced to pick one alternative over the other. Rather, honesty and respect can be mutually achieved.

Our lives begin to end the day we became silent about things that matter. 
--Martin Luther King Jr. 

The problem is how that can be done? This will be addressed in the following chapters. The authors first explain the process of holding a healthy and robust conversation that seeks to demolish the “Fool’s Choice” concept and replace it with first explaining how to engage in a dialogue. This simply means “the free flow of meaning between two or more people” (23). Dialogue begins by sharing ideas and providing the place for others to feel safe to input their ideas freely. This in essence is what the authors coin as a “shared pool of meaning” (24).  As individuals, every person has his own pool of meaning that contains thoughts, feelings, experiences, and knowledge about a certain matter. In times where people have opposing opinions, that is when shared pool of meaning is necessary. Two individuals holding a crucial conversation can have a dialogue where ideas can be candidly expressed in the open and the best decisions can be deducted based on the greater pool of combined information.

Thus, better solutions can be determined because there is increased information readily available to both. On the other hand, deviating either way from this pool of shared meaning is silence or violence. Individuals that find themselves in a heated debate make the conversation ineffective and childish. The outcome of this is that one person might choose to withhold information that could be added to the shared pool by not responding or depending on  “hints, sarcasm, casuistic humor, innuendo and looks of disgust to make our points” (27). Sometimes people take the other tactic, which involves forcing one’s views on others by employing disdainful diction and disregarding the other’s opinion. None of these tools work to better the situation. What one should comprehend at this point is that learning the art of dialogue, the most superior option, is easier than falling in the habit of getting into uncomfortable or insensitive arguments. Allowing the mismanagement of conversations can widen the chasm in a relationship. Still, this can be fixed by simply changing how one handles crucial conversations.