For change, back conversation before communication

Be present. Pay attention. Ask grounded questions. Draw out stories.

These are the arts of conversation: the arts of meaning-making. Sometimes genuine breakthroughs come from one inspired moment. More often, new meaning arises in the to-and-fro of conversation. You won’t always be the one to cry ‘Eureka!’ But you can make such moments more likely. How? By breathing life into conversation.

Choose for meaning

Here’s a little word-play. It’s all about meaning:

If the meaning is clear, you have a message. So communicate it clearly, concisely, and relevantly.

If the meaning isn’t clear, you need to find fresh understanding and insight. You need to create new meaning, shape it and make it your own. That’s a very different dynamic. That takes conversation.

Create space for conversation

Think of a professional or personal conversation that changed things for the better. I bet it wasn’t straightforward. You started in one place and finished somewhere very different. Someone introduced an idea or phrase. It sounded odd; then ‘it just made perfect sense’. Someone told a story that triggered an insight. You glimpsed a new perspective.

You hung in there with each other long enough for the idea to take shape and make new sense of (some part of) you and your world.

What you did — you and your conversation partners — was create new meaning.

This simple unpredictable human interaction is the unseen life of any group:

Take strategy. Communication will give you (aka you and your group) data and other people’s ideas. That can be helpful. Conversation will open up your ideas — your sense of identity, purpose and direction, and your imagination and desire. You can begin to build an argument for the future.

Or innovation. Communication can give you a process for collecting ideas. Conversation will take you into the stories and their underlying brilliance you may never have noticed. You can begin to imagine what could be possible if you paid attention to that brilliance.

Or engagement. Communication will cascade a program telling people what they should be and do. Conversation will delve into the craft and community that keeps your world working. You can begin to turn engagement upside down.

10 ways to breathe life into conversation — and your group

1. Be present.
2. Pay attention.
3. Ask grounded questions.
4. Draw out stories.
5. Give time for the story-telling.
6. Push back the tables and get around a whiteboard.
7. Talk across and beyond boundaries.
8. Map the conversation as it unfolds.
9. Stay open to the most unlikely people and ideas.
10. Don’t expect one conversation to fix anything.

Back conversation when things are tough

Ok, let’s make that list more concrete. If you have an initiative, project or program that’s floundering…

1. Be present and attentive to the confusion, uncertainty, ambiguity and fear. Don’t ignore it.
2. Frame a grounded question that names the toughest challenge frankly but respectfully.
3. Ask yourself with whom you most want to think it through.
4. Don’t set a meeting. Take it somewhere informal.
5. Test the question. Does it ring true? Edit till it’s as strong and true as possible (don’t get sucked into semantics).
6. Ask what stories the question brings to mind: best and worst. Tell them.
7. Go for a walk in pairs and ask each other: What are our stories telling us?
8. Draw the insights together. What are you seeing? What meaning do the stories offer you for the current challenge?
9. Look further. What realities do those insights fail to address? What haven’t you asked yourself?
10. Finish with commitment. What commitments will you make to each other to meet this challenge? And how will you sustain the conversation and widen it where possible?

Where do you see communication unhelpfully inhibiting conversation?

How will you breathe life into the core conversations of your group?

COMMENTS: Unfortunately I have had to turn off comments because of automated trolls filling the pages with random spurious text messages. My apologies. For those who want to interact, please email me at mark(at)markstrom(dot)co.