Think Like a Tree

Book Notes - Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High

Why: A primary function of product managers is to listen and have conversations with customers, stakeholders, team members, executive leadership in order to get feedback, learn, improve, make sense of conflicting opinions. This book does a great job of exploring how to have those difficult conversations.

Premise and main argument: The premise of the book is that crucial conversations happen every day and the authors give you tools to better yourself in these situations. You first learn to look for when a crucial conversation is occurring, then you look for signs of the dialog feeling unsafe for the other person. Your goal in these conversations is to put as much info as you can into the “pool of meaning.” This creates an understanding for all parties. You want to keep mutual respect for each other and possibly have mutual purpose. You’ll want to end the conversation with clear decisions and planned actions.
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Key Insights

Learn to Look for signs people feel unsafe. Generally falls into two buckets:

  • Silence: sarcasm, sugarcoating, steering away from the topic, physically walking away​
  • Violence: cutting off others, hyperboles, labeling people or ideas, belittling or threatening.

Start with the Heart - answer these questions:

  • ​​”What do I want for myself, the other person, and the relationship?” Then ask yourself, “How would I behave if I really wanted these results?”
  • Be sincere, curious, patient.

Add to Pool of Meaning with STATE skills

  • Share your facts: talk about facts rather than jumping to conclusions
  • Tell your story: reflect if you’re feeling like a victim, others are villains, or you’re helpless. You can overcome these stories asking yourself “are you an actor in the story?”, “what are their reasons?” and “Am I able to do something to fix this?”
  • Ask for others’ paths: Follow the steps below with AMP, ABC.
  • Talk tentatively: stay calm, don’t get defensive.
  • Encourage testing: invite other opposing views, play devil’s advocate
  • User Power Listening skills: AMPP
  • Ask - to get the conversation going. “What’s going on? I’d like to hear your opinion on this.”
  • Mirror - “I can see you’re upset, who wouldn’t be.”
  • Paraphrase to acknowledge their story - “Let’s make sure I understand. You are upset because… and you are perceiving/feeling this as….”
  • Prime - Only used as a last option if you’re getting nowhere. Offer your best guess at what they’re thinking.

Find and create true meaning of shared facts with ABC skills

  • Agree - find areas you agree in. Most arguments are about small details. Acknowledge the big part where you agree.
    Build - “I agree. In addition, I noticed that…”
  • Compare - “I think I see things differently. Let me describe how.” Don’t suggest others are wrong, compare the two views.

Options for how to decide

  • Command: Not our job to decide what to do, it’s how to make it work.
  • Consult: Gain ideas and support without bogging down decision making.
  • Vote: Highly efficient if between multiple people with all good options.
  • Consensus: Only used for high stakes, complex issues, where everyone must support final choice.

How to choose decision option - answer these questions.

  • Who cares? Only involve people who care about the outcome.
  • Who knows? Identify expertise.
  • Who must agree? Don’t surprise the people who need to know.
  • How many people is it worth involving? Do you have enough people to make a good choice?

Plan of Action:

  • Document decisions
  • Who? Assign specific people, avoid “we”
  • What? Strive for clarity and specifics
  • When? Goals without deadlines are merely directions

How to follow up:

  • Check-in milestones. If you want accountability give people the opportunity to account.

Daily Practice:

  • Learn to look for crucial conversations.
  • Keep the dialogue in safe space.

​Big Ideas:

  • You know you’re having a crucial conversation when the stakes are high, there’s opposing opinions, and the potential for strong emotions.​​​
  • You need a skillset for crucial conversation dialogue
  • The conversation should first start out by creating a “Pool of Meaning” - where everyone feels safe to add their opinions, feelings, theories, and experiences. The Pool of Shared Meaning is a measure of the group’s IQ. This is very similar to the Product Management concept of Shared Understanding when writing and grooming stories.
    The quickest way back to a safe environment is establishing a Mutual Purpose – that you’re working toward a common outcome and you care about their goals, interests, values.
  • There’s no purpose to enter a conversation without a mutual purpose. And you can’t stay in a conversation if you don’t have mutual respect.
  • You can have a dialog with anyone if you create a sense of kinship and connection, and honor and regard their basic humanity.
  • To get a conversation back to safety: apologize, contrast, create mutual purpose. Apologize: Sincerely express sorrow for the feelings you caused.​ Contrast: A don’t/do statement. The “don’t” part addresses concerns that you don’t respect them. The “do” part confirms your respect and clarifies purpose.

Quotes:

  • Culture runs downhill in an organization.
  • Twenty years of research involving more than 100,000 people reveals that the key skill of effective leaders, teammates, parents, and loved ones is the capacity to skillfully address emotionally and politically risk issues. Period.
  • When it comes to risk, controversial, and emotional conversations, skilled people find a way to get all relevant information out in the open. That’s it.
  • People skilled in crucial conversations present their brains with a more complex question. They routinely ask: “What do I want for myself, the other persons, and the relationship?”
  • Emotions don’t settle upon you like a fog. They are not foisted upon you by others. No matter how comfortable it might make you fell saying it – others don’t make you mad. You make you mad. You make you scared, annoyed, or insulted. You and only you create your own emotions.
  • One of the best ways to persuade other is with your ears.
  • To help turn your visceral tendency to respond in kind into genuine curiosity, look for opportunities to be curious. Do your best to get at that person’s source of fear and anger.
  • Don’t allow people to assume dialogue is decision making. Dialogue is a process for getting all relevant meaning into a shared pool. That process involves everyone. However, this doesn’t mean they are guaranteed to take part in the final decision.