“The reason why so few people are agreeable in conversation is that each is thinking more about what he intends to say than others are saying”.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld

How many unproductive conversations do you hear people having on a daily basis?  How many of those do you get involved in?  What do you see going on that makes them unproductive?

I’m talking about situations where the parties involved in a dialogue actually do want the conversation to be effective, and the outcome to be productive. This is, after all, the primary way in which business, commerce, negotiation, consultation and relationships work.  

So why do so many conversations not work successfully?  Well, as you might expect, it is down to the way our brains work. When people raise issues, concerns or simply want to share a point of view with another person, they typically display a set of predictable behaviours which show up in a number of ways. The underlying motivations driving these behaviours can be summarised as:-

• A need to maximise one’s own comfort / while minimising the other person’s discomfort
• A desire to win / and not lose (i.e. to get your way)
• A need to maintain control 

These needs ‘leak out’ into conversations in a variety of ways, but, most typically as:-

• Leading Questions (designed to lead other people to get to the conclusions you have already arrived at)
• Piling (loading points and/or questions on top of one another to emphasise your argument)
• Over-advocacy (over-zealous control of the arguments without providing space for discussion)

When these strategies are being deployed by people, what is actually going on in their brains?   Continue reading →