How to reframe difficult conversations, advanced AI design and being less scared of failure

5 minute read

Friday Thoughts & Learnings

This week I found out how to reframe difficult conversations into learning conversations with the guidance of Sheila Heen, Dave Talas gave me an advanced lesson on conversational design to get the most out of Chat GPT and Amy Edmondson helped me learn how to become less scared of failure.

How to reframe difficult conversations

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most by Sheila Heen, Douglas Stone and Bruce Patton

I’ve been brought up as a people pleaser.  So having difficult conversations has been an ongoing challenge I’ve been working on to get better at. 

My search for understanding and solutions brought me to this book.   It helpfully breaks down what makes some conversations difficult, why people tend avoid them and how to better manage them.

We find conversations difficult when we fear the consequences of what might happen if we start them.  So, for the most part, we do our best avoid them because they make us feel vulnerable. 

The authors show that underlying difficult conversations there are three deeper conversations.

1. The "What happened?" conversation – which usually involves disagreement over what happened, what should happen, and who is to blame.

2. The Feelings conversation – which is about the parties' emotions, and their validity.

3. The Identity conversation – which is an internal conversation that each party has with herself, over what the situation tells her about who she is.

To reduce our reluctance to have difficult conversations it helps to reframe them into learning conversationsand avoid the common mistakes we make when having them.

So how to do this? 

• Turn the “What Happened” Conversation into a Learning Conversation by focusing on curiosity, impact and contribution.  How you interpret what you see as the facts is just your perspective.  The mistake is to think this is the only perspective  Instead ask the other party what they see and how they interpret it.  Stare at the facts and interpretations together and see where the common ground and differences are and ask why.

• Improve the Feelings Conversation by exploring, negotiating and sharing your feelings.  To do this without emotional escalation – first find gratitude in what the other person has shared and then let them how the situation or actions have made you feel.  Then listen to what the other party shares and acknowledge it.

• Focus on the nuances of Identity Conversation and refrain from controlling others’ reactions.  We tend to judge ourselves in absolute terms: competent or useless, mean or kind.  And this limits our willingness to have hard conversations that we perceive will make us feel we are not who we think we are.  Instead see yourself as a work in progress and always open to learning and improvement.  And abandon the need to predict and control other’s reactions.  If what we say is done with respect and in an act of service, how people react to this is then their choice.  And that’s OK.

• Tell a neutral third story to start.  No one loves having someone else saying “hey what you did sucked and you need to stop it.”  That’s how the other party interprets the start of a difficult conversation, and it leads to defensive barriers being put up. Start by saying “I think our definitions of cleanliness and our preferences for doing dishes differ, can we talk about this?”.  Instead of “I do all the cleaning and your partner then says “you’re so anal about the dishes”. 

It’s not a battle over who’s right and who’s wrong, its quest to seek greater understanding that makes it less scary to have difficult conversations and more productive when you do.

Advanced AI design

Conversational design using Chat GPT with Dave Talas from Promptmaster

Chat GPT is a general-purpose technology like the introduction of electric lightbulbs in the late 19th century and the internet in the late 20th century.  It’s a bit scary at first as it challenges what we know and has a big element of the unknown about how it will help reshape our lives. 

But, it’s here to stay, so my view is don’t ignore it, get on board and learn about it and how you can use it. 

This week I dropped into a fantastic online learning workshop led by Dave Talas from Promptmaster about how to use a conversational approach with Chat GPT to get better results from your prompts. 

Dave started by saying if you’re a knowledge worker, research by Wharton University has shown you can be 30% - 40% more efficient using Chat GPT.  Whoa!

So naturally I wanted to know how I could get some of this. 

What I learned is, if you’re using Chat GPT, its your job to guide it to the best outcomes it can provide.  It won’t just serve you up the most appropriate output unless you help it.  It remembers what you have asked and its responses, so this is where having a conversational approach, where you build or narrow what you ask of it, is better than just using one-off questions.

You can also use personas to help provide context for Chat GPT to give answers.  For example: “You are an expert digital marketing professional…” then ask your question.  The persona continues until you tell it to change.

An advanced form of questioning I found super helpful was called ‘exploration driven enquiry’.  It’s where you ask Chat GPT to help analyse information and provide a recommendation or conclusion.

The way you do this is ask Chat GPT to provide information from multiple perspectives on a topic.  Such as the future, environment, legal, economic, political etc. 

Then you can ask it to provide pros and cons of this information as it relates to your topic.  And following this, ask for a recommendation.   Always check the responses.  What it can do in a short amount of time is staggering.

How to become less scared of failure

Amy Edmondson has written a new book called Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well. 

I joined a Q&A facilitated by the Growth Academy this week and heard Amy explain how common thinking about failures as either: avoid failure at all costs or fail fast, fail often doesn’t help us learn how to fail well.  And this holds back our personal and organisational development.

In her view there are three types of failure:

1. Basic failures: these happen in a familiar area and caused by human or other reasons that are predictable.  These are undesirable and efforts should be spent on preventing them.

2. Complex failures:  perfect storms of factors that are unlikely and typically not repeatable.  They occur due to the inherent uncertainty of a system or work: A particular combination of needs, people, and problems that may have never occurred before.  Triaging patients in a hospital emergency room, running a fast-growing start-up all occur in unpredictable situations.  These usually occur due to a series of small failures.  Avoiding consequential failures means rapidly identifying and correcting small failures.

3. Intelligent failures:  these are inherently ‘good’ because they advance understanding and develop new capabilities.   They occur when experimentation is necessary.  A new perspective on strategic experimentation is to drop the notion of ‘trial and error’ suggesting right and wrong. Replace it with expected outcome and learning opportunity.  Not win or lose, win or learn.  The right kind of experimentation produces good failures quickly. Managers who practice it can avoid the unintelligent failure of conducting experiments at a larger scale than necessary.

By looking at failures from these perspectives it provides a greater opportunity to tackle problems that otherwise would be avoided at all costs. 

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