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Move to Action

How to Turn Crucial Conversations into Action and Results

Up until this point we’ve suggested that getting more meaning into the pool helps with dialogue. It’s the one thing that helps people make savvy decisions that, in turn, lead to smart, unified, and committed actions. In order to encourage this free flow of meaning, we’ve shared the skills we’ve been able to learn by watching people who are gifted at dialogue. By now, if you’ve followed some or all of this advice, you’re walking around with full pools. People who walk near you should hear the sloshing.

It’s time we add two final skills. Having more meaning in the pool, even jointly owning it, doesn’t guarantee that we all agree on what we’re going to do with the meaning. For example, when teams or families meet and generate a host of ideas, they often fail to convert the ideas into action for two reasons:

• They have unclear expectations about how decisions will be made.

• They do a poor job of acting on the decisions they do make.

This can be dangerous. In fact, when people move from adding meaning to the pool to moving to action, it’s a prime time for new challenges to arise. Who is supposed to take the assignment? That can be controversial. How are we supposed to decide in the first place? That can be emotional. Let’s take a look at what it takes to solve each of these problems. First, making decisions.