SHARPENING YOUR SKILLS

Learning to Balance Candor and Curiosity, One Skill at a Time

You must either modify your dreams or magnify your skills.

—JIM ROHN

Earning a black belt in karate. Piloting an aircraft. Driving a car. Performing neurosurgery. Performing a role in a Shakespearean play. Climbing the face of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. Dancing with the Paris Opera Ballet. Playing tennis, curling, guitar, golf, or piano. Balancing candor and curiosity under stress. What do all these activities have in common? You can’t just read a book and pull them off competently—you must first acquire the skills.

This is an important point. As I mentioned earlier, too many books and thought leaders succeed at pushing concepts—whether they’re about conversation, team building, personal effectiveness, management development, or leadership acumen—while failing to provide the requisite skills. They’re great at telling you what to do and why to do it, but they disappoint when it comes to showing you how to put that advice into action.

This book is different. It doesn’t just provide good ideas; it teaches you practical skills for putting those ideas to work. And because acquiring a skill requires practice, in this chapter I’ll share a range of ways you can sharpen your ability to stay in the sweet spot when it counts.*

Reminder: Your Personal Plan

One quick note before we move on. As you review these practices, keep in mind the personal plan I’ll help you create—a customized strategy for bringing more focus, discipline, and balance to your conversational style. As you review the practices, reflect on the work you’ll need to do to get better at crafting a clear position, putting forward your thinking in a lucid way, carefully testing your hypotheses, and inquiring into the hypotheses of others. Your goal is to identify the most valuable activities you can adopt to do that work.

Don’t stress out about mastering all the skills at once. Focus on the specific skills that will most enhance your overall conversational balance. In this sense, it’s like tennis. A tennis player will improve her overall game by identifying a place she needs to improve—her backhand may be a little sloppy or her serve may be a little soft—and then she’ll practice that particular skill. By doing drills to isolate the skill, she increases her overall performance on the court. In the same way, identify the skills that’ll bring the most balance to your conversational behavior, and then make practicing those skills the focus of your personal plan.

Position Practices

Stating your position—where you currently stand on an issue—in one or two sentences is the first step in getting an idea out of your head and into a conversation in a well-structured way. Here are a few practices for improving your ability to do this well.

Ask Yourself Questions

What follows is a list of questions to ask as you craft a position:

•   What is my main point?

•   Why does it matter? Why do I think it’s important?

•   How do I feel about this issue?

•   How can I state all this in the most clear, concise, and compelling way?

•   If I’m torn between two or more options, how can I clearly communicate that?

•   What if my position is that I don’t have a strong point of view on the matter? How can I convey that, explain why, and see if others feel the same way or have a more focused take on the issue?

•   If my position is more an intuitive feeling than a clear thought, how can I best express that and then check to see if others have a clearer idea about where those feelings might be coming from?

Write It Down

Before a conversation or meeting, write down your main point three different ways; be as clear, concise, and compelling as possible. Identify the statement that expresses your overall view most effectively. When you’re writing an email, a letter, or a proposal, practice clear position statements. Whether you’re writing or speaking, clear position statements are a pivotal component of effective communication.

Position Exercise

Another great way to build this skill is to read an article in a magazine or newspaper, or watch a news segment, and to then summarize the main point of the piece in one tight sentence. If someone asked you, “What was that article about?” how would you distill the main idea down to its essence? You can also do this when listening to people in meetings, at dinner, anywhere. Condense what others say to the clearest and most succinct point you can.

Active Listening

Inquire into the views of others to make sure that you understand their position. To do this, provide a one-sentence summary of what you’re hearing and then test your interpretation with them: “It seems to me you’re saying X. Do I understand your point correctly?”

Have Someone Rephrase Your Point

Explain your view and then ask a colleague or friend to echo back your main point in just one sentence. Sharing your position with a colleague—and having them help you clean it up—can be particularly useful before a conversation or meeting in which you plan to raise an issue.

Listen Carefully to Others

In meetings, dinner conversations, on TV, podcasts, or radio, listen carefully as people talk and observe how they express their points of view. How clearly do they state their position? How might they have said it more clearly? Jot down how you’d say what you think they’re trying to say.

Have a Beer

Whenever people are finding it difficult to nail down their position on an issue, an approach I have found useful is to ask them this question: How would you frame the basic issue or problem if you were talking casually with a trusted friend over a beer at a bar? If you can relax and just blurt out your impromptu response to that question, you can then work with that raw observation, perspective, or concern. Starting with that quick, casual, off-the-cuff comment can be a very useful way to identify and craft a clear, succinct position statement.

Steve, for instance, might blurt out to a friend: “You wouldn’t believe this guy I’m working for now. He’s a piece of work. He tells everyone he wants them to tell it to him like it is, but then when you do, he beats you up for it.”

Steve could then clean that up by making sure it’s clear, concise, compelling, and contains no unnecessary harshness: “Phil, I’ve never worked for someone who’s more open about his need for timely and accurate information as you, and I applaud that. But despite your good intentions, I think you act in ways that makes it really hard for people to do what you’re asking.”

Constructive Framing

Remember a good position is as direct as possible with no unnecessary harshness. There is a big difference between “No one wants to work with you because you’re an arrogant ass,” and “Your behavior is limiting your effectiveness because you often push others away with your aggressive style. Let me give you an example and then tell me if you think I’m off base in some way.” Practice reframing your position in the most constructive and compelling way possible.

Thinking Practices

By stating a clear position, you’re letting others know where you currently stand on an issue. When you explain your thinking, you’re explaining how you got there. Again, this skill is similar to doing long division in elementary school, where you weren’t allowed to simply show your answer—you had to show your work. What follows are a few practices and readings you can use to do this in a sharper and more accessible way.

Think About Your Thinking

Ask yourself questions to reflect on the content and caliber of your thinking:

•   Why do I think what I think?

•   How did I arrive at this point of view?

•   How have I “gone up the ladder”?

•   On how much solid ground does my view sit?

•   How much evidence do I have for this way of looking at the issue?

•   What do I think the evidence suggests?

•   What assumptions am I making?

•   Are there gaps or blind spots in my way of looking at the situation?

•   Do other people see it differently, and, if so, how did they go up the ladder?

•   How can I express all this clearly and succinctly so that others see my train of thought?

Write It Down

A quick way to get clear on your thinking is to assess how you’re making sense of an issue by writing it down:

•   What evidence do I have for this view?

•   How am I interpreting this evidence?

Watch Your Own Ladder

Watch your mind at work. How? First, read and review Chapter 6 of my book Conversational Capacity, which explores my take on the “ladder of inference,” a concept that illustrates how your mind makes sense of the world around you. Then pay attention to how your mind goes up the ladder, where your beam of focus tends to drift, and just as important, how your mind responds. (This activity, by the way, doubles as an awareness practice.)

When you walk up the street at lunch, for example, recognize what your mind is up to. What is the sensory input? What judgments, thoughts, interpretations crop up? If you notice a tie someone is wearing, for example, and think, “That purple paisley tie pairs poorly with his brown plaid suit,” you should recognize the difference between the directly observable evidence (purple paisley tie and brown plaid suit) and your interpretation of that evidence (“pairs poorly”).

This practice, which appears deceptively simple, is actually quite a challenging habit to master. Why? Your mind tends to lump evidence and interpretation together into a jumbled, fuzzy mess. Learning to distinguish clearly between the two is a prerequisite to thinking and speaking more clearly.

Separate Data from Interpretation

You can perform a similar exercise when you read a short article or listen to a news story. As you read or listen, identify the evidence being provided and the interpretations being employed to make sense of it. Here are questions you can ask:

•   What data do they share to make their point?

•   How are they making sense of that data?

•   Is their point of view well-grounded in evidence? Or are they providing a speck of evidence and then taking you on the equivalent of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride with their speculations?

Questions to Ask About the Views of Others

Learn to see how others are going up the ladder by paying closer attention to their reasoning. Don’t do this to be a judge or to convict them of ignorance or stupidity. Do this to genuinely see how they’re making sense of a situation. Here are questions you can ask:

•   Why do they think what they think?

•   How did they arrive at that point of view?

•   How much evidence do they have for that way of looking at the issue?

•   What assumptions are they making?

Get Help

Seek out partners who can help you work through your “business case” before you have a conversation. Other people can be a valuable resource when it comes to clarifying your thinking, as well as how to best explain it.

Strengthen Your Systems Thinking

Increasing your SysQ, a practice I first shared in Chapter 9, is not just a proven way to sharpen your thinking; it also provides a powerful set of tools for communicating it. Below are a few short examples. If you’d like to learn more about the following skills and how they can help you think more clearly and communicate your thinking in a more cogent way, a suite of examples and tools can be found at findinghighleverage.com.

BEHAVIOR-OVER-TIME GRAPHS

“I think our situation is less precarious that it seems. Let me share with you a behavior-over-time graph that shows a longer-term trend that illustrates my point, and then I’d love to get your reactions, especially where you see things differently.”

CAUSAL-LOOP MAPS

“I think this decision will create some vicious unintended consequences. Let me share with you a causal-loop map that illustrates how I’m making sense of this problem, and then I’d love to hear from those of you who see it in a contrasting way.”

STOCK-AND-FLOW DIAGRAMS

“I think we’re focusing on the wrong place to intervene. Let me share with you a stock-and-flow diagram that describes a more high-leverage way to take action, and then get your thoughts and reactions, especially if you think I’m missing something.”

Draw a Picture

Another potent way to share your thinking is graphic facilitation, the use of images, symbols, metaphors, pictures, and visual descriptions to illustrate your mental model. You can do this yourself, but it’s often best to employ a graphic facilitator or visual artist to help you with the imagery.

Graphic facilitation (sometimes referred to as visual facilitation) can be an efficient and engaging way to explain your current thinking about an issue in a fresh and creative manner so that you can test, expand, and improve it. For more information, visit www.facilitationgraphics.com/.

Readings

Here is a list of readings, books, and resources that you can use to expand your ability to think well:

•   De Bono’s Thinking Course by Edward De Bono

•   How to Think by Alan Jacobs

•   Smart Thinking by Art Markman

•   Surely You are Joking, Mr. Feynman by Richard Feynman

•   Teaching Thinking by Edward De Bono

•   The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan

•   Thinking Critically by John Chaffee

•   Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows

•   Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

•   What Do You Care What Other People Think by Richard Feynman

•   Reread Chapter 6: “Conversational Capacity and the Value of Conflict” in my book Conversational Capacity

Testing Practices

Testing your views of “reality” is the first and, in some ways, the most important, curiosity skill. It’s a form of mental discipline by which you refuse to thoughtlessly accept the picture of reality that your brain hands you. Conversational capacity, in fact, can be defined as the ability to hold your perspectives hypothetically under pressure. Your ability to treat your view skeptically is a barometer of your focus on learning; it’s the essence of putting your workshop mindset into action. But building the discipline to do this takes practice. Here are several ways you can adopt and strengthen this powerful competence.

Watch for Where You Are Wrong

Pay attention to when a view you hold is proven wrong. Feel it. Notice it. Relish it. It’s a gift. That discomfort you feel is the sensation of a closed mind being forced to open. “I wonder where my perspective is wrong?” is a priceless question to ask if you are interested in finding the inevitable disconnects between your worldview and actual events on the ground. Why? Because if you’re going to make the goal of expanding and improving your thinking, your North Star, the first step is to get in close touch with the limitations of your mind.

Keep an “Indianapolis Journal”

I was driving to the airport in Los Angeles early one morning, listening to the news, when the traffic report noted two major accidents on the 405 freeway. “I’m going to miss my flight,” I thought to myself. Sure enough, when I reached the 405 it was a parking lot. I finally arrived at LAX 90 minutes late, raced to the terminal, and got in the security line. As I approached the agent, I nervously glanced at my watch and thought, “It’s going to be close, but I might just make the flight.” But my optimism was dashed when, after handing the agent my boarding pass, he looked at me, chuckled, and said, “You’re at the wrong airport. You’re supposed to be at Burbank.”

“Dammit! That’s right,” I thought. It was yet another “Indianapolis moment.”

I’ve found that keeping an “Indianapolis Journal,” a practice I first described in Chapter 9, is one of the most powerful (and humorous) ways to build your ability to hold your views more gingerly. I strongly suggest you not just notice when you’re hilariously (or not so hilariously) wrong—write those moments down.

To reinforce the value of this exercise, let me share something a client sent me recently:

Wayne Dyer came home from school one day and asked his mum, “What’s a scurvy elephant?” She told him she’d never heard of one and asked where he’d heard it. “From my teacher; he said I was a scurvy elephant.” Bewildered, his mother called the teacher and asked what he had meant. The teacher responded, “As usual Wayne got it wrong. I didn’t say he was a scurvy elephant; I said he was a disturbing element!”

I love this story because it reminds me of my childhood and the mistakes I used to make. How many times did I mishear something and jumped to a wrong conclusion? Sometimes I have constructed whole alternative explanations for things and incorporated them into my reality, only to learn much later that I have got it wrong, and the misconception has collapsed. It is part of growing up and reevaluating what is happening around you. You learn from your mistakes and grow as a person. However, I wonder how many other things I have misheard or misunderstood and built into a false reality, but not yet learned the error of my ways.¹

Adopt New Self-Talk

Given the wide range of cognitive biases that distort your views and the natural limitations of your brain, assuming that your view is always wrong to some degree is a very safe assumption. To boost your anti-confirmation bias, I again suggest you regularly ask yourself a basic question: “What’s wrong with my view?” Being more skeptical of your own thinking not only makes it more likely you’ll hold your views hypothetically; it also increases your curiosity and your humility. It’s hard to be arrogant when you know your views are off-kilter in ways you can’t even see. To that end, here are a few questions you can ask yourself to help maintain a healthy distance from the views of the world that your brain presents to you. (Put them in front of you in meetings or conversations, if you have to.):

•   Where am I wrong?

•   Is there a better way to look at this?

•   Who sees things differently and how can I get them to respond to my view?

•   Do other people see it differently, and if so, how did they go up the ladder?

•   What are the gaps or blind spots in my way of looking at this situation?

Use a Different Test Every Time

Too much repetition can be construed as inauthentic. Years ago, I worked with a colleague who would use the same test over and over: “How does that seem to you?” Her heart was in the right place, but her repeated use of the same phrase—which isn’t a great test to begin with—came across as forced and fake, and people took her less seriously. So, mix it up by never using the same test twice in a meeting or conversation.

Come Up with a Few of Your Own

To keep it fresh, review the sample tests I provide in this book and in Conversational Capacity (pages 87–90), and then come up with a few of your own. (To make this easier, I’ve compiled a list of these tests at https://www.weberconsultinggroup.net/dojo-item/a-great-big-list-of-stests/.) Better yet, come up with a new test every day for a couple of weeks and keep a record of your expanding list. Be creative, and more important, make sure that the tests are authentic and heartfelt, and that they sound like you. A good test not included in my previous samples, for example, is this: “While I am wedded to solving this problem, I’m not wedded to solving it the way I just described. So, if you have better ideas, or see problems with mine, I’d love to explore them with you.”

Read A Mind of Its Own

When I coach someone with a strong “win” tendency I always suggest they read Cordelia Fine’s book A Mind of Its Own. It provides an engaging overview of the plethora of reasons we should not trust our brains.

Best Test

If you have a full team using the skills, you can adopt this approach. At the end of a meeting, vote on who used the “best test” and explore why. Be sure to evaluate not just the caliber of the test, but how well it was employed: the person’s tone, demeanor, and sincerity.

Leave the Room

This is especially useful if you’re in a position of authority and people are less likely to push back on your thinking rigorously, even when you invite them to do so. The CEO of a small engineering firm in Silicon Valley found that even when he started testing his perspectives in engineering staff meetings, his engineers were averse to challenging his thinking for three big reasons: He owned the company; he was an MIT-trained engineer with an intimidating intellect; and he had a strong “win” tendency and didn’t like to be wrong.

“I was really excited when I learned about this idea of testing my views, so I was really disappointed when it didn’t work at first. I realized that if I was going to convince my engineers I was serious I’d need to start with ‘training wheels.’” When I asked what he meant, he said, “I purposefully went to a meeting with a big decision. I explained it to my team in detail, and then said, “Before I make this decision, I want you to help me improve how I’m looking at it. To help you do that, here is what I’m going to do: I’m going to leave the room for 30 minutes. When I come back in half an hour I’d like at least three concerns put up on a flip chart and we’ll work through them together.” He then got up and left. He gave his engineering team time alone to wrestle with the decision so his presence wouldn’t get in the way of their conversation. I thought the flip chart was a particularly good idea. It’s more neutral territory.

“When I came back to the meeting,” he said, “rather than sit at my customary place at the head of the room, I pulled up a chair at the far corner of the table and said, ‘So, what did you come up with?’ I listened. I asked questions. I took a ton of notes. I could not believe how valuable that was. My next thought was ‘Damn it. Is this what I’ve been missing?’ I was hooked. So, I began doing this as a matter of course. Anytime I had a big decision to make, I’d ask my team for input and leave the room. It was working like a charm,” he said. “I actually started looking forward to my weekly engineering staff meetings because I was getting so much more value out of them. I did this for several weeks,” he said, “and then something funny happened. I got up to leave the room one day and one of my engineers said out loud, ‘Look, we talked about this as a team and you can stay if you want. You don’t have to leave the room.’”

That is culture change. It’s a powerful sign that trust—and the conversational capacity of the team—is going up in a dramatic way. And it happened because the CEO was sending a strong and consistent signal that he not only accepted critical feedback from his engineering team, he valued it.

Disinvite Agreement

Ask for counterarguments first. This is especially useful if you’re in a position of authority and people are less likely to push back on your thinking rigorously, no matter how strongly you test them. “I already know what I think. So, if you agree with me, I’d like you to hold off for a few minutes. To expand and improve my thinking, I first want to hear from a few people who see this differently than I do.” Then, after you’ve listened to people who disagree with you, go back around to explore what people like about your idea.

Thank People Who Challenge Your Thinking

Thank people who push back on your thinking. “Thanks for challenging me there. That was extremely helpful.”

Readings

Here are a few great books that will help you loosen your tight hold on the delusion that the way you “perceive” things is the way things really are. Beyond Cordelia Fine’s book, A Mind of Its Own, I’d also suggest these:

•   Being Wrong by Kathryn Schulz

•   Don’t Believe Everything You by Thomas E. Kida

•   Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me) by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson

•   On Being Certain by Robert Burton

•   The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan

Inquiry Practices

Genuine inquiry helps you sharpen your own thinking by leveraging the views of others. Here are a few practices to help you hone this potent but underused skill.

Bring Others Down Their Ladder

An effective inquiry asks people to share their “ladder of inference”—how they’ve made sense of a situation or issue. When someone makes a claim, states a position, or declares a point of view, imagine people up on the “ladder of inference” and then ask questions to help you see how they got up there.

In a meeting, if a colleague blurts out: “That idea doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of working,” you might bring him down the ladder by asking a question such as: “Can you take a couple of minutes and tell the group what leads you to see it that way?” or “Help me out here. What have you seen or heard that leads you to think that’s the case?” If the person you’re talking with understands the concept of “the ladder of inference,” you can simply inquire into the person’s view by saying: “Can you bring that down the ladder for me?”

Inquire in Four Ways

In every conversation or meeting, look for at least one opportunity to use inquiry in each of these ways:

1.   Listen for someone with an unexplained or only partially explained position, and then inquire into their thinking to help get their full perspective into the discussion.

2.   Watch for people not participating and invite them to share their views.

3.   Notice colleagues who haven’t stated a clear position on an issue and invite them to clarify it.

4.   Ask a question that expands the conversation:

•   What might we all be missing?

•   Do we have a collective blind spot?

•   What might be an unintended consequence of this decision?

•   What person or group would likely see this issue differently than we do and what would be their argument?

•   What would our worst critic say about how we’re approaching this problem?

Lean into Frustration

“Behind every frustration,” says Robert Kegan, “is something cared about.”² With this in mind, I encourage you to practice getting curious about behavior that would normally put you off. When people get angry, defensive, aggressive, belligerent, or emotional, ask yourself: “What do they care about here?” Then inquire into their view to help them express what’s behind their frustrations or concerns: “Isaac, you just called me a dipstick for stating that I liked the decision. You obviously have some strong feelings about this, and I’d like to understand what’s behind them. What about this decision upsets you so much?”

Focus Your Beam on the Ideas of Others

Using your disciplined awareness, practice keeping your beam of attention locked onto the views of others. In every meeting, see how long you can stay focused on listening to others without drifting off. Get in the habit of periodically reflecting on how curious you’re being in the moment.

In the meeting, periodically ask yourself this question: “Am I actively working to understand how others view things?” If the answer is yes, keep it up. If the answer is no, deliberately shift gears and listen, in a more disciplined way, to how others are making sense of things. Pay attention, in other words, to how curious you’re being in the moment. The surprising difficulty of doing this well is what makes it such a great practice. (This is also a great example of a multi-solving practice: It helps you build your awareness, humility, patience, curiosity, and mental agility simultaneously.)

Reflect

Reflect on your conversations and meetings. Use your travel time, perhaps, to consider questions such as these:

•   How often did I inquire into the views of others?

•   How curious was I in the meeting today?

•   Were there things I put forward without testing?

•   Why? What triggered me to push my view so hard?

•   How can I become more aware of this the next time it happens?

•   What was I feeling?

•   What were the signs that I was sliding toward the “win” side of the sweet spot and losing my curiosity about the views of others?

•   Next time I notice this happening, what is a more productive way to respond?

Keep Score

Measure it. Have a colleague keep score of how many times you inquire into the view of another person during a meeting and track your progress.

Come Up with Your Own

As with the testing practice, come up with one new inquiry per day. This will help you build up a repertoire of ways you can curiously delve into the views of others.

Seek Feedback

When you trigger a reaction in someone that you don’t expect (someone gets upset, shuts down, acts nervous, or feigns agreement), inquire into the reaction and how you might have contributed to it:

•   I’m inferring you’re uncomfortable about discussing this. (Explain.) Is there something about the issue or how I’m talking about it that’s contributing to that? Or am I just misinterpreting things?

•   Is there anything about the way I raised the issue that triggered your reaction?

•   How can I bring up an issue like this again and NOT trigger the same defensive reaction?

Readings

Here are a few readings that reinforce this important skill:

•   Appreciative Inquiry by David Cooperrider and Diana Whitney

•   Humble Inquiry by Edgar H. Schein

•   Reread Chapter 6 in Conversational Capacity, “Conversational Capacity and the Value of Conflict,” which explores the value of conflicting perspectives.

Want to Learn More?

For a regularly updated list of practices, readings, and other resources, visit conversationalcapacity.com.

* My work is heavily influenced by Chris Argyris, a research-practitioner who placed a superordinate value on conducting actionable research. If you can’t put the research to use, after all, what’s the point?