Chapter 2
CREATE AND MAINTAIN A SAFE SPACE FOR DEEP, FOCUSED CONVERSATION (SKILL 1)
Think about the best conversations you've ever had. These were, perhaps, conversations that led to your best friend becoming your best friend. Or maybe they were long talks you had during the earliest days of getting to know the person who is now the love of your life. Maybe some conversations on your short list of best conversations ever were with a business partner or a mentor. Even a chat with a wide‐eyed four‐year‐old can be a great conversation. Agile leadership means knowing how to guide conversations. This ability begins with understanding how to create and maintain a safe space where great conversations can occur. Before delving into what it means to create and maintain safe spaces let's first be sure to understand the nature of deep, focused conversations. That will help us determine the right sort of spaces in which to have them.
DEEP CONVERSATIONS
How many conversations do you think you had this week, over the last seven days? These could be conversations with your spouse or partner, your kids, or other family members. This would also include work‐related conversations – conversations with your boss, with those you supervise, your peers, partners, customers, or anyone else you encounter because of work. Don't forget all the other conversations you have, like those with the person ringing up your groceries or the neighbor you encounter while taking your dog for a walk.
What is a “deep conversation”? Although there are some definitions out there, let's use the Roosevelt Standard to define “deep.” Eleanor Roosevelt was an American politician, diplomat, and activist. She served as First Lady of the United States longer than any other presidential spouse, from 1933 to 1945 during her husband's (Franklin D. Roosevelt) time in the White House. Among her many quotable comments is this one: Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people. We'll use that as our guide for how shallow or deep our conversations are. Our most shallow of conversations are more likely to be about people, moving to somewhat more depth when discussing events, and the greatest of depths when we discuss ideas with one another. With that as your standard, where do you stand? How many of your week's conversations were discussions of ideas?
Of course, not every conversation needs to be a deep one. Many of the daily tasks of business and life can be accomplished with conversations that skim, appropriately, right along the surface. The discussion of what to have for dinner on a given evening need not always lead to the ideas embedded in our take‐out pizza. There is, however, some evidence that we are hardwired to need and even thrive on a certain amount of deep, substantive conversation. In a study led by the University of Arizona, researchers found that higher rates of well‐being were associated with spending less time alone and more time talking to others. This finding confirmed what had been found in several other studies.
In addition, however, they also found that higher rates of well‐being were significantly related to participating in less small‐talk conversations and more deep, substantive conversations. When they compared the unhappiest participants in the study with the happiest, they found that the happy bunch had roughly one‐third as much small talk and twice as many deep, substantive conversations. The study did not attempt to explain the causal relationship behind this finding, but it raised the possibility that happiness and well‐being can be raised by increasing the time spent in deep, substantive conversations. Combining this idea with our Roosevelt Standard, the more we discuss ideas with others, the happier and more satisfied we are likely to be.
FOCUSED CONVERSATIONS
Writing a book takes focus. Focus is hard to come by. That might have something to do with why it took us so long to get this one written. Time to focus and time to have focused conversations won't just happen. For most of us, life is just too busy. Focus requires discipline. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon's Human‐Computer Interaction Lab (in partnership with the New York Times) think they may have an explanation as to why it's becoming increasingly difficult to make time to focus. We've known for quite some time that multitasking (what researchers sometimes call “rapid toggling between tasks”) comes at a cost. Rapid toggling is a habit many of us have developed: working on a draft of a memo, reading and responding to email, checking our social media; jumping around from one task to another and back again, all in the space of a few minutes. This switching comes with a cognitive impact. In our work day, many of us get only 11 minutes between each interruption and it takes an average of 25 minutes to return to the original task after an interruption.
Imagine you are writing an important report for work. On your computer, your email program is likely running in the background and you probably have your cellphone nearby. On average, you won't go for more than 11 minutes before an email notification pops up on your computer, your phone alerts you to breaking news, a text message, or maybe you get an actual phone call. Also, a knock could come on your office door, or if you happen to be working at home the dryer may buzz letting you know you can put in the next load (which is currently sitting wet in the washer). Attend to just one of these interruptions and it could be 25 minutes before you get back to focusing fully on your report… for another 11 minutes. Like deep conversations, focused conversations won't just happen. We need to deliberately shut out potential distractions, even for just a short amount of time.
DEEP, FOCUSED GROUP CONVERSATIONS
We've established that deep, focused conversations are a rarity for most of us. This is probably the case whether we consider one‐on‐one conversations and likely even more elusive when it comes to group conversations. Agile leaders who can increase the productivity of groups and teams will be well on their way to making marked progress on the complex, strategic challenges they are facing our organizations or communities. Increasing the productivity of groups and teams begins with increasing the productivity of their conversations. There are several ways we can address this.
Group Size
One of the ways to assure deep, focused group conversations is to pay attention to the size of the group having the conversation. There is a bit of a “Goldilocks” principle at work when it comes to optimal group size: there is too small, too big, and just right. Perhaps you've heard of Amazon's Jeff Bezos's “two‐pizza” rule for team size. He contends that if you can't feed a group with a couple of pizzas, your group is too big. It seems that Bezos's intuition is backed up by science.
In Decide & Deliver: 5 Steps to Breakthrough Performance in your Organization, Marcia Blenko and her coauthors contend that the ideal group size is seven and that every person beyond seven reduced the team's effectiveness by 10%, so that when a group gets to about 17 members about all they can do is to make a decision about when to take a lunch break. Others have advocated for a slightly smaller size. A 2000 study in Psychological Sciences finds a group of five persons as optimal. What both of these optimal numbers have in common is that five and seven are both odd numbers. An additional study, this one in Organizational Science, confirms that having an odd number of people in a group is better than an even number. It isn't always under our control, but when we are able to predetermine who is part of a group doing complex work together, being intentional about group size can increase the group's odds for success.
Safe Places for Conversations
With a better understanding of what a deep conversation really is, the benefits of a focused conversation, and optimal group size for doing complex strategic work, we can now turn our attention to the spaces and places where such conversations can best occur. As with group size, we don't always have the ability to determine where and when strategic conversations will happen. Whenever possible, however, it is preferable to give this some thought and to do some preplanning. In our work with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) we had scientists coming together from several of the agency's different locations. Having a workshop on anyone's home turf would not have been the best idea. One reason is that there could be a real or perceived home field advantage with the host unit in the position to knowingly or unknowingly tilt the advantage of the collaboration toward his or her own agenda. Also, for those attending from the hosting unit, the potential for the distractions of running back to one's workstations during breaks or even sleeping in their own homes while others were far from home, would not be ideal either. Instead, we selected a location for the first gathering that was neutral and, as one of our colleagues describes it, equally inconvenient for everyone involved. In our work to bring together a global company and smaller potential partners, we chose a community college for our workshops. Why? Because we wanted to establish the idea that collaborations can most easily emerge on neutral turf.
In communities, it is especially important to pay attention to the local context when deciding where to have strategic conversations. Suppose you are bringing together a group to think about a particularly complex issue like educational attainment rates or the increasing number of people becoming addicted to opioids. The school or the health department might seem like logical places for these challenges but that may not be the case. Is the school neutral territory in a discussion about education? In our experiences working with communities, the library is often a safe space for strategic conversations about civic issues. A library has some basic rules of behavior, and usually there's no such thing as a dumb question at the library.
We've also seen great results having strategic conversations in places like children's museums. There's something about that kind of space that is conducive to the dynamics needed for strategic conversations. It could be something called the teddy bear principle at work: there is evidence that when adults are exposed to childhood cues they exhibit more prosocial behavior. These cues can be obvious – toys in the room, for instance. Or not quite so obvious, like using lots of colorful markers on a whiteboard instead of just black.
Safe Spaces for Conversations
Along with safe physical places, the notion of safe behavior is equally important – a safe space in which everyone can participate. Perhaps more than any other writer and researcher, Amy Edmondson of the Harvard Business School has advanced our understanding of this topic in her work on psychological safety. Edmondson describes psychological safety as a shared belief among members of a team or group that they are safe in taking interpersonal risks. In psychologically safe teams, team members feel accepted and respected. She offers several characteristics of psychological safety and many others have built on her work, offering insights of their own. At least one well‐known company, Google, has made psychological safety a priority; it is an important factor in how they approach teamwork.
As a leader, how do you assure psychological safety in creating and maintaining safe spaces for deep focused conversations? Returning to a topic we touched on briefly in the first chapter, some great lessons can be learned from our nation's history. In her book, A Brilliant Solution: Inventing the American Constitution, Carol Berkin outlines how something akin to psychological safety played a foundational role in the formation of the United States.1
A decade after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the fledgling nation was threatened by a tug‐of‐war between the states and the central government. The young nation's leaders decided to convene a Continental Congress to draft the Constitution of the United States. Expecting that these would not be easy conversations, the first order of business was to draft the rules that would govern their conversations. James Madison recorded the rules that were finally agreed upon. They included rules like (1) while a member is speaking don't walk in front, hold sidebar conversations, or read a newspaper or pamphlet and (2) if two men rise to speak at the time, General Washington will determine the order in which they will speak. Knowing that there were a lot of talkers among the group (apparently an occupational hazard for politicians in every era!), a third rule said that on any given topic, a person could only speak two times. These rules helped ensure that the participants felt the kind of psychological safety they needed to confront difficult decisions.
Agile leaders consider the settings of their conversations from many vantage points. The physical location is important, but there are many other factors that will help participants build trust with one another and give their very best to the challenge at hand. When the topic of discussion is complex, the conversation will need to be deep and focused, and such conversations rarely happen without thoughtful planning.
A metaphor may be of use as you think about this. If you've ever done any serious hiking or river exploration you might have encountered a guide. A river guide or trail guide is going along the journey with those she is guiding. She assures everyone they will make camp by nightfall. She course‐corrects as needed. She knows when to lead from behind, when to get out in front, and when to come alongside to encourage individuals. Above all, she keeps the members of the group safe. This is the role of the conversation guide as well, and why this skill of maintaining a safe environment for deep and focused conversation comes first. Use this skill on its own or combine it with some that come later in this book. Practice applying this skill in one‐on‐one conversations, in small groups and teams. In the next chapters, we give you some additional tools and insights to guide the conversation.
PUTTING THE SKILL TO WORK: THE AGILE LEADER AS CONVERSATION GUIDE
Agile leaders guide the conversation in ways that go beyond picking the right room or making sure that the group is the right size. The digital‐age equivalent to “don't read a newspaper or pamphlet” during a deep, focused conversation might be “put your smartphones away.” Common sense can dictate what the appropriate rules of civility should be when it comes to creating and maintaining a safe space for deep focused conversation. Our go‐to rule of civility is this – we will behave in ways that build trust and mutual respect. It is not only the role of the agile leader to communicate and reinforce this rule, it is a shared responsibility among those having the conversation. This was also the case with at the Continental Congress. When a member was not acting in accordance with the established rules of civility, he could be “called to order” by any other member, as well as by George Washington.
This one rule of civility (or other rules that you may decide on for your own conversations) can certainly be implied, but in our work, we've seen that it is better to state the rule explicitly. Agile leadership means setting this expectation. One of the ways to do that is to help others understand that a strategic conversation is a specific kind of conversation that necessitates this sort of behavior – some of the regular ways in which people interact are suspended for the duration of the conversation for a particular purpose. Remember, deep focused conversations are not likely the sort of conversations most people are used to. Some may have developed conversational habits that are not conducive to doing the strategic, complex work that is hand. Your job is to help them develop new conversational habits.
Another simple conversational habit that can be implemented quite easily is equity of voice. When bringing together a small group or team for a strategic conversation explain that when individuals work together in groups, there is evidence that the best outcomes occur in groups that have the greatest levels of “equity of voice.” This means that when they meet together, every member talks about the same amount of time. Simply letting group members know that you'll be striving for equity of voice can be quite powerful.