Crucial Conversations Tools for Talking When Stakes are High

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

This book is about identifying and navigating crucial moments in communication and getting to the desired end state. It goes through the identifiers of crucial conversations, gives advice on how to identify issues for yourself and others, and finally tries to make the reader understand how they should behave to get to the desired end state.

🎨 Impressions

I think identifying the most important aspects of a conversation and understanding when it becomes a crucial conversation is important. It is also nice to understand the tools needed to defuse a tense situation and navigate through it.

I liked the book, although some parts were a bit dense and unnecessary.

I strive to become a better listener and understand how I can get to the desired end state.

✍️ My Top Quotes

• Twenty years of research involving more than 100, people reveals that the key skill of effective leaders, teammates, parents, and loved ones is the capacity to skillfully address emotionally and politically risky issues. Period.

• The best at dialogue speak their minds completely and do it in a way that makes it safe for others to hear what they have to say and respond to it as well. They are both totally frank and completely respectful.

• So we studied over 2,000 projects and programs that had been rolled out at hundreds of organizations worldwide. The findings were stunning. You can predict with nearly 90 percent accuracy which projects will fail—months or years in advance.

• When sharing a story, strike a blend between confidence and humility. Share in a way that expresses appropriate confidence in your conclusions while demonstrating that, if called for, you want your conclusions challenged. To do so, change “The fact is̵ to “In my opinion.” Swap “Everyone knows that” for “I’ve talked to three of our suppliers who think that.” Soften “It’s clear to me” to “I’m beginning to wonder if.”

• In fact, this is the first principle of dialogue—Start with Heart. That is, your own heart. If you can’t get yourself right, you’ll have a hard time getting dialogue right. When conversations become crucial, you’ll resort to the forms of communication that you’ve grown up with—debate, silent treatment, manipulation, and so on.

• People who excel at dialogue are able to influence their emotions during crucial conversations. They recognize that while it’s true that at first we are in control of the stories we tell—after all, we do make them up of our own accord—once they’re told, the stories control us. They first control how we feel and then how we act. And as a result, they control the results we get from our crucial conversations.

• Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret. —AMBROSE BIERCE

• Start with Heart How to Stay Focused on What You Really Want   It’s time to turn to the how of dialogue. How do you encourage the flow of meaning in the face of differing opinions and strong emotions? Given the average person’s track record, it can’t be all that easy. In fact, given that most people’s style is based on longstanding habits, it’ll probably require a lot of effort. The truth is, people can change. In fact, we’ve trained these skills to millions around the world and have seen dramatic improvements in results and relationships. But it requires work. You can’t simply drink a magic potion and walk away changed. Instead, you’ll need to take a long, hard look at yourself. In

• And that’s the first problem we face in our crucial conversations. Our problem is not that our behavior degenerates. It’s that our motives do—a fact that we usually miss. So the first step to achieving the results we really want is to fix the problem of believing that others are the source of all that ails us. It’s our dogmatic conviction that “if we could just fix those losers, all would go better” that keeps us from taking action that could lead to dialogue and progress

• have known a thousand scamps; but I never met one who considered himself so. Self-knowledge isn’t so common. —OUIDA

• “Yeah,” your coworker explains, “I always watch two elements. When things start turning ugly, I watch the content of the conversation (the topic under discussion) along with the conditions (what people are doing in response). I look for and examine both what and why. If you can see why people are becoming upset or holding back their views or even going silent, you can do something to get back on track.”

• *To break from this insidious cycle,

  • Learn to Look.  
  •  Learn to look at content and conditions.  
  • Look for when things become crucial.  
  • Learn to watch for safety problems.  
  • Look to see if others are moving toward silence or violence.
  • Look for outbreaks of your Style Under Stress.

• Contrasting is not apologizing. It’s important to understand that Contrasting is not apologizing. It is not a way of taking back something we’ve said that hurt others’ feelings. Rather, it is a way of ensuring that what we said didn’t hurt more than it should have.

• [The don’t part] “The last thing I wanted to do was communicate that I don’t value the work you put in or that I didn’t want to share it with the VP. [The do part] I think your work has been nothing short of spectacular.”

• Use Contrasting for prevention or first aid. Contrasting can be useful both as prevention and as first aid for safety problems. So far our examples have helped us apply first aid to a wounded conversation. Someone has taken something wrong, and we’ve intervened to clarify our true purpose or meaning.

• *Decide Which Condition of Safety Is at Risk  

  •  Mutual Purpose. Do others believe you care about their goals in this conversation? Do they trust your motives?  
  • Mutual Respect. Do others believe you respect them?*

• “He’s a male chauvinist pig” is not a fact.

• Clever stories match reality. Sometimes the stories we tell are accurate. The other person is trying to cause us harm, we are innocent victims, or maybe we really can’t do much about the problem. It can happen. It’s not common, but it can happen.

• *Turn villains into humans. When you find yourself labeling or otherwise vilifying others, stop and ask:  

  • Why would a reasonable, rational, and decent person do what this person is doing?

• Outspoken by whom? —DOROTHY PARKER, WHEN TOLD THAT SHE WAS VERY OUTSPOKEN

• Humility. Confidence does not equate to arrogance or pigheadedness. Skilled people are confident that they have something to say, but also realize that others have valuable input. They are humble enough to realize that they don’t have a monopoly on the truth nor do they always have to win their way.

• Be careful not to apologize for your views. Remember, the goal of Contrasting is not to water down your message, but to be sure that people don’t hear more than you intend.

• We mentioned that the key to sharing sensitive ideas is a blend of confidence and humility. We express our confidence by sharing our facts and stories clearly. We demonstrate our humility by then asking others to share their views—and meaning it.

• Talking tentatively simply means that we tell our story as a story rather than disguising it as a hard fact.

• Why soften the message? Because we’re trying to add meaning to the pool, not force it down other people’s throats. If we’re too forceful, the information won’t make it into the pool. One of the ironies of dialogue is that, when talking with those holding opposing opinions, the more convinced and forceful you act, the more resistant others become.

• First, Learn to Look. Watch for the moment when people start to resist you—perhaps they begin to raise their volume and/or overstate the facts behind their views in reaction to your tactics—or perhaps they retreat into silence.

• One of the best ways to persuade others is with your ears—by listening to them. —DEAN RUSK

• There are four common ways of making decisions: command, consult, vote, and consensus. These four options represent increasing degrees of involvement.

• Consulting is a process whereby decision makers invite others to influence them before they make their choice. You can consult with experts, a representative population, or even everyone who wants to offer an opinion.

• If you don’t make an actual assignment to an actual person, there’s a good chance that nothing will ever come of all the work you’ve gone through to make a decision.

• Learn from Hughes. When you’re first agreeing on an assignment, clarify up front the exact details of what you want. Couples get into trouble in this area when one of the parties doesn’t want to take the time to think carefully about the “deliverables” and then later on becomes upset because his or her unstated desires weren’t met. Have you ever remodeled a room with a loved one?

• I can win an argument on any topic, against any opponent. People know this, and steer clear of me at parties. Often, as a sign of their great respect, they don’t even invite me. —DAVE BARRY

• CONCLUSION—IT’S NOT ABOUT COMMUNICATION, IT’S ABOUT RESULTS

• Rather, we wanted to identify crucial moments—moments when people’s actions disproportionately affect their organizations, their relationships, and their lives. Our research led us time and again to focus on moments when people need to step up to emotionally and politically risky conversations. That’s why we came to call these moments crucial conversations.

• Our emotions are incredibly plastic. In crucial moments they are almost always wrong. With practice, we can gain incredible power to change them. And as we change them, not only do we learn to change how we see those around us, but we learn to change our very lives as well.