The Conversational Sweetspot

Business901 Podcast Transcription

Implementing Lean Marketing Systems

Working Conversations

Copyright Business901

The Conversational Sweetspot

Guest was Craig Weber

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Craig is the founder of The Weber Consulting Group, an alliance of experts committed to helping organizations and teams build their capacity for engaging tough, wicked, adaptive challenges. He’s consulted to an expansive roster of world-class clients, helping them

improve their performance by treating dialogue as a discipline. His unique work is outlined in his ground-breaking new book, Conversational Capacity: The Secret To Building Successful Teams That Perform When The Pressure Is On. Craig has worked with leaders and teams from such diverse organizations as Boeing; Boeing Defence Australia; The Royal Bank of Canada; NASA; Clif Bar; Los Alamos National Labs;

NASA; Novo Nordisk; The CDC (The Centers for Disease Control & Prevention); Pfizer; Vistage: An International Organization of CEOs; legislators from the states of Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Colorado; Suncorp Insurance & Finance (Australia); and The Upper Valley Waldorf School.

For more information visit us at weberconsultinggroup.net or see The Weber Consulting Group on Facebook.





Transcription of Podcast

Joe Dager: Welcome everyone. This is Joe Dager, the host of the Business901 Podcast. With me, today is Craig Weber. He is the founder of Weber Consulting Group and an international consultant specializing in team and leadership development. He has spent the last 18 years helping to grow a roster of world class clients improve their performance by treating dialogue as a discipline. His unique work is outlined in his new book, “Conversational Capacity: The Secret to Building Successful Teams That Perform When the Pressure Is On.” I would like to welcome you Craig. I’m impressed that someone can make a living off creating better conversations. Could you fill in the gaps and start off by telling us what you do and if I had simplified it too much.

Craig Weber: No, not at all Joe. First, I’ll thank you for having me on your podcast. I appreciate being invited and I look forward to talking to you about this. You did a good job of setting it up. As you said, I work with a lot of clients around the world big and small not just businesses but organizations, governments you name it. Helping them have more productive conversations by bringing a little more rigor, a little more discipline, and a little more structure to how they communicate about their toughest issues. There is a particular

framework I help them develop for doing that. I’ll say at the outset, the stuff I do, it’s not stuff I’ve made up which is not uncommon in my field of work. My background academically is in organizational development and organizational psychology and not the most rigorous fields in the world.





The core idea is I kind of help people develop and cultivate our grounded in a phenomenal body of social science research, Chris Argyris and his collaborative work with Don Schon at MIT. The founding fathers of what we can call organizational learning. What I do is make some of those core ideas perhaps a little more user friendly over the last couple of

decades. Joe: So all these ideas aren’t made up. There is research behind them. Craig: Yeah, which isn’t always the case, a lot of the ideas out there about improving conversations are sometimes sadly, it is from people who just kind of made things up. There is a lot of good research behind the work I do. In the beginning of my book, I actually talk about standing on the shoulders of giants to paraphrase Sir Isaac Newton. I

really am as I present these ideas standing on the shoulders of very impressive intellectual giants. Joe: I thought your book looked like it was well researched. As I read through it, the references showed that you were very well read. Each chapter had great references in it, and I wanted to compliment you. It was obvious there was a lot of background in it. Craig: Thank you. Joe: Let’s start out by what is conversational capacity? Craig: It’s kind of an interesting concept. There are several ways you can talk about it. The





simple definition is conversational capacity refers to the ability of an individual or a team or an entire organization and for having open balanced learning focused through non-defensive discussions about inherently difficult topics. Let’s say a working relationship or teams with high conversational capacity can put its most difficult, wicked painful issue on

the table and get good work done around it. That doesn’t mean there isn’t tension, conflict, disagreement. I mean despite this, they’re able to hang tight and do good work. Low conversational capacity means a minor difference of opinion can screw up a meeting or a discussion or a decision. So, you can have the right people at the table, you can have a great product or service, you can have a good strategy or a goal in mind, but if the conversational capacity of the team, the working relationship is too low relative to the challenge you’re taking on, it is going to go sideways on you when it counts. That’s kind of the working definition of conversational capacity.

Joe: Do you find that people are not trained in having dialogue or conversation? Craig: Yes, very much, I think that is part of the problem. I always like Joan Magretta’s quote at the Harvard Business School. She said, “Managements business is building organizations that work.” I love that. It’s elegant, it’s simple, and you know that building an organization that works at different challenges depending on what you’re asking your organization to do, but it’s a great high level definition. What I see happen is when thinking about building an organization or team that works. What tends to happen is we think about the technical aspects of the challenge; financing, strategy, structures, staffing, process and systems, which are all important. What we tend to underestimate is how well people can interact and work together when they’re dealing with difficult problems.





So we don’t focus on the conversations much, partly because we lack the frameworks. We’ve got a lot of good frameworks and strategies out there for how to structure an organization, how to set up your IT. Yes, all the technical stuff we’re good at. The

conversation stuff we kind of lack a little structure, lack a little rigor. We’re just not trained to pay attention to it or to give it as much focus as we’re at other aspects of building a good work relationship. Joe: Why do you think topics like this are coming to the forefront now? I mean we’re starting to talk more about people issues, and we’ve all this technology. Is technology solving the other issues or they created new issues for us?

Craig: I think probably a little of both. I think in some ways the technology makes it easier to communicate and connect with people around the globe. What we’re doing right now is a great example of that. This is incredible. On the other hand, what it doesn’t do is address more of the fundamental issues that we have. We’ve haven’t been paying as much attention. For instance conversational capacity, maybe a critical aspect of building a company or a team that works well under pressure but technology can help us build our conversational capacity. Something we have to do internally, some hard work we have to do as human beings and no amount of technology can compensate if our conversational capacity is too low. The second part of that question is why is this getting more attention now? I think because our world is getting much more complex, much faster paced partly because of





technological development. We’re far more interconnected, the world is a more dynamic place where change is coming quite rapidly. I think we realize that the skills that may have served us well in the past aren’t the same skills that will get us where we’re going in the future. The complexity and the rapid fire change are something we’ve to get better at.

Joe: We talk about the T shape person. We talk about the specialist. Then, on the other hand, when I taught to people within the organization, they said, this department over here just tosses it over to us, and we have to deal with it. Is that the type of thing that we’re looking for in conversational capacity is how to solve those types of problems? Craig: I think if we’re going to solve those kinds of problems, we will require high conversational capacity. The tougher the problem you’re facing, the more stringent the

change you’re trying to foster, the tougher the strategic direction you’re trying to head. The higher the conversational capacity we need. When you’ve got an either a friction point in an organization or you’ve got what I would refer to us as a baton pass. So when one group is got to hand that project or a decision off to another group, we need a lot of good conversational capacity to manage that baton pass in a productive way or else it just becomes a flip it over the wall and let them worry about the problem, and that doesn’t tend to serve complex problems solving well. Joe: In my world we talk about DevOps. Where it’s the development side and the operational side getting together. We all stand in front of this wall to discuss things. That doesn’t solve the conversation issues; we still have to have the conversation.





Craig: Exactly. Joe: Can you explain, what gets in the way?

Craig: That’s a great question and so maybe we can back up a second. We want to do another definition of conversational capacity, and this is the one I use in the book, quite a lot is a concept called the sweet spot. In any meeting or conversation there is a sweet spot, and that’s that place where the conversation is as we mentioned are open, they’re balanced, they’re learning focused. It’s where good work gets done and what tends to happen in difficult circumstances is that people will trigger out of the sweet spot towards the more defensive ends of the behavioral spectrum. Some people start to shut down. They become more guarded, more cautious, and more careful about what they’ll say. Other

people go the other direction and start to heat up, they get loud, they get argumentative, and they get upset. We can define conversational capacity as that ability to stay grounded in the sweet spot doing good work in situations where most people and most groups will trigger out of it. What tends to trigger is out of strong differences of opinion, misunderstandings, conflict, competing definitions of the best way to get something done. When you got to say, operations and development sitting down in a meeting to kind of do a baton pass, they need higher conversational capacity to manage their ability to stay in the sweet spot especially when there are strong differences of opinion or some sort of misunderstanding. Operations have one idea about how to move forward and development has a completely different idea. You need to negotiate those differences in a productive way. What tends to





hold this in a sweet spot is relative balance between candor and curiosity. I’m comfortable sharing with you what I think we should do to move forward. I’m equally curious to hear what you think especially when I recognize you may have a different point of view, and that’s what tends to holds us there. Now what often happens is under

pressure I drop one pole or the other and if drop my candor, I’m guarded, I’m cautious, I’m being overtly careful. I’m telling you I agree with your idea when I don’t. If I drop curiosity, I become arrogant, argumentative, combative and as often say my mind shuts and my mouth opens. That’s a real problem here. That’s why it’s so hard in an organization, when we’re dealing with top problem with strong differences of opinions or we’re trying to manage one of those baton passes in the organization where we’re talking with different, we’re talking about a problem from different functional perspectives. You need high conversational capacity, but our differences often trigger those two reactions. I

drop candor or I drop curiosity, and now we’re in trouble. Joe: I’m doing this podcast and thinking, what’s going to be my next question sometimes rather than listening to you. How do we get over something like that because that seems like a big part of what you’re talking about? Craig: That can be a problem, and a bit of a conundrum. If you were not doing that, you wouldn’t be doing your job effectively. I liked Ron Heifetz, a gentleman at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and he wrote a book called “Leadership without Easy Answers” and he talks about when exercising leadership, we often spend too much time down on the dance floor kind of work the problem in the detail. We’re not upon the balcony thinking strategically. And often in a tough circumstance, we need both abilities at once. I





need the ability to be in the conversation engaging people but I also need part of my mind to be up on the balcony kind of saying, we’re focused on what’s our purpose here, what we’re trying to accomplish? How do we in Lean terms, maximize the value in the meeting and minimize the waste let’s stay on focus.

I think when you’re orchestrating a podcast like this one; you’ve got to be doing both answering questions, engaging the speaker. At the same time, you need to be upon the balcony thinking what’s the next question. That’s hard, that’s really hard. Joe: How do we build it? I mean are there steps; is there a way that we can get better at this? Craig: Yes, that’s the good news. The bad news is conversational capacity is really hard to

build because in some times our own human nature works against it. As I mentioned, we’re in the sweet spot of having those balance conversations when we fly off center to one pole or the other, what tends to trigger is the issue so is it conflicting perspective, a different point of view. Someone says something in a way that’s kind of catches me wrong and suddenly I react and when we’re triggered what’s been triggered internally is that the fight-flight response. The low conversational capacity is usually the manifestation of the fight-flight response playing out in the conversation. If I flee the discussion, I’m shutting down, I’m leaving the conversation early, I’m pretending to agree when I don’t and when my fight response gets triggered I can get loud, I can get argumentative, I can be dismissive, I can call people names, I can be extremely aggressive in the discussion. That is not an easy tendency to get rid of in fact you can’t, it’s hard wired in our human





nature. What you need to do is develop the ability to start recognizing a little more clearly when one of those two tendencies might be pulling you off your conversational game and in developing the capacity to manage those reactions in a more disciplined way to stay in the sweet spot balancing candor and curiosity when a tremendous amount of emotional

energy maybe trying to pull you off center and that takes a lot of work. Joe: Should we try to be doing this in all our dialogue or sometimes not. Should we always try to be in the sweet spot? Craig: That’s a great question actually. No, I think there are a lot of situations where it’s not that critical for instance casual conversation. We don’t need to spend a lot of time focusing on a more structured disciplined approach to a casual discussion and if there is a

fire in the building we don’t need to worry about it either. Someone barking orders, taking control and you know, even screaming out loud to get people moving out of the building, so that, you get out safely. That’s appropriate. I think where we need to focus on the conversational capacity, a lot of those issues where it’s really difficult to put on the table because it’s strongly different points of view. There is conflicting perspective. There are some serious mistakes. It’s important. When it’s difficult and important, that is where we would need to slow down and maybe take a more structured approach to how we craft our dialogue. Joe: My listeners are mostly Lean and Agile people. We’re improving businesses. Improving conversation seems not a priority to spend our time with. Should we?





Craig: The tougher the problem you’re facing. The more difficult the change, you’re asking people to make. I think the higher the conversational capacity you need to have productive influence and to deal with the defensive reaction you’ll provoke in people. I like the notion that there is what they call in law enforcement or military operations, operational

momentum. An organization develops a certain culture or inertia, a certain way of doing things. For instance, we’re going to try to become more Agile, we are going to focus on becoming more Lean. We’re going to have some hard decisions to make and some hard changes to address. Conversational capacity is a key part of that. You can have the best idea in the world on how to build a more Agile or Lean enterprise, but if you can’t orchestrate productive conversations that actually move the needle on the decisions and changes, it’s a good idea

they’ll go anywhere. I think it’s a fundamental leadership tool that ability to both recognize when the conversational capacity is in where it needs to be and the ability to build it. I always liked Bob Keegan, an adult developmental psychologist at Harvard. He said, “Any organization is a community of discourse, leadership is about shaping the nature of the discourse.” If we’re going to exercise the kind of leadership that helps us build more resilient, more agile, more effective organizations that perform when things are difficult. We can’t ignore conversational capacity. Joe: Can these ideas be utilized by the entire organization? I mean is this something that the entire organization has to buy in to or how do we start this with an organization? Craig: That’s another good question. I see that happen in a variety of ways. Sometimes





one individual starts, learning the skills, they attend a workshop or something and learn these skills, get excited about it and then they go back in the business begin using these skills to try to foster more effective meetings. Other people pick up on what they’re doing and it starts that way. A lot of my work I start with executive teams and they’ll start

learning the skills to work at the executive level and then when they’ve developed a certain confidence, they start filtering it down into the organization. So it really depends. What I like about these skills is that they aren’t dependent on everyone knowing them for them to work well. One person with the high conversational capacity can sort of affect a meeting in a very productive way. Now everyone in the meeting is aware of the same skills. It’s even more powerful. But it’s not necessarily required. Joe: Do you need a facilitator sometimes to make this all happen?

Craig: Yeah, sometimes that can be a helpful way to go. In fact, in a lot of the teams I worked what they end up doing is appoint someone and it often rotates a member of the team to either be the kind of a conversational capacity monitor or facilitator and the monitor would pay attention to how well we’re doing this thing in the sweet spot balancing candor and curiosity. They’re actually tracking the use of the skills and then from time to time, they provide the group feedbacks. Listen what we’re doing really good on the candor side of the scale, a lot of rigorous discussion but we’re a little short on the curiosity side after the break, I suggest, we focus on X, Y or Z. A facilitator would actually intervene to help the group stay in the sweet spot. Some groups find that a little too intrusive other groups really like it. But yes, having someone





who is assigned to sort of help the group pay attention to how well they’re using the skills is important. And that’s what nice about the framework is there are tangible skills for how we can actually shape the conversation in a more productive direction.

Joe: When we think people talking in diversity and we always think of our sales guys, OK, our sales people. Is this a skill that they should develop? Craig: Yes, absolutely. I think whether you’re running an engineering group or you’re heading operations, whether you’re a line supervisor down there trying to do improve performance day by day. That ability to have hard hitting pragmatic balance discussions about difficult issues is key and so it’s I would be hard pressed to find a role where these skills wouldn’t be useful. So it’s certainly not just for sales. I mean the higher you’re going

in an organization, typically the tougher the issues are grappling with, the harder the choices you have to make and therefore the higher the conversational capacity you need to exercise your role effectively. Joe: What would you recommend for someone to improve their skills? How would you get them to just, you know, the first couple of steps? Craig: First, I’ll really start thinking about what are the situations and what are the issues and what are the maybe the behaviors even the kind of people that tends to push me out of the sweet spot. So becoming more conscious of your tendencies, what are the circumstances where I tend to drop my candor and become more guarded and cautious in a meeting? Then maybe, when someone raises their voice or when someone brings up a





strong opinion and asserts it is an absolute truth. I tend to shy away from the conflict by pretending to agree when I don’t. It may be just the opposite when someone does one of those things, my hair rises on the back of my neck and I start to get argumentative because I’ve take a front of being, told to how to think. So becoming aware of your

tendencies is really important and then developing the skills that help balance those tendencies. What I mean by that is we talked about two tendencies in conversational capacity. I dropped candor and what I would call minimizing. I’m minimizing tension, I’m minimizing conflict, I’m minimizing the level of negative emotion in the discussion often at the expense of what I’m trying to accomplish. So I’m being careful when I should be speaking up. At the other end of the spectrum we lose curiosity, we trigger to win, to win the

conversation to be right, to get my way. I want to sell my perspective to the team. So, I’m just raw unadulterated advocacy and I’m doing a lot of listening and I’m not doing a lot of enquiring in other views. When I’m being triggered into one of those two states, there are some counterbalancing skills that can help us manage the reaction. So for instance, I tend to be a strong minimizer. I don’t like conflict, I like to be Mr. Agreeable and what helps me in a meeting avoid being overly cautious and guarded are two skills. I develop the ability to put my clear point on the table, my position, my idea, my view, my concern or my suggestion and then I develop the capacity to explain the thinking behind it. What I’m basically saying in a meeting when my tendency would be to be a little guarded. For example, let me tell you what I think we should do to solve this problem and give me a couple of minutes here to describe why I think it’s a proven course of action. And those are





the two candor skills. Putting forward a clear position and explaining the thinking behind it. I can practice this. In fact, every meeting provides an opportunity to get better at those two skills.

If on the other hand my tendency is to win, to get argumentative when someone says something I don’t like. The two skills that help me manage that tendency would be to test my own perspective to actually encourage people to challenge my thinking because they may be seeing things I’m not. They may have a data I don’t have access to. I need to put forward my view to explain and to test it. I’ve laid out my thinking in terms of what we should do and why. You may have a different take on this. You’re from a different side of the table than I am. What’s your reaction to what I’ve just put on the table? What I’m really doing is treating my view or my idea or my suggestion more like a hypothesis and

less like a truth. It makes perfect sense in my own head right now but Joe may have some ideas that might change how I’m looking at this if I listen. I’m going to invite him into the conversation specifically asking him to share his reaction to how I’m looking at this. The other skill is inquiry when you say, I got to be honest I don’t think you’re suggesting will fly rather than get defensive and say, “Oh, OK, forget about it.” What I would do is inquire into it to try to understand more of the thinking behind your point of view, behind your position. And so to answer your question what can I do to kind of get better at this. Well, learn to recognize when you’re flying off center one way or the other and learn to instead of responding in your habitual way use these four skills to stay grounded in the sweet spot. Joe: Maybe I just have a few cheat notes on each side of my notepad. So I know when I am moving one way or the other from the sweet spot?





Craig: You know, that’s not a bad strategy, in fact in a lot of the organizations in which I work, they actually have a frame posters up in meeting rooms where they have a sweet spot up on the wall with two arrows, one going upwards, the minimize side of the spectrum, the other going out towards the win side, right. So it’s kind of a visual reminder

of what we got to be watching out for and they don’t have a separate sweet spot below it with the four skills. So on the one side is position and thinking, the candor skills pushing away from the minimize side of the spectrum back towards the sweet spot and on the other side of the sweet spot, they’ve got testing and enquiry to curiosity skills pushing from the win side of the spectrum back towards the sweet spot. So it’s a great reminder of what’s going on in the meeting, let’s pay attention to how well, we’re doing and if we’re noticing we’re not where we need to be, here are the things we

need to be conscious of, here are the things we can do, this more disciplined structured approach to conversation, to make sure we’re grounded in the sweet spot. Joe: So really to get something out of the conversation, we want to be moving towards sweet spot but moving back and forth and always working towards it. Craig: Yeah, if we start to slide in one way out of the sweet spot, we can actually use the two skills to get back. If, we notice the meeting starting to overheat for instance, lot of arguing, couple of people really getting their tempers up. There is a lot of positional back and forth, a lot of positioning. One person might jump in and say, “Look, it seems as if there are a lot of strongly different points of view here. I think it could be helpful for the team if we slow down and try to understand the difference.” You know, why do we see it so





differently? You might say John you tend to hate this idea take a couple of minutes and describe what the team why you think it’s a problem. Jane, you love this idea. Once he is done, I would love to hear your thoughts about why this works. One person is trying to slow the conversation then and deepen and pull people back to the sweet spot.

Joe: Now, when I read the back and went through it, I thought the book would be a great instrument for a discussion group. Could you see it being used that way? Do you have any recommendations and how you would begin? Craig: Yeah, in fact that’s kind of what I had in mind when I wrote this. You know, if people can’t attend a workshop I facilitate how can we help them develop these skills independent of an outsider resource. I thought well, write the book in a way where as a

team can sit down, read it chapter by chapter and discuss it. Where does it affect us, where do we find ourselves drifting out of the sweet spot under pressure? What are practices we can employ to get better at this overtime? In fact, I wrote a chapter on developing disciplines some things a team and an individual can do to get better with this overtime. How to apply it to decision making, how to apply it to meetings and to problem solving? How to manage conflict in a more effective way? Joe: Was this book directed for any person? I mean really within an organization or out of an organization but for really just about for any group wanting to improve the conversational skills? Craig: I think that’s exactly right. For anybody who wants to make a difference when





making a difference is difficult. I think these skills should be helpful. I worked with people, I worked with a number of CEOs around the world but I’ve also worked with someone driving a forklift on the factory floor, and you know when they see an idea for improvement out there, they feel like no one is going to listen to me. I’m just a lonely guy on the totem

pole here. I want that person to be able to raise their hand and to bring up and idea for how to improve a process or how to make the organization more Lean and efficient. Despite the fact that they are just driving a forklift. That doesn’t matter. I like the idea that a good organization is meritocracy and that good ideas are utilized no matter where they come from. Joe: Craig, one problem I had with reading your book. I wanted to have a conversation with someone about it. OK and it seemed like the book was written as a two-way street. I

mean it talked to someone about it. What’s probably somewhat of a compliment, but it seemed like I needed a partner. Craig: I like the fact that it hit you that way. I think ideally again, you know, sitting down with other people and having some conversations about conversational capacities are better way to learn these ideas and to explore them, and there are a couple of reasons for that. One often times, someone else will pick up on an aspect of the book you’re missing. I had that experience many times. A friend and I read the same book, and he picks up on something completely different than I did and I like that’s right, wow even see that, when I read it but also when we’re talking about this issues around conversational capacity colleagues, friends, loved ones will often help us see our tendencies and how they affect our behavior even more clearly than we can see them. Other people are around the





receiving end of our behavior. We are always on the delivering end. As a result, they are often more clear on how we react in meetings, how our body language comes across. If we read the book with other people, we often get a lot more crystal clear feedback and information about some of the concepts. Precisely, because we are reading it and

discussing it with other people. Joe: Where can someone get more information about the book? Craig: You can go to my website, the weberconsultingroup.net has a little information about the book and then of course there is a bit of information on barnes and noble.com, amazon.com.

Joe: What’s the best way for someone to contact you? Craig: Again through the website usually the weberconsultinggroup.net. Send me an email and if you like to chat, find the time to get on the phone and talk. Joe: Craig, I would like to thank you very much for the conversation, and this podcast will be available on the business901 website and the business901 iTunes store.





Joseph T. Dager

Business901

Phone: 260-918-0438

Skype: Biz901

Fax: 260-818-2022

Email: [email protected]

Website: http://www.business901.com

Twitter: @business901

Joe Dager is president of Business901, a firm specializing in bringing the continuous improvement process to the sales and marketing arena. He takes his process thinking of over thirty years in marketing within a wide variety of industries and applies it through Lean Marketing and Lean Service Design.

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The Conversational Sweetspot