What We Talk About When We Talk About Anything. Shaping Chaos Issue 6
What We Talk About When We Talk About Anything: A Simple Tool
A practical post for this issue: a tool that I use repeatedly in my coaching work on communication. It’s simple and, apparently, endlessly useful.
What Are We Talking About?
When we talk about anything, we can see ourselves talking on two levels which we’ll call The Thing and You/Me/Us.
The Thing is, well The Thing: what the conversation is ostensibly attempting to address. What library should we use? Who should person X report to? Do we ship this code, or wait? In an ideal world the conversation would be a case of listing pros and cons, looking at risk, evaluating uncertainty, and coming to a conclusion.
You/Me/Us is the rest of the conversation, the part that is very often unspoken and unacknowledged. Which is not to say it’s not communicated. It will be communicated in tone of voice, body language, facial expressions, pauses and all the other ways humans broadcast meaning and emotion.
You/Me/Us is about exactly that: what’s going on in me, what’s going on in you, what’s going on between us. This lower level of the conversation is where the heat is, the energy — usually the knottiest and most fundamental part of what is really being discussed.
A typical failure mode for conversations is confusing a conversation about a Thing with You/Me/Us. For example, a discussion about technical debt may really be about trust. An attempt to decide product priorities is really more about a tangle of ownership and status. Talking about The Thing has become a stand-in for a conversation about people and relationships.
The point of the model is simply to allow you to judge what is really being discussed. A conversation which keeps repeating, which gets overheated, where the arguments being put forward don’t carry the weight of even a most basic analysis, is one where, almost certainly, the two levels are entangled.
Some Recurring Examples
→ org chart discussions are often proxies for unspoken conversations about power and status. An impassioned defense of an org chart position can be a plea to avoid loss.
→ technical decisions can founder on unspoken issues of ownership and (again) loss. It’s unlikely that anyone is going to explicitly say “we should use this because I put my heart into it and I don’t want my work abandoned”. But they can certainly feel it, and express it as a heated, illogical opinion.
→ product and design decisions similarly can carry the weight of creative ownership and loss.
→ management direction conversations can push on autonomy and fairness.
A useful place to go further here is the SCARF model which looks at common emotional triggers in social situations (Security, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness). If somethings “off” in the “Thing” conversation, it’s likely some part of the SCARF model is being pushed on in the “You/Me/Us” conversation.
Using the Model
Two ways to use the model to turn an unproductive conversation productive:
→ take the conversation back to the The Thing. “I hear the emotion around this. I’d like to focus our conversation on the business effect of moving Group X under me (or you)”.
→ acknowledge the conversation has moved to you/me/us and decide, explicitly, to have that conversation. “I’m really hearing a lot of emotion around this. I'd like to explore what is important to you here - what you think is causing these emotions to show up”. This can be an uncomfortable move in the business context. But the entanglement is there anyway, and hoping it will go away isn't a solution.
Usually trying the first option and finding no progress leads you to the second option.
(Those of you familiar with the Conscious Leadership concept of “above/below the line” will find this familiar. There are more complex versions of this model in Fred Kofman’s work which may be helpful to you - I’ve found this simple version completely adequate)
Notes
Difficult Conversations: What Is True and Kind
This is the simplest rubric I know for approaching a Difficult Conversation. We spend so much time and energy trying to think through exactly what to say, how to say it, how the other person will react and how we will react that their reaction and on and on. Usually that time is simply a way of delaying having the conversation at all.
Try limiting your preparation to figuring out: What is True? What is Kind? Then say it.
"We Have a Values Doc, We Just Can't Find It" (various clients)
This comes up in sessions a few of times a year. The doc is buried in Notion somewhere, or it's too long so nobody reads it, or somebody was going to update it after the last offsite but never got around to it. So you have values, you just ... don't have values that anybody pays attention to.
Find it. Simplify it. Repeat it until you feel like an idiot repeating it.
Why Wouldn't He Want Them Gone?
Q: Why would he care about the feelings of these people?
A: Because they are people, he is a person, and life is short.
Links
How to set engineering org values. Excellent breakdown by Will Larson (Calm, Stripe, Uber)
A very quick breakdown of what authenticity is and is not (with links to further reading).
"all my life I've been told I shouldn't be angry at work". An interesting POV (feel it, but be very careful acting on it). Pair with "Is It Ever OK To Lose Your Shit?".