I was recently asked to make a presentation to the senior leadership team of a tech-driven research organization on Difficult Conversations.
Their organization has already had some managers go through the training on the Difficult Conversations model that I teach and co-created with Gordon White. A new language is starting to emerge, and the senior leadership team would like to be united in referencing the same model.
Concepts are being talked in the organization now – ideas like:
- Pinch Theory to Inspire Motivation: Pinch Theory sheds light on how to stop conflict before it grows from a small pinch to a very large crunch.
- Taking Time to Prepare Before Talking: There are powerful ways to prepare for important conversations. As one person who learned the model said, “Learning that preparation is key is the most impactful learning.”
- Connect With the Heart Before Giving Your Content: How we open a conversation matters. Do we open with ideas we want to convince others of, or do we start with appreciating the other’s efforts and stating the mutual purpose?
- Express Observations not Evaluations: Another leader in an evaluation said they learned it was important to “stick to observations not evaluations” to influence collaboratively. Krishnamurti called that skill the highest form of intelligence.
- Listen for Deep Human Needs (“SCARF”): It takes training and a certain kind of awareness to listen for someone’s deeper needs in a conversation. Understanding those needs disarms resistance. Express your own deeper needs too, instead of pushing for your preferred solution. This way of listening and talking opens new possibilities beyond any one solution.
In preparing to share the Difficult Conversations model with this Executive team of leaders, I realized I also wanted to share a new vision that I’m only starting to understand, after decades in the conflict field.
What drew me to this work over 30 years ago – and keeps me passionate about it – is not just helping people “do” difficult conversations more effectively – although that’s important.
It is the possibility of creating cultures rooted in compassion, humanity, civility, courage, and kindness.
Increasingly, I don’t believe these practices matter only because they make organizations more effective. I believe they matter because they protect something essential in our humanity.
We are living in a time where polarization, certainty, outrage, and dehumanization are becoming normalized in public life. In that kind of climate, the ability to remain curious about one another, to tolerate disagreement without contempt, to listen beneath positions for deeper human needs, becomes more than a communication skill.
It becomes a civic and moral practice.
Every culture, whether in a family, workplace, community, or nation, is shaped by repeated patterns of interaction.
- Do we move toward blame or understanding?
- Toward humiliation or dignity?
- Toward fear or relationship?
Difficult conversations – at their best – are not merely about problem-solving.
They are small daily acts of resistance against the forces that pull human beings apart.
Research in organizational culture from thinkers like Edgar Schein ( Humble Inquiry), Amy Edmondson (psychological safety), and Chris Argyris & Donald Schön (organizational learning) suggests that culture is shaped less by isolated learning events and more by repeated patterns of behaviour.
For a Difficult Conversations model to influence culture, it must move beyond training into:
- shared language
- distributed practice
- consistent leadership modelling.
As conflict competence becomes embedded across an organization, culture shifts in more fundamental ways:
- Feedback becomes more immediate and less formalized.
- Disagreement becomes more normal and less threatening.
- Repair happens faster and closer to where issues arise.
- People remain in a relationship while disagreeing.
- Tension becomes a source of learning and innovation, rather than breakdown.
I do not see conflict competence as simply a professional skill set. I see it as part of how we protect relationships, dignity, and humanity in a fractured world.
Perhaps culture change does not begin in massive systems. Perhaps it begins in thousands of moments where ordinary people and informed leaders choose to model curiosity over certainty, connection over contempt, and courage over avoidance.
These are the islands of coherence I want to help create.
You?
Warmly,
