Crucial Conversations
Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan & Al Switzler
Crucial Conversations is a method for the conversations people dread: high stakes, opposing views, strong emotions. Its authors studied people who handle them well and found that they watch for safety first. When a conversation feels unsafe people go silent or go on the attack, and meaning stops flowing. The tools restore safety, mutual purpose and mutual respect, and then let you say hard things: share the facts, tell your story as a story, ask for theirs, talk tentatively and invite disagreement. It is the most used book on workplace conversations for a reason: it works in the room.
The conversation you are avoiding will go one of two ways, silence or a fight, unless you know how to keep it safe. Four researchers who studied the people who get these right wrote down what they do.
The book in essence
The authors, founders of a training company, began by studying people whose colleagues named them as unusually good at difficult conversations. What those people did was not argue better; they kept the pool of shared meaning full. The book's diagnosis is that under stress people choose between silence, withdrawing, masking, avoiding, and violence, controlling, labelling, attacking, and both drain the pool. The remedy starts with the self: know what you really want from the conversation and refuse the sucker's choice between honesty and kindness. Then safety: watch for its loss, step out of the content, restore mutual purpose and mutual respect with contrasting or apology, step back in. Then STATE: share facts, tell your story, ask for their path, talk tentatively, encourage testing. Then explore the other's path, and finally move from talk to decision with clear ownership.
Published in 2002 and revised twice since, it has become the standard text in corporate training, and its language, crucial conversation, silence and violence, the pool of shared meaning, has entered workplace English.
Who it's for
- Anyone avoiding a conversation about performance, a broken promise or a decision made over their head
- New managers who have never had to say a hard thing to someone who reports to them
- People whose hard conversations turn into fights or into nothing
Who it's not for
- — Readers looking for negotiation tactics; the book is about dialogue, not deals
- — Anyone allergic to training-room acronyms; STATE and CRIB are here to stay
Key lessons
01
Watch for safety before content
When people feel unsafe they go silent or go on the attack, and meaning stops flowing. Learn to see it in the face and the tone, and treat it as the first problem to solve.
An accountant tells a colleague 'this can't keep happening'; she goes silent and the actual cause, a broken spreadsheet link, never comes up.
02
Restore mutual purpose and respect
Step out of the content: contrast what you do not mean with what you do, apologise for your own contribution, and name the goal you both share. Then return to the point.
'I'm not saying you are careless; I'm saying we both need to be able to trust the close, and neither of us wants the auditor's call.'
03
Facts first, then your story as a story
Open with the observable facts anyone would agree on, then your conclusion labelled as a conclusion, said tentatively, with a genuine invitation to correct it.
'You left two stand-ups early and the task has not moved since Tuesday. I've started to wonder whether something is pulling you away, and I may be wrong.'
04
Refuse the sucker's choice
Under stress the mind offers two options: be honest and hurt them, or be kind and say nothing. The book's whole method is the third option, which is honest and safe at once.
A manager who thought she had to choose between the relationship and the truth about a deadline says both in one conversation, in that order.
Try this today
Pick the conversation you are avoiding and write two sentences before you have it: the purpose you both share, and a contrasting sentence that says what you do not mean.
Quick check
What makes a conversation crucial?
What are the two failure modes under stress?
Selected quotes
“The mistake most of us make in our crucial conversations is we believe that we have to choose between telling the truth and keeping a friend.”
“When it comes to risky, controversial, and emotional conversations, skilled people find a way to get all relevant information (from themselves and others) out into the open.”