BookYol

Concept

Tentative telling

Tentative telling is stating a strong conclusion in a form that invites correction: 'I may be missing something, but it looks to me like the month-end figures cannot be trusted.' It says the thing and leaves the door open; certainty says the same thing and closes it.

Crucial Conversations pairs talking tentatively with encouraging testing: after you say your story as a story, you make it genuinely safe for the other person to say you have it wrong. This is not weakness or hedging. A conclusion stated with certainty, 'clearly you don't care about this', forces the other person to defend, because agreeing would mean accepting the verdict. The same conclusion stated tentatively can be corrected without anyone losing, which means it can also be confirmed without anyone losing. This connects to Annie Duke's advice in Thinking in Bets to state beliefs with a level of confidence: 'I'm about 70 percent sure' invites 'why not 60?', where 'I'm sure' invites 'you're wrong'.

A real-life example

A product manager suspects a teammate is quietly working against the new pricing plan. Instead of 'you're undermining this', she says: 'It looks to me as if you have doubts about the pricing plan, and I may be reading it wrong. What am I missing?' He tells her the plan breaks two contracts he manages, a fact she did not have. Certainty would have got a denial and nothing else.

How to use it

  1. 1Introduce your conclusion with 'I've started to think' or 'it looks to me like', then say it fully.
  2. 2Follow it with a real invitation: 'tell me what I'm missing'.
  3. 3Mean the invitation; if you would argue with the correction, it was not tentative.