A conversation about conversation, with Douglas Squirrel
We all communicate, but we don’t all do it well. The need to send information in small packages, like texting, has taken away a vital component of conversation: conflict. Sounds strange, right? But we learn more when arguments and counterfactual discussions are introduced into our interactions. It strengthens knowledge and relationships. My guest, Douglas Squirrel, is an expert in practicing the art of constructive conflict.
For more information about Douglas Squirrel and his book, visit douglassquirrel.com.
Tags/Keywords: conversation, conflict, communication, interaction, leadership
Transcript
Steve: I want, let me welcome you to our cool Time Life podcast. Can I call you Doug Douglas or Squirrel? Which do you prefer?
Well, I prefer any of them. They’re all fine, but most people choose Squirrel because there are a lot of Douglases and not many people name Squirrel. So why don’t you use Squirrel?
Steve
Fantastic? And what a great way to sort of summarize effective communication. Now you have such a fascinating approach to talking about conversation and communication and people working together. And you come from a tech background, which is interesting because it’s sort of crossing over a big Rubicon in a way. But let’s just start before getting into your background. What would be your big, sort of big story here about conversations and being more than just talking. What do you mean by that? And why is it important for people to hear?
Conversations are a skill. And the thing is that we all kind of forget we have this skill. It’s like walking. But, you know, there are people who are race walkers, and they get really good at walking, but most of us, we just walk, and we don’t think about it. And the same thing happens with conversations, and just like race walkers can probably get to you know wherever they’re going much faster than you or me, people who have effective conversation skills get to the outcome of the conversation, get to a profitable result of the negotiation with their partner or in business, or their technology team or their marketing organization, whoever it is, they get a better result faster because they’ve practiced. And the key is actually practice.
Steve
I talked to an awful lot of companies. I’ve worked with something like 300 around the world in the last decade or so. And every time I hear somebody say, you know, “I get on great with Steve. We have a great relationship. You know, Steve’s running technology, I’m running marketing. We never disagree.” That’s when I say, “Now I know you have a terrible relationship,” because the disagreements, if they are productive, are the place where you learn things. That’s where you move your business ahead, because the technology people say, “Hang on a second, that marketing plan’s never going to work. No one’s ever going to click on those links,” and they know something that you don’t. And if you’re not being surprised through productive conflict, you’re not getting the best out of your organization, whatever your organization, wherever you sit in. So I’d look for that. I’d say, “when’s the last time you were really surprised, and when’s the last time you had a really good disagreement with someone that was productive?” If the answer is never, we got a real problem,
I can see, however, that people might think the opposite, that we want to live in a world where we avoid confrontation, because obviously, in the times we’re in right now, it could get physically dangerous to be confrontational with somebody
Yes, I certainly understand everybody’s so polarized that they want to avoid confrontation. But I said conflict, not confrontation, and there’s a huge difference because, well, a confrontation is an unproductive conflict that’s pounding on the table and saying, “Steve, you’re a jerk. I can’t believe how could you think that we got to do this?” That’s not productive. That doesn’t help. I’m calling you names. I’m not finding out anything new. Nobody’s going to be surprised with new valuable information in that conversation. But if we can have a conflict where you think one thing, I think another thing, and we both understand the other’s point of view. When we’re done, we don’t have to agree, but we’ll certainly have greater trust in each other. We’ll reduce the fear that the other person will do something unhelpful, and we’ll be able to collaborate a lot better. That’s what we’re looking for. Is productive conflict, not confrontation.
That’s a great term, productive conflict. So this, again, might be either new to certain people or just simply having have been buried in the last few years because of genuine fear, whether it is physical danger or just simply, perhaps the repercussions of conflict with the wrong person might endanger my job. You know, it just gets around that I’m difficult.
And you know what? Conflict isn’t fun, even productive. Conflict isn’t necessarily fun. You don’t wake up in the morning and think, “how could I disagree with Steve today? You know? How could I come up with something that would really make us not agree?” And you and I didn’t approach this we’re having right now with that in mind, I’m sure. But I bet we’ll find something that you, Steve and I disagree about in this in this podcast, and that’ll be valuable to the listeners. So I often tell people that they should think of themselves sort of like responders to an emergency, that you want to be thinking, how could I get into the situation that will teach me more, that allow me to help the other person, that will improve the situation? But you know, firefighters, they run toward a fire, so you have to get yourself in the mindset. A conflict would be a good thing. A disagreement would be powerful. And when you can think that way, and you establish the tools by practice to be able to handle that, well, you’ll move fast to really great results.
Steve
Yeah, it would seem, for example, I remember, when I was in undergraduate with psychology, we were talking about what was called, at the time, the holographic brain theory. And what the whole idea was, was the same thing with the hologram, which is an interaction of light waves to create a three dimensional image. You’ve got your ideas interweaving with my ideas. And the difference, the difference pattern, is where knowledge or discovery comes from. So I fully agree with what you’re saying, and I do love a great conversation, especially when people are not on the same side. But however, I can still see the same concern people might have, especially people of all ages, but especially younger professionals who have now grown up in an era of self contained conversation by sending text bubbles through SMS and WhatsApp and so on.
They have a huge advantage over us old people, because when they have a conversation, it’s written down, and part of the practice is to look at your conversation critically, just like, you know, I started with that silly speed walking example, a speed walker or a runner or a football player, or anybody will watch videos of themselves, they’ll say, “Hmm, you know, I’m moving my left foot two centimeters to the right. I should do that same way.” You should be looking back at your conversations and saying, you know, I could have disagreed with Steve better when I said this, I wasn’t curious enough. I didn’t ask enough questions. I didn’t do this. And the folks who are doing all this in text have that one advantage over it’s low bandwidth. That’s the problem is that you can really misunderstand each other, so you have to be very careful. But it is written down so they could go back to their text logs and say, “Man, I texted the wrong thing to Steve at 4:57 and you and I were going to have more difficulty doing that. We’re not in that habit so much. So there is an advantage, actually, to that kind of self-contained conversation
Steve
When you help people understand that very part looking back over a text log, which, again, might be news to a lot of people. Yeah, I texted, but I never thought about having you know, this is as a transcript of our conversation. Do you invite them to use any sort of AI technology to summarize this intelligently? Or would you suggest that they do that themselves?
Squirrel
AI is really useful in certain places. What it’s useful for here is as a practice tool. And I’ll say that about more about that in a second. The problem with summarizing is then the AI is saying your words, and it tends to sort of boil them down. AI puts out pretty boring stuff. So where I might have said, “Steve, you’re a moron, you really should think about this differently, and I don’t know why you’ve never listened to me”, the AI might say, “Squirrel thought that Steve should reconsider,” and that’s not going to help. I need to learn from my unproductive way of dealing with Steve, and if I do that by looking my actual words, I’ll get better. But where the AI is great is if I ask it to actually make things up. Because, you know, that’s one of the problems with AI, is it hallucinates, and it kind of comes up with stuff. That means it’s a fantastic actor. So if I want the AI to be my difficult boss, Steve, who’s always ragging on me and telling me what I’m doing wrong. I can tell the AI to be Steve, and it will happily make up some stuff to criticize me. And then I can practice better responses to Steve, and I will have a more productive conflict of a more interesting interaction. And then I can practice with the real Steve. Steve. So in those situations where I find it helpful is actually to be my practice partner, to be just like tennis, you just knock the ball back and you get better at returning it. So that’s where I’d use AI not to summarize.
Steve
I think most people aren’t aware that the ChatGPT can do that. They still see it as sort of like a, you know, a writing tool. There is a guy by the name of Salman Khan who runs the Khan Academy, maybe really, and that’s one of the things he does when he’s teaching kids, for example, how to how to understand their book assignment. If you’re going to do the Great Gatsby, then go and talk to Gatsby himself through ChatGPT. So, probably a light bulb moment for a lot of people to realize that they can turn to that, as you just said, to take on the role of your boss or a difficult boss, and practice those skills. And I do think that that’s a great outcome, because, as you’re saying before about texting, you’ve got a great chat log, but what I understand for a lot of people is that it’s controllable thing. They’re avoiding confrontation by having controllable blobs, as compared to what we’re doing right now, which is both verbally and visually, because I can see you on the screen, we’re dancing around trying to find the right place to interrupt and turn, to agree and to move forward, which is the wonderful magic of a conversation. How do you teach this? How do you take this message out to your public?
Squirrel 11:25
I wrote an entire book about this. I’m not trying to sell it. You know, anybody wants to get in touch with me, I’m happy to send them a copy. It’s called Agile Conversations, and it has a bunch of chapters all about the practices and the tools you can use. But let me tell your listeners just one they can do quickly themselves. Anybody who’s driving don’t do this. You need to do this with an actual pen and paper. So, you know, do this when you stop driving. I always worry about people driving, but anybody who’s got a pen and paper nearby, grab a pen and paper and draw a line down the middle. You know, you could fold it in half if you want. So you’ve got two vertical columns and pick a conversation you had that didn’t go quite so well, you know, you left it thing. Oh, man, that’s Steve, you know, he just doesn’t understand me. And boy, we’re not going to get anywhere with this write down on the right hand side, what you and the other person actually said, what a video camera would record, the actual words. Don’t worry about it. If you don’t remember them perfectly. If you have a chat log, you could look at that. But it doesn’t matter if you write down wrong words, you’ll make the same mistakes. What we’re trying to do is hack your brain here, and so your brain will put down the same silly stuff. It just might use slightly different words, and you’ll make the same mistakes. On the left hand side, write down what you were thinking and feeling. Oh, by the way, Steve, I have to check, are you a telepath? Can you read other people’s minds?
Steve
I knew you were going to ask that question.
Squirrel
I’m sure you did. Okay. So Steve could write down what someone else is thinking. But unless you’re a telepath, and I suspect most listeners are not, you cannot write down what the other person was thinking, because you don’t know. And that’s part of the trick. Is when you write down what you were thinking, you’ll realize that you were making a lot of assumptions about what the other person was thinking that aren’t justified. And that’s a huge insight just by writing it down. But then I’ll give you one more very simple exercise. There’s lots more you can do to keep improving as you use these reflective tools. But what you do is you go through and you circle every question mark on both sides of the paper. Now, often, what happens is somebody will say, Oh, yeah, I’m very curious. You know, I always, I’m always asking questions. When they look at their actual dialog, there are no question marks. They score zero. There’s not even any question marks in their brain. All they’re thinking is, I’ve got to convince Steve. I got to tell them all these things. Boy, this stuff is totally wrong, and they’re asserting a lot without asking questions, and they don’t realize it until they write it down and try to find question marks. Sometimes, it also happens you have a lot of questions in the left hand column inside your brain, and you never asked. You’re thinking things like, Why? Why is Steve coming up with this crazy idea? Who told Steve to do this? Who? Where’s the team coming up with this? What’s this in service of but you never ask, and therefore, guess what, you never find out. So the revision then to make, and the thing you could practice with a friend or with ChatGPT or just in the mirror is then asking more of those questions. Do you think what could I ask here that would be informative, that would help me to understand better, that would help our conversation move ahead? You want to ask genuine questions might lead to surprise, like we were talking about before. So if you can do that, you will have made a huge stride toward having a much more productive conflict just by doing that simple exercise. And there’s lots more you can do.
Steve
Do you ascribe any significant value to the art of handwriting these in these two columns, versus doing it on this on a screen.
Squirrel
They’re very, very interesting. I prefer to handwrite it. I don’t mind it being on a screen, but the most important thing is that be written down. Sometimes people think, oh, I can just imagine it. You know, I’ll just be here driving my car. I’ll be taking a walk or something, and I’ll just imagine the paper with no, you don’t. To do that because of something very important called self-distancing. This is not social distancing like we did in covid. This is so self-distancing. And it’s because you can see it on the paper, and it feels like it’s a different person, and your brain has different neurons and pathways and so on that it uses to deal with other people. And so you can look on the page. Oh, that Squirrel guy. He’s just not asking very many questions. Oh man, you know, he’s not being very curious. He’s not sharing what he’s thinking. And it’s this other guy, squirrel, which is me, of course. But when you get it on the paper in any way, computer handwriting, Morse code, then you’re thinking about somebody else, and that helps you to analyze it a little more dispassionately.
Steve
I can imagine there’s people who are listening to this and thinking, yeah, that’s an idea. It’s a problem. I didn’t even know that I had. You know, they have their basic conversational style, their basic style of walking, and now there’s this new idea of getting some more depth. So how would I, if I was that person go to introduce this concept to my colleagues, so they don’t think I’ve certainly changed my personality. How would you introduce this new idea?
Squirrel
I would actually share one of the dialogs with them. If you were comfortable doing that. You might clean it up a little bit if you there are embarrassing bits, but you might say I’m trying something new. You guys could try this too, if you want. But here’s this thing that I’m trying which really helps me to do things differently. So you might notice me asking more questions. I’m not trying to cross examine you, but what I am trying to do is be more curious. And here’s an example. So if you feel comfortable doing that, just showing them what you’re doing can be very useful, even just saying I’ve been learning about improving my conversations. One thing I’m going to do in this one is asking more questions. You can find when someone is doing this anew, that they get accused of being a lawyer. You know, you’ve just asked me 20 questions. Yeah, why don’t you tell me what you think? I’m just being curious. So if you let them know ahead of time, it helps.
Steve
I think that this comes back around to just the idea of interaction in an era where interaction is not so comfortable, most people will always respond to the what’s in it for me. Statement, you know, like, what’s in it for me. Okay, you’re introducing this new concept. You want to try this because you want to be more curious. Oops, there we go. Sorry. And Can you still hear me, by the way? Just, yeah, okay, I just got a blip, sip, a single thing on here. So, yeah. So the what’s in it for me? Statement saying, okay, bit great. You want to learn how to be more curious and more conversational. But what’s in it for me to learn this? I mean, are you, I’m just being facetious here, to play the role of somebody in my in the workplace. Okay, I see you want to do this, but why do I want to do it as well? You know? How can this work for me?
Squirrel
Here’s a very simple statement. You don’t have to So Steve, I’m going to try to be a better partner to you. I’m going to try to work with you better, which means that I’ll be less in your way. You know, we’re always butting heads over this project that’s really driving us both bananas, and we’re really having trouble. So, so, you know, I keep saying what I think I’m going to try to find out more, what you think, Steve, would
that be helpful? Most people would respond, yeah. I sure wish you’d understand me. You know, what I teach people to do often is to ask enough questions and to say back what they’ve heard until the other person says exactly. I call that the exactly moment, because when I can say, Steve, you’re trying this and you’re doing that. You say, “no, no, no, you haven’t got it.” I say, “Oh, you so you’re adding this part too. “And you say, “Yes, exactly”. That’s when we’ve had a breakthrough. And that’s really helpful to the other person. You hear the positive sound in that person’s voice when they’re saying, you know, that feeling of, you know, oh, exactly, finally you get it. Now you’ll stop, you know, getting in the way and not getting my features done and doing the things that I want you to do. And you say, Great, I might or might not do that, but I really can collaborate with you. Why don’t we try this new idea? And most folks will respond very well to that now. Then sometimes they’ll ask you, wait a minute, what was that line in the center of the paper, thing that you were doing? How did you do that? Because suddenly you’re a different person. They get interested in the results you’re exactly right. You’ve got to start with what’s in it for them. What’s in it for them is you understanding them better and therefore being a better partner to them.
Steve
That sounds like a great leadership opportunity too, for team leaders, maybe even managers as well, to say, hey, we can create a group that works better, because they’re always looking for ways to generate that kind of cohesiveness within an organization. So this is wonderfully fascinating stuff. And I mean, it does have a clear ROI, both for leaders and for individuals as well. Now you came to this from the, let’s say, an unexpected side in terms of working in tech. And obviously you’re very, very familiar with Agile. What do you think gives you a strategic advantage with your substantial professional background in tech and encoding?
Squirrel
I don’t know that it gives me any advantage. This is really a set of techniques you can use for anything we happen to apply it to Agile software development. We wrote our book more my co author and I wrote it mainly aimed at people who are working with technologists and are very frustrated by them, all these black and white thinkers so conservative, why don’t they just give me the thing I need, or the people within those organizations who want to do better and who want to have these better conversations. That’s who we aimed at. But you know what’s been applied for sales, for marketing, for people across business, people are always telling me they use it with their husbands or wives or sweethearts, and I say I’m not qualified for that. You know, you use it if it helps you. But what we really want to do is help people have better relationships at work, and these tools really work for all of those. What’s nice for engineers is that engineers have a particularly that conservative characteristic is one thing, but us engineers, we also tend to think in terms of steps and practice and improvement and skills, whereas salespeople and marketing folks, then creative people like that tend to be a little more intuitive. And so it can be very helpful to approach something that’s frankly difficult for us, kind of geeky engineers. We like to talk to computers, not people. But it’s helpful for us to have a series of steps, and I gave you some just before where, you know, fold the paper in half, write this here, write that there. And when you have those steps, it makes it clear for everybody, and it’s particularly helpful for the technologists. So it appeals to people with a tech background, but it’s applicable to people in every part of business.
Steve
This is great stuff, really, really wonderful stuff. And so I’m hoping we can actually schedule another follow up conversation, because I think we think alike in terms of the psychology of people in communication, and maybe a themed conversation we may want to think about, or maybe you want to leverage one of your articles, but I did want to just ask one more question from your chat, with regards to Tiktok, with TikTok. I mean, you know, is TikTok dangerous? Can we tie this into the conversation in terms of certainly TikTok is short form? All right, so I’ll just pitch it that way.
Squirrel
People are all very worried about whether China is taking data out of TikTok and it’s going to be used for various nefarious purposes that might be true, and I’m not going to cover the politics of that, but what I will say is TikTok gives you very short one way communication, and that’s more like the negative side of the text movement that you were describing before, Steve, and that does worry me, that what we’re getting is such small bites that there’s and there’s no there’s no real back. You know, there is a way of commenting on TikTok, but people don’t really use that that much. They’re mostly scrolling along and they see a bunch of the things, and if it agrees with what they think, they sort of say yes. And this leads to some of the political outcomes that we don’t like. Right? And more importantly, they just get used to sort of nodding along and consuming and consuming small bites without having any feedback. And the key thing that we can practice, and I think it’s atrophying as a result of TikTok and YouTube shorts, and people just getting very passive about what they watch is this active involvement where you say, Gee, Steve, I don’t agree with that, but I’d like to learn more. Could you tell me more about this part of it? How about that? Why did you do this? How did you come to that conclusion? What does it mean for you? That’s not a dialog you tend to have with tools like TikTok. So that’s the bit that worries me, is that we’re getting used to that. It’s fine in small doses, but it’s like, you know, eating McDonald’s for a year. It’s probably not that healthy for you.
Steve
That’s a really excellent way to summarize it. We started the conversation talking about confrontation and conflict, and end it talking about active conversation. So there’s a clear again value and ROI for our organization or individuals to dive deep into this wonderful gift that we have as human beings, to be able to fabricate conversations and to process the ideas that come from that and to learn from each other. So squirrel, where can people find you when they want to learn more about your services, your products, your writings and everything else?
Squirrel 26:16
So the very best place to go is just my name, Douglas squirrel.com and there you’ll find videos and material about my history and background the hundreds of companies I’ve worked with, all that kind of good stuff. And then there’s another place to go, because I love conversation so much that I created a community of 1000s of executives, both tech people and non tech people, collaborating and talking to each other all the time. And that’s called Squirrel squadron.com so if you want to join that and sort of meet up with me, go to Events, I have hear from me regularly and be on a forum talking about these kinds of topics with other like minded people. That’s the place to go. So Douglas Squirrel com and Squirrel squadron.com and the book is called Agile conversations. If anybody wants to get in touch with me, just go to those two websites. Either one, write me, and I’ll send you a free copy of the book
Steve
That is beautiful, and I will certainly have those in the show notes, of course. Well, Squirrel, this has been really wonderful. In a fabulous conversation. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it.
Squirrel
Loads of fun. Thanks so much for having me.
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