Ed Catmull, former president of Pixar says, “If there’s more truth in hallways than in meetings, you have a problem.”
If you can’t even talk about something in the hallways, you have a bigger problem.
I wrote a book about conversations and how we can (and already do) design them. Some people feel like conversations are a squishy word and that design excludes people. I say: design belongs to everyone now. And we are all designers of our conversations. What follows is an excerpt from that book, Good Talk: How to Design Conversations that Matter.
Each day we have dozens of conversations. Some conversations are once-in-a-lifetime interactions that light us up and shift our course. Others seem stuck in an infinite loop, eventually becoming stale and repetitive.
We count on conversations to help us get what we want and need from other people, and we all put significant effort into making them go well. When conversations go off track, it’s hard to walk away without regrets or replaying them in our heads.
A client of mine (let’s call her Samantha) was head of the design organization for a conglomerate of fashion brands. She’d been hearing frustrated reports from her Design team: The Sales team wasn’t listening to their ideas. Meanwhile, the Sales organization complained to Samantha that the Design team would bring half-baked concepts to meetings that their customers would never buy.
Samantha felt stuck. She wanted her Design team to push the boundaries and create new products that their customers would love. But without cooperation and insights from the Sales team, these products wouldn’t sell. How could she help these two feuding teams see eye-to-eye?
Organizations, in essence, are simply a conglomeration of conversations and the people who have them. These people are connected, not just through economics but through relationships. Those relationships dictate which conversations they’re supposed to have. Individuals are meant to talk to some people and not to others. We’re supposed to talk to certain people before we talk to other people. And there are definitely things we’re not supposed to talk about.
Just like a person can’t get what they don’t ask for, an organization can’t do what it can’t talk about. The conversations they can’t have limit them entirely. What seems impossible in one organization might be a simple task at another, a non-event. Asking for a meeting on a topic that’s taboo or tender might be blisteringly political and risky…or it may be welcome.
Like positive and negative numbers canceling each other out, the conversations your organization isn’t having can negate the impact of the conversations they are having.
Leaders Create the Conditions for Transformative Conversations
Samantha had the opportunity to start a fresh conversation that had the potential to transform her relationship with the people involved. She came to me for help. Given her budget and timeline (small and fast), I suggested she bring the teams together to discuss the tension and find better ways to move forward. I sketched a workshop where all interested parties in Sales and Design could talk about how they currently pitch and critique, and then develop a new way forward collaboratively.
Samantha assured me that no one would come to a cross-brand effort, as each brand was only concerned with their own work. We would have to work team by team. No other conversation seemed possible unless the CEO got involved to motivate (i.e., force) people to show up.
Samantha hesitated to invite a deeper or larger dialogue, limited by what she thought was possible. Based on her understanding of the power structures at play, the willingness of people to engage, and who’s “turn” it was to do something about it, she decided that no good options were within her power.
Samantha was hoping for someone else to lead the transformation, to open the door. But leadership isn’t a title; it’s a role that anyone can take on at any time. Anyone can, at any moment, guide a conversation through a hard topic by bringing a willingness to engage and the right questions.
Waiting for someone else to act won’t do. If we see the problem, we have to do something about it. If we want others to open up to new possibilities, we might try to open as well. It’s our responsibility to frame the challenge so that others can be open to exploring the issue. This is what an old business partner of mine called “making problems huggable.” If we can approach the problem together, we can solve it together.
These conversations can inspire new futures. We can create the conditions for these types of conversations intentionally, by design.
Don’t be defined by the conversation you’re not willing to have.