There are a lot of pretty good books out there on the subject or similar subjects. You have courageous conversations, difficult conversations, radical candor, yada, yada, yada. But my team and I, so I have a 13 person global faculty. We have studied this subject, I think more intentionally than anybody else has in the world. When we train people in workshops or individual coaching sessions, people are bringing to us real conversations that they’ve had that didn’t produce the results they wanted. So with a customer, with a colleague, with somebody on their team, with their manager above them, whomever. And they either bring us a conversation where they didn’t get the results they wanted, or they share with us how they would have a conversation, and they’re anticipating they won’t get the results that they want. And we have a particular tool that helps us get access to how they really behave in those situations without us having to be in the room. It’s a research tool that I appropriated from this famous organizational psychologist, Chris Hargers from Harvard, that I turned into a developmental tool. And so we get access. It’s almost like being in the room and we know what they’re saying, and we know what the other people are saying.
And what’s very interesting, when you look at, we’ve analyzed tens of thousands of these conversations. And when you look at these conversations, what you notice is that in every single instance where someone’s having a conversation that hasn’t produced the results they wanted, there is always something that they are doing or not doing that is preventing them from getting better results. And when you look at this large sample of conversational data. Everybody has the same gaps. Everybody seemingly falls into the same traps, regardless of the company they’re in, the culture they’re from, or the country where they reside. And they’re blind to the things that they’re doing that are preventing them from getting better results. So part of the success has come from being a total geek on the subject and just studying it intensely and doing nothing else. And then trying to figure out, well, how do we help people have better conversations? And experimenting with tens of thousands of people over the course of 30 years now with people all over the globe. And a lot of ideas that I I hoped would work, didn’t. Things that I didn’t think would work, did. We started to realize there seems to be just a small handful of algorithms that, if you can learn them well, will enable you to have a very honest and effective conversation about something that really matters in ways that will help you make progress on the problem you’re talking about or the issue, the challenge, whatever, but also deepen the relationship between us.
And usually it’s one or the other. I talk about the issue, I hurt the relationship. I preserve relationship, I don’t talk about the issue. And so through this intense analysis, we have discovered things that really work. And we didn’t do it in a lab. We did it with people in the field around the real conversations they had to have with real people. Again, customers, colleagues, managers, their bosses, their teams, all of it. And then we were able to look at what actually worked and what did it. And then we developed a methodology, a way to develop this capability, because the people’s ability to even just express the truth of what they think, it’s a really underdeveloped muscle. I think in almost all of humanity. It’s like we don’t get trained in this stuff. Like as little kids, we should probably get trained in managing our finances, right? We don’t get trained in that. And we talk to each other every day about important things, but we don’t get trained in how to do that well. And so we developed a methodology that isn’t some big intellectual theoretical exercise. It’s no. Josh, bring me a conversation we have with somebody about something that’s important to you, maybe to your business, and that where you’re afraid, you’re not going to be able to get the results that you want.
And we’ll very quickly help you be able to see, okay, here’s what you do by default that’s working, and that’s not working. And then we’ll be able to teach you something that really works in the real world. And then we’re realistically practice what you’re going to say, simulating the situation you’re going to be in. So it’s not a lot of blah, blah, blah theory. It’s a little bit of theory and very, very intense practice so that you’re ready to get out there and produce effective conversational behavior under pressure. So I think it’s the intense study of the subject I don’t think anybody else can match, but also it’s developing a methodology so that people can actually learn it and then apply it relatively immediately.
