Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton

Difficult Conversations

1. IDEA 1

   Every hard talk has three layers

   Stone, Patton and Heen, from the Harvard Negotiation Project, argue that every difficult conversation is really three conversations at once. There is a conversation about what happened, one about feelings and one about identity.

2. IDEA 2

   Stories differ about what happened

   In the what happened conversation, people argue about facts, intentions and blame. The authors suggest exploring each other's stories instead. In the authors' view, each side tells the story as it sees it, so it is more useful to understand both than to prove who is right.

3. IDEA 3

   Intentions differ from impact

   The authors argue that we often assume others meant to hurt us. Separating intentions from impact reduces conflict. In the authors' view, we know what someone did and how we felt, but we can only guess their reason, and the guess is often wrong.

All 8 ideas from Difficult Conversations →