The Conversations We Need to Have

I am a news junkie. I read the papers, follow the feeds, listen to podcasts and pick up books about the issues of our time. Lately, there has been plenty to take in: trade relationships, talk of referendums, rising antisemitism and difficult questions about what kind of country we want to be.

These are much bigger than the conversations I facilitate at work. Still, I keep noticing a familiar pattern. When people stop talking with one another, it becomes easier to assign blame, assume the worst and hold tightly to positions that leave little room for progress.

It makes me think about what stakeholder collaboration can teach us beyond the workshop room.

When the old ways stop working

In strategic planning workshops, we often ask people to identify obstacles to what they are trying to achieve.

That sounds simple until the obstacles turn out to be familiar ways of working. A structure that once made sense may now slow everyone down. An established process may no longer fit the circumstances. People may have learned to protect their own piece of the work because, for years, that was what the system rewarded.

Those patterns can be hard to name. It is tempting to look for the person who caused the problem, even when no one did. The context changed, and the way of working did not change with it.

When a group can say, “This no longer serves us,” without adding, “and here is whose fault it is,” something opens up. People can spend less energy defending themselves and more energy deciding what to do next.

I hear a version of that blaming instinct in public conversations, too. The issues are far more complex, the stakes are often higher, and yet the question quickly becomes: Who is to blame?

Sometimes accountability is necessary. But blame alone does not help us understand how we got here or what we could build together. For that, we have to stay in conversation.

The rules of engagement matter

I recently read Jared Wesley’s Canada is Difficult substack article, and found myself nodding along. His call for leaders to get back to talking face to face, work together on problems that cross jurisdictions and restore the rules of engagement sounded remarkably familiar. It is what we ask of people in stakeholder collaboration, just on a much larger stage.

We do not need to agree before we can talk. If we did, there would be very little to talk about.

We do need a willingness to listen, to see how another person arrived at their view and to consider that they may know something we do not. That takes humility, especially when the subject matters deeply to us. It also means choosing not to assume the person across from us is inherently bad.

I know that can sound painfully modest beside the scale of the issues in the news. Put down the insults. Resist the inflammatory headline. Talk face to face. Surely we need more than that?

Of course we do. We need decisions, leadership and action. But dialogue helps us understand the problem we are trying to solve and whether the people responsible for acting can work together. Our elected leaders need that capacity, and so do the rest of us.

Civility is sometimes mistaken for keeping things pleasant. That is not what I mean. A civil conversation can be direct, challenging and uncomfortable. It gives people enough respect to disagree honestly, and enough room to ask a question before deciding they already know the answer.

What happens when people actually talk

Recently, I supported a colleague at a gathering of about 300 people from a project management office. The client had deliberately mixed people across tables so they could meet colleagues from different roles and career stages.

Our part of the agenda focused on trust: how we assess it through someone’s behaviour, and how we can respond to requests in ways that help us work together as peers.

“I don’t trust them” can mean several different things. Are they unreliable? Do they seem unwilling to help? Do they understand what I need from them? Those are different conversations, but we often squeeze them into the same little sentence and leave it there.

With 50 tables talking at once, it was hard to tell exactly what was happening across the room. We asked tables to share some of what they had discussed. Afterward, the client told us how unusual it was to get their people talking this way. One younger participant valued hearing colleagues describe real situations they had encountered and how they handled them.

No one left with a universal formula for trust. They left having met people, heard examples and talked about something that shapes their work every day but does not always get discussed.

That is a meaningful start.

A larger conversation

A room of colleagues discussing trust is not the same as a country wrestling with its hardest questions. I would not pretend the methods scale up neatly.

But I do think the habit matters at every scale: get people together, make space for different perspectives, ask what is no longer working and keep talking long enough to understand the answer.

Some public conversations also require us to say plainly what must be protected. I don’t think I can listen to another politician say, “Hate has no place in Canada”. How about instead: “This act of violence is unacceptable, abhorrent, intolerable. We’ll pursue and punish the perpetrator to the full extent of the law”.

Jewish people should be able to visit their places of worship and display symbols of their faith without fear. Any Canadian should. No one should be threatened because of their identity or held responsible for the actions of a government elsewhere. When intimidation or criminal acts occur, our leaders must take them seriously and respond.  A democratic, pluralistic country depends on that.

Dialogue asks us to listen across differences. It does not ask us to be indifferent to harm.

I spend my working days helping people have conversations that may be difficult, overdue or both. The news reminds me how much those skills matter outside the rooms where I practise them.

We will not talk our way out of every problem. But when we stop talking to one another, it becomes much harder to see the problem clearly, let alone solve it together.

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Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash.