7

How Things Really Get Done

One of the amazing blindnesses of us humans is that we consider ourselves to be part of the mechanical world. Many of us really do believe that we are “driven” to do things, or that pressure is what brings about results in organizations. No amount of studying relationships, teams, or corporations in terms of mechanical effects will bring about any true lasting power. This chapter is about the competency that—when mastered—leaves us able to accomplish much more than ever before in a wide variety of circumstances.

Speech Act Theory

Here is a little background from where this way of working comes. In the 1950s, at Cambridge University, John Austin came to a simple and profound discovery. He saw that words, which up until then had been thought to be describers of the world, could function in another way as well. Words could perform, that is, they could make something happen by being spoken. For example, when we promise, we are not describing something but making it happen.

From this initial insight, much work has been done by Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, John Searle, Fernando Flores, Chauncey Bell, Julio Olalla, Alan Sieler, and many others. The list of “speech acts”—ways of speaking that make something happen—now include promises, requests, offers, assertions, assessments, and declarations. These combine into conversations that explore possibilities, build relationships, and coordinate action: all the activities that are necessary for a business to succeed or for an individual to reach her goals. The more precise, fluent, and rigorous a speaker can be in employing these distinctions, the more she will be able to forge lasting accomplishments.

Principles of Communicative Action

Let’s begin our study with some principles underlying the theory of communicative action.

• Whenever someone speaks, she is bringing forth a type of commitment.

  Here commitment means something that the speaker is willing to stand behind, be known for, and provide grounding for, as necessary.

• The speech acts always occur in a particular language and community.

  Any community shares a background of common custom and practice that provides the context in which the speaking makes sense. Outsiders never will be able to appreciate fully the nuances of what is being said, and a dictionary will only lead them in circles. For example, the words “beg” and “beseech” will look nearly identical when researched in the dictionary, but have a very different effect when employed within a community of people who speak English.

• The speaking always reveals the speaker.

  Her cares, concerns, commitments, and world are revealed every time she opens her mouth and says something. The selection of topics, the understanding of what is necessary to bring about outcomes, the network of supportive people involved, as well as personal history and mood of the speaker, always come forward in conversation. We cannot hide behind words. Even someone who imagines that she is reporting “objective facts” is in fact, in every case, selecting a subset of “facts” that she feels are relevant. The selection alone reveals her world of concern.

• Speaking is not mechanical

  It is never a matter of putting together a series of words to make a particular outcome occur. The same words spoken with a different emphasis, with different timing, to a different audience will bring about different outcomes. We all know this and are careful when we ask for something that is important for us to get. For example, pay attention when your children ask for the chance to stay over at a friend’s house. They do it when you are in a good mood or showing particular affection towards them. In other words, to be effective, speakers must take into account the way they are being listened to. This becomes a problem when, for example, we are preparing a presentation and don’t know our audience. What questions or worries or historical background will they bring to what we are saying? When we don’t know this, it makes it more likely that our presentation won’t quite fit into what the audience is listening for.

  You know this from your own experience. Have you ever walked into a meeting of biochemists and listened to what they are talking about? If you are not a scientist yourself, it may not have made sense, and what could have been most dumbfounding was the passion with which things that were incomprehensible to you were said.

  Remember this the next time you get excited about something. It is not exciting in and of itself; it is the world that you are in and your own concerns that make it exciting. This might be quite clear in the moment when you are reading it but it is very different in the middle of a conversation or a meeting. As coaches, it is essential that we never dismiss something that is important to the client, even if we can’t feel it ourselves.

• Speaking and listening always arise simultaneously.

  One cannot exist without the other. If we study our experience closely, we can notice that when we are speaking, we are listening; and when we are listening, we are speaking to ourselves. (We are editorializing, making judgments, and coming to conclusions about what people are saying at the same time that we are listening to them.) Because these two phenomena cannot be separated, it is vital that speakers become very good listeners so that they can, in the midst of a conversation, shift the form, emphasis and content of what they are saying. As listeners, it is very important that we begin to make note of what we are adding to what’s been said to us. The quieter and the more impressionable we can be, the more we can receive and appreciate what is being said.

Moves in a Conversation

Although words and phrases appear in conversations, in order to study them it’s important at first to take them out of that context and look at them, as it were, anatomically. It is the way a medical student would study a leg: as if it didn’t have a hip attached and a knee attached. It is a good place to start but it is only a step along the way.

Each speech act has a different function. We will study each one in some detail. They are: requests, promises, offers, assertions, assessments, and declarations. All of these speech acts warrant years of study but here we will only be giving the barest of outlines that will still be sufficient for coaches to begin working with them. The bibliography at the end of the chapter can guide you to further study. After studying speech acts individually, we will show them in their more natural setting of conversations.

Requests

Let’s start by studying a request. Like all the conversational moves, a request is an utterance, which means it is a public event. Something only counts as a request if it is interpreted as such by a listener. Requests can be made verbally, in writing, electronically, through all kinds of body signals. However, wanting something fiercely in my own thinking doesn’t make it a request until it enters a world shared by at least two people: me and someone else.

As with all the speech acts we’ll study, a request is a type of commitment. A requester is committed to a very specific outcome being accomplished within a certain time. When we hear someone making sounds that could potentially be a request but without sufficient commitment, we don’t take it seriously. You might see this at a public place like an airport when parents are asking their children to quiet down and the children go forth blithely with their activity. The same thing happens in meetings when someone asks us for a report, but we consider their request to be something they are doing pro forma and we don’t ever take action on it.

Elements of a Request

With a background commitment in place, the following elements must arrive in the interpretation of the listener for the utterance to be considered a valid request.

1. Speaker:

   This perhaps seems obvious, but a request has to have a committed person who is making it, someone whom we can identify and bring our clarifying questions to. Too often managers hide behind sentences like, “Management requires you to arrive at meetings 10 minutes before the posted time.” As a reader of this announcement, we don’t know who is saying this, what the context is, what the importance of this request is in comparison to others that have been made, and so on. As you’ve noticed, this leads to quite a bit of mischief in the workplace and elsewhere.

2. Listener:

   Requests happen within a relationship. The minimum condition for this relationship is that the speaker and the listener speak a common language, or at least can somehow make sense of what each other is saying. An utterance (as I’ve already said) becomes a request when it is interpreted as such by a listener. A shout in Croatian made into a crowd in Tokyo probably won’t be heard as a request even if the speaker formed it into one.

   I’m not making an esoteric point. How often in business does the marketing department make a request to the research department in a language that is not common to both, resulting in huge waste? At home, how frequently do parents imagine they’ve made a clear request to their teenage son, who hears it as whining or complaining by the adult? We have not made a powerful request until we have a listener who has been moved to action by what we’ve said. Our own clarity is nice but alone is woefully inadequate to coordinate action.

3. Future Action:

   Requests can only be about the future. It makes no sense for me to say, “I invite you to have lunch with me yesterday.” That point is obvious. What often gets missed is that a request has to be actionable; that is to say, the listener must be able to do something to fulfill what is being asked. Requests such as “Have this make sense to me,” or “Do something to make me happy,” really are not actionable requests, because there is not something that one can do to bring about clarity or happiness in someone else. Yes, we might be able to do something that moves the situation in that direction, but the fulfillment of the request will be an action taken by the requester, who will understand something or feel happy.

   You might be able to see from this point how much frustration occurs when  a listener has taken away a request from the conversation and sees no action that can be taken to fulfill it. Some organizations and families insist that any request made from a boss or parent must somehow be filled by the subordinate or child, as if a position of authority gives the power to make someone else understand what to do, even in the case when the requester doesn’t know what it is.

4. Conditions for Satisfaction:

   Embedded in every request is a promise that the requester makes that if the specified conditions are met, she will be satisfied. We alienate people when we refuse to be satisfied though our requests are fulfilled. Our dissatisfaction will shift our public identity and, after a while, people will avoid being in a conversation with us in which they may be asked to fulfill such a request. A lot of emotional turmoil within companies and families is around the unwillingness of requesters to be satisfied.

   Unfortunately, in our current culture, dissatisfaction is sometimes seen as a sign of sophistication or an unwillingness to compromise on high standards. Nonetheless, emotional/relational damage is done when we thwart the intention of others to satisfy what we are asking. Check this out for yourself the next time you ask your young child to bring you some water and they bring it to you in a less than pristine manner. How do you respond? What effect does your response have on the relationship? This same dynamic happens many times every day in the world of work. The mood of organizations is, for the most part, shaped by the willingness of superiors to be satisfied.

   Making a powerful request also requires us to clear about what we are asking for. It is one thing to have a conversation in which we are exploring possibilities, in which I might say, “Well, put a few things together, try it out, come back next week, and tell me what you have found out.” It is quite another to say, “By this time next week, bring me a product that I will be really happy with.” Being in a position of authority does not negate our job to make sure that the conditions of satisfaction in our request are discernable by the listener.

5. Time:

   In each request, the speaker specifies the time by which the request is to be fulfilled. Technically, time is a subset of the conditions of satisfaction but it so often gets left out that it is worthy of its elementary status. Time is usually best said as a date and time. Within certain contexts, either “right away” or “as soon as possible” might be sensible time requests; but in our  complex day-to-day dealings, it is best to say precisely when we are  asking for something to be accomplished so that the listener can give the request its proper response.

6. Shared Background of Obviousness:

   People in shared language communities share a huge background of obvious, “everybody knows” common sense that forms the background for all requests. It is impossible to specify every single tiny bit of a request (even though some government contracts attempt to do this). For example, when we ask a friend to bring us some water, we don’t specify drinking water in a clean drinking glass. We would be shocked if they brought us muddy water in a teaspoon.

   The background of obviousness then is so huge and its knowledge so embedded in our everyday practices that it could never be fully articulated. Consequently, we have to understand the world of the listener sufficiently before we make a request. Perhaps you’ve made funny mistakes in ordering food in a country with a culture quite different from yours and you were surprised by what you were brought. I’ve seen many chagrined Americans sitting in cafés in Paris when they see what is brought to them after they’ve ordered “regular” coffee.

7. Assumed Competence:

   As a requester, we are assuming that the person to whom we are addressing our request is competent to fulfill it. We don’t ask our three-year-old children to drive us to the airport or a new intern to do a heart transplant operation. Sometimes of course we don’t know someone’s competence until we make a request and notice its effect. The listener might become afraid or anxious or uneasy because she feels inadequate to fulfill it. Sometimes this discomfort is brought about by the listener’s own self-doubt. Frequently, though, it is because we’ve asked someone to do something beyond her current capacity. Becoming more forceful at such moments is not helpful. You can yell as much as you  want at someone who doesn’t know how to do something. That does not suddenly build their skill, and emotional pressure can easily lead to big mistakes when people take on something way beyond their ability.

8. Sincerity:

   Even though we’re not aware of it, whenever someone asks us to do something, we evaluate how serious the speaker is; especially when we are busy or jammed, we listen to determine how important the request is to the speaker. We’re very unlikely to take something on if it seems trivial or procedural to the requester.

   This situation comes up a lot in organizations when someone who is not committed to an activity passes along its component actions to others. Even if the form of the request is in every other way perfect, if the speaker is not personally committed to the outcome, the listener will likely detect that and hold back her own full commitment. This little bit of insight may shed light on when you ask for something to be done and it doesn’t get accomplished. After a while of being with someone, we can readily discern his level of commitment to what he is saying. A speaker who is merely going through the motions will find himself disappointed when the intended results are not achieved.

   This point around sincerity brings into relief an aspect of speaking that we rarely study. Even though many people think so, language is not a freestanding tool that we use to describe reality. Rather, in every case, language is the way we humans bring forth a shared world so that we can together coordinate actions and build the world together. Attempting to hide behind the meaning of words or construction of sentences will not be sufficient to camouflage the speaker. What we are up to is revealed every time we speak.

9. Something Missing:

   This refers to the obvious point that a request is always about something that is not currently present. We don’t ask people to stand up if they are already standing. There is additional background to this element of the request. The something missing must be some type of activity or outcome  that the speaker can bring forward. It’s nonsensical to ask someone to have the sun come up earlier or for the tides to change their rhythm.

   Being able to specify precisely what’s missing facilitates the listener in determining if she has the ability to fulfill the request, given her current level of skill and the other activities she is engaged in. Frequently, people in authority make very vague requests, such as, “Make sure that the deal turns out in a way that everyone involved is happy 10 years from now.” When this kind of directive is given from someone of sufficient authority to someone who feels as if he must fulfill it, the exact “something” that must be provided for the request to be fulfilled remains unknown to everyone involved. As a consequence, many false starts will be attempted, timelines might be missed, and undoubtedly much waste of time, money, and other resources will occur.

10. Token:

    Token is a word taken from computer theory, and it means a method for the conveyance of the request. Verbal, written, electronic, somatic: all can be methods for making requests. This element reminds us that there has to be a phenomenon in the public shared world that can be pointed to as the conveyer of the request. Claiming that “you should have known” or “I should not have had to ask” are not helpful and probably point to the inadequate action that the speaker took or neglected to take.

    Yes, there are times when events are so frequently recurrent and so standardized that making a request around them is merely troublesome. But at the beginning of relationships or when an activity has special important or unique conditions, then it is important to make sure that we give a complete form to our request.

FIGURE 7.1 Summary of a request.

Promises

A promise is a speech act or an utterance in which the speaker commits himself to take actions as specified in a request. The elements of a promise are exactly the same as those of a request. The only difference is that in a promise, it is the speaker who goes into action to fulfill the request. A promise is not giving in to a request or going along with it, but it’s a genuine, personal commitment to the actualization of the intention in the request. Roles, procedures, chains of command cannot make promises. Only individuals can. Bringing clarity to this point undoes much of the mischief and excuses around agreeing to do something and then not doing it. Of course, there has to be room in a request for the listener to say no. Otherwise, the situation is one of force or compliance and not of commitment. We will study this point more when we put these elements into an entire conversation.

FIGURE 7.2 Summary of a promise.

Offers

Offers are speech acts that we use nearly every day. They blend promises and requests together. A simple example is when we make a business proposal. In it, we promise to take certain actions and bring about particular outcomes (this is the promise part) in exchange for monetary compensation that we specify (this is the request element).

Offers are important in coaching in several aspects. First, as coaches, it is important to be able to articulate what our offer is. In order to attract clients and build a business, we have to articulate what it is that we are promising to bring to the coaching engagement. Making these promises in generic or clichéd language does not show clients the unique experience and value they’ll receive from working with us.

The area of offer is fertile because many coaches (in fact, many people) have extraordinary difficulty in saying in their own voice what they are providing—and, on the other hand, usually have even more challenge in formulating how much they will charge for their services. As you can no doubt readily see, issues of self-knowledge, clarity, knowledge of client interests, and issues of self-worth all play into the coach’s ability to create their offer.

Working with offers is also important for our clients for many of the reasons stated above. Although many of our clients will not be entrepreneurs who must find a way to market themselves, they might instead be managers looking to be promoted, or single folks looking for relationships, and so on. The same constraints as mentioned above also appear here when people design their offer.

Beside the internal issues I listed above, knowing the interests of the person to whom we are making the offer is fundamental. This is not a simple matter of asking what people want. It’s more a matter of feeling and observing into the world and matching breakdowns in people’s lives with potential resolutions. The most famous offerings in the recent commercial space are equipment such as iPods, cell phones, GPS units, laptops, and Blackberries. Nobody at Apple Inc. went around and asked people if they had a need for carrying 15,000 songs with them wherever they went. The offer came more from a question like, if you were able to “X,” would that be worth spending “Y” amount of money?

Fresh offers, in other words, open up new territory in which people can take action, connect to the world in a different way, and even establish a new identify for themselves. This last point becomes most clear in the offers of social networks where we can be known by different people, and even known differently with people we’ve had friendships with for a long time.

Perhaps you can tell from reading this that working with clients around offers resolves many, many coaching situations. Expanding on an example already given, when a client intends to be promoted, it is very powerful for her to put together in writing the offer that she is making. For example, what value, innovation, commitment, skills, resilience is she bringing to the current and future situation the enterprise will be in? How does this list fit with what the organization is looking for and values, and how does it open up thinking to what will be unfolding in the future? Employees are seen as extremely valuable when they are looking ahead to what difficulties and opportunities the organization will be having in the years ahead. When a client includes this in her offer, she seems to be extraordinarily desirable as a team member.

With that as background, it is often easier for the client to ask for compensation that is a meeting point between what they are bringing and what the organization is receiving. Instead of the amount of compensation being made up out of whole cloth, it has a sound basis in the whole package of skills, commitment, and thinking that the client had articulated.

A similar process can be initiated in any area where clients want something in the world that requires the cooperation and involvement of others. It is at this intersection of mutual needs and commitments that making skillful offers is most germane.

FIGURE 7.3 Summary of an offer.

Assertions

Assertions do what most people think language itself does. Assertions are big pointers, bringing our attention to particular aspects of the world. In everyday parlance, assertions are called “facts.” Today is Thursday; the temperature is 65°F; we are in San Francisco. All are examples of assertions.

Assertions, though, do not escape being connected to individual people. As Humberto Maturana famously said, “Everything said is said by someone.” This means that every time we make an assertion, we are making a personal commitment to provide the underpinnings for it. Assertions are embedded in the common world of practice and it’s here that the grounding occurs. When I say, “Today is Thursday,” I’m relying upon the English language and its grammar, as well as the historic practice of weeks and days. (Any assertion only makes sense within a particular community. “Today is Thursday,” makes sense to contemporary English speakers, but it certainly wouldn’t to people living in medieval Japan.) Assertions, then, are never freestanding and self-evident. They require an historically shaped context to be sensible.

Maturana’s statement also points to that an individual person is behind every statement. The speaker is stating that something is the case and that if asked, he can provide good grounding, sensible reasons for making it. Historically this is what distinguished the front page of the newspaper from the editorial page. The front page had assertions that could be verified if questioned, and the editorial page showed the point of view of the writers who relied upon their own power of persuasion to make their case. Of course, in the last decade, this distinction in newspapers has been muddled so that it is very hard to tell these days what is fact, assertion, or opinion.

In the world of coaching, it is essential for coaches to be able to make assertions. We have to be able to make statements based upon observations that we’ve made so that our clients can see and deal with the grounding of what we say. Telling our client that she is an ineffective leader and then going on to say why—with a coherent listing of observations—can be a powerful coaching moment. If we don’t have the grounding, however, we are left with our opinion only, which means the client will not have a chance to observe what it is to be an effective leader and will have to lean on us to tell how she is doing.

Making assertions is also a central activity in business. Being able to cite numbers, statistics, and research findings gives our speaking enormous, influential power. Reflect back upon when you’ve heard presentations that have had solid evidence beneath them as distinct from when you heard opinions, speculations, and hope. Which one made it more likely that you would take action?

This is not the time or place to get into epistemological discussions as to what constitutes truth or even what can be counted on as fact. It is sufficient for our purposes that a statement that holds up in a community of practice counts as a fact. A number that is accepted by a group of experienced, ethical accountants is an example of what I’m saying, as is the result of a medical test shown to an experienced faculty at a teaching hospital. Outside of these groups, so-called facts would be unintelligible. That doesn’t mean that they don’t count as true, but that the truth claim is always made by a person who is a competent speaker within a particular community.

FIGURE 7.4 Summary of an assertion.

Assessments

Like assertions, assessments are quite easy to describe and can be sticky in application. They are exactly what you would take them to be: a judgment of a particular state of affairs based upon criteria that are shared within a given community. Assessments are distinct from assertions because the judgment includes the desirability of the situation. For example, saying “it’s a beautiful day” is an assessment, while the statement “it is 68 F with clear skies” is an assertion.

You can probably see the difficulties people get into with assessments. Here are some of them:

We shrink them to only being an expression of my individual preferences. This means that instead of adopting criteria that are shared, I use only my own. So, if I assess that the book I am reading is a good one because it is heavy enough to hold down papers on my desk, almost no one else would embrace this assessment as sensible.

Like all speech acts, an assessment is a phenomena occurring in a shared public conversation. Consequently, in order to be understood and accepted, it must be stated in a way that fits the practices of the community. This is a tricky point: the public at large might think that a given guitar player is fantastic; but within the cadre of professional guitar players, she may be seen as flashy but derivative, not really bringing anything new to the field and, in fact, merely being fast.

Especially in the States, people feel that one assessment is as good as any other. We have call-in shows and news programs replete with email messages from people who are only saying whether they agree or whether they like what has happened. These speakers almost never have training to distinguish what makes something of high quality or not. Instead, they say whether they like it. Especially in the face of something new, our untutored view of something almost never says anything more than a statement about ourselves.

For example, when people go to a modern or contemporary art museum without having educated themselves about the artist, the work, or the history of art, they often spend their time making derisive comments or exclaiming, “Well, I could do that” (or “My kid can do better than that”). These comments are totally understandable, but in no way they are powerful assessments. Powerful assessments are those that carry the day in a decision-making process, or open up a new field of human activity, or bring a new appreciation to the world.

Let me attempt to make this point more clear. When almost any of us visit the Louvre, we would readily appreciate European painting from the fourteenth century to the nineteenth century. Without study, we would not know that many of the paintings that we call beautiful were severely criticized when they were first brought into public view. The work of Rembrandt, El Greco, Velázquez, Manet, and Monet are examples of this phenomenon.

Each time a new art was brought to the world, art critics and the public had to learn new criteria for assessing it. The appreciation came easier for those people who were conversant with the history of art and the problems artists were attempting to solve. Absent this background knowledge, it is as if people were coming into the middle of a conversation and hearing a few words and trying to make sense of what was being said in that brief snippet.

A work by Jackson Pollack is one of my favorite examples of what I’m trying to say here. If you’ve seen his paintings reproduced in books, they may appear as a bunch of random spills onto canvas. If you study his work in more depth, you will find out that he not only found a new way of doing painting; but also for the first time created works that are beautiful—go see them in person to verify what I’m saying here—without any inside or outside, any lines between parts of the canvas. Pollack solved an impossible conundrum: how to do painting without making any lines. On that level alone, his work is masterful; but as I’ve said, it is also amazingly captivating and beautiful when viewed personally.

To make an assessment, then, we must learn how to make observations based upon the vocabulary of the given discipline. Unless we do this, we have only an uninformed opinion, which is fine in conversations with our family or friends; but in coaching, in the world of business, or in other places where the sharpness of assessment is vital, our words will be worse than useless and in fact may be harmful.

I’ve been speaking about grounding, which means that the speaker has made a commitment to provide the criteria that he has used to come to his assessment. What we call “an expert” is someone who is well informed in the evaluation criteria in a given field of activity. This is a commonplace occurrence. All broadcast sporting events have an expert who on the spot can say whether something was a good dive, a good throw, or a good shot. Their speaking is based upon being able to observe with the shared criteria of the activity. This is very different from asking someone, say, in the stands of the Olympic diving competition what she thought of a given performance.

The world of experts though can also be troublesome. Frequently, their assessments can be insulated from the real world of concerns of other human beings. No doubt you’ve noticed this in listening to political pundits talk through the week’s issues in Washington, D.C. You may have found yourself wondering, what does this have to do with me or anyone I know?

The same can happen when experts in any field start speaking to each other. The distinctions that they make may have no practical consequence in our life or even in helping shape our appreciation for an activity. It’s important for coaches to keep this in mind when making assessments, so that the purpose of the coaching endeavor is always kept in mind and assessments are not made for their own sake.

As coaches, then, we must learn to make assessments that have grounding. To do this, we have to learn the vocabulary of a given field of endeavor and how it is used. None of us have enough breadth of knowledge and experience to be able to make grounded assessments in all fields of human endeavor. We may be able to make an assessment about how a meeting or conversation went but not about the efficacy of a business strategy, the clarity of computer code, or the long-term consequences of a chess move. Practically speaking, this means that all coaches have a limited range of topics they can work with.

Coaching can be a great aid as clients begin at an activity, when they themselves are learning to make assessments. For example, when someone is entering a new work relationship at a new company and perhaps in a new field of business, she probably won’t be able to assess how well she is doing on the job, but we as coaches can, if we have the wherewithal I’ve been describing to observe and assess.

A last point about assessments: one of the most powerful questions coaches can ask is the equivalent of, “What is the grounding for the assessment?” This is a somewhat awkward and technical way of speaking. In the same spirit of this question, coaches often ask, “How do you know that?” (which to me seems to be a much broader question about the possibility of knowing than inquiring into the basis upon which the client is coming to an assessment about an activity). Grounding our assessments keeps us from jumping to conclusions, acting from fearful/neurotic patterns, or acting from prejudice. Coaching requires us to be calm, present, and able to distinguish an historically based reaction from an observation and assessment we are making in the current moment. These two phenomena feel different, and it is essential as coaches to be able to tell which is which.

FIGURE 7.5 Summary of an assessment.

Declarations

The final speech act we’ll study is declarations. When someone makes a declaration, she is committing herself to the possibility of something happening, then taking action to shape her life and circumstances to make its realization more possible. Declarations are very powerful because they open up whole fields of new possible action. The United States, for example, was brought into existence with The Declaration of Independence. John Kennedy’s declaration that people would be on the moon by the end of the decade and Nelson Mandela’s declaration that black and white people could live together peacefully in South Africa are other examples of world-changing declarations.

Declarations carve out possibilities that must then be filled in with action. If Jefferson or Kennedy or Mandela merely spoke and never took action consistent with their declarations, their words would have had no impact. At the same time, actions that do not follow from a declaration are random and reactive and unfocused. (Have you ever wandered into a messy garage or attic and just started looking through things, glancing at things, moving stuff around, and then looked up and noticed that two or three hours have gone by and nothing has really happened? That is what life is like when we are living outside of declarations we’ve made.) The genuine work of a coaching program begins when a coach and client both declare the outcomes that they are dedicated to accomplish.

Declarations form the boundaries of what we think/feel is possible for us. We generally do not stray from outside these boundaries, although life may force us from time to time. Clients tell us these declared boundaries when they say, “I am not the kind of person who .” or “I’m the kind of person who .” Notice that these phrases are cloaked as assertions or assessments when in fact they are declarations—committed statements about what is possible—that have no evidentiary basis, but gain their validity exclusively from the authority of the speaker.

No one else can declare possibilities for me (although, parents, life partners, and bosses are always trying). Each person alone is the authorized speaker to bring into existence the possibilities within which she will live and to which she will dedicate her life. A huge portion of coaching’s power comes from clients intentionally making declarations, a deliberate stepping out from reacting to life, from one incident to another. Living without a declaration is truly being a cork in the stream, having no say whatever about how our life will go.

Contrary to what some people claim, we do not have the power to declare reality. (Check this out for yourself at the racetrack this week.) We do, however, have the wherewithal to say what we care about, what we will commit to, and what we will stay true to in the face of any and all difficulties. Human meaning seems to me to flow from our personal allegiance to our declarations, more than from any type of success. Getting what we want can often be a matter of propitious circumstance (the particular flight we pick may be the one that leaves before the storm arrives) and consequently have no real connection to us. I learned this by watching beautiful movie stars who did nothing to be beautiful, and therefore felt no connection to or meaning from the public’s adulation and their monetary success.

When we live aligned with what we’ve declared to be central to us, though, our life is imbued with meaning in each breath, each activity, each conversation, and each relationship. (Winning the lottery may seem like it would be fantastic, but numerous studies have shown that it very rarely makes a qualitative difference in the lives of winners.) Who we make ourselves into determines our sense of meaning, value, and belonging; and who we become is a matter of the declarations we make and live into.

Declarations are the speech act that frees us from historic circumstance and the limitations of the past. In a bold way, they claim the future by remembering that it is still unwritten. We, as I already said, cannot change the laws of gravity, or how tall we are, or how long it takes to boil water from our declarations, but we can radically shape who we are by skillfully employing them. Our declarations must feel and be true possibilities for us in order to have any power to shape us and our activities. Have you ever tried to declare your love for someone when you didn’t feel its truthfulness in your heart, body, and mind?

Notice what happens in your body when you make a declaration. Our body will tell us every time if we are serious in a declaration we are making and whether we are genuinely committed to it. Any reluctance, resistance, holding back or second-guessing will be revealed in our somatic impressions if we pay attention to them. You know this already. When someone makes a declaration to you, you can immediately tell whether it is nonsense, wishful thinking, or hot air. Maybe you didn’t realize that your body was telling you this, but pay attention next time and see what you discover.

FIGURE 7.6 Summary of a declaration.

A declaration then becomes rooted when we make it undivided from any parts of ourselves. When we work through any divisions in our self or in our commitment (and then, if necessary, within our speaking) we will truly bring forward a new possibility for us.

Now that we’ve studied speech acts anatomically, let’s put them together into conversations, a natural place in which they occur.

Conversation for Relationship

The background for all conversations is relationship. Being able to communicate to someone means that a minimum threshold of relationship exists. For example, because we speak or read the same language, we understand that when someone looks in our direction and speaks that he is saying something to us. Maybe when you’ve been in a place that feels very foreign, you feel the lack of the relationship I’m talking about. But even in a country where we don’t speak the language or know the customs, there is enough shared relationship in our humanity that we would do our best to help someone who tugged on our sleeve and pleaded for something even if we couldn’t understand for what.

Besides this baseline of relatedness, in the world of commerce, education, friendship, and coaching, it is necessary for us to more intentionally bring forward a working relationship. We all know this, but I’m bringing it out here so that we can study it just a little bit and so that we remember when something is amiss, one of the first places to look is the current condition of the relationship.

My view is that relationships can’t be forced. We might be on the same team and have to work together, but that doesn’t mean that we have much of a relationship. People must freely enter the mutuality of relationship of their own volition. We do so, for example, when we meet someone who shares interests, concerns, or commitments with us. It is an easy matter for parents standing at the school bus stop to enter into conversation with the other parents because both people have so many obvious interests, commitments, and concerns in common.

These different elements of relationship provide different possible levels of relationship. Shared interests facilitate our being acquaintances and friendly participants in an activity. We readily enter into this when attending a sporting event or a concert. When we discover mutual concerns with another, we enter into a deeper relationship where we reveal more of ourselves and are open to hear more from our conversational partner. Shared commitment is the basis for genuine partnership because here we are willing to move through ambiguity, misunderstanding, and friction in the interactions in order to fulfill the commitment we share.

As coaches, we are presenting ourselves as people who are committed to the commitments of our clients. Such openness provides a strong foundation in working through the inevitable difficulties that occur during a coaching engagement. Any less depth in the relationship than this, in my view, is insufficient for bringing about any substantial outcomes. If we find that we can’t commit ourselves to what the client is up to, it is best that we step out of working with our client and refer them to someone else.

It is a commonplace event in our contemporary world that clients live without much relational support. Yes, it is true that people have many social network friends or work friends or hang-out friends (all people that share interests, or maybe even concerns), but what is frequently missing are people who share commitments. Practically this means that clients often don’t have anyone to call on when dealing with difficulties, confusing choices, or emotional turmoil.

An entire coaching program can be built around building the competencies for skillfully conducting a conversation for relationship. The elements could include:

• staying present and attentive to our conversational partner, whichmeans—in practice—returning ourselves from self-conscious inner worries, or self-criticism, or wild speculations about what might happen next in the conversation;
• listening for mutual interests, concerns and commitments;
• participating equally in speaking and listening as the conversation unfolds so that neither partner dominates; and
• refraining from making judgments about what our conversational partner says and, instead, expressing respectful curiosity for whatever is brought up.

The conversation concludes with any future planning that feels appropriate given the level of mutuality that was uncovered in the conversation. Sometimes that might mean, “Well, let’s go see that art exhibit” or “Let’s get together on Tuesday and talk more about this”; or, on the other hand, “It was really interesting to talk to you—goodbye.”

Conversation for Possibilities

Conversations that explore possibilities have a bit more form. I mean something a bit different than brainstorming, although it could fairly be said to be in this genre. A conversation for possibility assumes a background of relationship. We engage in this way with someone that we already know shares interests, concerns, or commitments with us (we don’t stop people on the street and ask, “What should I buy for my wife’s anniversary present?”).

With this relational background, the conversation starts when someone brings up a topic and asks a question, such as: What could be done about this? What’s possible here? How could we address this? In a conversation for possibilities, the conversation flows pretty normally and naturally; what determines its efficacy is the acuity of the participants listening for a new possibility. “New” means outside the pre-existing solutions, categories, or conclusions that were present before the speaking and listening began.

Real possibilities begin to unfold when everyone involved suspends criticism and refrains from any version of “yes, but.” There is no pressure for getting anything done other than a shared commitment to find any possibilities that arise. Following someone’s idea out a few steps beyond what has already been articulated frequently opens up something new, as well as going the opposite way in the conversation by revealing what assumptions and views led to the possibility being proposed.

Being open to associations that occur while in the middle of a conversation can be very helpful as long as we don’t get too unfocused. An unrestrained conversation for possibility can quickly, if misdirected, stray so far afield that nothing useful is collected at the end. For example, someone could go around exploring possibilities for where to go on vacation. A misdirected conversation could go like this:

Person 1: Have you ever gone to Greece?

Person 2: Oh, remember “Grease”? Didn’t that star John Travolta? Wasn’t he also in “Saturday Night Fever”?

Person 1: Oh, yeah, “Fever”: great song. Didn’t Peggy Lee sing that song?

Person 2: She always reminded me of Miss Piggy, who was infatuated with Kermit. Frogs are so interesting. They grow up from tadpoles so quickly.

Person 1: Life does seem to go by so quickly. I wonder why that is. Maybe it’s just the effects of relativity like Einstein spoke about.

Person 2: Speaking of which, there is an Einstein’s Bagel Shop on the corner. Let’s go get some.

Maybe you’ve been in this type of conversation yourself. It’s a matter of skill and delicacy to keep the conversation directed without too much constraint. Keeping the intention of coming away with possibilities that can be decided about by the end of the conversation will keep us from straying, as in the conversation above.

A successful conversation ends by the participants deciding to explore the possibilities further, move them right now into action, or declaring that none of the possibilities are of sufficient interest to warrant further engagement.

Conversation for Action

Please notice that conversations for action sequentially follow those for relationship and possibility. Neglecting those earlier steps will have us engage in a conversation that will not be grounded upon sufficient mutual commitment and/ or not enough exploration of possible directions of action. Many, many, many conversations for action fall apart because people attempt to conduct them based upon roles or power. Parents, teachers, bosses frequently fall into this mistake. Readers are undoubtedly familiar with all the research around people being more committed to action if they have been included in the exploration preceding it.

The next time you’re in a conversation for action that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, be it with a family member or work team, please consider whether enough depth of relationship is in place and enough possibilities have been explored to give a foundation for the current conversation to go forward. Don’t be fooled by someone insisting that we be more and more specific in our request, when the truth of the matter is that we are speaking to someone who does not share our commitment and does not have any interest in the topic. Be careful not to substitute force or cleverness for relationship as the conversation for action unfolds.

The conversation itself is displayed in the diagram below. The first quadrant is preparation, which includes the two earlier conversations that we’ve already studied. Once complete, the preparatory stage leads to the performer making an offer, which, as you’ll recall, is a combination of a request and a promise; or by someone (we are calling this person the receiver) making a straightforward request.

What follows in the next quadrant is any necessary negotiations so that both parties are clear about what’s being asked for and what will be delivered at the end. In this stage, elements of the request or offer may have to be modified. The timing, quality, or quantity of what is being discussed may be altered and, for this to be a real conversation, there has to be mutual acceptance of these changes. Honesty, candor, and completeness are essential qualities to bring to this part of the conversation. Neglecting any of these will lead to immense waste as someone goes into action to fulfill something that is later changed or modified because something was withheld, spun, or misrepresented in the negotiation stage. Also, please remember that any request or offer can be declined, simply by saying “no.”

In the performance stage, everything that is necessary for the conditions specified in the request or offer to be completed in the allotted time is initiated. Undoubtedly this will include unanticipated breakdowns, delays, and complications. Sometimes this means renegotiating timing or another part of the request/ offer. The essential activity is ongoing conversations so that everyone involved can adapt to what’s changed and coordinate her/his other activities accordingly.

Careful attention here will assure that, at the end, everyone is as satisfied as possible and that no serious damage has been done to the relationship. Giving the ongoing nature of personal and business relationships, these last two factors are vitally important.

The last quadrant is a conversation in which the involved people say that what is delivered is satisfactory. It is not up to the performer alone to decide this. It really is a conversation back and forth until both people willingly say that they are complete with what happened. Customer loyalty, personal credibility, feelings of mutual support, and partnership: all are based upon this final stage of the conversation.

For coaches, this third conversation—conversation for action—is one that can be explored, studied, and practiced with great benefit. We all know people who can generate ideas but have difficulty executing them. The conversation, as displayed and discussed here, lays out the necessary actions in a way that can be mastered. It is not beyond most people’s ability to become proficient in conversations for action. Also, please note that the coaching engagement is an example of the action cycle: both coach and client enter into it with a commitment to produce particular outcomes within a particular timeframe.

FIGURE 7.7 Conversation for action.

Correcting and communicating along the way is essential, as is a conversation for completion at the end. This chapter is meant to lay out in a preliminary and cursory fashion the essential elements and conversations that bring forth and coordinate our shared human world. Every adult has to have a minimum competence in all three in order to function in the twenty-first century, yet nowhere in our educational system is this a topic of study.

Perhaps you have already made the step in seeing that a large number of coaching issues that clients bring are addressable and resolvable by the client becoming skillful in speaking and listening. Too often, in my view, coaches work in an inefficient and wasteful fashion; for example, working to build up someone’s self-esteem when what is more germane is working with a client to be able to make a full request.

Working for conversational competence is a powerful place for coaches to engage because we do not have to enter into the historic psychology of our client, but can instead focus our coaching on the client’s current skills and what it takes to build them. Perhaps surprising to some people, building these conversational competences will shift the client’s experience of himself as well as the public identity he has in the world. Besides that, our success is forwarded or limited by our ability to speak and listen. Even the most brilliant inventor at some point has to ask for investors, and even the most innovative artist has to present her work.

As is typical with a successful manager, Bob was highly skilled in conducting conversations for action. He could readily understand and probe as necessary into what was being asked of him. He always had a very good sense of the current workload of his team and their capacity to take on something new. He didn’t overcommit because he did not want to sully the reputation of his group or disappoint the people making the requests.

The step into the executive ranks required Bob to think and act and speak beyond the current situation of the facts and figures. He had to learn to look out over a longer horizon of time beyond what was predictable or extendable from the present circumstance. He had to learn to ask, “What if.?” Or, “How about.?” Or, “If this could happen, what might be possible?” For quite a while, Bob kept wanting to pull the conversations back into what could be done right now. These habits of thought and action were deeply embedded in his self-image and public identity.

Over and again, I kept pointing this out to him and inviting him to engage in conversations for possibilities: at first, with people where there would be little consequence, but then—as he got more confident—with people whose opinion could shape his future. The exercise he took on about building a network of support was the indispensable first step for being able to conduct a conversation for possibility.

As you might recall, these conversations only happen with people with whom we share interests, concerns, and commitments, and at first, none of these people existed in his world. Once this network was established, it was far easier for Bob to have these conversations regularly and learn both by observing others and by practicing himself. Bob became more at ease taking a risk of saying something that he did not have the data to support. He learned to clearly designate when he was speaking speculatively and when he was making promises or assertions. The simple matter of knowing that there were these distinct ways of speaking—that brought about different results and that let him be known in a new way within his organization—freed up Bob’s actions tremendously.

Suggested Reading

The information presented in this chapter has been gathered through attending classes and lectures. The actual creators of the work as presented have not written books on the topic. Nonetheless, here are some books that can provide a firm foundation for the material presented and examples of its application. Many of the books cited at the end of Chapter Two have their place here as well. I’ve only repeated once, giving it a different emphasis in the context of this chapter.

Budd, Matthew, and Larry Rothstein. You Are What You Say. New York: Crown Publishers, 2000.

While the author was on the faculty of Harvard Medical School and was a practicing physician in Cambridge, he studied extensively with Fernando Flores. He took what he learned about language and brought it to his patients. The book has many stories of symptoms being relieved and well-being restored by shifting conversations. The author includes many useful checklists and generously makes available the practical things he’s learned along the way. Accessible, exciting, and inspiring.

Sieler, Alan. Coaching to the Human Soul, Volume 1. Blackburn, Victoria, Australia: Newfield Australia, 2003.

This book provides the philosophical grounding for the speech acts theory presented in this chapter. The author is a practicing coach in Asia and Australia. His volume is ripe with useful examples and the writing itself is clear.