Introduction

How to use this book

This is a book for you and for your work in the world. It is a field guide and workbook, with a series of exercises that thread through the chapters. It asks you to do some hard work that requires reflection and vulnerability. If you stick with it, your work with the book will help you communicate powerfully with anyone about what’s most important to you. It will help you harness the power of conversation to transform polarization and gridlock into creative outcomes and stronger relationships.

In the chapters that follow, we will challenge your notions of advocacy, leadership, and authenticity. We will invite you to examine your own conversations, your own moments of getting stuck, and the common pitfalls we all encounter. We will create opportunities for you to change the conversations that matter to you. We will then help you advance this new approach to conversations in your organizations and as part of crafting larger movements.

If we all do this, we will be able to solve big problems, to create a better future together. Along the way, we can create a better world right now—strengthening our immediate relationships within our families, communities, and organizations while reaffirming our own sense of purpose and accomplishment.

Serious play

To join us on this journey, we invite you into a very particular spirit, that of serious play. If those words sound contradictory, they are meant to.

The “serious” part involves the focus required to reflect in detail on our experience. It includes the courage to face the moments when we have contributed to our own failure.

“Play” recognizes a few things. The first is that if we take ourselves too seriously, our reflection will stray into judgment or possibly despair: not only are society and the planet coming to an end, but it’s all our fault! Looking at our foibles and our humanity with lighthearted compassion makes it much easier to sustain our focus and courage. In fact, the moment we can poke fun at ourselves is when we know we have learned something.

The second aspect of play is that it’s something we do together. The complicated situations we face are not unique. None of the pitfalls we stumble into have been made exclusively for us. Part of the value of our workshops and this book is to recognize that we are not alone.

This book will be more useful, and more fun, if you draw others in to give you a hand. Neither of us recalls making a personal transformation without help, without working with someone who helped us challenge ourselves. At the end of chapter 2, we will ask you to find a buddy who can accompany you on the journey, so you can start thinking now about who that might be.

To get started with the work, we would simply like you to identify where in your life this book might help you explore and experiment.

A note on the exercises

When you see an exercise presented in the text like the one we just shared, it is because we think this is the appropriate moment to do it. Our best advice is to pause your reading and get it done. Throughout the book we have laid out a sequence of exercises in which the output of each builds toward the next. We have drawn most of them directly from our workshops, where they have been refined over time to optimize their results out in the world. Others are designed specifically for the book, and we’ve worked with test users to refine their delivery and their results.

The reason for these exercises is that we are action biased. Put simply, you can’t learn to harness the power of conversation without being in conversation. We know people who have read the book and skipped the exercises, and it has contributed to their thinking. If you take on the exercises, however, you are more likely to produce real results in your life than be left with thoughts about how you might produce results. You’ll complete the process with skills you can use going forward and potentially teach to others who share your goals.

Through participating in the exercises, you will be able to create results that speak for themselves. One of our classroom participants took on the reflective work with a partner in class. She then built the courage and a new approach to change the conversation and shared the following in a reflection paper:

I’ve been a vegetarian for decades now, sometimes off and on—but often religiously. . . . It’s easy to make such a life choice for yourself when you are living alone. But last year I moved back in with my mother to lessen the financial burden of getting an MBA. My family is Persian—which makes being a vegetarian very difficult. Our diet is made up of chicken or beef kabobs and stews filled with lamb.

I never set out to turn my family into vegetarians when I moved here. I simply tried to convince them of the importance of purchasing sustainable and humanely grown meats and animal products. But even this request had no effect. During our class exercise I realized it was because I would lace my request with emotional outbursts and accusations.

The day after our workshop, my aunt made eggs for breakfast and tried to serve me some. I was about to burst into a lecture of the torturous existence of caged chickens. Instead I politely declined the eggs. My aunt asked why (she knows I love soft-boiled eggs).

Earlier that morning we had bonded on our discomfort of having been in China. My aunt used to travel there for work regularly—and would always come back a little depressed from her trips. . . . We talked about how, despite the importance of buying friends and family small gifts from travels, neither of us felt comfortable buying cheap knick-knacks for fear of how they had been made in order to be sold so cheaply.

I hadn’t planned on having “the talk” that soon—but all of a sudden I realized the connection I could make. With my mother listening in, I explained to my aunt that the same thing that made her feel uncomfortable buying bargains in China was why I feel uncomfortable buying bargain foods. For the first time ever I saw a spark of understanding in her eyes.

As a family, we began a conversation not about why I make the choices I make, but why we make the choices we make. And at the end of it all, my aunt asked me how she can tell what kind of meat to buy.

The next day I came home to find a carton of cage-free eggs and organic milk in the refrigerator. My mom had gone shopping. It was mind-blowing.