Preface to the Second Edition

When we completed Difficult Conversations ten years ago, we hoped it would catch on with businesses and help people in personal relationships. Happily, it’s done both.

We regularly receive e-mail sharing stories of life-changing conversations, as well as e-mail of the “my wife gave me this book and it wasn’t terrible” variety. We hear stories of rocky marriages righted and sibling relationships recovered, of conversations with a child about night terrors and with a dying friend about death, love, and those left behind. Parents use the book to work through differences in parenting strategies and to reach out to their teenagers, while neighbors use it to figure out what is or isn’t “too loud.” We’re enormously grateful to those who have taken the time to tell us their stories.

The reception in the business community has been overwhelming. Our little book on talking has been embraced as a guide to taking on the hardest challenges – from how stakeholders with divergent interests can make tough but smart decisions, to giving difficult performance feedback, to making dysfunctional functions function, and good teams great. From new hires to CEOs, the book has helped people to break down silos and build up morale, showing the way past a culture of nice to a culture of efficiency, openness, and respect.

Most surprising has been Difficult Conversations ’s reach. A dance instructor uses it to teach Argentinean tango. Palestinian educators built communication programs around the Arabic edition; Israeli mediators used the Hebrew edition to help with external and internal conflicts. Postwar Hutu and Tutsi leaders in Burundi have come together to develop a conflict resolution program for their youth using the French edition. Global organizations are using it to manage the challenges of working within and across cultures. At twenty-five languages and counting, it has even been downloaded, we’re told, onto the International Space Station (where tight quarters can breed conflict).

The book has been used to train oil-rig operators in the North Sea, Iñupiat negotiators in the oil-rich Northern Slope of Alaska, and business leaders at Saudi Aramco. It’s been used at the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center and the headquarters and field offices of UN-AIDS. Doctors, nurses, and administrators in hospitals across the United States have used it to deliver better patient care and develop more humane workplaces. Within the U.S. government, it’s distributed at the Department of Justice, the IRS, the Federal Reserve, and the Postal Service. During one administration, the White House made it required reading for its top sixteen hundred political appointees. Law schools, business schools, and colleges assign it, as do high school teachers, life coaches, therapists, and ministers.

How to explain it all? Just this: people are people.

We have perceptions and thoughts and feelings, and we work and play with other human beings who have their own perceptions, thoughts, and feelings:

People are people. It is true today, it was true ten years ago, and it was probably not much different ten thousand years before that: “After all I did to put this hunt together and make it a success, this is my share of the kill? You call that fair?!”

We don’t outgrow difficult conversations or get promoted past them. The best workplaces and most effective organizations have them. The family down the street that everyone thinks is perfect has them. Loving couples and lifelong friends have them. In fact, we can make a reasonable argument that engaging (well) in difficult conversations is a sign of health in a relationship. Relationships that deal productively with the inevitable stresses of life are more durable; people who are willing and able to “stick through the hard parts” emerge with a stronger sense of trust in each other and the relationship, because now they have a track record of having worked through something hard and seen that the relationship survived.

So one explanation for the interest in this book is simply the delight of individuals happy to find a way through difficult relationship dilemmas, whether at home or at work. But we think there may be a broader organizational need driving interest in the business community : a recognition that the long-term success and even survival of many organizations may depend on their ability to master difficult conversations.

Why? Because the ability to handle difficult conversations well is a prerequisite to organizational change and adaptation. And because the combination of globalized competition and technological development have made rapid change and adaptation a necessity for organizational survival.

Of course, people in the business world have a certain cynicism when it comes to the “next big change initiative.” We hear about a new commitment to learning organizations, total quality management, reengineering, or some other novel idea, and our eyes start to roll. Consultants show up with studies showing the huge potential value to be gained with the innovative approach, and enormous effort is expended, but at the end of the day the endeavor fades away with only a small fraction of its promised value achieved.

In our view, this is not because the studies were wrong or overhyped ; the value is there to be captured. Nor is it because the individuals involved are lazy or don’t care. A lot of us care passionately and put loads of effort into these projects.

We believe a major reason change efforts so often fail is that successful implementation eventually requires people to have difficult conversations – and they are not prepared to manage them skillfully. People inevitably have different views on priorities, levels of investment, measures of success, and exactly what correct implementation should entail.

With everyone taking for granted that their own view is right, and readily assuming that others’ opposition is self-interested, progress quickly grinds to a halt. Decisions are delayed, and when finally made they are often imposed without buy-in from those who have to implement them. Relationships sour. Eventually people give up in frustration, and those driving the effort get distracted by new challenges or the next next big thing.

The ability to manage difficult conversations effectively is foundational, then, to achieving almost any significant change.

And in addition to supporting major change initiatives, these skills are increasingly needed simply to sustain business as usual. The relentless press of competition has forced most businesses to grow in scale to achieve efficiencies and competitive clout. Many industries are now global in reach. At the same time, the need to be responsive to the market – nimble, flexible, adaptive – has driven many organizations to be less hierarchical and to operate in a matrix that introduces more complexity to decision making and the ability to get things done.

This is a recipe for more conflict – and for more difficult conversations.

Think about it: Do the people in your organization deal with conflicts directly, routinely, and well? Or does the e-mail and water-cooler chat continue to focus on all the ways the organization is dysfunctional, even as important conversations are avoided? Having worked with countless businesses, we are tempted to say that the only reason some of them survive is because their competition is equally lousy at confronting the things that matter most.

And the pressures to work more effectively and efficiently are only going to increase. Businesses have spent the last twenty years focusing on process and technology improvements, and on cost cutting, and by now there’s not much left to cut. For the next ten (or fifty) years, breakthrough performance is going to depend instead on people learning to deal with conflict more effectively and, indeed, leveraging it for competitive advantage. Ideally, conflict and differing perspectives, handled well and efficiently, should become a competitive asset – an engine for rapid learning and innovation.

And that’s the upside: companies that nurture these communication skills as a core competence for leaders will leave their competition in the dust.

In this second edition we have chosen to leave the main text of the original intact. We have, however, drawn from what we’ve learned from those who are using the book, and from our own experiences in coaching and consulting, and included some additional commentary on a variety of critical topics. We present these in the form of answers to “Ten Questions People Ask about Difficult Conversations .” We hope this new material helps deepen and broaden your understanding and ability to manage potentially difficult conversations, and we look forward to the new questions it stimulates.

Special thanks to Penguin’s Rick Kot, editor to the stars, who favored us throughout with his intelligence, humor, and baked goods. Had an unclear thought or misplaced word managed to find its way into our manuscript, Rick no doubt would have caught it.

We close this preface to the second edition with the story of one of the many correspondences with readers that have touched us over the last few years. We try to respond to every letter we receive, and in some cases get engaged in quite a conversation, as you’ll see in the account below. ¹

In early 2002 Sheila received an e-mail from Ali, who wondered how to handle a challenging situation with his eleven-year-old son. His son, he believed, was taking money from him, and when confronted, the boy denied it. What to do? “I understand from your book,” he wrote, “that the blame game is not the correct approach. I agree, but there are times when father and son need to understand the truth.”

Sheila was at first tempted to respond with the simple reassurance that yes, at times a parent must confront and/or discipline a child, particularly if a child is stealing and lying about it. And she did offer this, but added a couple further suggestions: that Ali continue to inquire about his son’s feelings and perceptions, and that he remain open to the possibility that he, Ali, doesn’t yet know the whole story.

Several days later, Sheila received this e-mail:

Douglas Stone
Bruce Patton
Sheila Heen SCghLn5seGG+PwQHhkJ7JnnzdGyFn3Sx9R28jNFNEcbBx74nmvHzzN9KBxJr0Gmi