Improve Your Communication Skills, 2nd Edition

• ‘Can you see any flaws in my thinking?’ 
• ‘Would you look at this stuff differently?’ ‘How would 
you put this together?’ 
• ‘Would this look different in different circumstances?’ 
‘Are my assumptions valid?’ 
• ‘Have I missed anything?’ 
The beauty of this model is that you need no special training to 
use it. Neither does the other participant in the conversation. You 
can use it immediately, as a practical way to intervene in 
conversations that are collapsing into argument. 
6. Summarise often 
Perhaps the most important of all the skills of conversation is the 
skill of summarising. Summaries: 
• allow you to state your objective, return to it and check 
that you have achieved it; 
• help you to structure your thinking; 
• help you to manage time more effectively; 
• help you to seek the common ground between you; 
• help you to move beyond adversarial thinking. 
Simple summaries are useful at key turning points in a 
conversation. At the start, summarise your most important point 
or your objective. As you want to move on from one stage to the 
next, summarise where you think you have both got to and check 
that the other person agrees with you. At the end of the 
conversation, summarise what you have achieved and the action 
steps you both need to take. 
( c) 2011 Kogan Page L imited, All Rights Reserved.

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54 Improve your Communication Skills
To summarise means to reinterpret the other person’s ideas 
in your own language. It involves
recognising
the specific point 
they’ve made, 
appreciating
the position from which they say it 
and 
understanding
the beliefs that inform that position. 
Recognising what someone says doesn’t imply that you agree 
with it. Rather, it implies that you have taken the point into 
account. Appreciating the other person’s feelings on the matter 
doesn’t mean that you feel the same way, but it does show that 
you respect those feelings. And understanding the belief may not 
mean that you share it, but it does mean that you consider it 
important. Shared problem solving becomes much easier if those 
three basic summarising tactics come into play. 
Of course, summaries must be genuine. They must be 
supported by all the non-verbal cues that demonstrate your 
recognition, appreciation and understanding. And those cues 
will look more genuine if you actually recognise, appreciate and 
– at least seek to – understand. 
7. Use visuals 
It’s said that people remember about 20 per cent of what they 
hear, and over 80 per cent of what they see. If communication is 
the process of making your thinking visible, your conversations 
will certainly benefit from some way of being able to see your 
ideas. 
There are lots of ways in which you can achieve a visual 
image of your conversation. The obvious ways include scribbling 
on the nearest bit of paper or using a flip chart. Less obvious 
visual aids include the gestures and facial expressions you make. 
Less obvious still – but possibly the most powerful – are word 
pictures: the images people can create in each other’s minds with 
the words they use.
( c) 2011 Kogan Page L imited, All Rights Reserved.

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