Improve Your Communication Skills, 2nd Edition

43 Seven Ways to Improve Your Conversations
• Try to distinguish what you’re looking at from what you 
think about it. 
• Ask how other people might see it. 
• Break the problem into parts. 
• Isolate one part of the problem and look at it in detail. 
• Connect the problem into a wider network of ideas. 
• Ask what the problem is like. What does it look like, or 
feel like? 
Conversations for possibility are potentially a source of 
creativity: brainstorming is a good example. But they can also be 
uncomfortable: exploring different points of view may create 
conflict. 
A conversation for possibility: key 
questions 
What’s the problem? 
What are we trying to do? 
What’s the real problem? 
What are we really trying to do? 
Is this a problem? 
How could we look at this from a different angle? 
Can we interpret this differently? 
How could we do this? 
What does it look like from another person’s point of view? 
What makes this different from last time? 
Have we ever done anything like this before? 
Can we make this simpler? 
Can we look at this in bits? 
What is this like? 
What does this feel or look like?
( c) 2011 Kogan Page L imited, All Rights Reserved.

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44 Improve your Communication Skills
Manage this conversation with care. Make it clear that this is not 
decision time. Encourage the other person to give you ideas. Take 
care not to judge or criticise. Do challenge or probe what the 
other person says. In particular, manage the emotional content of 
this conversation with care. Acknowledge people’s feelings and 
look for the evidence that supports them. 
A conversation for opportunity (‘supply’) 
A conversation for opportunity takes us into second-stage 
thinking. This is fundamentally a conversation about planning. 
Many good ideas never become reality because people don’t map 
out paths of opportunity. A conversation for opportunity is 
designed to construct such a path. You are choosing what to do. 
You assess what you would need to make action possible: 
resources, support and skills. This conversation is more focused 
than a conversation for possibility: in choosing from among a 
number of possibilities, you are finding a sense of common 
purpose. 
The bridge from possibility to opportunity is 
measurement
. This is 
where you begin to set targets, milestones, obstacles, measures of 
success. How will you be able to judge when you have achieved 
an objective?