as the most effective day of learning so far in his lifetime.
As the CEO of a company that helped these leaders scale conversations with this gravity, I didn't (and still don't) feel satisfied with these achievements: I feel an increased sense of urgency. Hundreds of thousands of people participated in scaled conversations about the health and safety of students, teachers and staff in the pandemic, but millions of other parents did not. Hundreds of leaders scaled conversations to accelerate efforts to overcome racism, and yet hundreds of thousands of leaders did not. Anti‐racism, global pandemics, climate action, LGBTQ rights, gun violence, remote worker mental health…. All of these are issues that require people to join the conversation. Now. It's not a matter of if they join the conversation, it's a matter of how.
More than the narrow goal of growing ThoughtExchange, with this book my hope is to do my part in moving forward a body of work that inspires more research, development, and deployment of conversation technologies to bring people together to solve the most pressing issues in our organizations and on our planet, before we become so divided we blow ourselves up or become so selfish we wreck the planet. With all due respect to those who are working to ensure we can leave the planet and inhabit airless, oceanless worlds…my thinking is we should prioritize efforts down here on this world. It seems worth saving.
The same mechanism that helps revenue leaders increase sales helps public leaders save lives. It's about scaling conversations.
PART I WHAT'S IN A CONVERSATION?
Before I dive into how to effectively leverage our collective conversation strengths and overcome challenges to scale conversations to include hundreds and thousands of people, I'll first explore the components that are required to make a simple conversation successful with a small group—believe it or not, it can be summed up by one thing: Margaritas. After that I will cover the value of scaling that ability. Then, before discussing how to scale a conversation up I will address the attempts leaders make to include voices now and explain why they are typically unsuccessful. This is done through the lens of what people require to successfully converse.
CHAPTER 1 What's a Conversation?
MARGARITA THOUGHTS
A waiter asks a group what they'd all like to drink. First person answers: A beer. Next person: Sure, me too: a beer. Next few people follow suit and order a few more beers. One person orders a glass of wine.
Then, the final person says to the waiter: “A friend of mine said you make one of the best margaritas in town…and since it's the first hot day of summer, I'll take one of those.”
Everyone else at the table considers this critical new information.
Then the first person says: “If it's not too much trouble, I'd like to change my order. I'd also like one of those famed margaritas.”
Second person: “Me too.”
Third: “Yep, me too, and unless I'm mistaken, make it a pitcher so we can just do a round of margaritas?”
The wine‐ordering person is the only holdout. “I'll stick with my wine,” they say.
This type of interaction is at the core of human communication. We share ideas, listen to one another, change our minds at the drop of a hat, and ultimately forget which idea belonged to who in the first place.
“I'm glad I thought to order margaritas!”
“That wasn't your idea, that was mine…”
“Was it?”
In any conversation with fewer than 10 people, this is, in a word, natural. Small meetings create dialogue and interesting solutions surface. A single idea can become the most important idea in a heartbeat. During small focus groups, or in small chats online, discussions take place and people change their views, combine thoughts, explore where there is consensus, and where there isn't. No problem.
But as soon as that group gets larger than 10 what happens? The most frequent thoughts are mistaken as the most important ones. In the margarita example, the waiter would never be able to discover the “margarita” thought with a large group of tens or hundreds, even if they used the highest standard of survey or polling technology. Every survey output, word cloud generator, person paid to codify feedback, and advanced natural language processing algorithm that clusters similar thoughts would do the same thing: Inaccurately emphasize that BEER! and words similar to beer are by far the best and most loved simply because that term was most frequently shared as a “first‐thought‐best‐thought.” When, of course, given the chance to participate in a conversation and consider the thinking of other people, no one in the group above even ordered a beer.
The curious thing about “margarita thoughts” is that, in a small group, this phenomenon of surfacing important ideas, instead of counting the frequent ones, is just so obvious.
Picture any meeting or group discussion you've had with six or seven people. As you try to solve a problem, everyone shares ideas as others react. Eventually, someone shares a thought that many people resonate with and that becomes an important thought that guides the actions you all take together. This is an extremely common and standard way of people working together. It's a conversation.
Now picture, in that same meeting, someone was listening to the conversation and counting the frequency of ideas shared. After the group arrives at agreement to take an action, that person interrupts and says: “Sorry, we can't go with that idea. It was only shared once by Julie and there are several other ideas that were shared more often early in the conversation. We need to use one of those earlier, frequent ideas. They are more important.” That is obviously ridiculous. No one would do it. But maybe they would. And more importantly, maybe you would. In fact, you probably do. I'll explain.
Mistaking frequent thoughts for important thoughts is how most organizations inform decisions affecting many people. The annual survey run through HR is now a staple of almost every organization in almost every sector. These surveys are supplemented by special issue surveys/polls/pulses on topics such as Diversity and Inclusion, Culture and Professional Development. Some organizations even “pulse” weekly to measure everyone. During this now familiar process, a quantitative survey of questionable scientific value is sent to a few hundred or a few thousand people and the results are, let's be honest, hard to interpret. And for good reason.
I recall speaking with one leader who had the opportunity to talk with an employee who had anonymously provided an extremely low mark on their internal NPS survey. The question was phrased something like this: On a scale of one (low) to ten (high) how likely are you to recommend our organization to a friend or colleague as a great place to work? The employee gave an extremely low rating. Fortunately, they spoke up as the results were discussed by the team. “I gave that a one because all of my colleagues already work here and none of my friends work in our industry.” They had interpreted the question as asking whether their friends would be suitable employees, not as a measure of their happiness.
In another, very similar scenario, a parent came forward after participating in a school district survey, which had asked a similar question: On a scale of one (low) to ten (high) how likely are you to recommend our school district to your friends and family? They had also given a rating of one. Their explanation: All of my local friends already attend this school district and my family lives out of town.
Ah.
“But how do you feel about our school district?”
