Difficult Conversations Archives - Page 2 of 15 - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis
Anjali, welcome!

Anjali Sharma
Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to chat storytelling. And I’d love it if you could kick us off by telling us a particularly surprising or counterintuitive discovery you’ve made about us humans and story over the course of the last 20 years.

Anjali Sharma
I think the most wonderful thing about storytelling is that, no matter where you go, there is room for storytelling everywhere, whether you go into someone’s life, whether you go into someone’s work, whether you go into relationships with your family, but the most effective storytelling is the one that actually really deep dives into a particular domain.

What do I mean by that? What I mean by that is that what I used to think, roughly about 12 years ago about storytelling is, storytelling is everything, it’s everywhere, and that was the beauty of it, but it was also the disadvantage of it, because you could start telling stories to people who work in corporations, which is where I largely kind of played the work that I do, and they would be like, “Yeah, it’s a great story, but how does it matter to me?”

So, I think the hyper-target-ness of the story is what makes it resonate, where people listen to it, and go, “Oh, my God, that’s exactly what happens to me.” That thing that people say can only come when you really target the story to the audience that you’re telling the story to. Stories are great, but the best storytellers know how to flex their narrative according to who they’re telling the story to. So, I think my biggest discovery was that.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. Well, could you give us a really quick example of what’s a generic story that’s not really going to “wow” someone versus what is that same story sound like in a micro-targeted way?

Anjali Sharma
Okay. So, I think I’d like to sort of make a little correction to that because, even though the story can go “wow,” we don’t tell just for them to be like, “Wow.” We want people to get up and take an action, and it is not necessary that whatever I will say “wow” to, I will actually act upon. I’ll demonstrate this to you.

So, say I want people to challenge the status quo for better innovation, and I say, “You know, we must challenge the status quo,” and I tell them the story of the founder of Body Shop, Anita Roddick, and Anita Roddick tells this story. She’s no more, but when she was around, she told this story to a magazine interview in which she says that, “When I was all of 12 years old, I remember the day when my father passed away, and my mother, in the house, was cleaning the floor, and there was this bucket of dirty water next to her.”

“And she looked quite sort of anxious and stressed, but a large part of her anxiety and stress was coming from the fact that my parents didn’t get along with the local priest, and she wasn’t sure that my father was going to get a Catholic funeral or not. And a few minutes later, the doorbell rang and my mother opened the door, and the priest was standing there. And the priest looked at my mom and said, ‘You’re very lucky. We’ve decided to give your husband a Catholic funeral.’”

“And my mother picked up the dirty water and splashed it onto the priest. Now when you’re brought up with a mother like that, you would challenge status quo.” Because for her, as a Catholic, it was right to get her father to get that funeral. It wasn’t a favor that the priest was doing.

Now, a lot of people get moved by that story, and they go, “Wow,” and “Amazing.” But as soon as you walk out of that place where I have told you the story, you’re walking out with a colleague of yours, you would say, “It’s a lovely story, but if I did that to my boss, I just, you know, I don’t think I’ll have my job. I’ll lose my job,” right?

So, a lot of the stories get, like, “Amazing,” but they don’t get an action in the right direction. Therefore, you have to choose the story very, very correctly because a job of a corporate professional is to remember that, more important than the re-marketability of the story, that this is an amazing story, is the resonance of the story. Resonance of the story will drive an action. Remarkability will give you claps.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. That’s a really handy distinction, and I think it’s possible to go a whole lifetime without making that distinction because the claps feel good, you say, “I’m a master storyteller. People, they cry, they applaud, they tell me I’m amazing.” If you’re a speaker, they keep telling their friends, “And I keep getting booked.” But in terms of, if you’re being after a specific activity or action from your audience, that’s not adequate.

Anjali Sharma
Certainly. So, my success in a corporate world is not determined by the amount of claps and tears I get in a boardroom. It’s determined by how I moved people to take the action in the right direction and how much innovation we get, how we enhance the productivity, how we motivate people to come up with the best possible campaign next. So, I think that’s a very important distinction. You’re absolutely right.

Pete Mockaitis
And then I guess, specifically that context, in terms of if you’re just looking to make phenomenal content that gets a lot of podcast downloads or even if it’s like a full-blown movie or something, then a wow can be fine. But if we’re after a particular action on the part of the people we’re telling it to, then, yes, that’s one key thing to look out for, is, “Can they receive that? Is it relatable?”

So, lay it on us, how do we go through a process by which we can craft stories that are effective at bringing about the action-taking we’d like from the people we’re telling the stories to?

Anjali Sharma
So, we’ve kind of, over the last 12 years or so, tried to make this approach extremely practical, simply because of the reason that, if I walked into a corporate boardroom and I asked people, or into any workspace and asked people, it’s like, “What is it that is your biggest challenge?” almost everyone will say time, right? 

The really traditional format of story and the creative format of story that actually relies on high character, high emotions, kind of built over time, you write, you go away, you let your creative juices flow. In corporations and workplaces, we don’t have time. So, the way I look at it is like this. Before even you tell a story, I say to people, the audience that you’re talking to, first determine, “Are you influencing them or you are inspiring them?” Those are two very different things. I mean, if I’m going to be speaking to the board or I’m going to be speaking to the senior leadership team. I need to influence them. But if I’m speaking in a town hall and getting 450 staff members to join an AI-upskilling program, then I need to inspire them.

So, the key way to differentiate whether I’m inspiring or influencing is, “Am I asking these people to take an action that affects many people? Or am I asking them to take an action that just affects them?” If it is affecting many people, like, “Let’s adopt that, buy that new technology,” it’s going to affect many people. That’s an influence decision.

But if I’m asking people to go and join this one-week upskilling AI hackathon that we’ve got, then that’s an individual’s decision that I’m going to go and join it, right? It’s a little bit like getting people to be fit, getting people to read more. These are individual decisions. I’m not disrupting an ecosystem. It’s my individual decision. Those are primarily inspirational messages.

So, very simply, “How do I target the story right?” You first think, “Am I influencing? Am I inspiring?” If I’m influencing, I’m asking people to take an action, make a decision around things that sort of influences, has an effect on many people. But if it’s an inspirational message, it’s likely to be an individual who’s going to have to take that action.

Okay, once I’ve determined that, very simply, I go, “If it is inspiration, then I have to give them a nudge to a new identity.” Because what we often do is we give people goals, but I learned this from James Clear in his book, the Atomic Habits, and then I’ve brought that learning into storytelling.

When we talk about goals, for example. Writing a book is a goal. But why do people write a book? Because they want to be called authors. That’s a new identity they want for themselves. Running a marathon is a goal, but being called a marathoner is an identity. People want to be known like that.

So, when you are developing an inspirational message, you have to give nudge to a new identity. If I bring it down to the corporate world, I’ll give you another example. When I bring it down to the corporate world, we worked on a program back in 2016 where we were asked to build a story around a factory that was going to become a smart factory with automation, robotics, etc.

And the whole proposition of that story was productivity, and I was like, “This is not going to work for people on the ground. This is not inspirational for them,” right? So, we built a new identity for them – supervisors of robots. Because somebody’s got to program them, somebody’s got to charge them, somebody’s got to roster them, and “Do you want to be the supervisors of robots?” And that was inspirational for them.

So, that’s how you kind of look at an inspirational message. And then when you come towards the influence style of messaging, I think your hyper-target-ness comes from, really, looking at three areas. Most messages that are influential have a story that anchors on time, which is efficiency. So, can you make a proposition for being more efficient? Or, they come to an image or a reputation, which is, “Can this story help build better image or a reputation?”

And then, lastly, if you’re working for a profit-making company, which most people are, “Am I able to, through this story, save money or make money?” So, I often joke around and say, “What is the TIM you’re angling?” T-I-M, you know, time, image, money. So, if you want influential stories, story that influences, then time, image, money are my anchors. But if I’m building an inspirational story, then a nudge to a new identity.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think this is a fantastic distinction between inspiring or influencing. And I’m reminded of, I think in my early days, I was doing consulting for a strategy consulting firm, Bain, and we would make these slides that were so dense with numbers, numbers, data, charts, all this stuff, and effectively we were influencing corporate executives and boards in terms of, “Take this course of action and you will see tremendous profit.”

Like, that was always, we talked a lot about our story, “What’s our story?” And, basically, that was always the story, like, “Hey, do this thing we say and you’re going to make a lot of money, if you boil it down.” And so, those slides had a whole lot of data, a whole lot of charts to paint a compelling picture that was, “Hey, here’s the proof, here’s the evidence, here’s the argumentation like a debate, that this is, in fact, the optimal pathway relative to your alternatives.”

But then, at the same time, on my downtime, I’d be watching TED Talks, and I think, “Man, their slides look so much cooler and more beautiful and inspiring than what we do.” I felt like we were sort of we spent all the time with these slides, and I thought they don’t feel as awesome as the TED Talker slides, “What’s up?”

And I think this is a really handy way to think about it. It’s like, we are attempting to accomplish completely different objectives. If you trot out 20 fancy data charts to your TED audience, they’re like, “Yeah, okay. That wasn’t very much fun for us. Thanks.” And vice versa, if I just showed a picture of a seed in a hand to a board, it’s like, “All right, I hope you’ve got some data coming because this isn’t going to cut it for long.”

Anjali Sharma
Exactly. Oh, my God, you sort of distilled it beautifully. And I love the fact that I have taken you back to some time in your career because that is exactly what resonance is. I’m reminding you of an experience you have already had. And when that happens, you know that what I’m saying is resonating with you. So, you’re absolutely right, the objectives are very, very different, and that’s where the hyper-target-ness works really well.

I’ll add one little piece of information. There’s always this sort of war between the technicality of what we do and the emotions that are embedded in the way we communicate. And what I have learned is that time, image, and money, although seems like a sort of a very transactional way of influencing. In fact, rooted in it is an emotional thing.

Look at that boardroom and see all those people who are seated there. Their next career move depends on whether they are making that company efficient, whether they’re making that company profitable, which is money, and whether they are protecting the reputation of the organization or not, or they’re building the reputation of the organization or not.

So, I used to think, “Why is it so transactional and so dry and distilled in influence area?” But then when I started looking at the people sitting there, I was like, “No, this is also emotional because their next career step is dependent on those three things. So, their connection comes from that.

Leaning upon the definition of connection from Dr. Brene Brown, the exchange of energy that happens when people feel seen, heard, and valued.

When those people sit in that boardroom and you tell them a story that anchors itself on time, image, and money, they feel seen, heard, and valued, because that is what their job is all day in and out, to make more profit for the company, to enhance the reputation image of the company, and to make sure they’re efficient all the time. An inspiration, a nudge to the identity, new identity, is what’s the connection for the person who’s listening to you.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s really resonant. And it’s funny, like if you apply the same sort of debater, data-driven argumentation approach to be very compelling about a thing they don’t care about, and I’m not making value judgments either way, but if a board doesn’t care a hoot about climate change or whatever, and you have just fantastic statistics about the carbon emissions of a thing and how this pathway will be so much better, you may have proven that point excellently in terms of that’s a rock-solid, logical approach, but you haven’t hit upon a thing that they’re emotionally invested in, you’re not going to be successful in your attempt to influence.

Anjali Sharma
Hundred, hundred, hundred percent. You know, Pete, you’ve taken me back to 2018, when I went to Hiroshima, Japan for 18 months to make another semiconductor factory have increased level of diversity. So, Japan, obviously had a huge amount of skill shortage, I mean, still does, but that was becoming a huge issue at that time. And this factory was originally owned by Japanese owners, but an American company took over.

And they soon realized that, “If we don’t get more foreigners working here, if we don’t get more women working here, and if we don’t get younger people working in here, so it’s diversity of three different lenses, we’re not going to have any people, and the factory will have to shut down.” So, there was this whole proposition, imagine, that homogeneous culture of Japan, this proposition of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and everyone used to just kind of roll their eyes and they were like, “Yeah, whatever.”

And I had this vivid memory of one conversation between two senior leaders that I just happened to hear, who said, “Great, now we can make a compelling case of diversity, equity, and inclusion, but we still don’t get what is its connection to the performance?” And I realized, “Oh, my God, like, what they really care about is the performance of the factory,” and then we have to find a way to connect the DEI proposition to the performance of the company.

And when we started to kind of figure how diversity, equity, and inclusion will help the performance of the company, every boardroom eye was curious, eager, willing, because it connected with them, and there was a direct correlation. We just needed to surface that and anchor the story in that.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think I’ve learned that lesson a few times in terms of, “No, this is what you should care about. This is what is right and good and proper.” Like, that really falls flat, it’s like, “Okay, well, now I feel judged and I guess I don’t, so I am bad,” and I’m thinking about another manufacturing situation.

I was once doing a Myers-Briggs training for some executives. I was very excited because, like, we had these executives. There was their big meeting where they had flown in from multiple continents, and I was a part of it, like, “Oh, wow, I feel like I’m big-time now,” kind of early on when I was independent in my career.

And they had this situation, they manufactured like sausage casings. And, apparently, one of their major production facilities was having a real big problem at the moment, where there were sausages exploding left and right, which I thought was sort of a funny thing to imagine, “Oh, another exploding hotdog!” you know.

And so, they were all kind of consumed with this mentally, and I was like, “You know, isn’t that kind of a manufacturing issue. You should just kind of let them handle it. This is, like, your big executive meeting. This seems weird. And I feel inconvenienced because I’ve trucked it out here and I’m ready. I’m fired up and ready to go.”

And I thought it was so brilliant the way their VP of Human Resources reframed it for me, she says, “You know, this stuff here that we’re doing is important, and I really want to make sure that the whole team has all of their attention and focus on this, as opposed to this manufacturing issue. So, it’d be great if you could come back in two hours and then we’ll have it as sorted as it can be, and we’ll be able to give you all of our attention.”

I thought, “This woman is a master, because I’m annoyed, I’m frustrated, I don’t like rescheduling the thing. I’m fired up, energized, perfectly caffeinated, raring to go.” But then she turned it around to the thing that I cared about was having a productive, engaged, transformational session, and, “How, in fact, if you just do this thing that we want, then you’ll get that.”

And I heard a quote, which I love, which it said, “Diplomacy is the art of letting other people have it your way.” And I was like, “Okay, yeah, she just did that to me.” And we had a great session and the sausage factory, I guess, got sorted out, all is well. And so, you nailed it. Like, if you are making a super airtight logical case about a thing they don’t care about, you’re not going to get very far.

Anjali Sharma
And the tricky part is to really figure out “What do they care about?” Because, in your head you can think, “Oh, of course, everybody should care about DEI and climate change, and it affects our planet.” Yeah, sure, everybody should, but tomorrow morning when they get a call from their boss, nobody’s going to ask them about the diversity level. They’re going to ask about, “Where are we sitting in terms of performance?”

Like, even with the whole ESG bit, I have to be very honest. Every time I work on a narrative, and we come to the S part, which is the social impact part, the reason why the teams are really motivated is when they recognize that they’re not going to get investors if they don’t work on this. So, in some ways, it is an institutionalized forced change. So, how good it is that we have to think about diversity under social impact of ESG, the S part, because now, if we don’t have a good ESG report, we’re not going to get investors?

So, it’s like, there’s this term I heard many years ago, intrusion of inclusion, like you really make sure that it happens by systematically creating things that are institutionalized. You cannot escape those. So, I think more and more that I do this work, the more and more I realize that, yes, we all want to be good, but what we’re worried about is just getting through today. And if we want to get through today, in the way the ecosystem is built, then we have to really find the right framing and the right positioning and the right target of the story, or else it would fall on deaf ears.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so understood. And so, we have a huge distinction about “Are we trying to inspire or influence?” And we got to really get after a thing that they care about. So, can you walk us through sort of step-by-step or what are the key actions or processes we go through in order to do just that?

Anjali Sharma
Yeah, so I’ll pick it up from before. So, you sort of think influence, inspire, you think, “Okay, I need a story that I can anchor on time, image, money, or I need a story that can actually invite them to being, have a nudge to the new identity.” Now, here’s one thing I want people to remember is that, for a very long time, what we have understood for storytelling to be is either a marketer’s take, or a very big sort of stage sort of style of storytelling.

But when you are standing in the boardroom, the kind of storytelling that works in corporation has to have a little bit of a journalistic take into it. So, my invitation to all people who work within, who are actually trying to use stories in day-to-day work is to have a slightly journalistic take of storytelling. Now let me elaborate this for you, and then I will demonstrate for you.

So, what do journalists do? They go into the ground, they find the stories, and then they bring them out, and then they tell you, and then they make a point, or whatever is happening, they bring that out into the open, they bring it out to the surface. Now, a lot of people will try to find stories on the internet, from TED Talks, and try to tell all these really big types of stories which will never work.

Journalistic storytelling requires for you to actually get your hands dirty, go in, into the grounds, the coalface, and actually find stories that can actually help you make a point that you want to make, or sometimes they even change the point you want to make. You think that’s the point you want to make, and when you start having those conversations with people on the ground, you realize, “Oh, my God, what I thought was all along wrong.”

So, here’s an example of a journalistic story. So, once I’ve said that my audience are inspirational, so I will say, “You are the workers in this factory that are going to become a smart factory. I invite you to become the supervisors of robots.” Now at this stage, they’ll be like, “Hmm,” so it’s relevant for them, but it’s not yet resonant for them. It’s, “Okay, here’s something for me. You’ve opened with that positioning. I like it, but tell me more.” It’s not going to stop at that. A nudge to the new identity is the beginning of it.

Then, when you tell the story, here’s the story I found from the ground, and I built it for a CEO president, and he told: “Now, what do I mean by being supervisors of robots? Now, many of you in the audience today actually work within the factory, helping with taking things from one end of the factory to the other end of the factory.”

“Let’s take Maria, for example. Maria has been with our company for about eight years now, and Maria is in the audience. And when she joined us eight years ago, her job was to take a trolley, put in the semiconductor chips, and move them from one area to the other area.”

“Now, this may sound simple, but we all know this is a highly sensitive product, and it has to be done very, very carefully. So, it takes time and she moves the products carefully to the other side and downloads them for whatever other activity that needs to be done with them before they’re ready.”

“Now when she joined us eight years ago, she would on an average do eight rounds in an eight-hour shift. She’d go from here to there, here to there about eight rounds or so. Now, today, it’s the same Maria, it’s the same factory, but she’s having to do many more ups and downs, close to 24 ups and downs in a day. That’s three times more. Why is that? Because the demand for semiconductor chips has increased.”

“Semiconductor chips are everywhere. In our passports, there’s a semiconductor chip. When there is a finger scan somewhere, there’s a semiconductor chip everywhere. They’re everywhere. So, the demand increases, our workload increases.”

“Our workload increases, we are not allowed to have a bigger factory, we are not allowed to hire more people. Within the same factory size, within the same number of people, Maria is now being asked to do a lot more. And this trend of more and more and more and more will not stop. So, what are we going to do? What we are going to do is we are going to tell Maria to stop doing this work of picking up products from one end and moving them to the other end.”

“Instead, we’re going to get an AGV vehicle, which is like a robot, to do that, and Maria’s job is going to be the supervisor of that vehicle and make sure that it is rostered, it’s charged, it does the work that it does.” Now, this is a journalistic style of storytelling, because I’ve gone and found it on the ground, and when people are listening to the story, they’re going, “Yeah, exactly. That happens to me all the time. I have to move things so many more number of times. Like, I’m a human. How much more can I do?”

It reminds them of their own experience, so the resonance starts to happen here. The positioning and the anchoring of supervisor of robots brings relevance. It does not bring resonance. It’s when the combination of relevance and resonance happens, influence takes place. So, what is journalistic about it? Journalistic is that I didn’t get that story by just sitting in the boardroom and having a conversation. I got the story because I went on the ground, I chatted to people, “Talk to me about your day-to-day work.”

I can’t even tell these people, “Tell me a story,” because if you ask people, “Tell me a story,” then people think that I’m asking them to be Clint Eastwood. So, you have to have a very specific style of getting moments out of them and then be able to sense-make and put them into a structured way and give people who work in these organizations, who need to inspire or influence people, a language which will move people into the right direction.

Now, this is not a story which will make people go, “Wow, what a story!” What this would definitely do, it’ll remind many of those people who are sitting in the audience going, “That’s exactly what happens to me. That is so true.” That is so true doesn’t mean it’s factual. What it means is, “It resonates with me.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And I like that journalistic frame, because that helps a lot with regard to, we’re not trying to blow minds, necessarily, by making like a James Cameron epic film situation, so it’s not the Hollywood style, nor is it are we trying to be sort of the great American novel style but we’re being journalistic. And just the same way that we have a fascinating, riveting, impactful sort of news article or documentary, that’s kind of what we’re going for here with regard to our actions, our discovery, our presentation.

And we can feel great about the success if they are nudged toward that identity, as opposed to they are telling everybody they have to check out your YouTube channel.

So that’s a great lens, the journalistic lens. Tell us, do you have any top do’s or don’ts in terms of executing this in practice?

Anjali Sharma
I think the first thing is that, whenever you stand in front of your audience and you start speaking, you have to have earned the right to be there. This is not, “I’ll get GPT to come up with something for me.” I mean, of course, you can take GPT’s help to refine it, but the moment I start speaking about Maria’s story, straight away, the audience know that I have done the due diligence of going to them, at the coalface, chatting to people, and finding out what’s going on.

So, I always say to people that, “Don’t sit in the boardroom and just don’t chat there. Don’t think you know what it is. Get down, and talk to people and figure out.” I think that’s the first thing.

The second thing I would say to you is that please relieve yourself from the pressure of trying to come across as an amazing storyteller, because people are not interested. In fact, if you get told that you’re an amazing storyteller, then that’s the wrong outcome of your communication. What you have to be able to hear from people is, “You made a very relevant point. I’m going to do what you said. I think that makes a lot of sense.”

Moving people in the right direction to take an action is a better judge of how effective you were versus the claps that you get and versus how you get. If you get complimented on your being an amazing storyteller, that means the focus was you and your flamboyancy, not the point you made. So, if someone says to you, “What an amazing storyteller you were,” like, “Thank you. What did you get out of that? Like, do you think you’re going to take the action I was asking for?” Figure that out. So don’t feel that pressure.

And I think the third thing I would say to you is. When looking for a story, yes, you have to be journalistic, but also remember the kind of story that works in a corporate space is a story that happens all the time. In other words, a high-frequency story, not a low-frequency story. So, a pilot lands a plane in the Hudson River has happened. But if I told that story in a corporate boardroom, then people would be like, “That’s great. Never going to happen to me.”

But if I told a story about us not using a tool that we have to update our learning and development plan, and then not getting the promotion that we wanted because, on the dashboard, it didn’t seem like you were updating that so people didn’t know you’ve done all these things, all these courses and workshops etc., then a lot of people will go, “Oh, my God, that happens to me all the time.” So, high-frequency.

The founder of Google said this, “If you can find a problem that people face multiple times a day, you have a billion-dollar business.” Now when you take that saying and put it into the world of storytelling, if you can find a story, the problem that you talk about in that story, people experience many times, you  have a story that will resonate a lot.

So, resonance is more important than remarkability of a story. So, don’t pressurize yourself at trying to find a story that is amazing because, most likely, that will get you claps but will not get you the action. So, look for a story that happens all the time. So, I think those three are probably practical ones to follow.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really doing the trick. And you’ve finally put to words why I get a little bit skeptical and I don’t tend to dig presentations or stories that lean a lot on legends of business, like, “Here’s what they do at Amazon and at Disney and Netflix. And Steve Jobs said and did this.” It’s like, “Yeah, okay. Sure, these people are genius, high performers, and they did a cool thing, and maybe there are some things we can learn from that. But it doesn’t resonate with me much,” and I think it’s for these exact reasons.

One, they haven’t journalistically done the work to see, “What are we actually struggling with here?” And secondly, they’re low frequency matters, like, “Yes, introducing the iPhone was really cool. That was a historic technological moment, and that happened, and now it doesn’t happen that often.”

Anjali Sharma
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So, I think it’s just, you know, resonance only happens with things that happen all the time, because those are our daily experiences, things that kind of resonate with us. Yeah, I mean, like, we love Steve Jobs, and we love his ability to orate, but, you know, it’s available, but it’s not accessible. His style is available for us to view, but it’s not accessible for us, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, totally, “Just be like Steve Jobs, guys. That’s all it takes. Come on!”

Anjali Sharma
“What’s wrong with you?” Yeah, so that’s the hyper-target-ness. So, everything we’ve spoken about is about that really, that hyper-target-ness of a story, really looking at it from that lens of critically thinking it through and really trying to understand that it’s so easy to become a victim to this big style storytelling, “When I was born or when I started my career, oh, my gosh, you know, it’s like…” nobody really cares about that. Only your mom is really interested in listening to what happened to you, but we don’t really care about that.

Pete Mockaitis
Right on. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Anjali Sharma
I can never say the full thing because it’s really long, but I’ll tell you which one it is, and you’ll be able to find it very easily. I think there’s this quote, where it sort of says, “When you lose the grip, you slip into a masterpiece,” which I really, really like. But the reason why I love that quote so much is because, after working in this space for more than a decade, my style in the beginning of working was very systematic, it was very structured, and it was very effort-filled. And then came a point somewhere, three, four years ago, where that system, that structure was like that intentional approach was so embedded in me that if I sort of knew the direction.

I could kind of maneuver within that, but that’s the only part. To become effortless, you have to put in the effort first. And telling someone who’s just, like, a couple of years into a certain domain, a specific domain, to just lose that grip is not the right thing.

But I think there comes a point where you start experiencing the magic of all that is in your subconscious, all that is embedded. So, I think that’s one of my favorite quotes, to put in so much effort into what you do, that it becomes so effortless. 

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Anjali Sharma
So, if you are interested in storytelling, learning how to be better at it in a corporate space, the thing that helped me gain mastery in that, more than reading, writing was actually the fact that a system, a system for success that actually forced me to do the necessary work in this space.

If you want to gain mastery, then make a decision on what are you going to not just do, which is within you, but how are you going to put yourself out in the world in that domain. When you do that, you actually start becoming really, really good at it, whether it’s a video, whether it’s a blog every week, whether it’s a little thing you’ll come up with. If mastery in this domain is your aspiration, then a promise to the world that I will show up in this manner every week is what you need to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. Anjali, this is wonderful. I wish you many beautiful stories.

Anjali Sharma
Thank you for having me and having this wonderful conversation. I really enjoyed how quickly you grasped everything I talked about, distilled it, and repeated it back to me, which was really nice.

Pete Mockaitis
Rob, welcome!

Robert Fersh
Thanks, Pete. Nice to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into some of your goodness here. And I’d love it if you could start us with a juicy, dramatic story of a super difficult conflict that you mediated and how you ended up resolving things.

Robert Fersh
Well, thanks, Pete. There’s a lot of stories to tell, but maybe the most dramatic is the one that opens the book that Mariah Levison and I have written called From Conflict to Convergence. And it was really my maiden voyage in trying to be a bridge-builder on big national policy issues. So, I had an idea back in the early 2000s that if we could only bring together all of the people’s disagreements that stood in the way of extending coverage to millions of Americans that didn’t have it, that there’d be an opportunity to potentially create a breakthrough, because at that time, 40 to 50 million Americans were estimated to be without healthcare coverage at any point in time.

And also, this was just a few years after, in the Clinton administration, an attempt to reform healthcare led by Hillary Clinton, failed miserably and divided the entire healthcare field, and people opposing and supporting their ideas. So, we actually pulled together, all the leading stakeholders on healthcare. And they agreed, left to right, that people ought to have healthcare coverage. The disagreement was how to do it.

So, we brought together the hospitals, the insurers, the pharmaceutical companies, consumer groups, unions, you name it, people who are all influential stakeholders in healthcare policy in this country, and we attempted to break this decades-old gridlock on how to cover the uninsured.

Well, this group met 12 times over two years in an attempt to try to break the gridlock on how to cover the uninsured. And, eventually, they came up with a series of ideas that formed the basis for expanding coverage to people in the United States based upon shared values. We had the Heritage Foundation, a very conservative foundation was at the table, US Chamber of Commerce, various unions and liberal advocacy groups and so on, but they all came together to design what became the architecture of efforts to improve healthcare coverage in the country.

And I think my favorite story out of that is, as I said in the book, there was a representative of the American Medical Association at the table by the name of Carla Willis, who was their chief economist, and she’d been very outspoken in early meetings trying to forward the ideas the American Medical Association had developed.

But I noticed, over this two-year period, Carla had gotten quieter and quieter. And, finally, at the 11th meeting of this group, where they actually looked like, that day, they would seal the deal on the design of how to cover the uninsured in a way that bridged the divides across the left and right, Carla came up to me at a lunch break and said to me, “Rob, you have ruined my life.” But she said it with a smile, and I responded in kind, and said something like, “I hear that all the time. How, in particular, have I ruined yours? I do have four kids after all.”

And she said, “I’ve been sitting here for the last two years. The AMA and I had come up with very thoughtful proposals. I thought I understood all the issues and all the different approaches and our ideas were best. Now I’ve been sitting here for two years seeing all these intelligent, well-meaning thoughtful people say things I never thought of, and I can’t see the world the same way.”

And in a sense, she was saying, even though the final proposals included some AMA ideas, she epitomized what we’re trying to do in this work, which is to have people who have disagreements on how to solve problems expand their worldviews, not relinquish their principles, but begin to see ways to have their underlying interests met in a way that might be different than what they’ve, you know, were positioning themselves to support, but in a way that did not sacrifice the principles and the values they had.

So, that was a pretty dramatic opening act for me as a bridge-builder to help pave the way for multiple pieces of legislation that expanded healthcare coverage in this country.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow! Well, that sounds amazing to hear anyone say that. That’s about as much as you can hope for, I suppose, when you’re doing this kind of work. So, that’s powerful. And can you share, what do you think were some of the core principles that made that possible?

Robert Fersh
Thanks for that. The essence of the work, and it’s interesting. Well, one of the participants at that table came from the Heritage Foundation. His name is Stuart Butler, very much someone who wanted private solutions, not so much government solutions. But having been born in Great Britain, he also believed in universal healthcare, so he was an interesting person to have in the room.

And here’s what Stuart would say, he said, “Look, I’ve been battling people for years on healthcare. And what was different about this process is that although we thought we knew each other, we really didn’t know each other. So, this process, which allowed us to understand the values, concerns, and interests of people underneath all the different positions they take, to allow people to go deep and to understand how they came to believe what they believed, and to feel a sense of shared mission, which they did have to solve problems was really important.”

So, some of the key elements of this process are to, A) at least have a shared vision, and there was that, and this group said, “We’re going to cover as many as possible.” That was agreed upon. No one said it has to be single-payer like Canada or Great Britain. No one said it had to be every last person but as many people as quickly as possible. The second piece was to build relationships across people so they understood each other deeply. And with that comes trust. Trust that the intentions of other people are things you can work with.

In most cases, people want the same things, disagree on how to get there. And that process actually demonstrated that building relationships with trusts could break through decades-old disputes some people in the room had with others. And many areas of common ground that were significant, even though disagreements remained, and, in fact, some of the ideas that eventually became law were not necessarily fully included in our consensus.

But what we did was to move the ball forward to get people much closer to the point where they were very near agreement on how to cover the uninsured in this country. And in fact, what we did design was what people call the architecture of what became the Affordable Care Act, even though the Affordable Care Act went a little further than what our group recommended.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, that does sound novel, as opposed to how do we normally go at it when we have different viewpoints on a matter.

Robert Fersh
Yeah. So, what’s normally done, and I was part of this in the Washington culture, is that people who disagree get invited to all sorts of webinars and seminars, and people set them up for debate, and then everybody unloads about what they believe, and they may be polite or they may be impolite, and people then summarize what the disagreement was. But it’s pretty rare that people take the time to go underneath that to understand what drives people, what life experiences led them to believe the things they did, and to understand what their underlying interests were.

And this is an idea that Bill Ury and Roger Fisher and others, Bruce Patton, in Getting to Yes, distinguished a long time ago, which is the difference between positions and interests. Positions tend to be hard and fast ways that people want to solve a particular problem, but underneath that are your interests, your needs. And what we’ve done is, I think, allowed people to have a conversation which almost never starts about debating positions about how to solve a problem and getting underneath it all.

“What are your values? What are your interests? What are your concerns?” And when you begin to identify them, and there’s usually any number of pathways that can satisfy interests, and our goal, different than many other political battles or other discussions that go on, was to try to meet the widest range of interests, create the so-called win-win solutions for people.

Again, not necessarily requiring everyone to agree on everything, but to find wide swaths of agreement that have people leaving whole, feeling their needs are being met, and to understand that just for their needs to be met, other people do not necessarily have to lose, that you can set up situations where multiple people and multiple groups’ needs can be met. So, that is what distinguishes our approach from a lot of the normal give-and-take, and Washington, and the State houses and other places around the country.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s see, the United States health insurance coverage is among the most complicated things on the earth today. So, perhaps, could you give us a nice illustrative example of this positions versus interests, and going deep to unearth them, in perhaps a simple example that we can all understand, like, “Oh, okay, that’s a position, that’s an interest, and I can see how you’ve crafted a thing that’s meeting people that have almost the opposite, it seems, positions, are getting a win-win in terms of their interests being fulfilled”?

Robert Fersh
We have an issue in the United States, which is called long-term care, which is the non-healthcare-related services that you provide to elderly and disabled people who cannot take care of themselves. And we do have a crisis in that many people only rely on family members to take care of them, can’t necessarily afford coverage.

So, we were approached by a group of leaders in that field to convene a group. And the position of some people was that, “It’s got to be a private sector response. It’s got to be insurance. And that’s how we’re going to get home. Let’s keep the government out of it.” And then there were people who said, “You know what, long-term care is a terrible issue. It’s bankrupting families. The needs aren’t being met. Let’s move to some massive new government program, a la Social Security, tax everybody, create a huge program on how to cover people who face this crisis. It’s not everybody, it’s not even a majority of the public.”

And so, you had two very opposing points of view. One was market-based solutions only, and one was government-based solutions only. So, their positions were, “Yeah, for some people, let’s set up a new Social Security type of insurance for the entire country.” And the other people said, “No, let’s just tweak the private insurance system.” And so, we were at loggerheads for a while, and then we took a break, and other groups working on this, and helped design a study that Milliman, an actuarial group, and the Urban Institute did together.

And the study showed that private insurance is never going to make it happen all the way, and that there were some issues with going public all the way. And eventually these groups found a way to combine a mixture of public and private approaches to allow people to get long-term care coverage as they needed. These ideas are still panning in Congress, they haven’t yet moved forward, but there’s a lot of attention to it.

But underneath it all, people found, based upon studies and information they had, that each of their own solutions weren’t sufficient. And it set the stage to find compromises to take the best from private insurance to try to make that stronger, and to also have the government help take care of the catastrophic costs that make the private insurers more viable and also to provide coverage to people through the public as necessary.

So, I hope that was close enough to home to make the case for the distinction between positions and interests.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And so, there it seems like you had some progress because you had some independent research, which said, “Hey, see how neither one of you are really going to get where you want to go by doing just your position.” So that’s handy. Although, I imagine it takes a little bit of prep work in order to get folks’ hearts and minds to even be receptive to facts or research or data of any kind that is unfavorable to themselves. So, how’d you get there?

Robert Fersh
Well, this was a number of years ago before I think the loss of confidence in institutions and the debate about what’s facts and what’s alternative facts was as ripe as it is now. I think we honestly got there because people realized, in this particular debate, they were missing information. How effective, and with modeling, and again, by lining up two groups, one that leaned left and one that leaned right, to do the research that was trusted by people of all sides?

There was a sense that they wouldn’t be able to go further until they had more information. That’s not true in all the work we do. Some cases, people feel they have enough information and have enough agreement on facts that they can go forward even if they don’t agree on all the facts. So, in this case, I think people just felt frustrated that they needed more information. They got curious and they helped themselves design the study so that their various needs could be met and the questions they wanted answered could be met.

So that’s an unusual intervention but it’s also an important one, given what we have today, which is a lot of disagreement on facts, a lot of people feeling that the other side isn’t as honest or as forthcoming as they should be. So, to the extent groups that are coming together to solve problems can agree upon trusted sources or help put together facts that they can all rely upon, that’s an important step toward progress and agreement in any particular process.

Pete Mockaitis
And if your counterparts are not feeling curious and rather sort of dug in and solidified, or you yourself are not feeling curious, you’re solidified, dug in, what are some of your perspectives on how to stir up that helpful curiosity?

Robert Fersh
Well, I would say a lot of people enter our rooms where they’re sort of, maybe shoulders are hunched, their arms are crossed, they’re defensive. Many enter our room not in a collaborative frame of mind. To be honest, some come for defensive purposes. We did a huge project on K-12 Education, where we had the current president of the National Education Association, she was vice president then, and a woman on the West Coast who ran a conservative foundation, who was known as a critic of teachers’ unions and a supporter of more computers in the schools, which some people thought would take some teaching jobs away. And especially she was an advocate for school choice.

And the woman on the West Coast, who was a conservative, basically said she came to the table not thinking much would happen. She’s a woman of action, didn’t believe in gabfests, as she kind of called them, and too much talk and not enough action. But when she got in the room and began to hear people as human beings and create relationships that weren’t just about debating the issues, breaking bread with people, hearing their life stories, I think it opens your hearts to understanding other people.

So, part of the way I think to foment curiosity, if you will, is to have people feel a connection to each other and to take an interest in each other. Beyond that, I think the process itself works that way. If you bring together people who can interact in goodwill, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t get tense, it doesn’t mean there aren’t fierce debates at times, but who begin to see that they share values and they share goals, which is how we start out, and oftentimes they develop some principles by which to guide it, then people have a greater propensity to get curious because they’ve come to the table because they agree there is a problem that needs to be solved.

And once they begin to also open their hearts, the way Carla did in healthcare, to see that they didn’t have all the answers, that no one perspective or no one individual has all the wisdom, and they get that, and that happens almost automatically, when people are in the room and there’s skillful facilitation of conversation across differences, usually, it tickles something inside of them to want to learn more, not just to oppose blindly.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Rob, could you perhaps walk us through maybe a step-by-step, in terms of, okay, we got two folks, they have wildly different positions on a matter, and we want to have some of those delightful breakthroughs, transformations, feel goods that you’re describing on the other side? It seems like we’ve got a couple principles to work with, with regard to shared vision, shared values, as well as coming to some personal connection pieces and understanding the human and the what’s underlying stuff. But could you share with us, maybe, as much as it’s possible, a generalized framework or step-by-step, “When you got conflicting positions and want to find some convergence, here’s step one, step two, step three”?

Robert Fersh
I mean, the first step is to clarify, “Is there a shared goal to begin with?” It’s very hard to have people work together if they don’t have a shared goal. But the fact that they share a goal, even if they disagree on how to get there, is a very important starting point for people to come to the table.

So, at least, and even that, Pete, begins to build a little bit of trust that you’re not at odds with someone about how the world should look. You just disagree on how to get there. So, having a shared vision, a shared goal is a very important first step for people who seem to be in disagreement.

After that, as we’ve talked about, having them get to know each other a bit, having them understand each other’s values, their own life stories, what led them to believe what they believe is really important, and beginning to assemble some basic guidelines or principles by which they could potentially agree on, even though they continue to disagree.

So, we had a project on economic opportunity and mobility where we had the Chamber of Commerce and we had unions at the table. But they developed a principle that said, basically, if you work full time, you should have a life of dignity, and basically not live in poverty.

Robert Fersh
And yet, underneath that, there was disagreement because people on the left, in particular, wanted more higher minimum wages, in fact, a big national minimum wage, and the Chamber and other business leaders said, “No, that doesn’t work for us. Too many regional variations. Too much difference.” But they also signed on to the principle that if you work, you shouldn’t be living in poverty or should at least be living in dignity.

And that meant that they also, if they weren’t going to do that solely through putting the costs on the employer, that they would be open to governmental changes, including things like the Earned Income Tax Credit or the Child Care Tax Credit, other things, because to adhere to that principle, they needed to do something besides just saying no to the minimum wage, and so there was some movement there.

So, to review now, have a shared goal, begin to build relationships of trust, begin to understand each other’s underlying values, and then engage in a conversation where you begin to go deep on the issues themselves, and ask people to keep a mindset of curiosity, ask them to keep a mindset of giving others the benefit of the doubt, develop a mindset where, in some ways, you internalize that.

Even as smart as you may be, or as well-informed as you may be, just develop a little humility that you may not know everything, and you begin to engage people in respectful conversation about different ideas that help meet the goals and the principles you’ve already established. And our experience is that, when this is well done, people can then push each other’s thinking to a higher level. As William Ury said to you in his podcast, he said, “We don’t have enough conflict.”

And I don’t know if I agree with that fully, but my point is that conflict can push thinking to a higher level, and bringing out better solutions than any one party had to begin with, and that’s our experience. So, that’s the basic process to try to promote relationship, promote trust, promote curiosity, engage in respectful dialogue where you don’t ever attack the person or their motives.

You have ground rules by which you observe confidentiality. You allow people to make mistakes knowing it’s not going to go out of the room. And you try to listen in a way that really leads to constructive results and the full expression of different points of view as people push each other’s thinking to a higher level and become attuned to understanding how they might meet each other’s needs.

There’s an acronym in our book called OPTIONS, I never quite get it right. But it’s really “only proposals that meet others’ needs succeed” is the thrust of it. And when the whole group, whether it’s two people or other people, become committed to not only meeting their own needs, but seeing that their needs can be met and others’ needs can be met, you have an opportunity not only to solve problems better, but to create relationships that radiate over time constructively.

People leave our processes often working together better for years to come because they now see each other and understand each other at another level.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fantastic. And when it comes to the understanding of individuals at a deeper level, with regard to, “Why did you believe…?” or, “How did you come to believe that thing?” and understand who they are as people, are there any super powerful questions or exercises or activities that you engage in that helps unlock some of this interpersonal magic?

Robert Fersh
There are sort of two key questions you can ask when someone else is talking is, basically, “Did I get that right?” and, “What am I missing?” So, you can internalize that. Using curiosity is a hugely important tool. And as I often kid, curiosity is not well expressed when you say to somebody, “I’m curious, how the heck could you ever come up with that point of view to solve the problem?”

But if you can ask authentically curious questions of another person to learn, not to debate, to hear them out. You can always debate. You can always walk away later. You can always disagree vehemently. But if you can develop enough personal relationship, where it’s sort of natural, you get curious. Often people develop bonds of affection in the room, even though they used to be sworn enemies. Some of them go to ball games together or call each other up when they want to make sure they’re not just hearing from their own side in a way that blindly misses the other points.

So, this is the practice of curiosity in a skillful way, where people begin to see that they can, despite they’re maybe being upset about what they’re hearing, go to another gear, go to what Bill Ury calls the balcony to kind of look at this more dispassionately, and not to get triggered by what the other person says, but committed to wanting to learn something. So, that’s a very important skillset for people.

Pete Mockaitis
So, a poor question is, and that’s not real curiosity, is, “How the heck did you come up with such a stupid point of view?” Could you give us some illustrations of what a few good, quality, authentic, useful, genuine, curious questions look, sound and feel like in their verbiage?

Robert Fersh
It would be something like, you know, someone says, “I think the only way to provide healthcare coverage is to go Canada as its single payer, and everybody’s covered, and the costs are down, and so on.” And you could respond from the hip saying, “You know, that’s not an American way. It’s going to stifle innovation. It’s going to give the government bureaucracies too much,” you know, you could go after them that way.

But you could simply say, “Okay. What has been your experience with that particular approach? And why is it that you favor that? And is it something related to your own personal experience? Or is it more a philosophical point of view? Please, I’m very curious about how you came to that set of beliefs and why you believe that.”

And if you just ask that authentically, you’ll learn something. You may still disagree with it totally, but you won’t simply just go into a pitch battle of government, not government, private sector, not public sector, whatever. You begin to get into what we call complexifying an issue, and that’s really important to begin to disrupt a little bit the sort of tightly held views people have.

Again, not asking them to compromise their values or their principles in any way, but to see the issues a little more complex once they fully understand how reasonable people could take that view. And that’s kind of how, because I’ve done this work the last 25 years or so, I go through life now. Whenever I read an article that I either immediately disagree with or agree with, my first thought is, “Let me read something that’s the opposing side there. I’m sure there are reasonable people who disagree. I’m sure this isn’t the full answer.”

And if you can internalize that, at any given moment no one has the full answer and there’s always something to be learned, then that’s an important move forward in your mindset to be a collaborative problem solver.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that notion a lot, the complexifying, because I think the human brain tends to like and prefer simple. We tend to like clear-cut, black and white, “But, of course, this is how it is.” And yet, if, in fact, reasonable people do have a differing point of view, then there is naturally going to be some complexity there.

And if it feels simple in your brain, then perhaps it is indeed the case that you are missing something and there is some complexification that is necessary for you to enter into in order to get to that place of understanding, “Oh, okay, so that’s why you think that.”

Robert Fersh
So, Pete, that’s exactly right, but let me also, for your listeners, because I think these ideas apply to businesses and nonprofits and philanthropies, and certainly on the academic campuses, widely. But I also want to make clear there, and this approach we move forward, doesn’t mean you necessarily talk to everyone about everything all the time. Sometimes there is not time for leaders to make decisions by consensus. You can have so-called death by consensus, drive itself nuts.

And there also are people in groups who are so ideological, so wed to certain ideas, or may have some views that are so extreme, whether that be on race or other things, that they cannot necessarily come to the table, cannot open their heart. And you got to that a little bit to begin with. So, that’s where you have to have a shared goal. If you don’t have a shared goal, like I used to say, not that I would ever have been called upon.

I wouldn’t have suggested that Martin Luther King sit down with the then, you know, I think he was the sheriff or that law enforcement officer, Bull Connor, in the South. If what King wanted was integration and economic opportunity, and he was facing a segregationist and there was just no room, then you can’t necessarily pull people together when people are so extreme or so convinced they have the full truth.

On the other hand, I would also say to you, that really tough issues, when you know there can’t be agreement, you can still use these processes to form relationships of trust and do some things that are just adjacent to the disagreement. So, I have good friends who worked on the issue of abortion. And one friend had convened a bunch of people who are anti-abortion and pro-choice, and it was understood to begin with that, on the fundamental issue of when a woman would have a right to choose, there would be no agreement.

It was a position of deep religious belief on one side, in particular, but also a deep principle-belief on the other. But these people were convened at a time when bombings were going on in abortion clinics and people were dying and tensions were running high. And the idea was to understand each other. And in the case of my colleague, Mary Jacksteit, as I understand it, she brought together these people on the auspices of Search for Common Ground.

They began to understand each other. They began to understand that principled people could stand on either side, and that, at least at a minimum, they stopped demonizing each other as inhuman or not in touch with the fundamental needs of others. And then, in some cases, they actually found they could work together on things they shared, like teenage pregnancy prevention, and better foster care and adoption systems should be brought to terms.

So, even though they didn’t reach agreement on the fundamental issue of abortion per se, they were able to develop respect for each other, and live more civilly with each other, and not live as if they’re at war with each other, and then define areas they could work on together, which they thought were socially positive. So, I think that contributes to a more civil and effective society, where we can bridge those divides, even if it’s not solving the entire underlying problem.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. That’s a cool example in terms of, perhaps, indeed, the foundational viewpoints may be irreconcilable, like, “This is a human being in the womb,” or, “It is not.” It’s like, “Okay, well, I don’t know what we can do with that when we have the opposite views. But maybe there are some other shared goals that we can rally around,” and away you go.

Robert Fersh
So, we talked earlier about values and shared goals and listening and trust, but beyond that, when we do our work, we urge people to do their homework. And that’s true if you’re in a business or otherwise. Make sure you understand who the key players are, who you need to include, and get the best possible answers. And we’re all for inclusiveness of all the voices that are important, not just influentials and experts, but people with lived experience.

So, mapping, what we call mapping the terrain, understanding who believes what to begin with is really important, and doing your homework to understand who you need to convene. Then comes what I’ve already said, nurturing trust in the room, and we do that through a series of exercises. Never start by debating people’s positions, but to understand each other.

And then it’s really important that everybody be heard and really deeply and listen to respectfully. And that’s what we reinforce that by what some of us call ground rules where you don’t go after people’s motives, and you give people equal time or as much time as they need to be heard and so on. And then with skillful help often, but this can be done within organizations, you ask people to begin to generate what we call options for mutual gain. And that’s really an important part of the process. Yes, continue to forward things that are in your interest.

I’ll tell you one quick story, which may surprise people, when I did my maiden voyage on healthcare in 2000, really, 2003 to 2006. We had an executive from a major pharmaceutical company, and there were people in the room very skeptical of pharmaceutical companies, writ large. But this gentleman, who was one of the top officials of this pharmaceutical company, earned the trust of everybody in the room by making, I believe at the opening, making a statement that says, “My company has a huge interest on how we cover the uninsured. I know there’s 40 or 50 million people in the country without insurance.”

“But let me just say on behalf of my company, let’s have a conversation about the best way to cover people. And let me worry about later, what that does to the financial underpinnings of my company. But I really want to have a conversation in which we’re part of a community trying to solve the problem in a way that does the most good for the most people. And if we need to fight it a little bit or demur or we need to tweak it, let’s come to that later.”

But he set a tone there, and this, I think, is a sign of great leadership that said, “I’m open. I’m not going to be defensive. I want to listen. I want to learn. And, hopefully, we’ll come out with solutions that work for everybody.”

Pete Mockaitis
I like that principle a lot in terms of the deferring, it’s like, “Yeah, you all know I work for a pharmaceutical company, and we’re going to have to go ahead and maximize profits for them shareholders. That’s sort of what we do, but we’ll figure that out later. For now, let’s see what the theoretical ideal is that we can all sort of move toward.”

And, yeah, you know, you may, afterwards, need to do some negotiations, some give and take, some horse trading, whatever, to make that workable for all of the parties. But to start with an initial goodwill commitment to get somewhere, and then finetune later, I think, can be very helpful in many contexts.

Robert Fersh
Yeah, and again it’s, in this case, I think, in light leadership by this individual, who seemed to be a very wise man. Let me tell you just another story. The first project, pretty much, I ever did at Convergence, was on nutrition and obesity. And it was interesting because we had difficulty assembling a table. We got a table of public health and consumer groups and some major food companies.

And about a week before the first meeting, which was pretty highly charged because a lot of these people had already been in prior discussions. As one food company executive said to me, “I’ve never been in discussion with the consumer groups where they didn’t walk out in protest against big food.” And he represents a big food company.

So, we assembled this group, and about a week before the first meeting, a leading voice on the consumer side wrote a blog or an op-ed basically saying, “You know, those of us who want to diminish and fight obesity and diabetes in this country, need to stay pure to our principles. Of course, we need to talk to food companies because they’re part of it, but let’s make no mistake. Their interests are,” exactly what you said, Pete, “is to maximize shareholder profits, and so they can never be full partners.”

So, fast forward, so immediately, my inbox filled up with notes from outraged food business people who were coming to the table, saying, “Is this guy really coming to the table? Does he understand how insulting that is that we can’t be part of a solution like we don’t share goals to diminish obesity and diabetes?”

So, we convened people who were very highly charged in the room, and for a while pretty tense. But eventually, as we went around the room, I’m not here to blindly defend all food companies. Some are better than others in terms of their public spiritedness.

But one after another, food company representatives said, “You know what, we do have obligations to shareholders. On the other hand, we’ve got employees. We have family members. We have people who have lost limbs to diabetes and people who have terrible health problems. And we have healthcare costs for our companies that go up because people’s diets aren’t so great. We can’t unilaterally disarm selling our products and just take away all our profits.”

“But if we can make it so that serving healthier foods could be more profitable and marketable, then we would love to join as partners with other people, and we’d also love it if consumer groups would stop attacking us every time that we try to do the right thing. Because whenever we do it, you’re just skeptical and you come after us.”

So, what happened was, over the next 36 hours, there was a remarkable level of frank dialogue about what were the needs and interests of companies, and what were the needs and interests of consumer groups. And, eventually, within a year or two, we did come up with a series of recommendations. But by the end of that meeting, the leading voice for the food industry, representing an umbrella group, said that she had learned a lot, and that she really hoped to be able to work together with the group.

And the fellow who had written that op-ed that had stirred people up said, “You know what, I’m not conceding anything at this point, but this conversation is going to make me think afresh about how to partner with the food industry. And I look forward to doing that.”

So, this is about what it does when you understand and you complexify, and know that, just because someone works in a corporation doesn’t mean they’re evil and selfish. And if someone works in a consumer group, doesn’t mean they don’t care about the thriving of corporations that help make services and goods available to people in this country.

And to the extent we can complexify their views of each other and make them a little less ideological in an honest process, not by lecturing them, but just by learning and experiencing, you open doors for levels of collaboration that normally are not thought possible by a lot of people who think that we are divided everywhere into us and them. And that’s not necessarily true.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Rob, in our last couple of minutes, could you share any top dos or don’ts for folks who are looking to be awesome at their jobs and thinking about some conflict things?

Robert Fersh
Well, I think the top do for me is, no matter where you sit in your job, you can be a collaborative leader, whether you’re the boss or not. You can always be a voice for saying, “You know what, this is a tricky problem. Let’s get everybody who’s got a stake in the outcome in the room, let’s try to listen, let’s try to push for ideas that work for as many people as possible.”

I had the great honor of working with Stephen Covey quite closely for a number of years. He was the author of “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” and probably the greatest promoter of the term win-win, which some people dismiss, I think, too easily.

So, I think, developing a mindset of, “For me to win, others don’t necessarily have to lose, that no one person or group holds all the answers, that there’s always something to be learned. And if I can learn to be curious, then I think there may be ways to get through things that are really important.”

I think the don’ts, are to check your ego at the door. Make sure that you’re as centered as possible, that’s another do. When you’re interacting with other people, take care of yourself, and make sure that you are not as reactive as you might be when you’re meeting people who disagree with you.

So, don’t take the bait. Don’t get reactive. Do be passionate about your views, absolutely. But don’t make the assumption that just because someone disagrees with you, that they’re not a good person, don’t have good values, don’t have important things to say.

Pete Mockaitis
Rob, thank you. This has been enriching, and I wish you much pleasant convergence.

Robert Fersh
Thank you very much, Pete. A great pleasure to be on. If people want to know more about our work, please look at the book, From Conflict to Convergence. And also at Convergence, we’d love to have people involve with us. We are doing problem-solving ourselves, and then we have a whole new learning lab where we are.

And the book is part of that where we’re trying to inspire and equip people to be collaborative problem-solvers. And we have an online training program coming on in the next few months, where I think people who really want to pursue this can, in addition to reading the book, find ways to collaborate more effectively no matter what they’re station in life. So, thank you for this opportunity.