Resourceful Conversations Principle 2: Unpacking

Uncovering facts and stories

We recently published our framing article on Resourceful Conversations – our five principles for curating more useful conversations on the things you are trying to make happen, so you get more creativity and progress, and less tension and conflict.

 Principle 1 was Contracting – the importance of people clearly agreeing why there needs to be a conversation at all, and how they will tackle it.

Here we’re focusing on Principle 2: Unpacking.

The time we do this most is when we take over a new team.  You unpack what’s going on and where people stand – separate the facts from the assumptions, the reality from the stories.  And it takes time and skill.

It should be the same when we’re in our existing team facing a challenging situation.  We should pause to unpack.  But under pressure, it’s too easy to assume we all know what’s needed, to feel the urgency to ‘do something’ and rush around being busy in ways that aren’t always useful.  We all have different, partial perspectives, developed over time, and without unpacking them together, rushing around produces at best wasted fragmented effort, and at worst conflict and frustration.  Emotions often run high. It’s easy to misunderstand, to hark back to previous problems, and unwittingly reopen old sores and tensions.

So, even though we think we’ve just contracted and ‘agreed’, we still need to unpack, and for us that means two things:

• an explicit discussion about what is happening, the facts of the situation, the truth – our truth, as we see it, with questions such as:  Where are we focusing?  What facts do we have?  How do we know – where’s the evidence?  What are the challenges and opportunities?  What stories and assumptions do we hold?  How real are they?
• an explicit discussion about how we feel about the situation, clarifying and voicing our emotions so we admit them to ourselves, and so we can start to move forwards.  Questions include: How do we feel?  What impact has that had?  How long do we want to feel like this?

Most of us don’t do this well simply because:

1. it’s not our experience – rushing around can make us look and feel good, and we don’t always handle differences well
2. we rarely discuss emotions at work, even though we feel and display them all the time.

But if we want to make useful, new things happen, with more creativity and progress, and less tension and conflict, unpacking is a crucial task.  To use an old engineering saying, you can’t fix something you don’t understand. 

In high stakes situations, no-one has the complete picture, the whole story, and you need everyone involved to fix it.  So you need a solid discussion for everyone to create a shared understanding of what’s happening, and what’s at stake. And you need to be comfortable talking about the uncomfortable – the feelings and emotions that are showing up, overtly or covertly.

Without good unpacking, the other four principles just don’t work.  That will become clearer in our next article on Principle 3: Grounding, where we highlight the need to go deeper, and understand what really matters – find the motivation you all have for the road ahead.

Keep your eyes open for it – we’ll link to it in the comments here too.  And as always:

Feel free to experiment and play – it’s how we learn and grow.

Let us know how you get on.

Let us know what questions you have too.

Resourceful Conversations - the spiral model, it's principles and expressions - is a joint enterprise between, and copyright of, Kathryn Pope and Alan Arnett, 2024 onwards.