When It's time to act

In recent weeks Alan Arnett and I have been publishing a series of articles on the principles of Resourceful Conversations.  We’ve had a great response to them, with lots of good comments and reflection on the insights, and some questions for clarification. Many people have asked us “When do you use this?  When do you need resourceful conversations?”.  Good questions.

Our general answer is one we talk about in the articles.  You need these skills whenever you’re working with other people, trying to make something happen; you’re experiencing tension and conflict, and you want to turn that wasted energy into creativity and progress.

That’s a long description, and for some not as clear as they’d like, so we have a couple of other situational descriptors we use ourselves, as shorthand ‘markers’.

One of them is:

High Stakes Change

When you are trying to make something new or different happen, there will be change involved, and if it’s very important or critical, the stakes are high.  The stakes could be high for the business, for your team, for your customers, the planet, for you or, more likely, some combination of all of the above.  The change could be broad - strategy, reputation, structure, proposition, etc – or very targeted – a new job, a new product, a new team.

Whatever the context, high stakes change creates pressure, and that pressure may turn into tension and conflict.  What we see happen a lot, is we fall into our familiar patterns, which we all recognise – ball juggling, plate spinning, pushing harder, working longer, etc.  And, even though we know it’s not having the impact we would like, we’re not sure what else to do.  So, the pressure increases, and we push the same buttons even harder.

We find people recognise the patterns, but get caught in the catch-22 of “I know we need to handle this differently, but we’re too busy firefighting the problems to press pause and talk about anything else”.  And this is a great place to use our principles, because this is the essence of resourceful conversations – learning to do that really well, under pressure, at speed.

And what causes people to shift from plate spinning to pressing the pause button in the first place?  When do people come to us?

We call them:

Oh Shit Moments

‘Oh shit’ moments can turn up in several different ways.

For some, it is when the scale or impact of the challenge suddenly becomes too much. When they cannot see a way through; when the doubt or uncertainty overwhelms; when they see that look in people’s eyes that shows they are not on board and are heading for the nearest exit.

For some, it is those moments of realisation we all have when we effectively tell ourselves “We can’t go on like this”.

Sometimes it creeps up on us slowly, and one day we wake up and it’s time.

Sometimes it comes as we finish a particularly messy project, we release, and decide we never want to go through that again.

Sometimes it happens when we’re in the middle of something particularly messy and stressful, and we find ourselves having an almost out of body experience – we’re in one of those meetings where everything is going round in circles, but instead of being caught up in it, we can see it clearly.  We don’t know for sure what to replace it with, but we know we need something better. 

Of course, occasionally some leaders anticipate and want to get ahead of the game. 

They reach out before the stakes get too high, before the pressure builds, before the oh shit moments happen, they decide to do some skill building in advance.  That helps, because we can show you how, and you can practice in less stressful situations.  Which means you and your people get better, faster.

So, whether you want to get ahead of the game, or you’re in the middle of the game looking for a time out, get in touch. 

We’ll show you how this works by doing it with you.  Then, when you want to learn to do it for yourself, we’ll show you how.

In the coming weeks we’re going to be sharing stories to bring these ideas to life – stories of people who have got better at resourceful conversations, and stories of people we see stuck in high stakes change without yet having got to their own oh shit moment. 

As always, let us know what questions you have about this.

And let us know when you’d like to have a conversation.

This article is a joint enterprise between, and copyright of, Kathryn Pope and Alan Arnett, 2024 onwards.