Difficult Conversation

The Hand Grenade in Your Pocket

You have a difficult conversation waiting for you. Maybe with your sister about your mother's care. Maybe with the friend who keeps borrowing money. Maybe with the colleague whose missed deadlines keep landing on your desk. Whatever it is, you have probably rehearsed it in your head a dozen times, and you have probably decided you are going to handle it badly no matter what.

Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen, the Harvard Negotiation Project veterans behind *Difficult Conversations*, have a simple explanation for why those rehearsals never work. You are preparing the wrong kind of conversation. You think you are about to deliver a message. You are actually about to enter a learning conversation, and the difference between those two things is the difference between a relationship that survives and one that does not.

Their core image for the dilemma is the hand grenade. Delivering a hard message, they write, is like throwing one. You can coat it in sugar, you can lob it gently, but it is still going to do damage. The other side of the choice is no better. Choosing not to deliver the message is like hanging on to the grenade once you have pulled the pin. Most of us hold the grenade until we cannot stand it anymore, then throw it harder than we meant to, then spend the next month trying to apologize for the explosion.

The book is built around the question of how to stop doing this. The answer, the authors argue, is not better technique for delivering bad news. It is a complete shift in what you think you are doing when two people start talking about something that matters. The shift is small to describe and hard to perform. Stop trying to deliver a message. Start trying to learn one.