The Art of Focused Conversation

 “Key to the development of an organization is the quality of interchange and group reflection going on in the organization”

Brian Hall, Values Shift (Stanfield, 2000, p. 38)

a) To stop sidetracking and wandering around in a discussion…
b) To stop conversations where nobody is ready to decide anything at the end because the wayward discussion has confused and misled...
c) Simply to escape unfocused and time wasting meetings…
… I read the book “The Art of Focused Conversation” (Stanfield, 2000) and will share my interpretation of the key values with you. First of all let me tell you something about my personal experience with bad meetings.

Personal Experience

Not talking about the same issue
You might know that: You are discussing an important issue and after 20 minutes you realize you are not really talking about the same issue. Everybody has one piece of the puzzle but there is no shared image. Most people just skip the step of talking about objective  data. It’s downplayed. Of course does everybody know e.g. what the customer “really” said. But actually that’s not true. So talking about the facts is important.

Not talking about feelings
Next example: The chef invites to a meeting and says there is a really annoying situation with the costumer who is totally unhappy with the product. You are talking in the meeting mostly about scenarios how to answer. But maybe not everybody thinks the clients comment is so bad. Unfortunately in the meeting is no space for their reflection. So at the end they leave the room and let their feelings out outside the meeting.
 Not talking about solutions
Did you have some similar experiences? Some people talking 25 minutes about an issue and getting a little bit away from it. Then they realize, they just have 5 minutes left, so: What is this all about? What can be a possible solution or an alternative? Let’s just switch from the problem focused talk to the solution focused talk in the last minutes.

Not talking about next steps
Are you leaving the meeting room and asking yourself: “And what should I do now”?  Then it’s time to react. Without some decision made at the end, the conversation appears to you just like a huge waste of time. So start to ask what are the next steps? What to do next? I learned, it’s sometimes hard for people to answer that.

But now let’s have a look at solution: The Focused Conversation.

The Focused Conversation 

Focused conversation has many names, like “discussion method”, “guided conversation” or “ORID-method”. It is a method to structure a conversation led by a facilitator. It means to analyze facts and feelings, to ask about implications and to make decisions intelligently. It consists of four different levels with concrete questions which lead to a decision-making stage: The Objective Level, The Reflective Level, The Interpretive Level, The Decisional Level. You can use it for example for conversations to review a report, to prepare and plan a workshop or to coach a colleague. In the book you find 100 different examples of conversations (p. 53 ff.).

The Four Levels

The Responsibility of the Facilitator

The Focused Conversation sound good – in theory. But in reality I have to say that groups need a very good conversation leader to do that. The facilitator needs time to prepare the meeting, needs knowledge how to react to group dynamics and is responsible how the conversation unfolds. So if the planned questions for example are not fitting the situation, he needs to invent new or skip others to get with the group to the decision stage. And of course he also needs the sense, not to force a decision if the group is not ready and maybe needs to gather more data as a next step. So leading the conversation and not dominating it, to receive the group wisdom, is a high ability.

And at the end – or I should say at the beginning – there is one more thing a facilitator needs to be aware of: Question himself if a focused conversation is the right method. Maybe your group needs a retrospective or a workshop etc. In the future I will write also about other methods and compare them with each other.