Action is not something that is separate from, or better than, conversation...
Transcript of this video:
I was on a Zoom call the other day and to be honest, for whatever reason, my attention had been drifting until someone in that Zoom meeting said the phrase “The conversation is the work.” And in that moment, I suddenly felt my attention return and I got excited because I liked hearing that phrase.
And I felt like it was a challenge to me not to let my attention drift but to bring my experience into the conversation, what I was thinking and what I was feeling.
And I thought I’d make a video about this phrase, “the conversation is the work,” even though part of me is thinking, you might think, that’s a rather boring or meaningless statement. What does that mean? What does that add to the sum of human wisdom?
Well, maybe to illustrate it, I could share my experience of facilitating meetings. And I’ve often been to meetings that are actually quite powerful where I feel like interesting ideas are being exchanged and conflicts are being addressed and good work is being done.
And then often towards the end of such a meeting, somebody will say, “Yes, well all this talk is all very well but if we don’t have action, well the meeting is pointless.” I’ve often thought, but never actually said to that person:
Well, I notice that your contribution is not being done in mime or in sign language. You too are just talking, if you like.
And I wanna challenge the notion that talk and action can easily be separated. And I think the challenge of the conversation is the work is that it’s an invitation to bring our experience right now into the meeting.
Which might include saying that perhaps we’ve not been interested or that our mind has wandered but to bring our full experience to bear on the conversation that we’re in now, because the conversation we’re in now is probably connected to whatever change it is that we’re wanting.
Or to use a phrase that my business partner Viv sometimes uses. We don’t want to be in a meeting about a meeting in which we are hypothesizing about a change that might happen at some future event.
We’re alive to the possibilities of change that are in the conversation that we’re in right now.
Photo by Harli Marten on Unsplash
