Conversational experiments

Transcript of this video:

I was working in one of the colleges here a couple

of weeks ago, and during one of the breaks I was talking

to Mike, one of the students,

and we had a rambling conversation.

And somewhere in the middle of it he said,

“wouldn’t it be interesting to make a list

of all the small disappointments we experience in a day?”

And I just leapt on this

and I thought, oh, that’s interesting.

Let’s have a go. And I said, oh, well,

when I got up this morning, I went down

to the kitchen to make coffee.

And when I opened the coffee bag,

I realised I was near the bottom of the bag

and I always think, oh, the coffee I make from the bottom

of the bag isn’t going to be as good.

I don’t know if that’s objectively true,

but it was a disappointment.

And then I looked at the side of the sink

and realised I hadn’t put away the crockery from

washing up the night before.

And that was a bit disappointing.

And I made a list of quite a few of these… when I got

to the swimming pool changing rooms,

the regular locker I like

to use, well someone else had taken it.

So I had to go to the one next door.

And that was a bit disappointing.

He responded with his own list

and we had a good laugh over it.

And I think we had a laugh over the

fact that we were laughing.

And I really enjoyed the way

that we had inadvertently launched

what I shall now be calling a conversational experiment.

I think we very easily drift

through life doing conversations as usual

that are slightly uninteresting.

And it’s exciting when we launch an experiment

that gets us out of our little ruts

and into something experimental

where we just give something a go.

And they’re often delightful

because they’re unexpectedly delightful, like that one.

So that was an experiment

with content, if you like.

A lot of my experiments, like unhurried conversations

where we have a process so

that only one person speaks at a time

or story circle where we have to stick to stories

and not the morals of stories.

And we don’t comment on stories like just the stories.

That’s a conversational experiment.

And actually, I think that’s what what a lot of my work is,

I work with groups and a lot of

what I’m doing is inviting them to experiment with

how they’re talking to each other.

I’m not very attached to telling them how to be a good team.

I think a lot of them have kind of read all that already.

And that’s theory. What I’m interested in is hopping them

to get out of business as usual

and try different stuff out and see what they can discover.

So conversational experiments. I might find myself having

more to say about this.

Oh, here we are, a few feet further on.

And here is something more I’d like to say.

I’ve been listening to Eric Idle

reading his own Spamalot Diaries,

and it’s a delightful example of the messy creative process

that led to the production of that amazing musical.

And it’s fascinating to hear are all the false starts

and mistakes that they make

and how the creative process is sustained by this

constant series of conversations

with the other key creative people where there are bursts

of great productive creativity,

but also a lot of messing about and banter.

And

I, you know, I think in the tech world,

they rather grandly talk about pivots.

I actually think it’s a series

of these small conversational

experiments of what we need to do.

And I fear that organisations in the efforts

to be efficient would think, think that these bits

of idle banter aren’t very useful.

But I think it’s in the relationships that they create,

in the sense of cre of, of a kind of intelligence created

between us that their value can lie.

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