How the tiniest gesture can change the shape of a conversation
Transcript of this video:
I enjoyed the responses to my last video in which I told the joke about the amazing hammer man. Mostly because, almost everybody who listened to it took a slightly different lesson from it. Some thought it was about the importance of perseverance, others about the absurdity of it. And some who obviously didn’t think it was funny or get the point of it at all.
I think it’s something I’ve inculcated in myself as a facilitator and as a coach. To actually appreciate misunderstandings as signs of life in the system. And also to think about how small things affect the way things are understood.
I love the story told by Milton Jones, the English comedian, who explains one of his jokes. And the joke goes something like this, incredible to think, isn’t it, that the Chinese language started off as English in England but then one person whispered it to another person.
And Jones explains that, as he told that joke every night, over time he realized he got a much bigger laugh if he included that little “isn’t it”. Incredible to think, “isn’t it”, that the “isn’t it” somehow set the joke up to be funnier.
And I’m, I delight in these stories about how apparently trivial things make a difference.
In another video, I referred to the work of Elizabeth Stokoe, the conversation analyst, and I remember her explaining that she studied conversations between people at a call centre calling up people who had been identified as having problems with their marriages and trying to persuade them to take part in mediation which most of them weren’t very keen to do.
And she discovered of all the things that worked and didn’t work, the most interesting was, if the caller said something like, “would you be willing to come to conflict resolution?” The uptake went up.
In fact, when she analyzed the conversations, she often found that the person at the end of the phone started to say yes, after the phrase “willing to” and before what it was they were being invited to do had been explained.
So, there’s something for me about these… that human conversation, human life, human relationships, I think is much more subject to these little subtleties of communication and gesture.
And it’s why I increasingly think of the work I do as being much more like craftsmanship and much, much less about science. I think, as I get older, I get less and less interested in arguments about details of processes because I suspect it’s in these small, often unconscious gestures that most of the real action is happening.
