Conversations and change are intimately linked. We use conversations to make sense of change. Conversations help us create change and adapt to change.
But there is another interesting perspective on the conversation-change link: the need to change the way we have conversations.
In his lovely and thought-provoking book Conversations: How Talk Can Change our Lives, Theodore Zeldin makes the interesting the point that “humans have already change the world several times by changing the way they have had conversations”.
This idea of “changing the way we have conversations” is at the heart of a passionate plea made in a recent TED Talk by Jonas Gahr Støre, the foreign minister of Norway.
In his reflections on the increasing importance of groups that transcend national boundaries, Støre makes a compelling case for more and different dialogue among groups that have different values and hold different perspectives. In short, he is arguing for changing the way we have conversations in our complex modern world.
Støre does not argue that dialogue is always the way. In fact, he explicitly states that there are times to walk away and even times to fight. He makes the compelling case that if we want to deal successfully with challenges that affect us all, we will need to “create a bigger we”; improving our communication skills is crucial for this.
Most of us deal with inter-group differences of a much smaller scale than the ones Støre talks about, and yet we all struggle to have effective conversations across these differences. I look at Støre’s talk as a challenge for all of us to consider what changes we need to make in how we have conversations so that we can deal with our shared challenges more effectively.
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