Applying the Lessons

(Note to new readers – Thanks for joining us. Since 9/26/2008, I have written a series of weekly newsletters regarding the model for critical discussions. Reading them will help you catch up on the basics).

The lessons learned in the last 3 months in this newsletter are most easily and appropriately applied first to ourselves. I cannot overstate the importance of taking every opportunity to examine my OWN claims, evidence, and inference before sharing them. Over time, this examination becomes a habit and is done very quickly (milliseconds) and to the great benefit of one’s credibility.

I stress here that you need to practice analyzing claims, issues, evidence, and inference in your own thoughts as a matter of course. The more you do, the easier it will be for you when you start using it to analyze the words of others. Twenty-five or so years ago, I practiced by reading books and analyzing the logic in them, much the same way that a grammar student might diagram sentences. I progressed very quickly when I began taking classes. Using the model that I have laid out over the last three months (a modification of a more complex structure called Toulmin’s model) will help you find gaps that you would not have seen before AND help you identify strong positions that you would have not been willing to support before. In other words, you will develop the skill to assess the position being presented by its merits and not solely its alignment with your own views. This is the purpose of Informal Logic – to help one develop a well-founded idea in the face of uncertainty. This is why it so improves our real day-to-day lives – because so little is certain.

At this point, almost all of the people I have taught say “This all sounds so easy, but the people I need to talk to won’t go for this! They are too (stubborn, mean, one-sided, difficult, smart, dumb, etc, etc, etc) to deal with in any kind of logic. What am I supposed to do when emotions come into play and someone gets angry?” I could go into a lengthy dissertation on the weakness of the above position, but I won’t (you should, though, just for practice).

Picture yourself faced with a difficult task – one for which you don’t have the skill. Maybe it is “to get from California to New York in 5 hours”. Could you do this on your own, without enlisting the skills of another adequately trained person? Probably not – unless you are a jet pilot.

Now, picture the person with whom it is “too difficult” to converse. The difficult task with which THEY are faced is to successfully get through a critical discussion with you and do so in a way that improves your relationship, rather than injure it. They can NOT get through this task without enlisting the skills of another adequately trained person. You are going to be that person – a “communication jet pilot”.

I know (from surveys conducted in 2008 with over 9,000 respondents) that 81% of people polled avoid having critical discussions because they fear they will end badly, with someone being angry. If you don’t hold these conversations, your choices are to:
- Accept the bad situations and their aftermath
OR
- Learn the skills required to master the conversations.
I know a lot of people that put off talking about the most important things in their lives (marriage issues, child issues, work issues) because they are afraid of what the other person might say or do. I also know that the more capable you are at having “relationship building” conversations around well-thought out content, the better your decisions will be in both the long and the short term. My belief is that you have already made the choice to improve your communication skills. You believe they can be learned and you are trying to learn them. I will do all that I can to teach you all that I know.

This brings us to the first nugget in this series about applying critical discussion and informal logic to business life.
In any conversation, there are always two things being exchanged: Content (the topic and supporting discussion) and Attitudes (everything else, including the baggage).

Think about the last few times that you got into a discussion which ended with you getting mad. Did you get mad about the content being exchanged (“If you say that man is the cause of global warming ONE MORE TIME I will never speak to you again!”) or because of the attitude being exchanged (“I can’t stand the way he acts! Like he knows EVERYTHING! He NEVER listens to what I say.”). My experience is that conversations end badly because we aren’t naturally skilled in dealing with attitudes (our own and others) when we speak about difficult things. We get distracted by things that don’t much matter AND we ignore things that are VERY important.

Just as we have spent the last few weeks dissecting and examining claims, issues, evidence, and inference we will spends the next few weeks examining attitudes in a conversation. How we interpret feelings and thoughts (our own and those of others) and act on that interpretation form the balance in the conversation. We will learn how to make that interpretation, to spot when things are getting out of balance, and how to bring them back into balance. To do this, we will dissect conversations to separate their components (content and attitude) and come to understand how to move forward together.

Some readers will remember the articles I posted in July and August regarding creating safety, being authentic, maintaining openness to ideas, using collaboration vs. advocacy to improve decisions, etc. These are the key to understanding the attitude components of a conversation and we will revisit them in a new light. We will learn how to recognize them and create them, just as we learned to analyze claims and create issues.

So, remember to practice analyzing YOUR OWN claims, issues, evidence, and inference as you go about your day and in your reading. Also, begin listening to conversations with the idea of identifying the differences in the ways that we exchange Content and the ways we exchange Attitudes.

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