40 pages • 1 hour read
Douglas Stone, Sheila Heen, Bruce PattonDifficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1999A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Social Context: Centering the People Involved in Confrontation
In many self-help books that revolve around the ability to have conversations and communicate effectively with others—especially with those the subject might find difficult to engage with—the method involved largely centers around results. The approach involves a way of reaching a particular goal, or of guaranteeing a particular answer. This risk of implementing a results-based method is that it may disintegrate into one that prioritizes the end over the means, which, without appropriate scrutiny, could eventually become dehumanizing.
In Difficult Conversations, however, the approach is people-centered. It eschews any particular “method” in favor of a core process of approaching a conversation that could have any one of an infinite variety of outcomes. In the preface to the second edition, the authors say that the book has been read and employed in a wide variety of contexts and situations thanks to its more universal scope and more personal applicability; the people-centered approach allows the principles related over the course of the work to be applied in contexts that typically would not be favorable to an overly formulaic approach to problem-solving in conversation.
Methodological Context: The Approach of the Study and Its Conclusions
The authors are colleagues of a project known as the Harvard Negotiation Project. The Project has generated similar work previously, such as the book entitled Getting to Yes (1981). The Project’s tactics are sometimes simply known as the “Harvard Method.” While Difficult Conversations was initially pitched as a way of assisting people involved in negotiation, the study and method grew to a wider scope as time passed and the authors found the work helpful for a very wide range of people and desires.
While Difficult Conversations is largely composed of personal stories and anecdotes, the authors assure readers that all personally identifying information has been changed. The book as it exists would not exist without the vast amount of personal information shared and the stories into which the statistics and conversational models are inserted.
In addition, the book draws on a host of other disciplines and subdisciplines that allow the principles in question to be made clearer, and to synthesize information into advice. As they relate in the acknowledgments, the book draws on information gleaned “from the fields of organizational behavior; cognitive, client-centered, and family therapies; social psychology; communication theory; and the growing body of work around the idea of “dialogue” (xix).
