Failure to Communicate Quotes

“Think of a folding fan. When it's closed, the two ends are all we see. When we open it up, there's a lot more inside. As a matter of fact, a wide range of responses always exists between the extreme ends in any conversation.”
― Holly Weeks, Failure to Communicate: How Conversations Go Wrong and What You Can Do to Right Them

“It is far more common to distort the problem or dismiss it, however, than respect the problem and plan strategy for it.”
― Holly Weeks, Failure to Communicate: How Conversations Go Wrong and What You Can Do to Right Them

“In a difficult conversation, it is much easier and more effective to talk about a good thing we want, and what's interfering with it now, than it is to talk about what's wrong with our counterpart. That counterpart might put up his own preferred working relationship, but for the two of us to be talking about what a good working relationship looks like, is better than talking against each other. It keeps us out of combat mode.”
― Holly Weeks, Failure to Communicate: How Conversations Go Wrong and What You Can Do to Right Them

“The first big problem is that even with the combat model, there's more to difficult conversations than a power imbalance, and we know it. When we peel back the superficial layer of power rules (if you think you can't win, don't engage. If you're one down, make yourself a small target. If you're one up, you win), we find a different incompatible rule: I am a good guy, and I am in the right, so if my counterpart resists me, the wrong is on his side. And the worse the conversation gets, the more likely it is that one side or the other will turn to it. We are still battling, but the rules just changed from might to right. How does that happen? How does right come into a scene that used to be determined by might? It happens when at some point, the conversation crosses a line, something new appears to be at risk, something more fundamentally important than a power position: our self respect. We are people involved in these conversations, not just entities and respective power positions.”
― Holly Weeks, Failure to Communicate: How Conversations Go Wrong and What You Can Do to Right Them

“We don't want to defer to our counterparts point of view at the expense of our own, but to balance the two. We don't want to presume the other side's perspective insistently, right or wrong in a way that bolsters our own. But we do want to recognize that they have one, think about it, and bring it out into the air.”
― Holly Weeks, Failure to Communicate: How Conversations Go Wrong and What You Can Do to Right Them

“Respect for the problem places all that we're struggling with into the landscape of the conversation itself. It lets us step back and take a satellite view of the way our tough conversation is playing out. The conversation is no longer a battlefield, but a course of obstacles through which we move.”
― Holly Weeks, Failure to Communicate: How Conversations Go Wrong and What You Can Do to Right Them

“Difficult conversations themselves may be complicated, but we can't use a complicated system to bring them into balance. Under the pressure of the conversation, how would we remember what to do? Can we get a simple enough system though? Yes, we can. And the key to it starts with three way respect: self respect, respect for our counterpart, and a healthy respect for the problems in the landscape of the conversation itself.”
― Holly Weeks, Failure to Communicate: How Conversations Go Wrong and What You Can Do to Right Them