Conversations For Action and Collected Essays Quotes

“Let’s look at selling a car, because if any industry seems to offend in collaboration, it’s the car-selling industry.”
― Fernando Flores, Conversations For Action and Collected Essays: Instilling a Culture of Commitment in Working Relationships

“No observer is the observer of what is purely and simply given by reality; all observations and all interpretations are the observations and interpretations of persons grounded in and limited by the historical time in which they observe and interpret. These”
― Fernando Flores, Conversations For Action and Collected Essays: Instilling a Culture of Commitment in Working Relationships

“Key moods for a powerful team are ambition, acceptance, serenity, respect, membership, pride, camaraderie, and celebration.”
― Fernando Flores, Conversations For Action and Collected Essays: Instilling a Culture of Commitment in Working Relationships

“Both unfulfilled promises and unnecessary requests can destroy trust between people.”
― Fernando Flores, Conversations For Action and Collected Essays: Instilling a Culture of Commitment in Working Relationships

“Future action to be performed by the hearer”
― Fernando Flores, Conversations For Action and Collected Essays: Instilling a Culture of Commitment in Working Relationships

“Hearer (specific identity) 3. Conditions of satisfaction (COS) stated in accordance with the standard practices of a community”
― Fernando Flores, Conversations For Action and Collected Essays: Instilling a Culture of Commitment in Working Relationships

“When others agree to our requests, we’re changing the future.”
― Fernando Flores, Conversations For Action and Collected Essays: Instilling a Culture of Commitment in Working Relationships

“Fernando Flores made a brave move forward, proposing that we design our organizations around the networks of commitments being made and that these commitments be made explicit.”
― Fernando Flores, Conversations For Action and Collected Essays: Instilling a Culture of Commitment in Working Relationships

“The idea that we invent reality together in the commitments we make to each other when we speak”
― Fernando Flores, Conversations For Action and Collected Essays: Instilling a Culture of Commitment in Working Relationships

“Domains of Human Concerns: Common Types of Possibilities For Action 1. BODY: exercise, medical checkups, traveling to an appointment. 2. PLAY or AESTHETICS: taking a vacation, going to the movies, going to an art museum, painting, putting a puzzle together. 3. SOCIABILITY: inviting a new person into a conversation, meeting an old friend, declaring a person trustworthy or untrustworthy. 4. FAMILY: getting married, sending children to college. 5. WORK: finishing a report, writing a letter. 6. EDUCATION: enrolling in a class, reading a book. 7. CAREER: choosing a major in college, getting a new job. 8. MONEY or PRUDENCE: investing money, bargaining for a new salary, buying health insurance. 9. MEMBERSHIP: joining a professional organization, becoming a citizen of a new country, founding a new club. 10. WORLD: working in a political campaign, visiting another country or culture.        11. DIGNITY: declaring pride in your work, declaring that your work is significant or insignificant, declaring standards of action for yourself to live up to.        12. SITUATION: declaring that your future is good or not good, declaring that you have more possibilities than you have been seeing, declaring that you have fewer possibilities in life than you supposed, discussing your possibilities with other persons. 13. SPIRITUALITY: reflecting on the facticity of life, going to church, philosophical discussions with others.”
― Fernando Flores, Conversations For Action and Collected Essays: Instilling a Culture of Commitment in Working Relationships

“Thirteen Recurrent Domains of Human Concerns: Possible Breakdowns 1. BODY: health, sickness, injury, availability and unavailability for meetings and appointments. 2. PLAY or AESTHETICS: entertainment, recreation, art, and appreciation of art. 3. SOCIABILITY: opening new conversations, making new friends, maintaining friendships, breaking friendships, trusting what others say, establishing trust for yourself. 4. FAMILY: having children, education of children, marriage. 5. WORK: completing actions you have committed to take, doing your job. 6. EDUCATION: gaining competence, skill in some area. 7. CAREER: choosing a direction to take in life, choosing a career or profession to prepare for and follow. 8. MONEY or PRUDENCE: having sufficient money to support yourself, your salary, reputation among others you deal with. 9. MEMBERSHIP: participation in club, professional, organizational, or government institutions; gaining membership in societies, clubs, or other organizations; becoming a citizen. 10. WORLD: politics, the environment, other countries or cultures. 11. DIGNITY: self-respect, self-esteem, lack of self-esteem, conflicts between your standards of action and your actions. 12. SITUATION: disposition, temperament, outlook, emotions, judgments about “how things are going.” 13. SPIRITUALITY: philosophy, poetry, religion, humor (laughing about our nonacceptance of the facticity of life, not being burdened by it).”
― Fernando Flores, Conversations For Action and Collected Essays: Instilling a Culture of Commitment in Working Relationships

“The next group of domains, which includes education, career, money, and “the world,” has to do with concerns we cannot avoid as human beings, insofar as we are historical beings.”
― Fernando Flores, Conversations For Action and Collected Essays: Instilling a Culture of Commitment in Working Relationships

“Those five domains—body, aesthetics or play, sociability, family, and work—are the domains we claim to be conditions for linguistic existence.”
― Fernando Flores, Conversations For Action and Collected Essays: Instilling a Culture of Commitment in Working Relationships

“we call this permanent domain of concern “sociability.”
― Fernando Flores, Conversations For Action and Collected Essays: Instilling a Culture of Commitment in Working Relationships

“To be in “play” in this way is one of our concerns to be able to escape self-conscious, intentional activity for comfortable, often purposeless activity.”
― Fernando Flores, Conversations For Action and Collected Essays: Instilling a Culture of Commitment in Working Relationships

“1. First, human beings are linguistic beings and, as we’ll show, live in concerns unavoidable for linguistic beings.        2. Second, human beings live in history: they’re historical beings, born into a world of conversations already going on, with practices and institutions already established. And we’ll distinguish domains of concern unavoidable for such historical beings.        3. Third, human beings are selves: they have permanent identities over time. And we’ll claim domains of concern unavoidable to beings with such identities to care for.”
― Fernando Flores, Conversations For Action and Collected Essays: Instilling a Culture of Commitment in Working Relationships

“Our BODIES—their health, their availability—are an unavoidable domain of concern for us as human beings.”
― Fernando Flores, Conversations For Action and Collected Essays: Instilling a Culture of Commitment in Working Relationships

“No observer is the observer of what is purely and simply given by reality; all observations and all interpretations are the observations and interpretations of persons grounded in and limited by the historical time in which they observe and interpret.”
― Fernando Flores, Conversations For Action and Collected Essays: Instilling a Culture of Commitment in Working Relationships

“Human beings are born into a world of conversations already going on.”
― Fernando Flores, Conversations For Action and Collected Essays: Instilling a Culture of Commitment in Working Relationships

“No one is privy to the final truth or understanding about anything.”
― Fernando Flores, Conversations For Action and Collected Essays: Instilling a Culture of Commitment in Working Relationships

“Activities once unintelligible (like willingly eating bran muffins) would become common. In”
― Fernando Flores, Conversations For Action and Collected Essays: Instilling a Culture of Commitment in Working Relationships

“Despite the popularity of the leadership industry, a real competence in building and leading teams is uncommon, and there isn’t a generally accepted way to teach these competencies.”
― Fernando Flores, Conversations For Action and Collected Essays: Instilling a Culture of Commitment in Working Relationships

“People who fail to manage their moods exhibit a lack of respect for their teammates.”
― Fernando Flores, Conversations For Action and Collected Essays: Instilling a Culture of Commitment in Working Relationships

“most people have an interpretation of mood and emotion that limits their power to observe and change their moods.”
― Fernando Flores, Conversations For Action and Collected Essays: Instilling a Culture of Commitment in Working Relationships

“Many people find that they frequently slip into negative, unproductive moods, and, once in these moods, it can be difficult to shift out of them. We suggest that this happens because most people have an interpretation of mood and emotion that limits their power to observe and change their moods.”
― Fernando Flores, Conversations For Action and Collected Essays: Instilling a Culture of Commitment in Working Relationships

“there’s one particular class of assessments that should ring warning bells. When someone makes the assessment that there’s no action to be taken toward some concern, and no hope of the situation changing in the future, we say that they’re stuck in resignation in that domain.”
― Fernando Flores, Conversations For Action and Collected Essays: Instilling a Culture of Commitment in Working Relationships

“Questions like “Where am I headed?” and “Is this the place I want to be headed?” aren’t central in your consciousness. Where are you headed, then? The answer is simple: you’re headed where you’re headed, as fast as you can get there.”
― Fernando Flores, Conversations For Action and Collected Essays: Instilling a Culture of Commitment in Working Relationships

“Often when we receive a request, we feel that we’re “on the spot” and have to commit right away one way or the other. This is an enormous source of hidden waste in our coordination, because often we make promises we really can’t fulfill under this pressure, or miss opportunities out of an automatic sense that we “just have too much to do.” By committing to commit, we can give ourselves a little breathing room to examine our own concerns, commitments, and priorities, and coordinate with other people who might be affected. Often we find that with a little conversation and renegotiation with other customers, we can take on a new commitment without adversely affecting other people. When we don’t give ourselves this room, though, all kinds of waste happens: we have unclear priorities, we feel overwhelmed, and we start slipping on our commitments to others. So”
― Fernando Flores, Conversations For Action and Collected Essays: Instilling a Culture of Commitment in Working Relationships

“Conversations for Action: Moves for Coordination”
― Fernando Flores, Conversations For Action and Collected Essays: Instilling a Culture of Commitment in Working Relationships

“The company becomes full of rigid controls, checks, and procedures that attempt to force people to act responsibly, but which actually create further walls between people and bring effective action to a grinding halt.”
― Fernando Flores, Conversations For Action and Collected Essays: Instilling a Culture of Commitment in Working Relationships