Making Conversation Quotes

“When we learn new words and ideas, and then begin to see them everywhere, the world is suddenly more legible and more vivid. Language reveals to us what was always there, but to what before we may have simply passed over, we now feel intimately connected.1 —Meara Sharma”
― Fred Dust, Making Conversation: Seven Essential Elements of Meaningful Communication – From an IDEO Senior Partner on Designing for Clarity and Authentic Impact

“Listening with your body, participating in the context, is so powerful precisely because it removes one of the greatest tools of listening and the greatest potential for bias: the question. Often, as we’re articulating the questions we ask in field research, the patterns we think we’ll see or the patterns we’d like to see start to get embedded in the question. In these cases, the question can become the enemy of the truth.”
― Fred Dust, Making Conversation: Seven Essential Elements of Meaningful Communication – From an IDEO Senior Partner on Designing for Clarity and Authentic Impact

“We need to be less a defender of our beliefs, and instead commit to the process by which we manufacture beliefs: exploration, community, and conversation.”
― Fred Dust, Making Conversation: Seven Essential Elements of Meaningful Communication – From an IDEO Senior Partner on Designing for Clarity and Authentic Impact

“Enforced rules of speed are incredibly useful when the intention is to be in discovery-mode. But it’s damaging in moments where you need to make significant decisions. We too often prize decisiveness in leadership. We have inherited a belief that leadership is about fast and confident decision-making rather than deliberation and reflection. The phrase “any decision is better than no decision” feels intuitively right, even though—if you stop and think about it—any decision is clearly not better than no decision.”
― Fred Dust, Making Conversation: Seven Essential Elements of Meaningful Communication – From an IDEO Senior Partner on Designing for Clarity and Authentic Impact

“Context, as we will explore it in this chapter, is comprised of the spaces we inhabit, the things in those spaces, and the positions we choose to take in that space. It is a mistake to think of context as “just in the background.” The context of a conversation can affect the course of a conversation, the feel of it, the outcome; it can even determine what kind of conversations we have.”
― Fred Dust, Making Conversation: Seven Essential Elements of Meaningful Communication – From an IDEO Senior Partner on Designing for Clarity and Authentic Impact

“The more living patterns there are in a place—a room, a building, or a town—the more it comes to life as an entirety, the more it glows, the more it has that self-maintaining fire, which is the quality without a name.1 —Christopher Alexander”
― Fred Dust, Making Conversation: Seven Essential Elements of Meaningful Communication – From an IDEO Senior Partner on Designing for Clarity and Authentic Impact

“We fixate on what is relevant to us, and we see what we want to see.”
― Fred Dust, Making Conversation: Seven Essential Elements of Meaningful Communication – From an IDEO Senior Partner on Designing for Clarity and Authentic Impact

“You can even name a conversation. Naming a conversation tells people what kind of conversation it is.”
― Fred Dust, Making Conversation: Seven Essential Elements of Meaningful Communication – From an IDEO Senior Partner on Designing for Clarity and Authentic Impact

“When we do the work of translating and simplifying complex terminology, we allow people to see their agency in the process—to take responsibility for joining and shaping the conversation and for turning words into action.”
― Fred Dust, Making Conversation: Seven Essential Elements of Meaningful Communication – From an IDEO Senior Partner on Designing for Clarity and Authentic Impact

“Let the words or silence run over you like a shower or the sounds of a stream. Be passive, simply release yourself into whatever the person is or isn’t saying. These moments of forced incubation can allow you to discover something great within you, but more important, you might discover something great in someone else.”
― Fred Dust, Making Conversation: Seven Essential Elements of Meaningful Communication – From an IDEO Senior Partner on Designing for Clarity and Authentic Impact

“When a conversation seems hard, when it makes you nervous, when you feel at risk or on edge, remember this core lesson: Conversation is always an act of creativity. We don’t have to just be participants in, or victims of, conversations. We can be the makers of the conversations that matter most.”
― Fred Dust, Making Conversation: Seven Essential Elements of Meaningful Communication – From an IDEO Senior Partner on Designing for Clarity and Authentic Impact