Watch for Safety in Crucial Conversations

Improving software quality requires addressing differences of conviction.
You can’t do that without making sure everyone feels safe enough to listen.
Here are some tips to achieve that condition during crucial conversations.

Suppose you’re on a software team that’s under pressure to perform.
What your team does is critical to the business and as such, there is stress.
You already have the two out of three condition where “Crucial Conversations” will occur – the stakes are high, and stress is high

What is a Crucial Conversation?

This article expands on the writing in “Crucial Conversations”. It addresses why there is a need to watch for safety, and what to look for, rather than how to address it. This article lays the conceptual groundwork for specific tactics one might take. If you’d like to learn more about some good tactics for reestablishing safety, definitely check out the book, it’s well-written.

After my last push to change a business culture failed, I read Crucial Conversations three times over. Since that initial binge, I’ve been letting its concepts seep further into my bones so that the next time I encounter a similar situation, I will precipitate a different outcome. Change management is as much a matter of skill as it is of ideals. Here are some thoughts to help you develop the skills to go along with your ideals. Hopefully this helps you to make positive impactful changes in your company.

“Crucial Conversations” are interactions with team members or stakeholders where

• The Stakes are High
• Views Differ
• There are Strong Emotions, such as stress

If your opinion does not differ in any significant way from your teammates or the stakeholders, or if you are fine doing your work within the current work conditions, or if you are fine not having an opinion at all, you can stop reading now and count yourself lucky. You won’t need to know about safety or crucial conversations.

If however, your opinion does differ, and you are certain that if the team adopted your opinion, it would significantly impact the future, and you’re willing to take on the thankless risk of change advocacy, then read on. One of the most critical skills you will need in having crucial conversations is to watch for safety. Once you can easily notice safety slipping away, you can take action to restore it.

The Nature of Flight or Fight

Never listen to your enemies, and never let them live in your head. Whether it’s combat or competitive sports, this is a natural law. It’s not only baked into our human biology, but into the biology of every animal on the planet back as far as the geological record can show. this is the flight or fight response. When any human, any animal, is under threat, it’s driven to flight, or fight.

If you surprise a house cat, its response will be flight or fight. Depending on the situation, it will either run and hide, or it will hiss and attack. Many animals add a third response: they become still. This is another form of flight, one where they hope to blend into their environment and go unnoticed. In any case, the cat is expressly not cooperating with their surpriser. About a billion years of biological trial and error have asserted that flight or fight are the correct solution to a threat.

Human beings are not much different when surprised. Our tactics are more subtle than an animals, but the essence of flight or fight is present whenever someone feels under threat, or afraid.

• Change that is not personally initiated
• Ideas that are not one’s own
• Having less than total control over a situation

all of these are causes for “apprehension”, “hesitance”, or “concern” in business terms: Fear, to put it bluntly. Change advocacy requires putting others in this state. And regardless of the rightness or goodness of what you propose, you should not expect others to thank you for making them afraid. Granted, there are many people who have developed a healthy dialogue with their internal fears and will be willing to listen, but not everyone. And not all the time.

It’s your job to watch for safety

Not every software engineer or business owner can be expected to also be infallibly emotionally intelligent. In fact, you yourself are probably not so. I’m not!

So if you intend to be a change advocate, you must master your fear, and own your own emotional state. “Crucial Conversations’’ has a chapter around this concept called “Start with Heart”. If you haven’t yet, you’ll need to read it and do the self-work before trying to advocate for change with others.

Once you’ve mastered your own fear to an acceptable working level (it’s a life-long effort), you can start watching for signs that the people around you feel unsafe - that is, afraid. When you see that, you must address the fear first, restore safety before continuing your advocacy for change.

Signs that someone feels unsafe

When people feel unsafe, they will tend towards “Silence” - flight, or “Violence” - fight.

“Silence” means that they have disengaged and want to not be present or not be noticed. It can take many forms, but it means that they have disengaged and want to not be present or not be noticed. Some examples include

• ending meetings early or cancelling them altogether,
• nodding in agreement and saying nothing,
• responding with the minimal text to show acknowledgement,
• remaining as still as possible in their frame on a video call,
• looking down, or at anything besides you,
• changing the subject to something “safe”.

“Violence” means they feel out of control and are pushing to regain it. It is the more noticeable than silence. Violence can take many forms, but frequently can involve

• raised voices,
• making absolute statements,
• making ultimatums or threats,
• cutting a speaker off mid-sentence,
• discrediting a speaker in any number of ways,
• changing the subject so that they’re in charge.

It’s often not so noticeable

The above are overt, high-contrast signals that a person doesn’t feel safe. But the signals can also be much, much more subtle. Just as much as a person who doesn’t feel safe is not interested in listening to your view, they are also not interested in letting you know that they’re not interested. All of the above can be masked in politeness, friendliness, and encouragement. I’m not saying always distrust positivity. Politeness, friendliness and encouragement should be supported in any professional environment. But, I am saying always watch for safety.

You might not be the cause

Advocating for change can be an easy cause for fear. But it’s also possible that you are not the cause for fear.

Someone may be moving to “Silence” or “Violence” becasuse of an earlier work conversation, or a situation outside of work entirely. I’d love to say we’re all perfect professionals. And we all leave our feelings at the door. But we’re people. And even trained people make errors. We need to accept that and cover for each other.

Watching for safety is one way of making sure one bad interaction doesn’t spoil more than it must. You do a kindness for yourself and rest of your organization when you watch for safety.

At its extreme, it becomes its opposite

A person who feels unsafe may even start with either silence or violence, and then switch to the other as their fear reaches a critical level. This can happen if you completely ignore safety. For example, a silent person may suddenly explode, or someone yelling may completely shut down.

Regardless of whether they reach that extreme tipping point or not, if someone doesn’t feel safe, they certainly won’t be considering your point of view. So as much as it would be nice if everyone else were always perfect disinterested professionals, watching for safety is your responsibility.

The Second Circle

Listening happens at the Balance-Point between Silence and Violence.

• “Why are they saying this?”
• “Am I in trouble?”
• “Am I losing control of the situation?”

Having questions like these causes us to tip towards silence or violence. But when we have enough information, we don’t need to ask those questions. When we’re certain that the other person has our interests at heart we’re balanced in a place of curiosity. It’s at this point that we’re listening.

This, in theatrical professions, is known as The Second Circle.

Second Circle is a state of being where you are not pushing and you are not hiding, you are neither responding with fight, nor with flight. You are interested, and curious. In theatre, this concept is very useful for coaching stage presence. Someone in a state of Second Circle is very watchable.

But it is also useful for understanding if someone is engaged with what you are saying. Someone who is not in a flight-or-fight mode is in second circle. Even without instense fear, apathy could be regarded as a form of flight response, but it is First Circle.

Let’s create a rosetta stone between the Jargons of Crucial Conversations, Theatrical Second Circle, and Computer Science Jargons.

Caveats:

1. They don’t precisely line up. Circles of Energy give a slightly different viewpoint to watching for safety than Crucial Conversations gives. This is beneficial. Where one makes no distinction, the other can see the nuance. Used together, a more complete picture of safety can be seen.
2. Energy, or presence, is not the same as intention. People who are truly ready to fight may also be in Second Circle. As Patsy Rodenburg observed, this state of being was particularly familiar with the maximum security prison inmates she taught.
3. It can be abused. Second Circle is not always the most appropriate energy to have in conversations. An intense Second Circle can get dangerously inappropriate for a work environment.
4. None of these values are boolean. Circles, the fight or flight response, silence and violence, all are analogue dials rather than boolean switches of behavior. They can be more or less intense. Observing the “volume” is part of the skill of watching for safety.
5. Second Circle is hard to do in video conferencing. Second Circle requires realtime giving and receiving. The amount of latency in video conferencing is still too high to allow for a full-tilt Second Circle connection. Digital audio designers discovered years ago that for humans listening back to themselves on headphones, latency must be lower than 5 milliseconds for the signal to be felt as no delay –[ SBE Broadcast Engineering Handbook 2016 ed. 5.2.7: Delay ]. It also shows that under 3 milliseconds, there is no detectable audio latency. Until video conferencing is operating under 3-5 ms latencies, Second Circle connections will be throttled.

Safety as a Realtime Read/Write Operation

If you look at flight and fight response, you’ll notice that it corresponds to Read-Only and Write-Only operations.

When someone moves to violence, they are often in Third Circle, and they are not listening. Instead, they are attempting to force their own view forward. In computer science, this is a write-only operation where part of the intent is to overwrite any other views put forward.

When someone moves to silence, they are often in First Circle. They are only observing and thinking, they are not adding any of their own views. They may even be in a quiet Third Circle, and are not even observing. Just hiding. So silence can be considered a read-only operation at best.

In both First and Third Circles, the focus is on the self. When you are afraid for your safety, you are thinking about you. The more you concern yourself with you, be it in First Circle or Third, in Silence or Violence, in Flight or Fight, the less cognitive bandwidth remains to think about others’ views.

However, as one moves further into Second Circle, read and write operations approach simultinaity, infinite frequency, and infinitesimal packet size. The concern increasingly becomes “We” as opposed to “I”.

If one went too far into an extreme Second Circle, perhaps some spiritual connection might occur. For the purposes of software teamwork, we shouldn’t travel all the way down that road. It’s too intimate.

We just need to find a comfortable hum where boundaries are openly acknowledged and respected, but information can travel freely. Second Circle as a state is allowed only to the extent that everyone feels safe.

Getting Pulled In

One other thing to note is that when someone is intensely in First or Third Circle, intensely silent or violent, it can pull you in. So when you find yourself in a crucial conversation where safety is not present or slipping, it can be quite challenging to not slip into either the same behavior or the opposite.

For instance, someone might start shouting, and now you are too. Or someone might be getting quieter and quieter while you get more and more forceful. You can imagine the other permutations, and maybe you’ve even been in one or two of them at some point in your life.

Gathering Allies

While getting pulled into another’s fear-based mindset is something to watch for, if you maintain your own Second Circle energy, it is also possible to pull someone else out of feeling unsafe just with your presence.

In the book Crucial Conversations, there are a number of tactics to help reestablish safety. All of them should first require that you maintain your own safety, your own Second Circle energy, while you try those tactics. Otherwise there’s a much higher chance that even though you’re using all the right tactics, even if you have the right intentions, you still might not have the leverage necessary to assure the others around you that you are not a threat and want what’s best for everyone.

Second Circle can be one more tool in your toolbelt when reestablishing safety in crucial conversations.

Successful crucial conversations can turn the hesitant into allies. your stongest supporters will often be those who initially took an opposite viewpoint from yours. As you have more and more successful crucial conversations, you’ll gather allies and support. Consistent success may even bring enough support for a tipping point in your organization.

If that happens, allow others to take the credit. If they take the credit, they’ll own the change and it will last well-past your departure.

Fear-Based Business Cultures

There are businesses that have decided (consciously or unconsciously) that it’s easier to organize work using fear as the means of information exchange. This is a fear-based business culture. In such a business, everyone is either silent when being talked to, or violent when talking. Where there is an established chain of authority, those in charge are violent, while everyone else remains silent. If you want to make changes in such an environment you have two options:

1. Start establishing more safety (likely a long hard thankless road)
2. Become the boss (likely with a large casualty list in your wake)

This article is about the first strategy, but both strategies require tremendous personal risk, so if you’re not willing to take that risk, its best to either accept the culture as it is, or leave to find one more suitable to you.

If you decide to take on the first strategy, such fear-based work environments will be difficult, if not impossible to change. They certainly won’t change quickly. As toxic as it is, you will need to learn to endure it as you slowly erode its power and reestablish safety so that colleagues and stakeholders can listen and collaborate. Just like in less fear-saturated situations, you begin by establishing safety in one-on-one conversations, followed by the small group meetings you are a part of.

Sponsors of Dysfunction

One final caveat: in any fear-based culture, any dysfunctional family, there is someone who benefits from the situation as it exists right now and sponsors that dysfunction.

• Their reasoning behind why it benefits them does not need to be rational. Such reasoning frequently is not.
• Their reasoning may not be beneficial to the organization’s interest. It frequently sabotages the organization’s interest.
• Their reasoning does not have to be conscious. It may be entirely unconscious and unexamined.
• And their reasoning can be held in cognitive dissonance with conflicting reasoning. It’s possible that such a sponsor simultaneously supports a collaborative non-fear-based work culture.

That person or persons will fight to uphold the dysfunction. In watching for safety, also watch for sponsors of dysfunction, and come to understand what benefits they gain from sponsorship.

If you fail to at least identify them, no work to establish safety, no matter how subtle or sneaky, will take hold. Once those sponsors of dysfunction have spotted your efforts, if you have not genuinely convinced them to support you earlier, they will work to remove your influence, and they will likely use the organization’s bureaucracy to do so.

In addition to gathering allies, you must identify and be aware of the sponsors of dysfunction to have success.

Final Thoughts

• Read deeper into Crucial Conversations
• Read deeper into The Second Circle

I hope by now you can see a little further into why safety is important when advocating for change. Perhaps you’ve gotten a little deeper understanding of what to look for when watching for safety.

If this is your first encounter with crucial conversations, or the second circle, this has probably been a lot of unexpected things to think about. It can be overwhelming at first, but in time it will come easier. You must always be vigilant though.

It’s a long road your setting out on, but you know the dangers you might face. And you’ve got the right tools to spot those dangers as you set off for positive change.