Imagine my surprise when I finally realized that the “new” way of releasing energy is an old way. In fact, I’ve come to suspect it’s the only way that intelligent energy has ever been released: through powerful conversations – what I call Pull Conversations.
A Journey of Discovery and Rediscovery
From Listening to Understanding
In 1993, I began working for the training company Eagle’s Flight. I devoted myself to helping organizations across North America become effective in something that I thought was crucial to business success: listening. I soon realized, however, that although listening was important, it was not the real deal; it was only a mechanism that helped produce the real deal: understanding. I was launched on my journey of discovery.
From Understanding to Dialogue
For the next several years I helped groups of people work through tough issues to achieve understanding. My quest brought me into the world of dialogue.
I delved into the dialogue work of William Isaacs, Peter Senge, and David Bohm. I traveled to attend seminars at the Global Dialogue Institute in Philadelphia in order to study their approach. I received mentoring from an expert in this field, Dr. William Stockton of Mobius. Mobius trains business leaders in the art of dialogue.
I garnered the best of what these dialogue experts had to offer and began to put their principles to work, helping organizations dialogue through their thorniest challenges. I found myself gaining greater skill in helping people tackle tough conversations in ways that systematically helped them achieve productive outcomes.
I’m blessed (and sometimes cursed) by an innate determination to understand the irreducible elements of how and why something works. I asked myself, What is the one underlying principle that each of these schools of dialogue has in common? What one thing makes all of them work?
I found that it is the importance, in any business situation, of taking on an orientation of pulling first – of pulling out the reality of the other person instead of pushing one’s reality onto them. (As we will see, the majority of people, whether in business or not, have an orientation of pushing their reality out onto people first.) Like a pump or a vacuum, pulling first hungrily draws in understanding. This process goes far beyond asking questions: it inquires deeply, maintains an undivided focus, strips away ambiguity, and comes back with the trophy – the essence of what the person is really trying to express. But even more than that, pulling first allows a person to invite the other into their own reality, in which the other also wins the trophy of understanding another’s reality.
I began to see how conversations that reveal the reality of the conversationalists actually move both parties into a much more exciting and powerful sphere: the Bigger Reality that exists between and beyond them. In the presence of the Bigger Reality, minds meet, creative energy is released, conflict and misunderstandings are resolved, and whole organizations head down more productive paths.
I was pleased that the type of conversations I was exploring had more in common with dialogue than with debate and discussion. These latter forms of communication don’t produce much reality. Why? Because debate means to beat down and discussion means to shake apart. As popular as these latter forms of communication are, they are not well suited for uncovering reality. Dialogue, in contrast, is a way of doing conversation that gets reality flowing. That’s what the word actually means: reality flowing through.
The Problem with Dialogue
I still wasn’t there, however. A recurring aspect of dialogues shortcircuits these breakthroughs for some leaders: the fact that the people who need to learn dialogue the most feel they need it the least. When they hear the word dialogue, it conjures up images of people sitting cross-legged in a circle getting in touch with the ether. They have no use for such an activity. And that became my challenge: how to engage people in a process that they needed but had no use for.
From Dialogue to Pull Conversations
As I was wrestling with this dilemma, a friend of mine said something that got me to the next step: “The quality of an organization is as good as the quality of the conversations of its people.”
That made sense to me. It was clear to me that people’s ability to dialogue determined the quality of their organizations. Firsthand experience had shown me that the only way an organization could attain and sustain its best results was to cut through perceptions and conventional wisdom and uncover reality together through dialogue.
But in my study of dialogue, I had skipped right over the simple notion of conversation. I turned to my dictionary and discovered something very interesting: that conversation means to turn together. This notion captures the essence of what Pull Conversations are all about: two people or groups turning toward each other, using inquiry and directness to pull out each other’s reality on the way to reaching common ground.
It was at this time, in 2003, that my company, Juice Inc., was conceived. I began to change my approach, talking to people about this type of conversation. People who could not relate to the ethereal concept of dialogue easily caught on to Pull Conversations. As we went to the business community with our concept and process, we began to experience some very exciting breakthroughs.
In the chapters that follow, you will see the remarkable results that are produced by the intelligent energy released by Pull Conversations. You will also see that there is one person who has more capacity to create energy-filled cultures than anyone else. That person is the leader. The leader sends out a wavelength that others resonate with, whether they realize it or not. Leaders who act as cultural architects create energy-infused environments and end up expanding their leadership influence. This gives them the juice (influence) they need to move people to action.
Chapter 2 illustrates how conversations release energy. Chapter 3 defines Pull Conversations and shows that while the tendency to push severs you from their reality, Pull Conversations enable you to draw out others’ reality. Chapter 4 describes how doing the latter gives you context: the ability to perceive as a sensible whole what others see as disconnected parts.
From there, chapter 5 shows you how to make yourself understood quickly by pulling others into your reality. This leads to an amazing phenomenon, discussed in chapter 6: how two people or many people in groups can work together to uncover the Bigger Reality.
Although the abovementioned chapters of this book are themselves rich in illustrations from real working life, the rest of the book, chapters 6 through 10, is even more specific about the practical results of Pull Conversations. These chapters show how this type of conversation releases energy in organizations, thereby heightening people’s output and strengthening their relationships, both internally and externally. The book wraps up by giving you sixteen practical ways to release intelligent energy in your company through Pull Conversations.
As a bonus, each of the chapters that follow, except the final one, ends with a section called “Juice at Home,” illustrating the topics of the book in a non-business setting. We have included these personal stories in a business book because using the skills of Pull Conversations at home is the litmus test of the theory. In fact, doing so is often a bigger challenge. And, in any case, for these skills to persist in our behavior at work, they must be practiced at home.