Scaling Conversations. Dave MacLeod

THE LIMIT OF OUR COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

      We humans are uniquely wired for empathy, facial recognition, and language. Our ability to collaborate with one another, beyond our relative groups, is widely recognized as the key ingredient of what has driven so much of our amazing progress as a species. Long ago humans were, fortunately, able to recognize the mutual benefit of our interdependence. Rather than just brutally compete with each other at all times, we took an interest in the well‐being of others to improve our own lives. Initially we applied this to feeding ourselves and to simple ways of interacting beyond our family members. Over time, we developed deeper and deeper ways of collaborating more effectively. Again, for our own gain.

      As our societies developed, we were pretty successful at collaboration: We embraced our ability to empathize and consider the points of view of others; we leveraged our ability to recognize each other and remember who we had made agreements with; and we refined our language to improve how we created things that mutually benefitted all of us. Soon enough we spread to all corners of the planet and created a global ability to share our feelings and opinions, watch sports and buy things from one another, using screens in our pockets. The language and technology we use to better cooperate with one another continues to evolve to this day as we all keep working to solve problems that threaten our species in small and large ways.

      It would be great if we could simply spend a lot of time discovering and celebrating our incredible ability to work together as a species, but unfortunately, and obviously, we have used those same abilities to divide and polarize.

Along with our favorable wiring, as a species we are also wired in extremely unhelpful ways. Often described as two different “kinds of brain,” along with our ability to learn and be creative, we have parallel survival instincts that hijack our capacity to empathize and communicate effectively. When we perceive a threat, humans react similarly to many other animal groups: We respond by fighting, fleeing or freezing. This happens in both well‐ and less‐understood ways.

      On the well‐understood side, sometimes relatively simple “threats” can cause two perfectly reasonable adults to be suddenly angry and unable to inhabit the same room. Sometimes, reading an email or social post that seems threatening can destroy an entire relationship. Different views on religion, philosophy and politics can make people so divided they can't even hear one another, never mind collaborate. You can easily think of hundreds of human behaviors that decrease our ability to work well together.

      On the less‐understood side, unconscious biases can cause people to misinterpret and react poorly to one another based on things they don't clearly realize. Extroverts and introverts require different environments to allow effective communication. Systemic racism has created mechanisms to ensure privileged people have more ability to influence than people with a different skin color. Social media is built to silo people and amplify extreme voices in an echo chamber.

      For nearly every communication ability we can point to, as a species, we can also single out a failure to communicate that threatens our organizations, our society and, ultimately, our world. The remedy for this is to continue to improve our ability to share our voice, listen to one another, and discover common ground and insight to our mutual benefit. Simply, we need to converse better.

Over the years, humans have innovated to overcome our unfavorable wiring and our inability to converse in large groups. To try to ensure we get as much benefit as possible from group conversations we have invented talking sticks, council etiquette, and, in more recent times, Robert's Rules of Order—an adaptation of the rules and practice of Congress to address the needs of non‐legislative societies published by US Army Officer Henry Martyn Robert in 1876. Many organizations train people in collaborative negotiation, conflict resolution and group meeting facilitation. Recognizing our inability to converse effectively in large groups, leaders in all sectors of society try to add structures to get the best out of groups and avoid the worst behaviors and outcomes.

      The problem is that none of these systems scale up.

      The talking stick, and its culture of respecting every voice, is probably still the most effective invention but doesn't help a group that can't sit together. Our current attempts at scaling communications digitally, to include many people, give unfair voice to small groups, divide people into silos, and create echo chambers within threads and channels of similarly minded people.

      The communication challenges facing our organizations and our society are increasingly urgent and we need to focus on what has always given us an advantage as a species: Our ability to converse. As a leader, you need to improve your ability to lead mutually beneficial interactions in which people feel heard, insights emerge, and trust increases. Our organizations are getting more complex, our population is growing, and therefore our ability to converse effectively needs to scale just as fast, or faster.

      I'm currently the CEO of a fast‐growing technology company in the conversation space, but I didn't grow up in tech. Quite the opposite. As a young adult living in British Columbia, Canada, I worked for many years in the late 1990s and early 2000s as an experiential educator and an outdoor adventure guide at a place called Educo Adventure School. As a group of young leaders, tasked with carrying the flame of an outdoors school founded in the early 1960s, we did our best to draw out the unique leadership qualities of young people as we climbed ropes and mountains, experienced sweat lodges with Secwepemc leaders and explored group communication through good times and challenges. While the rappelling, climbing, zip‐lining and river‐paddling provided an exciting platform to bring young people together, the lessons in self‐expression and group communication are the lasting aspects of a decade of involvement in experiential education. It had a profound impact on my life and my desired career.

Being an outdoor facilitator is