Conversation Capital. A keynote presentation from Facet5 Live 2022.

OK Thank you very much. Well, let me start off. Motivating I think this is important to talk to you about. And to start with, my own motivation is as working as a consultant with a particular focus on the development of management and team development. I use conversations as a training ground, as most of you might do, but also as an analytical point of attention. Where I examine, what priority conversations have in the culture and how conversations take place, and which competencies are represented and most prominent with everyone. It’s through this long-term focus and development work that I have created the concept of conversational capital as a concept at a strategic level in line with other forms of capital. Some of my core clients are within schools, social services, health, and psychiatry, and many of my tasks are about strengthening professional conversations and preventing one language to constitute low professional culture and behaviour. And so from this, I would state that conversations in the workplace must be considered as an important capital, perhaps the most important capital of all. And through this presentation, I will explain to you what I think conversation capital is. And I will share some of my tools and my methods in working with the conversation capital. So, I hope you’ll enjoy it and I certainly hope that you’ll be inspired, from this presentation. And I want to start just to press present myself and not only to present myself but also do this as. A key point from this presentation on conversation capital because this is how I am always expected to present myself. And it’s really quite dull and it doesn’t really tell a lot about me. But of course, it is at some point. It’s interesting for you all to know what my professional perspective and credentials are. Um, and I can tell you that aside from what is mentioned on, the slide, my career was in the top positions in trade unions and in private companies. As CCO and I have worked with network communication and as a lobbyist with official journalistic orientations too. Now I am fully self-employed, and I work across the public and private sectors. So, this is something about me. But when you know this about me, would you trust me from this? Would we be able to build up a trustful companionship? Would we be able to work together in full trust of each other from this point of what you know about me now, or would you rather know more about me and what my values are? Before you could say that we have built up trust among us. Because the. As the. Out of this. You wouldn’t really know if I was an expert. And, of course, if I was, this would be crucial for our collaboration. So, I’d like to share some more about me, which is more under the surface. And as you can see, I share some of my values here. I share some of my interests, and I also share some of my reports from the Facet5 premium report and myFacet5 word cloud. And of course, talking to you in this conference hosted by Facet5 is obvious I would draw this in front and tell you what Facet5 mentions about me and what I can truly recognize in my personality that you could expect from me that I am a pleasant person. I hope that you would agree. The ones that know me and I’m sociable, generally empathic, like to work in a team and will build good working relationships. Also, you should watch out that I could be too responsive to others’ wishes and I could be undemanding on others, other people. And both things are nice to know if for you if we should work together. Because the thing is that under the surface, you will get to know a lot of the values that I have. And which could explain more about my behaviour than the credentials that I showed you on the first slide. Or you can say that the Buddhist name is Thubten. My Buddhist name is Thubten Wangyal. So now you know what my perspective on life is. And I hope that the way I go around the world is true to my Buddhist values. So that would be nice for you to know, too. When we are about to cooperate and team up and you would always like to know, I think that I have always challenged myself and my beliefs. And I enjoy being in close and deep relationships with passionate people. So that has always been a purpose of my life to seek cooperation with these kinds of people I enjoy very much, to learn by working with other people. And I like to build learning environments. And I did that as a leader, as a CCO in companies. That was my main purpose in my leadership to build up learning cultures. And so that would be nice for you to know too. So now I have reduced the to being next to nothing. I hope so. So, my question to you could be. From which slide did you get to know me? And from which slide would you be most confident to build to team up with me? And Rachel, could you monitor the chat? So, if you would kindly answer in the chat, from which slide did you get to know me? The first slide or the second slide. Roger’s saying the second one. Yeah. Yeah, Diane’s got a slightly different perspective than both. Person if I’d been a Scandinavian jumper, then maybe I still would have thought axe murderer, but. OK yeah, obviously. Of course, more about me from the second slide, but. But when working together, it’s. It’s also nice to know what my credentials and my professional background are. But the key point that I would like to, mention, from this point is that underneath the surface, we really connect to each other. If we want cooperation to work well, we need to respond on this level. We need to connect our hearts, really, to get the potential out in the open and get the most out of our corporation. So, I hope you agree with this because that’s really a key point from this session that is also like that, that this is what I chose to present for you. Um, but I’m also the person that you experience. And if we were to work together at some time, at some point, it would be interesting for me to, know what you experience from my behaviour as a person in our collaboration, because there would be sides of me that would be hidden for me to know. And so, if we were in a trustful corporation, I would be able to ask you and get these data from you so that I could work on these two to adapt to our co-creation in a better way. Now, of course, most of you are familiar with this perspective when working with Facet5. So, it probably hasn’t come as great news for you. Um, but what I think about conversations and why it’s an important capital is that as I started, all work processes include a conversation at some point in, at some point in all work processes. There must be a conversation, in the corporation between people. And I can’t imagine any productions or any team collaboration where there are no converse conversations. And so of course, this underlines why conversations are important capital, for companies. And, regardless of what type of organization we are talking about and what the purposes and conversation have and central importance for all work processes and as I said, for the working environment and for the results. And all organizations need conversations to coordinate collaboration and to check efficiency, professionalism, and the ability to work together and for conflict resolution. Also, for effective re-establishment of the collaboration if it has suffered any damage. It’s of course, a managerial responsibility that this works, and it must often be possible to do so without a manager being present. And I’ll come back to that later. Why that is important. Conversation Capital one is a strategic approach to conversations as a deliberate professional, area of the culture, competencies, and terms. And as you can see, I always think that I also think that good conversations build up trust and psychological safety and all this is achieved from good conversations. So, I’d like to share with you that I’m for conversational capital. It really is this triangle consisting of three points, and the first point is the personal skills, which is about being able to participate in conversations and being aware of your personal resources and challenges. It’s also about the ability to facilitate conversations so that they work for everyone involved and challenge some understandings and attitudes. So that new developments are constantly created and so that a team does not stiffen in its own understanding. So, it’s both about really having the personal skills to engage in a conversation, but also the facilitator skills which are crucial for building up trustful environments. Then it’s about the culture. Conversations lift best in a conscious culture where conversations are recognized for their value and where there is a basic awareness and interest in creating good conversations in the workplace. And then it’s the third point, the conditions. And there must also be the right conditions for conversations, both in terms of the opportunity to develop one’s own personal and professional skills, but also that conversations can take place in a framework, an environment that supports good conversations. So, this is really the. The model for conversational capital that I work from. So, to take this further, I’ll stick with this slide that good conversations at the workplace must naturally aim to enable us to solve our tasks. This is the reason why we are at the workplace together, and I know that some consultants believe that you can actually hang your feelings and personality in your closet before you go to work and concentrate on your tasks and production. But the truth is that many of my tasks are about collaboration, which is prevented precisely because we only access as each other as colleagues on their behaviour and never get to talk about the person behind it and what their intentions are. Each one of us has in. In our collaboration. And working with collaboration that doesn’t work or, or people that actually sometimes hate each other. You could think that mending these areas could be difficult, but it’s quite easier to fix than you think because by facilitating conversations that bring people closer to a mutual understanding, conflicts are often resolved. And I get the question of how did you do that. But the answer is that they actually did the hard work themselves by sharing values and perceptions with each other in curious and sincere conversations through structures and type management. From my side, of course. But the key point is that if we connect by our hearts and get closer to our intentions, and when we know what motivates or motivates one another, we can establish better cooperation through these insights. So yeah, as I say, it’s quite easy. Of course, it’s my trait, so it’s easy for me. But, and it actually holds for a lot of training in the, in the workplace too, to, to build up a culture where, where this is known and where you get around with the skills ready to connect. Um, I’d also like to share some thoughts of the Danish philosopher, Ole Fogh Kirkeby, has produced that talks into my perspective on conversational capital and is of great importance to how we think about management in Denmark. And he says that beneath the surface, there’s a layer that is about our emotional experiences conditioned by our experience of security, meaning and relationships. He talks about Water Lilly leaves in the pond, which illustrates what we usually meet about how the work process is on the strategic level. But in fact, we have to dive down into the dam too to find what really matters and what we are really occupied with our thoughts about when we have to cooperate. From this perspective. I would like also to mention Hannah Arendt, who’s a German philosopher and sociologist, who also has a great impact on how I think about conversation capital, because here Arendt, talks about the concept of work consisting of three levels. One level is the label, as she calls it, which the biological process is how we maintain our life, how we earn the money that can keep us alive, and how we sample the resources in our life that we need to live and work as this second level, which is the creation of technologies and artificial production, all the things that we invent and all the things that we produce together in the workplace. And then what I think is an important level in Arendt’s theory is the level of action which she states is the activity that takes place directly between people without having things or circumstances between them. Action is something that takes place between individuals, and action is the development of free thought, exchange of ideas, and formation of values and culture. And also, because she’s a sociologist, she also states that it’s about political action. But in my field of work and when I work with companies. And when I work with the conversation on capital, I’m very interested in this third level of her perspective on work, because this is where we experience each other in the corporation. So, this is a very important level when we talk about what we can achieve from good conversations. So again, Rachel, I’d like to ask a question to be answered in the chat if you would like to participate. As you have heard, I focus on also the environments where the conversations take place. And what I mean is that you have to really consider which environment supports the type of conversations that you do want. So, you can see two different conversation rooms, number one and number two. And in my professional work, I actually meet both of them. And they can, of course, work as an environment for conversations. Which one would you think from your perspective would work well for building up that or establishing psychological safety? Which one? One or two. A mixture of both from Viola. Yeah. Do you want to say any more Viola? So, could I ask Viola to unmute and explain why she thinks both perspectives? Yes. Yes, I can. Here I am. Because of course, first I thought of the second one. The first one was looking a bit too messy for me. And I had a feeling I can’t get a clear thought in this environment. But in the second one, there was a bit of trust missing. It’s very strict, very straight and very formal. That is why I thought maybe there was a third option, but you didn’t offer one. I said, maybe it’s a mix of both. Yeah, exactly. Yeah yeah, yeah, exactly. Number two is, is what I most often meet in, in, in companies. And it’s like, you know, people tend to go to the same place and buy furniture and to build up the environment. And it all looks and looks the same wherever you are. And the. I think there’s no strategic consideration of what the environment should support in different conversations. And what I always suggest for companies is to go both ways, not to have messy rooms like in number one, but also give them the opportunity to be in a room where personality is more at hands than you would see in number two. Number two is, is a great meeting environment for strategic meetings. But if you want to connect by heart, you will probably do that better in an environment that would be a mix of one or two. So, Thank you, Viola. Yeah, we had a few comments on Diane’s point. She said it depends on who’s in the room, not on the room. Yeah, nobody changed it for me. I could imagine a university professor and the first one, and that is instantly the view, Roger says as a metaphor for the conversation. One is more honest and to some order. Yeah yeah, exactly. The first one is too messy for Matteo, but the second one is too sterile. So yeah, not. Not Goldilocks. Yeah, the people. Yeah, it’s good to have the person, I guess. Hmmm Yeah. And that’s, that’s really what I wanted to get to with the, with these two examples that, that both 1 and 2 can, can, can, can work at depending on Yeah. Who’s in the room and who connecting in the, in a corporation? But also, what is the purpose of the conversation we’re having? And different rooms support different kinds of conversations. So that’s really the key point from this slide. And that’s why this is about culture, you know, and it’s also about what you offer as conditions to the people having a conversation. Can the choice among different setups in the environment or are they forced to connect by a hard in a sterile surrounding? So let me just show you this slide, which is about my approach to how often we choose to, to work with these three angles of conversation capital. So, if we look at the personal skills, personal communication skills, um, I like to bring in SuperSkills, of course, by Facet5 where we focus on the performance in five areas, presence, hyper-awareness, decoding, voicing, flow control in, in conversations. And this is really a great tool to work with because this shows where the gap is between what you want to achieve through conversations and what your personal skills are and what you’d like to enhance in your personal skills. But also spotlight, which is much about relationships and how you manage your relationships engaged in relationships which of course is also a great insight into building our personal communication skills. And then again, I like to use voice training and personal appearance. I use a lot of tools from theatre, and I do a lot of theatre work. And maybe some of you are familiar with the improved theatre, which is a great toolbox to challenge people, to enhance their personal skills. And on the behaviour and their behaviour. Yeah, and then I work with the conversational techniques training. I work a lot with narrative techniques, for example, Karl Tomm’s systemic approach based on curiosity, how curious you are and the way you train yourself to keep yourself curious about the intentions of other people, for example. And then I do a lot of groups of supervision on the collaborative process and individual coaching, too. If you look at the conversational culture, I do a lot of leadership training because yeah, of course, also working with the leaders, I work with their personal skills, but as leaders on a strategic level, I also work with building professional conversation environment as we talked about before and how to become the positive example of a constructive and constructive learning environment. And then I have frequent, frequent discussions with teams and leaders on the state of the culture rhetoric used rhetoric used, methods developed and tried. And that’s what I told you in the beginning that a lot of my clients are from social welfare, and social institutions and in Denmark like I think in most other countries, we have a discussion once in a while about which rhetorics are used in hospitals and in elderly care. When we describe the people that we take care of. And sometimes the rhetoric drops to a point where it’s unethical. And so, a lot of my tasks are about building up the rhetoric’s, building up the professionalism in these institutions. And that’s a lot about conversations too. And then I evaluate the strategic outcomes of conversations, of course, and I measure the effects inside and outside the company because when the ethics drop in the rhetoric in the workplace, it’ll be noticed by the people outside the organization how they experience that. The people from the company talk about the other clients, for example, or the people that they are taking care of if it’s social welfare. And then there’s the terms and conditions, which is where we work with the priority of and the accessibility to be trained and join educational activities. And of course, I’m interested in that because that’s what I sell. So I hope that they all agree that it’s important to give all employees in the company the accessibility to be trained and to join educational activities. But also, because this is really what is required for building up a good culture and good conversations. And then it’s I work with the availability of appropriate environments and facilities for professionals and creative conversations in a learning environment. That’s what we talked about before when we talked about, which environments best could support different kinds of conversations. So, So why is this important? It’s important at present because good conversations are the most important strategic capital in all organizations. But it will also be important because when we look into a future where a lot of things are challenged and some of the things I mentioned in this slide, for example, and I have just learned that there are some new data on the Danish population and the level of stress. In 2017, the National Health Organization stated that 25% of the Danish population claimed to be stressed. And this is constantly increasing in numbers. And I think the last numbers are around 30% And that’s very high. Also, Gallup research from 2013 shows that 13% of employees in general from the global perspective are unengaged in the work. And that’s quite a lot of people that only meet up at work to earn the money or as Hannah Arendt, the German sociologist, would state that they are only there for maintaining their life. And so that’s quite depressing too. And also, the trust in organizations, institutions and authority is under pressure and that’s due to a lot of things Among them is that as we tend to be able to look through what organizations really do in the world, the more transparent organizations are known to be, we sometimes experience that the values don’t match with the behaviour in the world. And that really decreases the trust in these organizations. Also, around the world, we can see that there’s a fall in trust in health care in a lot of Western countries, which we believe to be the best in the world. We now tend to distrust more than we did before. And then the fourth challenge, which is a huge challenge, too, is that I meet like most of you probably also do I meet a lot of leaders that are fed up with being regarded as omnipotent leaders who have answers to all questions that might come in from, from, from people in their organizations. Um, all work processes, in companies are really getting more and more complex. And, the leaders can answer fewer and fewer questions, from the employees. So, these are big strategic challenges that most organizations face and must find answers for. And of course, conversations play a very central role in meeting these challenges. And that’s because, um, and that’s why we, we need to, Uh, to also bring a perspective in that’s about good conversations regarded as professional tools to, Uh, to be able to, on one side, get people more engaged in the work and get people more connected to their own values. But also bringing a conversation in, Uh, in the team that, that makes it possible to, Uh, to come closer to each other’s preferences, motivations, intentions and, and the dreams of how we could perform better. Anything that could enhance the cooperation between people in the team because then more and more answers will be sought and found by teams without leaders or among employees. In groups. So, in my training on the capability to really have these profound conversations with each other, I often use this model. It’s a narrative interview in a structured conversation. And it’s inspired by Jerome Bruner, who you might know also. But what I train people to do is to ritualize these kinds of conversations, because we’re not talking about conversations in the term of, you know, talking to each other at the water cooler. We’re talking about the conversations from a professional angle. So, what I train people to do is to share a certain situation that could be a crucial social situation and a situation where you made an error that you would like to present for your group or for a team. Or it could be a situation where you did well. And the best thing is if you can share both crucial situations and great situations where you knew you did well. But, at a starting point, I, ask people, to share a situation with each other. And then I ask them to ask questions like this and, and keep the curiosity and, and, and really stick to the model. But we would like to know from each other, which situation we experience as colleagues in the work environment. And then we would like to ask our colleague which themes the colleague himself discovered and which one is the priority. Because in a certain situation, when you think about it, there could be a lot of themes coming up in our head that is about this situation. And so, we would like to know which one has the context priority. And after knowing that, we would like to know why this is important. And of course, we are asking these questions because as we go on, we learn a lot about our colleague, not only about the situation that he wants to present but also what his thoughts are about this situation. So, moving around the situation with these first questions, we can proceed through the next one which brings, the group or the team in with the question. Which questions would you like to ask us? Because that brings really the team’s resources in front of these conversations. And after that. We would like to know why our colleague would like to ask. Exactly these questions. What are the thoughts about presenting these questions to us before we answer? And of course, this is a deeper level again. With the aim of learning more about how our colleague thinks about the situation. And then we want to know. Through this conversation, what has become clearer for you, that is for the colleague presenting the situation and through this conversation, what have you learned? And after that group reflection, what have we learned? And that’s because the two last questions really are crucial for building up psychological safety in the group, and we all learn from the presenting situations for each of them. And these are quite easy questions to ask. But in fact, it’s my experience that it’s quite difficult for people to, to stick to the model and really use the model for building up and learning conversations and using them on a strategic level. We tend to ask questions that also reflect what we know, so demonstrate our wisdom through our questions. But this is the quite opposite. These are open questions that have the aim of knowing more and more on a deeper, deeper level. So, what I want people to do is to use this model in a structured way and to ritualise the way that they use this model. And they ritualise it by deciding when to use this model which could be at a meeting once a week. And in some workplaces, I know that they have decided that they use it at one time every day on a morning meeting or a morning conference. Then they take turns presenting a situation to each other. And when they have worked with that for some time, the fact is that there is slowly built-up psychological safety and they will more and more present situations where they want to learn about their errors, where they want to present errors, to learn how to do that better the next time. So, a key point for me is that future organizations. And more and more calls for these personal abilities that I mentioned here. And that is really one of the answers to them and the things that we are facing, problems we’re facing in the future. We need a perspective on horizontal more than hierarchical leadership in teams and cooperative environments that calls for high-level conversations to support this. And we need to regard groups or teams in organizations to be the ones to find their answers by themselves. And that really requires these personal abilities that I mentioned here, and that is to be able to lead colleagues without formal leadership. And that is to be led by colleagues to accept that colleagues need you. And that is to lead yourself. To lead yourself is about having insight in what are your personal preferences and what are your risks and how could you release potential in your personal competencies. But what I experience is that what really tends to be the hardest part of these three abilities is to be led by colleagues. It’s easier for people to challenge themselves in taking leadership on colleagues. But it’s far more difficult to be led by colleagues. To accept that a colleague leads you under certain circumstances. But this is really what future collaborations is about, what future organizations need to develop, and where conversations really pay to play a central role in the building of this. So, I’m curious to hear some of your thoughts and comments on what I have presented here. So, there may be one or two of you would write something in the chat. And I think Rachel will monitor what is written if you would like to share your thoughts. I’ll keep an eye on anything coming in. You got Piotr’s curiosity going earlier. He wanted to know more about you, John and asked you what your Buddhist name means. He wants to understand you better. Yeah OK. OK yeah, me too. I’ll explain that at the end. Oh, good. OK, you commented on conversation capital. I was curious seeing the picture of the two rooms, you know, the messy desk and the sterile meeting room. I kind of was thinking about Zoom rooms as well, because that’s another dynamic. And how that’s changing the kind of conversation people are having because we’re more likely to see those kinds of personal spaces. I suppose having a mixture, you know, one person dials in from a personal space, another from a meeting room. So how does that? Do you see that showing up and changing that dynamic? Yeah, I do. And I think in some of the organizations that I know that are going more the virtual way they think a lot about how they should build up the environment the correct environment, for example, the room where Zoom is started from. And so, but what I also see is that a lot of people like myself perhaps don’t really give it a thought. What what’s the surrounding around the computer when you log on to Zoom? So, I think this is what we have to work with in the future, too. But then I always also say that the virtual meetings on Zoom or Teams or what we use are great at some point. In my perspective, the effect drops if we only use virtual meeting rooms. We have to meet each other in person. Exactly because there are things underneath the surface that we need to, experience with each other, our body language, how we smell, and how we go around things. Yeah, the body language, the communication that you lose in virtual communication. We have to have these experiences with each other. So, a virtual meeting should work in the long run. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You might think that you’re seeing a more personal side to someone, but you’re still losing that human. Yeah, yeah, Yeah. Jurate’s also asked, could you share any thoughts and tips about starting a Capital Conversation between two people who do not trust each other? Yeah Yeah. Uh, in fact, I showed you the method with the narrative question and the structured interview. I used that, um, and I and it’s not, you know, just throwing the method in their heads. You have to, you know, build up trust between you and the people that you want to be engaged with each other. So, so that’s, that’s some work to do before you present the method. But I really use this method and the fact is that, that they’re doing that there and they often come back to me and say now, now we learned a lot more about how we work and what our intentions is with what we do. So so now it’s like our conflict is solved and they went out of the room. And so so now we, we actually some, some people actually choose other, Uh, to work with, from, from, from, from that point because they now know a lot more about each other than they know about the rest of the group. So that would be my suggestion to you to use this method and to, you know, to massage the group so that there’s the right level of Social Security to work with it. Yeah, and I got the impression that you sort of, you know, giving people this framework. What’s amazing is that they learn that it’s difficult. They can all learn which bits they want to skip. And the learning and the curiosity seem to kind of come back again and again as the core. Yeah shifting. Yeah, exactly. I don’t think we have any more questions that have popped up in the meantime. So, answer about my Buddhist name, which is Thubten Wangyal. And that was given to me by my mentor who’s a Buddhist nun. And for several years ago. And it means the man who wants to achieve insights and conquer new areas in his personality. Gosh. That’s Thubten Wangyal. Yeah, but also, it’s a family name. So, when I meet another Thubten, I know which Buddhist line he’s connected to. Yeah Yeah. That’s lovely. If there are no other questions from anyone, I think what a lovely note to end on. Yeah as a phenomenon. Yeah Yeah. And I just to share with you what, what I’m mostly inspired by in building up in the conversation capital and this is, Uh, you might know these, Uh, these persons, John Bruner and Gregory Bateson and John Dewey and also Paolo Freire for the toolbox from. From the theatre world. And so this is really what I’m inspired by. So, we’re. I just say Thank you very much for attending this session. It was a pleasure to present the Conversation Capital, and I hope it was an inspiration to you, too. Thank you very much. Thank you, John. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you to those that joined and participated. You’re getting a lot of Thanks in the chat room. Thank you very much. Go well, everyone. And everyone’s looking forward to continuing the conversation either with you or taking up taking some of those models and ideas into organizations. So wonderful. Thank you very much. Thank you, John. Thank you, everyone. Have a good evening.