 Do you notice that the conversations around you are becoming more shallow, less fun and less productive? Well, in this episode, you'll learn why and how you can design for better. Conversations making them more human, meaningful and exciting again. Here's a guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, I'm Fred Dust. Welcome to episode 161 of the service design show. Hi, my name is Mark Fontijn and welcome back to a brand new episode of the service design show. On this show, we explore what are the hidden and invisible things that make the difference between success and failure, or to help you design great services that have a positive impact on people, business and our planet. Our guest in this episode is the author of the book Making Conversation, Fred Dust. That makes a strong case for the fact that we are having less and less of the hard and important conversations with each other. And that's a big problem. You'll hear why in this episode. Those important conversations don't happen by accident. You need and can design the environment that allows them to emerge. Fred shared some practical and simple ideas that once implemented almost guarantee that better conversations happen around you. And fun fact, you're probably doing already that a lot in your day to day. During this episode, you'll also hear why we should abandon active listening sooner than later and replace it with creative listening. This is one of those things that once you see it, it's impossible to unsee. So at the end of this episode, you'll not only walk away knowing why and how you can design for better conversations, you'll also be able to win a signed copy of Fred's book. Now we're talking. If you enjoy conversations like this that help you to grow as a service design professional, make sure you click that subscribe button and that bell icon to be notified when new episodes come out. That's about it for this introduction. Now it's time to sit back, relax and enjoy the conversation with Fred Dust. Welcome to the show, Fred. Happy to be here. Thank you for having me. It's such a privilege to be in a position like I am where I can invite authors of books that I've just read and I'm excited about. So thank you for coming on. We're going to talk about the book, which we'll reveal in a second. But Fred, for the people who haven't Googled you yet and looked up what your career has been so far, could you give a brief introduction of maybe who you are and what you do these days? Yeah. So I'm Fred Dust, a recent author of a book about how to kind of think about conversation creatively or designing conversation. Currently, I run a consultancy that actually helps organizations get through or craft the hardest conversations that they're grappling with. They can be cultural conversations, conversations with their consumers. And in many cases, they focus on large scale global systems change as well. So I've done that. And before that, I was actually, I was a former managing partner at IDEA, which is a design innovation consultancy out of here in the US. When did you start your own, go off on your own? I left IDEA maybe five years ago. It was actually, it was related to the fact that I felt like we were sort of seeing in the United States and actually in the state of business in general, kind of inability to kind of grapple with really hard conversations and had been lecturing on the topic. Just to be really clear, I've been lecturing on the topic and an agent reached out and was like, we'd love you to write a book on this. So I ended up writing a proposal, writing the book, and spent about a year and a half researching that. And then on the back end of that built the business. And so we do everything from working with clients to get through hard conversations to, in some cases, training clients on our methods and how to kind of use them themselves. Cool. Before we dive into this fascinating topic, I have a lightning question round, which I didn't prepare you for, which I prepare no one for. Five questions, five questions. Your goal is to answer them as briefly and as quickly as possible. Are you ready? Yeah, I'm ready. Awesome. What's always in your fridge? Cheese. Cheese. Okay. We've got a cheese lover here. Now this is an interesting one, which book or books are you reading at this moment, do you have any? You know, I don't read fiction or don't read nonfiction. I read only fiction in my spare time. And I'm reading a book that I can't remember the name of, which is amazing. It's about like, it's, yeah, unfortunately, I cannot remember the name of it, but it's really good. Okay. You'll get it. Maybe we'll add a link in the show notes. This might be a good question. Yeah. I'm sorry about that. Okay. We're moving on. Leave the world behind is the name that I'm sorry. There we go. I just needed to give you some time to reflect on that. Yes. Fred, what was your very first job? Well, my very first job was a delivery boy for the pharmacy in my neighborhood. So that was really my very first job unless you're wanting something that's like a real job. But that was a real job actually. Let's do a real quote unquote job as well. Delivery boy and then how did your professional career start? I started as working as a designer for a very large retail company. And I did that all through grad school. So I worked my way through grad school by working designing old navies, which was for a Gap Incorporated. So that was my very first job. And design as in graphic design? No, design as in space design. So did the architecture and space and experience designer? Okay. We need to always label what kind of design people do. Really do. Great point. Another fun question. If you could be an animal, which animal would you like to be? Gosh, my dog seems like she has the most fun. I would like to be specifically my dog. And I guess that doesn't have to do anything with the boss of the dog. No, I mean, the boss is pretty good, but it's all right. And a final question. And I don't know if you have an answer to this one, but do you recall the moment you sort of first learned or heard about service design specifically? You know, I don't remember the moment. I remember the era in the sense that I was working at IDEO when we had started the services on practice. And I remember working so hard with that practice to make it understandable for the world. Because I mean, this is maybe not a short answer, but because it was so embedded in the practices that we were doing as well, we were looking at systems change as well as kind of space design. And so service became a natural component. So I remember it as a couple of years where we were really kind of trying to make sure people could understand what the method, what about. Cool. Yeah, makes sense. Thank you for this lightning round. Somebody, a cheese loving dog. Yeah, cheese loving dog. I can't remember the book that is by the side. Really. Already makes for a great this is going to be a great episode. So there is a small teaser for the end of the episode because we're going to give away signed copy of your book. We're not going to announce what the question will be, but there is a contest. So make sure you stick around and we both wanted to show sort of the book, but we don't have a physical copy laying around. You only have a Chinese copyright and I only have the audio book. Yeah, I mean, there's the Chinese edition, so. But we are going to give away an English version assigned copy signed by you at the end of at least at the end of the episode. We're going to announce how you can participate in the raffle. Well, that was a stormy introduction, Fred. Let's let's dive into the topic of making a conversation. I read I listened to the book. I found it fascinating. It got recommended to me by somebody. I don't recall who sorry, but it was one of those books on my list where I thought that I need to read this. I need to listen to this and I got a lot of inspiration from the book for the community that I host for the cohorts that I host. So it was it was very interesting. And again, I feel really privileged to be able to then sort of get people like you here on the show and pick your brain and go even deeper on this topic. This is a long preamble for the question. Why do we need a book on conversations? Mark, it's a great question. And I think it's so funny. Sometimes I'll go sit with clients and you'll say like we need to talk about how to have hard conversations or how to make a conversation. And everyone's like, do we really have to? I don't want to. And you're like, yeah, we really do have to. You know, Mark, I think there's a kind of couple of things that that kind of popped up that actually led to why we wrote the book. When one had to do, I think with kind of civil discourse, and that's specifically in the United States, we were we were at that point seeing a moment where it had kind of broken down. I think we would continue to see the kind of disenfranchisement and the fact that actually people, neighbors, community members, family members can't speak to each other. And so they're on one level. There's that. However, I would also say in my professional life, the last work I was doing was large scale systems change, working with the U.S. government, then the Obama administration, working with Elizabeth Warren, working with the Surgeon General, and as well, looking at large scale philanthropy and thinking about how they were talking to nonprofits and talking to government and engaging with private sector and realizing that there was no real construction for conversations that that had the kind of impacts people wanted to have. That you would see people going into rooms talking, talking, talking, but not getting the impact, not making decisions that needed to happen. So that was a big drive, like, how do we get decision making to happen? But it was also how do you get people to be involved in some of the most important conversations of their lives and do it in a way that feels creative and exciting, as opposed to just feeling like a task? So those are the things that kind of like drove me to start to think about this topic and, and, and Mark, interestingly, I mostly in the beginning would speak about how we have lost conversation in our culture as opposed to how we create it. So that was a big shift in my thinking over the time over the last couple of years. So how did we lose conversation? What, what, what are you? Well, I mean, what do you imagine? Yeah, I believe that there's a couple of kind of misperceptions. I think that if you were to ask people just naturally, one of things that they might say right off the bat is, oh, it's technology, it's the phones, it's like, you know, whatever, it's it's political discord. I would say there's a technology component, although I would say at least in the United States, actually in a lot of Europe as well. In the fifties, we saw the advent of television. Television basically became the de facto host of familial life. And that actually, I think, had a big erosion in our ability to practice conversation, right? Because we weren't having conversations at dinner tables. And then I think there's a bunch of kind of things that happen in corporate practice. We saw the huge move in the seventies of the self actualization movement into business, which was kind of like me first. I think that led to a really, really interesting kind of thing where conversation wasn't the most prized thing, is like direct powerful leadership was the thing that was prized most. And then I think the other thing is that in we started getting into kind of tactics and things like what I often I talk about in the book, there's a thing called active listening. Mark, I don't know if you're kind of aware of active listening. It's the idea of kind of saying, yes, go on, please, whatever, which is actually, in fact, not listening. It's, in fact, built from a therapeutic technique. And so that actually got pulled into the world of HR, where suddenly we had a whole set of leaders who weren't listening to their employees. So it's kind of multi-pronged and multifaceted, I think, in a lot of ways. OK. Interesting to explore all of those things. The other very interesting. The other question there is why you, like of all the people who could write a book on conversations, why did you sort of feel that it was something you wanted or needed to create? Yeah, you know, it's a very interesting thing because when you start to kind of like craft a book and start to think about what like what you were going to do, I think you ask yourself that question exactly, which is like, why would it be me who writes this book? I think it has a lot to do with the fact that I had found myself in so many contexts and in that case, many contexts that were globally significant, where we're dealing with kind of big issues governmental issues, things like that, where I'd watch the downfall of conversation or conversation, not get where it needs to get. And so and then I'd also seen how you could begin to think about applying design to conversation and get outsized impact. And so I was doing a lot of experimentation with new ways of doing conversation, using designed formats and structures and realizing you could get so much more out of that. And so part of it had to do with the fact that it's like, I just had the experience of doing it and can actually practically begin to kind of give advice on how to think about it. What's interesting, Mark, is that I know about three other really remarkable authors who were also writing books on conversations now as well, because I think it is such a significant topic. All I would say from very different vantage points, mine's a design perspective. For others, it's a science perspective or something like that. So it felt like it was the right thing for me. And last thing I'll say is that once you start to write a book, you realize your whole life has been, in essence, kind of stocked up to kind of like tell the story of how you can make the change or why you should be telling the story. So we skipped over the part of the fact that we are sort of losing conversations or finding difficult to have those hard conversations. Maybe we can unpack that first before we explore the other areas like. So what is it from your perspective that is lost? Like how are the conversations that we are having today different from, I don't know, when from your perspective we were still having the right conversations? Yeah. And I would say that we've always had moments where we've had we've been less good or better at conversation. I will say that as we spend time, I spend time out in the world researching. Historically, there were great examples of places where conversation really thrived in really significant ways. You know, I think a lot of it, I mean, time had a huge impact on it. As time speeds up, we actually don't get to have the kinds of conversations we need to have. And some of those are quite significant conversations. In the book, I talk about conversations that happen around morning or crisis, right? And so and this a real interesting example came up to me with a series of conversations I'd had at the White House post a very significant school shooting. Where I was in rooms where you felt like people couldn't even get to a definition of what it meant to think about gun violence in America, much less begin to think about how to solve for gun violence in America. And so that was a really, to me, a significant example of a place where we needed to have a conversation that worked. And at the same time, it wasn't. And so my question was like, how could we actually begin to fix that? Yeah, I don't know if that begins to help. I'm yeah. So sort of the definition or one of the criteria for you of a good conversation is a conversation that helps us make progress. Yes, it is. And I recognize that not all conversations are meant to make progress. However, it's like even if it's actually progress towards progress, like sometimes, I mean, there are good conversations that are about helping people understand and embrace difference. One of the things I write about in the book is how kind of baseline afraid we are of walking into rooms where there's difference in the room and being worried about how to have those conversations, if that makes sense. I'm curious. Now, who did you have in mind? I'm sort of firing questions at you at this point. Who did you have in mind when you were writing this book? I mean, we did really think it was for business leadership, I have to say, like that's kind of the way it plays. Although as something, a funny thing happened as I went through the book, which is initially when I was doing the research, I was doing work that was really looking at kind of spectacular conversationalists. So I went to Darmshala and spent time with the Dalai Lama and went on pilgrimage to sort of see the kinds of conversations that happen as you walk for 50 miles a day or whatever, or 20 miles a day. And it was I thought those would be the spectacular places where you would see or global leaders. You know, I talked a lot with people who had led countries and things like that. And in the end of the day, the most interesting examples of people who'd had hard conversations creatively happened that happened to be held by like very kind of everyday people, people who basically had to kind of get through a hard conversation in their hometown or get through a hard conversation in their school or in the end. So ironically, the inspiration started to come from kind of people who you would talk to around the corner. And so I think that actually shifted over time, my perspective on who the reader was. And actually, interestingly, the audience has kind of been weirdly expansive. So it's like there's people like yourself who can really live in a space where you could see how this applies to the business and work you do. And then there's people who do it to kind of figure out how to get through a conversation at the dinner table. And so what's been surprising is how that morphed both in the writing and then actually in the way it's been received as it's gone out in the world. I'm going to give you the impossible task to sort of summarize the key idea or the key concept of making conversations like. What is it? What? Yeah, what is what is the key idea? Yeah, the key idea is that conversation is, in fact, a creative act. The key idea is that we don't believe we should be applying constructs to conversation, but conversation, in fact, we feel like should be natural. It should just be like it should be something that flows. And that's actually not true in many cases. Conversations don't flow or they don't get to the things we need to get. And so what the key idea of the book is, is you can apply design and creative thinking to conversations and build conversations that are going to feel more fun, more safe, more productive in that capacity. So the book has seven chapters, each one kind of outlying a different aspect of how you can use creativity to kind of have a better conversation. But if you were to get to the essence, that's it. Get creative at the conversations you have. OK. What are some ways to to do that? Yeah, I'll go through a couple that I think are really interesting or I'm going to go through some basics that I think you might not think about, which is that I have a whole second chapter, which is called creative listening, which is actually around the notion that we have, in fact, begun to think of listening as a as a punitive act, like you must listen to somebody or or I'm going to give somebody a good listening to, which is the way you hear people talk about listening to as well, which is like it's that sounds not fun. I don't know if that sounds fun to you, but to me, it doesn't. And so there's a whole chapter that's about like, how do we reinstall joy into listening? How do we reinstall listening as a as a fundamental fundamental inspiration point for us as creatives or as designers or as practitioners of anything? And so. That's a that's a key component. And there's some really interesting things. One of my favorite parts of the book is talking about what people like to listen to, which people like to listen to, like gossip and secrets and like really short kind of clever stories. And so there's a whole section about how to tell short clever stories, how to get people to tell you short clever stories. So that's a really significant component. I think the two others that I think are probably the most essential that when I teach this work, it becomes really critical is spotting scripts. So one of the things that happens in any kind of conversation is that there are scripts that are embedded in your conversation. And that can be scripts that are established by a room that could be like if I say the word boardroom to you, you're going to have a picture of what a boardroom looks like. And you can imagine what kinds of conversations are going to be in that. That's a script, right? So one of the things that we get people to do is be like, where am I kind of locked in a script that I don't want to be in? Like, so is this a room I don't want to be in? Is this a configuration I don't want to be in? Does the agenda of a meeting, which is also the script of a meeting, set the meeting so I can't even have the effects I want to have? So really getting good at finding embedded scripts and making sure you're not you're working with them or against them, if depending on how that plays. So that's a second big concept. And the third one is that rules help us and that rules can change. And when we change the rules of conversation, we get really different kinds of conversations. And so again, we expect that rules stay consistent. In fact, rules, whenever you play with them, can give wildly divergent kind of outcomes to a conversation. They can flip power dynamics. They can allow people to kind of say things they wouldn't say otherwise. And so we look a lot to games and gaming to kind of think about how you rethink the rules of conversation. So those are sort of three core components and I'm happy to go into any of them deeper. But I can maybe it is it's interesting to sort of share how I listened to these key concepts and how I yeah, how I'm trying to apply them. And I think I can comment on all three. But when you mentioned like what kind of stories people want to listen to, like the short stories, the gossips. And I think in the book, you mentioned Haikus as a way to tell stories, sort of like the short poems. This is something that I immediately try to incorporate in the community for in-house service designers where we do a two hour session. And at the end of the session now, I don't ask people for like what is your takeaway? I sometimes do, but I try to ask the host to summarize the meeting in a haiku, right? It's so funny. I love that. We've had a two hour conversation with, I don't know, 20, 25 people like summarize it in a haiku. And this is still a prototype, but I love that. It's I'm glad you like it. And what's funny and you've you've listened to the book so you know, but it's like we try to give up so many different ways to do something so you can if you don't like this way, you can try this way. And I love the haiku and I'm surprised at where people are using it. It's like shows up in places which it's delightful to see. So that's great. I'd love to hear more about that at some point. I'd love to give you a second example with regards to the scripts, because when I think initially of scripts, I'm thinking like the call center or somebody who takes you through this. But you mentioned it's also about context. And I was like, OK, in my days, when I was still doing service design, we were very aware of the room and like the physical setting of the room, what kind of vibe that would set. Nowadays, I do most of my things online. So I was thinking like what what signals is the online space giving for the conversations that we're having. And I guess it's funny because our community is called the circle. And you talk in a book about a circle. And I was reimagining the way we sort of organize our online space to make it less linear and to make it more circular. For I don't know if that's the proper word here. So, for instance, that's an example of how I'm trying to apply these principles into a virtual environment to to script the conversations or set the stage for a certain type of conversation, certain type of dynamic. I love that. I love that. And I think it's a great example of like, you know, that all the different ways that scripts can play and then how you can start to craft the scripts that you want to have. And that's I mean, it's interesting. I don't know where you're you're thinking as you're going on that. But immediately when you said that, I started to think about, well, what are the structures of a two hour conversation? And would you want the conversation to end where it begins? Because that's kind of like it's bringing it all around as a circle. I mean, are there time ways to think about circular? So, yeah. And I think the whole point about that, Mark, is like, why not get creative with it? Why not see if there is can be something better? Because we know that the baseline is not that great. So we might as well get better if we can. Well, that there is something, I think, romantic about the notion like, yeah, conversations should be organic and they should be quite spontaneous. If they are, you're lucky. But you can do a lot to sort of increase the chance that more fruitful, better conversations happen. I think that's the key. Yeah. I mean, and that's, Mark, that's a great point and one that I really I want to kind of hone in on for a moment, which is that gossip, whispering, you know, late night conversations, all those things, those are amazing. Don't touch those. I'm not I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in the ones that you make make you a little bit nervous or you feel like there needs to be impact or you know, the group needs to connect in bond. So it's the ones where there's actually there's something at stake that we feel like we want to kind of think about creatively. If that makes sense. And there is one more thing here is and it has to do with time. Like when you get people into a virtual or physical room for two hours, you want to sort of get, quote, unquote, the most out of it. It doesn't have to be like productive, but it can also be like fun, inspiration, connection. And I guess that's what you are designing for. You want to get the most value. I think that's right. And Mark, I just I think it's even let's just sort of. Pause from it and recognize the moment we're in, which is that most people for the last couple of years have not been experiencing fun in Zoom context or have not experienced hard conversations that can be fun. And so the outsize benefit, if you can add a little bit to that, is it is felt remarkably. I'll tell you one of the simplest things that I do in my meetings, which is like if it's an hour meeting, if it's a 90 minute meeting, if it's a 30 minute meeting, whatever, and we almost always try to end our meetings five minutes early. And the reason why is that there's this moment of delight when suddenly you're like not running up against something, but you're like you surprise somebody with an extra five minutes. So dumb, Mark, and yet so powerful. And believe it, you just sort of see the kind of this joy when you're like, I have a saying that every time a meeting ends early and Angel gets its wings and everyone's just like, yes. Basic things can have can make things more fun, actually. It's it's interesting that we are discussing a lot of things that are sort of setting again the stage for the conversation, not the actual conversation itself, right? Right. That's right. Well, and that's that's the point, Mark, because what we're looking for are tools and armatures and themes that actually can be used across multiple kinds of conversations and or the right tools for the right kinds of conversations. So so, yeah, it's really my one of the things I kind of discovered very early as I was writing is like, I'm not a facilitator. I don't think as like a facilitator. Like, it's like, I think like a designer, which is like, let's make the structures that make a conversation better. So it really is all those pieces, not the conversation itself. Yes. And exactly. And this has to there is a very easy link to be made with, for instance, things like experience or customer experience. You cannot force somebody how they will feel in a certain environment or you cannot force certain conversations upon people, which you can do is you can set the stage and then hope increase the chance that the conversations that need to happen will happen. It's why I was so delighted to talk to you and kind of to the people who are listening, which is that it's like you are, in essence, conversation designers, really. I mean, in the sense that it's like all those things, like the kind of the structures, the products, the scripts, the people, the like everything, all those things that kind of come around a service design process is, in fact, constructing the kinds of conversations that happen. So I don't see your work as being that dissimilar from the work that we do, frankly. I thank you for labeling it or one of the areas that I do. Because when I think you mentioned in the book, like conversation design or I wrote the term somewhere, I was like, yeah, that is like a very big part of how I spend my day and the things I'm thinking about, like creating that stage. I have a different question for you, and it has to do with the beef you have around active listening. Can you discuss that a bit? Yeah, I'm going to go into it in detail because it's actually kind of a really it's an interesting thing. So I'm going to tell you, I know you listen to the book, but I'm going to tell you like the origins of active listening are funny. So there was a therapist in the 40s, 50s named Carl Rogers, really remarkable therapist, originally a psychoanalyst, had at that point in his career kind of started to feel that that psychoanalysis had like limitations around its ability to kind of help people kind of forecast their feelings and understand their their kind of traumas. And so he created this thing called person centered therapy, which I think is quite funny if you think about a person centered therapy. And the idea was the therapist's job was to ask questions that helped you as the person who is responding, just uncover your own problems. So it's kind of like the classic if you see a movie of a therapist, I'll be like, how are you doing today? You're like, you're like not so good. I'm like, why are you not so good? And you're like, well, I'm depressed and I'll say, why are you depressed? And you're like, well, I can't set any goals. And I'll say, why can't you set any goals? And it's just this really recursive way that's always going back to you as a speaker. That's called active listening now. Active listening got pulled into everything. It got pulled into the way politicians talk. It got pulled into the way companies talk to each other. It got it was it's been taught in leadership. If you if you Google listening, you're most likely to come up with something like active listening as the primary thing. And active listening in the context where where is not it's not a two way practice. Active listening is one way I'm encouraging you to talk. I'm not even listening necessarily. I'm just encouraging you to talk. So it's for you, the speaker. It's not for me as the listener. And that makes listening. It's like you took listening out into the yard and like, you know, hidden with a rock. It's just like it's like why like it's not giving listening the merits it needs to have. So what I think about with creative listening is like, let's then think about how to kind of reembrace the joy of listening, the creativity of listening. You as somebody who can listen and ask questions as a listener, as opposed to think that it's actually this kind of like, let me just be here for you. Yeah, you're almost like a chatbot without. Well, and in fact, interestingly, like MIT in like the I think the 70s built the very one of the very first chat boxes and bot bots. And it was actually built off the notion of an active listening therapist. So it was called Eliza and it would basically do therapy, but it would do therapy basically, like just sort of like the way we just discussed. And so in fact, maybe was the origin of the way we think about chatbots. So when you describe this, I have to think back of how we used to do design research when I was still doing service design projects. And design research is like a lot of people read and or subconsciously practice active listening. They want to be unbiased. And like, you want to hear the stories from the interviewee, I took a different approach at some point. And I was like, I'm going to instill my own experience. I'm going to make it into a conversation rather than an interview, right? And I found that always more enjoyable. And usually it got, I think it got me better results. So yeah, I think what's interesting is even as researchers, and, you know, I work with design research, but I work with researchers like in the academic context. In fact, I was just training up a group in Australia, a bunch of academics on a new research methodology. And I think you hit a really good point, which is that to ask ourselves to be unbiased is a pretty unnatural state to go into a conversation. To hold a bias is problematic. But it's like one of the things that I think is interesting, especially if you're a designer, if you're a service designer, you're doing this kind of work is like it's OK to judge. And then it's OK to be like, well, but hold on, put that judgment aside. So I think to ask yourself to not act human makes listening terrible. And so I think what you're saying is exactly right. It's like you're letting yourself be human. And then in that situation, you're probably getting more human response from the people that you're talking to. That's it. And I there's like, I don't know. Maybe it's it's the idea of having to be scientific or objective. And I don't know where that came from, but like being human is probably more important in our context than being scientific. Well, yeah, I'll give you an example. So I'm working with a client that's kind of working on a strategy project and and they keep sort of being like, well, it's like, we want to make sure that we're getting bias when we're getting we're moving all of our bias from our interviews. And I was like, hey, guys, your strategy isn't objective. Like it's not an apple. You just don't go pick it off a tree. It's like it's like it's actually somewhat subjective. You have to feel your strategy forward. So yes, get as much information and facts as you can. But at some point you're responsible for it. You have to feel like you're going to own it. And it's actually been really, I think, open eye opening for people. We're like, oh, yeah, I can feel my strategy, not just like make my strategy. So is the essence of creative listening to be more human? Or like, how would you summarize that? I mean, it's what the essence of creative listening is to give you so many more tools you have to try listening in a bunch of different ways. And so it's a and a lot of that, though, does rely on being human. You know, it does like so. I talk about a thing, Conn, it's about Quaker listening, which is a point of inspiration for me, which is sort of silent, incubatory listening, and that touches into a very deep kind of human nature. It also, I would say the other aspect of what we look at in creative listening is how do you listen in the ways that allow us to think most creatively? And so one of the reasons I talk about like moments of pause or silence or taking breaks from things is that we know from the psychology of creativity that our minds make more connections in quiet moments than they do when we're in conversation moments. We're actually more likely to be connecting things. So there's real creative value to listening to something in silence than necessarily kind of like not or taking a moment of silence. So it's a bunch of creative listening has a bunch of different methods you can use to kind of let us kind of be more creative with the way we think about listening. I'm an easy audience for you, right? I sort of eat this ideology for breakfast. I love this. This resonates very strongly with me. Now, you mentioned that you work with many different people with business leaders, with country leaders. Is there a pattern in how they respond to these ideas? Right now, I would say that most of what we get is relief and surprise. So a bit of this notion that like I didn't know it could be fun. I didn't know it could be interesting. One of the things that I'm finding and I'm going to actually give you I'll tell you some examples of some negative responses as well. But what the most surprising thing in the last year is how often now our clients have started to refer to our conversations, structures, like conversations that they have as games. And it's really interesting because it's like it's not how we design them. But I was talking to a friend of mine who's the head of McKinsey Quarterly, who had done an interview with me a while back here when I was like talking to him recently. And I was like, why are they calling these things games? And he was like, well, games have results, games have rules and games are fun. And that's what your conversation structures are. And I was like, OK, so I'll go with it. So that's mostly the kind of response we've had. And I've been amazed at how much that kind of hits. I think because people want that. However, I had a very interesting experience last week where I was working with a client and it was the entire C suite of a client and very top level. The CEO hated the conversation structure, hated the game that they played. And in conversation afterwards with him and others, part of what we realized and he was fine with it when he realized it is that it's because the conversation structure leveled the playing field. It meant that everybody had the ability to have the same kind of conversation. But it wasn't that this one person could dominate the CEO just because of their power. And so it became a really interesting thing, which is that if you're suddenly feeling like your work is being or you can't do what you usually do, which is just make the final decision or just like jump ahead or talk over people, then it's uncomfortable. But it is uncomfortable in a learning way as well. So what are some of the other common roadblocks you see and experience when people try to implement this? Actually, a lot of it, frankly, the biggest kind of roadblocks are people being afraid to assert what they want to do and then not doing it and not getting the benefit. So I have clients who've come back being like, sometimes we didn't do what you said and sometimes we did. And it was always better when we did what you said, but it's still we were afraid to do some of these things. And I'm going to give you an example. I have a client. I was just teaching this client the value of silence and why you might hold five minute moments of silence where people can have quietly right ideas in the middle of a meeting and a conversation. And that client was like, I can't do that. That's so uncomfortable. People are so uncomfortable in silence. And so what I have to do in a situation like that is be like, first of all, that's the point is that you're working with the discomfort of silence, but then you have to kind of give sort of like the science behind silence. Like why does silence work and what does it do for us? And so what I find most and my team, I have a neuroscientist on my team. My team is now prepped for us to be able to kind of say like, if we're going to ask you to do this, here's all the evidence that says this is the right thing to do. So if you're going into a roommark and you're with these very senior people and you're doing something awkward, you can say, here's the reason we're doing it. And so that helps a ton. And so that's something I've really been working on. That's awesome because otherwise it's just, it leans towards the art side, right? Psycho, not psych, that's a bad example, but it leans towards art and feeling while business leaders and company leaders, they are sort of more analytical people. They try to have control and you sort of need to give them what they want to engage with this. And if this is going to give them scientifically proven better results, then I'm sure they'll go for it. Exactly. Because what you want to do is like you want them to do it once because what you find is once you do it once, you're like, that's amazing. It's just better. And then you feel it, but it's like, it's totally fair for people to be like, I need to know it. I need to understand like how this works before I actually try it. So that's a lot of the work that we do is now is make sure that if people are afraid to have a conversation, for instance, where people move around the room, which is something that we do, then we give them the reasons why that works. And then they do it. And then they'll never not have a conversation like that. So it's a bit kind of just like unlocking those barriers is the work that we're doing the most right now. One, a new address is in the final chapter of the book, but one of the questions I had while I was reading through it is like conversation might be interpreted initially as we need to talk. And like in my design practice, I learned that people often cannot verbally articulate the things they want, they need, but you address that in the final chapter. Like could you share a bit about that? Like how conversation isn't just about talking. You hit my kind of one of my favorite realizations during the book. And so in essence, I think the last chapter is called create. And in essence, the foundation of that chapter is when you can't talk, don't in fact, instead do together. And so, and what's interesting, and I was thinking about it for your practice and the people that you're working with, which is that and your listeners, which is if your service designer, you can talk and talk and talk about the work that you do. Whereas if you can take somebody into an experience and be like, this is service design, like let's experience it together, then it probably clarifies so much more. And what we find is that when we do things together like we create the same bonds. In fact, sometimes we create stronger bonds. You might create stronger bonds by going for a hike or cooking with somebody than you do it by having a conversation. Stronger bonds when you make something together than when you, but the conversation. So if making something together both helps you get someplace, further clarifies something and builds bonds, then it's okay as a replacement for conversation. So that's really what the final chapter is about. And I will tell you, Mark, the biggest surprise for me is how often people have been like, this helped me with my mom. You know, it's like, it's like, you know, or this this helped me with my family or it's like, it's like, it's so interesting like how people are have been interpreting and using it in different contexts. So I love, I'm really happy that you added that chapter because it needs to be, if you are not coming from a design background, I think it's really easy to overlook and just focus on talking while doing is probably in some situations more valuable. I can give you again an example how I was immediately trying to replicate and implement this in my community, in our community, I should say. So what I took out of creating things together is that it's a way to, for instance, create deeper connections, right? And we meet once a month for two hours, like that's okay. You can build connections there, but it's just two hours. Now, we came up with the idea to create a publication as a group at the end of the year. So everybody is going to contribute to a single thing, a single artifact that we're going to put into the world. And I really believe we'll have to wait and see again, it's prototype, but that is going to create stronger bonds within this group by co-creating something that we together as a community put out into the world. So that was how you inspired me through that chapter to implement this. Well, thanks. I think that's actually a really smart idea. I think what's also interesting about what you're doing is that you're also, you're taking this group, but there's a goal suddenly ahead of them, which means that they're all going in the same direction for the point of this year, which is also where the bonds and connections are made. So there's a lot of clever things you're doing there, I think. And it's not hard. Like, you just have to be mindful of it. Like, you just have to see the opportunity and then again. It's really funny that you say that, Mark, because you're, so when you sell a book, you get a bunch of, like you talk to a bunch of different publishers and you go meet with different publishers. And the way I ended up working with my publisher, and she was like, well, in my estimation, your book is really mindfulness for conversation. And I was like, oh my God, that's totally what it is. And that's why I ended up going with her as my publisher because I just felt like she was able to articulate it, which is like, once you're aware of it, once you think about it, once you think about other places where you've seen conversations go well, you have a whole palette of things you can pull to use to kind of create conversations anew. So it's, I think that's a really nice point. We are sort of branching off in different areas. But you mentioned, when did you start writing the book? Let me first ask that. Was it prior to COVID or was it during COVID? Oh, yeah, no, it was well prior. It was, I was starting, I started writing it like I started doing the proposal in 2017. Most of my research and actually the research, oh, Mark, the book was done pre-COVID. In fact, the only thing that happened in December, I remember sitting with my publisher and I was like, we both were like, I think there's going to be a pandemic. We're going to push the book out a year. So we pushed the book out a year. And then, and so it, so yeah, it was well, it was packed and done. Now, knowing death that you wrote prior to COVID, if you could add an additional chapter to the book based on the last two years, like what would that chapter be like? That's funny. I'll tell you a funny thing. So March or February of the first year of COVID, my publisher called me and she was like, we need to add a very short chapter on how to have the hardest conversations of your life in the pandemic over Zoom. And so interestingly, I had the opportunity then to add a very short chapter, which is really the kind of conclusion of the book, which is like, hey, right now we're in the middle of the pandemic, we have to do this. It's in this new way, which is interesting mark because I wrote that again, three years ago or whenever that was, and we still use it. I mean, I use it to this day as the kind of guidelines for the ways we think about having hard conversations in a kind of mediated environment. So I was lucky enough to be able to add the chapter in the middle of the process. It was rough because it's like you have to stay within page limits and stuff like that, but it was interesting. It was a very short audio book. It's very short. It's like the very last thing and it has like five things to do. And unfortunately, because I only have my Chinese edition in front of me, I can't tell you where it is. So let's assume that I somehow skipped over it. Do you recall what are these things that you added in the chapter? Interestingly, they were sort of based on the things that were in the other chapter. So one of the first things that I had an idea behind that was like you're busy. If you can't make a conversation on Zoom, don't because you're just making the conversation easier for everybody else and you're making your life easier by kind of making your time more simple. And so the idea was like if you're not needed some place right now, don't go so that other people can make the work, affect the work they want to do. I think one of the more profound ones was choose the medium for the conversation you want to have. When is the phone appropriate? When can you actually get the same progress in a Google Doc? So it was really about kind of like breaking open the notion that conversation had to happen face-to-face in an immediate environment. But we know phone conversations are remarkably powerful. And so there's a whole section on mediums and then basically like reestablishing the rules of conversation. See if you can find it. I wonder if it's not in the audiobook. But it's a great fun little chapter. So I don't know if you're planning on already doing a revision or a part two or a sequel. My question would be like what's next? What have you sort of learned by going through this process? Yeah. So that's a really great question. I'll tell you something that I learned that I probably could have learned five years ago. Which is that when I was writing the book I was with my agent one day. My agent was like the book really should just be a whole book on listening. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no. It's like I have a whole thing on all the aspects of conversation. I want to write that. And then I will say this last year I was kind of driving home from the city and realized that she was not wrong. She was right that actually there needs to be a book that's just on listening and the practices of listening and the extremities of how you can do listening and really fascinating in new ways and what to listen to. So I've got two things I'm working on. One is that is a book that actually looks at like how do we become more aware in a deeper way? And then another one that's actually a little bit more fun which is how to think about communicating your work if you're creative to non-creative people. So that's actually that's more of a fun thing. This was also going into I'm doing an online course that will be on as well. So those two things will kind of go side by side. I like those topics. I thought you might actually. Yeah those topics resonate with me for sure. I didn't expect it as much. Now maybe sort of heading towards the end of our conversation what do you feel is maybe the biggest misconception people have around this topic? Well I think that you actually targeted already which is like I think that people the misconception on the topic is that it's an art or a talent. As you said it's something that it's like you're just really good at or you're just like you know whatever whereas what I believe is that anyone can do this if they have the kind of white right things and so it's actually for me it's a construct and those are the things that get you there so that's the big difference in the way that I think about it and maybe other people come to this topic initially. And the great thing about that is that you can get better at this. That's a great thing. It's a skill. You can practice. You can learn. You can prototype. You can iterate. You can get better and you will get better once you know which way you need to go. What you'll find is as you get better you get more out of conversation. You find more to love about the conversations you have. So it rewards profoundly. And that's I guess part of the game mechanism because there's like the self-reinforcing system there. Totally. Little rush you get from succeeding in something like that. What do you hope is the one thing that somebody will take away from our chat if they remember one thing what do you hope it is? I have two things which is I hope people are taking away that hard conversations don't have to be as hard as they seem if you actually start to think creatively about it because I want people to feel like they are empowered to have those conversations. And then I hope that people are reminded that at its core conversations should be a inspiration point not like a point of kind of fear. I want people to be like how can I get the most inspiration from a conversation I have which will then I think make them ask how then do I get the most creative about the conversations I have. So that's the thing that I would hope people take away. Love it. And there are so many areas where to apply this not just your professional life as well and I think that's the next frontier for me. Like it's really easy for me to implement this professionally but now I need to implement this with my wife and my kids. You can do it. It's amazing how many of the even more formal games that we have that people have then taken home and played with their families which is fascinating. Now before we leave off there's one super important thing we need to do. We need to announce the contest. So the way this works for regular listeners to the show know what's coming we're going to announce a question and we want the answer to that question either somewhere below this episode or in the related post I'll add the details to the show notes and if you give the right answer you will enter a raffle and make a chance to win a signed copy. Now all the details again in the show notes but Fred what is the question that people need to answer to participate? I think we'll see it's either easy or hard but the name of the book is Making Conversation the Seven Essential Elements of Meaningful Communication How many chapters are in the book? That is like a catch 22 because maybe they don't have the books but they have enough clues they have enough clues if you listen to this episode you should be able to know and you'll know that the last chapter is about creating once again thank you for making the time coming on thank you for taking the time to write this to capture your thoughts because we all have so many ideas that we want to share with the world but not everybody sits down has the courage to lock themselves up and write a book about it so thank you for doing that and I hope our conversation will continue from this point on me too Marc and thanks so much for reaching out if it's always a delight to talk with new people about the work If you want to participate in the contest and make a chance to win a signed copy of Fred's book leave a comment down below answering the question how many chapters does the book have for all the details about the contest make sure to also read the show notes so much for listening to the service design show and I look forward to see you in the next video