The Focused Conversation approach isn’t just a meeting structure. It’s a pattern that helps us think more carefully and collectively about what matters, engaging in more effective dialogue with others who may have different points of view.
Are you tired of wasting hours in unproductive meetings? The average professional spends over 30 hours each month in meetings that go nowhere. In this episode, we introduce the Focused Conversation method from the influential book *”The Art of Focused Conversation”* edited by Brian Stanfield. This isn’t just a tool for better meetings—it’s a transformative approach to thinking, communicating, and connecting more effectively with others.
Discover how this four-step process—Observe, Reflect, Interpret, and Decide—helps you tap into collective wisdom, foster meaningful dialogue, and bridge divides in an increasingly polarized world. We’ll delve into the neuroscience showing how our brains filter information and how the Focused Conversation method overcomes these limitations to enhance decision-making and build stronger connections.
Whether you’re leading a team meeting, engaging in community discussions, or seeking deeper conversations in your personal life, this episode equips you with practical tools to make a positive difference in your sphere of influence. Join us as we explore how to turn challenging discussions into opportunities for growth, collaboration, and breakthrough conversations.
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Episode transcription
Peter Green
Most meetings at work are so poorly run that the average professional spends over 30 hours a month in unproductive meetings. So improving meeting effectiveness has obvious benefits. Even if you only enhance the meetings you organize and attend, you can make things better within your sphere of influence—and maybe inspire others to do the same.
Richard Lawrence
In this episode, we’re sharing the foundational structure we use to significantly improve just about every meeting we facilitate, based on the powerful book “The Art of Focused Conversation” edited by Brian Stanfield. If all you gain from this structure is better meetings, that’s a fantastic outcome—your team will thank you for making things a little more productive.
Peter
But there’s a deeper benefit: the Focused Conversation approach isn’t just a meeting structure. It’s a pattern that helps us think more carefully and collectively about what matters, engaging in more effective dialogue with others who may have different points of view.
This kind of dialogue is increasingly important today. Without it, we’re left with self-interested shouting matches and no capacity to find deeper meaning beyond individual points of view. As we look around and see wars, polarization, and suffering—caused in part by our inability to have deeper conversations with those we perceive as different—we feel called to share this message as one small way to fight back.
Developed after World War II to make sense of tragedy, The Art of Focused Conversation offers a path to more constructive interactions, whether you’re leading a team meeting or discussing contentious topics with your family or in your community.
Richard
Our goal for this episode is to equip you with the tools to facilitate real dialogue and to make a positive difference in your sphere of influence. By fostering more thoughtful and connected conversations, you can contribute to a world that’s a little more understanding and a little less divided. We hope you’ll stick around as we explore The Art of Focused Conversation.
Peter
The Humanizing Work Show is a free resource sponsored by the Humanizing Work company, where we help organizations improve their leadership, product management, and collaboration. Visit the contact page on our website, humanizingwork.com, and schedule a conversation with us if your organization wants to see stronger results in those areas.
Richard
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Peter
OK, so why does the Focused Conversation method work? The short version is that it helps us become more aware of much more information than we could possibly consider on our own. If you’ve ever heard someone advocate for data-driven decisions, this is one of the best methods we’re aware of to increase the breadth and quality of the data we consider in making decisions. Let’s briefly examine what modern neuroscience is uncovering about how the brain processes information.
Our brains are optimized to make energy-efficient, internally consistent, and safe decisions. To accomplish this, they filter out almost every bit of data they’re presented in order to focus on only what matters right now. They rapidly interpret selected data by comparing it to expected patterns and make nearly instantaneous decisions about what to do. All of this happens subconsciously in milliseconds, since conscious processing is expensive and slow. If we had to logically think about what to do in an emergency situation, we’d all be dead.
Richard
To oversimplify the process a bit, we can imagine it like a data funnel with different filters in place. At the top, we have all the information that is available to us through our individual senses. Anything we could have been aware of passes through this filter. Of course, there’s lots of relevant data doesn’t make it into our funnel at all because it’s not detectable by our senses (but might be to someone else’s).
Peter
Then at the next step down, we have the Focus Filter. Go look up the “Invisible Gorilla Experiment” if you’ve never come across it before. That study, conducted by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris in 1999 at Harvard University, involved showing participants a short video of people in white and black t-shirts passing basketballs. Participants are instructed to count the number of passes made by the white-shirted team. Then, during the video, a person in a gorilla suit walks into the scene, stops in the center, faces the camera, thumps their chest, and then walks out. About half of the participants in the study failed to notice the gorilla, despite it being clearly visible for about nine seconds. Even when eye-tracking software showed that people looked directly at the gorilla for up to a full second, they still didn’t consciously perceive it. Some studies suggest that only about .005% of all available data passes through this filter, a real testament to the brain’s efficiency.
Richard
Moving down the funnel, we next come to the prediction filter. Our brains have models about how the world works. Data that matches our current model makes it through, and data that contradicts the model is usually filtered out. Behavioral economists call this “confirmation bias.” In one study, participants were asked whether they identified with one or another political party. Then they were asked to read a summary of a proposed welfare policy and to indicate whether they would be in favor of the policy or not. What participants didn’t know is that half of the participants received a copy saying it was written by one political party and half that it was written by the other. When the policy was presented as coming from their own party, about 70-80% of participants expressed support for it. Conversely, when the same policy was attributed to the opposing party, only about 20-30% of participants supported it, regardless of the policy’s content. Participants, when asked about the impact of political party on their support, strongly denied it was a factor in their decision, though.
Peter
Next, we encounter the emotional filter. Since large systems in our brain are built to protect us from danger, we notice things that trigger negative emotions about 5x more readily than things that trigger a positive emotion. And then, things that trigger a positive emotion activate our rewards systems, making them more noticeable than things that triggered no emotion at all.
Data that made it through all of these filters is available to us to inform our decisions. For most day-to-day activities, it’s a beautifully efficient, species defining capability. We can’t pause it or replace it. It is literally the hardware system we have that’s available to us. So when we come together to have a conversation, each of us has already gone through the process. We show up with opinions formed based on frighteningly incomplete data. The Focused Conversation helps us mitigate the downsides of that by injecting much more information at each filter step, and then inviting us to consider it collectively to reach a better outcome.
Richard
Using the Focused Conversation method involves moving through four steps, one at a time, as a group. The four steps, Observation, Reflection, Interpretation, and Decision expand on each of the filters we discussed before. Instead of being limited to just what made it through our own individual filters, we include other peoples’ data.
So, the Focused Conversation starts with the Observation step, where participants are invited to share what they observed. Of course, they can only share what made it through their own filters, but at each level of the filter, we get expanded information. Each person had data available to them at the top of the filter that the others didn’t. Each person was focused on something different. Each person noticed things that aligned with their beliefs or missed things that didn’t, so the more diverse set of beliefs and mental models, the more complete the data set.
Peter
Then at the next step, Reflecting, participants are asked to reflect on how the presented data impacted them emotionally. In a work context, we often use the terms “motivating and frustrating” in this step, since many are uncomfortable discussing other emotions honestly at work. This helps us get more data at that third emotional filter, since it’s common for participants to have very different emotional reactions to the same data.
Richard
Next, at the Interpretation step, we invite participants to suggest multiple possible reasons for why the data exists, including what may have triggered different emotional responses. Now we are collectively reasoning about the underlying themes and patterns in the data, before finally moving on to the last step, Decision, where we use different group decision-making processes to choose what to do based on the wider set of data and our shared interpretation about it.
These four simple steps create outsized outcomes for the amount of effort it takes to plan and use them. We often abbreviate the steps as ORID, and they’ve become second nature in how we structure conversations. What have we observed? How are we feeling about it? How might we make sense of the situation? What actions should we consider taking?
Peter
I notice all of the “we” pronouns in that last part of the paragraph, Richard. I’ve found that going through the ORID structure is useful even as an individual thinking process, to sort of reflect on my own data and my own decision making. But as all of the collective pronouns suggests, it really becomes powerful when it is used in dialog. Hearing what other people are noticing, feeling, interpreting, and considering creates that expanded data set that leads to better decisions, but it also creates connection. We’ve been telling and listening to other people’s stories as a way to connect and make collective sense of the world for eons. Listening to what someone else has seen, how they felt, what it all means to them, and why they behave the way they do–is a missing ingredient in way too many modern conversations. To romanticize it just a bit, Focused Conversation is in some ways an invitation back to the campfire.
Richard
In the book itself, The Art of Focused Conversation, the description of the ORID method takes less than 50 pages. And then the next 130 pages share 100 example conversations across several categories, like Evaluating and Reviewing, Preparing and Planning, Coaching and Mentoring, Interpreting Information, and Decision Making. Each example conversation provides suggestions for how to open the conversation and what questions to ask at each of the four steps.
When we are asked to facilitate a conversation that we haven’t done many times before, we often turn to those example conversations as inspiration. I don’t think I’ve ever used one exactly, but I’m almost always inspired by one of them to create a structure that will work well.
Thanks for joining us on this episode. We hope The Art of Focused Conversation inspires you to facilitate more meaningful dialogue in your work, your community, and your personal life. Every conversation is an opportunity to bridge divides, foster understanding, and access the collective wisdom that leads to better decisions and a more connected world.
Richard
We’d love to hear about your experiences as you put this to use—feel free to share your stories or ask questions by reaching out to us. And don’t forget to share this episode with anyone who might benefit from more focused and more meaningful conversations.
Peter
We appreciate all that you do to make a positive difference—one focused conversation at a time–the world needs it. We hope to see you on the next episode, and thanks for tuning in!
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