A Tool to Make Difficult Conversations Easier
Use the magic words: "joint contributory system"
Happy July all! Summer is finally upon our family, and I could not be more relieved. I mean happy. I shared in a January post about my town’s sticky conflict: a several week long teacher’s strike. Though the strike ended in early February, its effects persisted, meaning that our summer started quite late. But here we are! Hot days, lots of ice cream, and me attempting to continue to work while also trying to enjoy summer with my three kids.
Summer enjoyment for me means good books, and I love getting book recommendations from people I admire. So, I was pretty delighted to get a recommendation from Charles Duhigg (he writes
Substack) during our interview about his book, Supercommunicators. He told me that Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most was the best book about communication out there (presumably before his new book hit the shelves?). Since I take seriously book recommendations from Pulitzer Prize winning writers1, I read it and, no surprise, loved it.
Written by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen from the Harvard Negotiation Project, this book identifies different kinds of conversations and the benefits of making sure you and your conversation partner are matched on conversation type (Duhigg’s book also centers on this framework). In particular, the authors emphasize the power of “learning conversations” noting that regardless of where you’re going conversationally, you increase your chances of getting there by trying to understand one another better. After all, as the authors note, “people almost never change without first feeling understood.”
This framework of conversation matching is incredibly useful2, but my favorite part of Difficult Conversations was something the authors call “the joint contributory system.” This is a fancy schmancy term for the idea that any interpersonal dynamic involves contributions from each person. In other words, it takes two to tango. But saying “joint contributory system” makes you feel cooler than referring to some dance that would never be featured on TikTok.3
The authors spend a lot of time discussing a particular issue that the joint contributory system helps us overcome: failing to perceive how we contribute to difficult conversations.
Yes, we all contribute to difficult conversations.
Consider the last time you had a difficult conversation. Where did you find fault? Who did you believe was responsible? Even in the rearview mirror, it is likely to seem that fault lay mostly with the other person, not you. And inside of difficult conversations, our tendency to see others’ contributions and not our own is even stronger. This common human impulse gets captured perfectly in the New Testament: “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?” (Matthews 7:3)
Scientific inquiry reveals the innateness of this tendency. Our narratives of what happened and why it happened are overly simplistic because of a reflex to see ourselves in an overly favorable light, and to see those who we feel hurt by in an overly harsh light. For instance, when it comes to domestic responsibilities, we are likely to overestimate our own contributions while underestimating the contributions of others. We have a tendency to see tasks we do as harder than tasks we observe. And we view our own behaviors as more justifiable than the behaviors of others.
These biases all contribute to us believing we know exactly why conversations have gone south (clearly the other person) while remaining blind to the ways we contributed (I did nothing wrong!). Nowhere is this captured as well as by the title of this terrific book: Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me).
As the authors of Difficult Conversations write:
Only in a B movie is it that simple. In real life causation is almost always more complex. A contribution system is present, and that system includes inputs from both people.
As Difficult Conversations argues, oversimplification of blame isn’t simply an annoying human tick—there are serious consequences to it. For one thing, blaming narratives inhibit our curiosity. They also activate defensiveness, as well as counterattacks of blame. Plus, as the authors write:
The urge to blame is based, quite literally, on a misunderstanding of what has given rise to the issues between you and the other person, and on the fear of being blamed. Too often, blaming also serves as a poor proxy for talking directly about hurt feelings.
This all means that difficult conversations often lead naturally and directly into blaming, being incurious, defensive and offensive, and avoiding any direct discussion of what’s really going on for each side. All the while, we feel overconfident that we know exactly what caused the train wreck of a conversation—the other person! That thinking is neither accurate nor helpful.
Here’s where “joint contributory system” thinking can help.
From the Blame Game to Real Understanding
We can override the reflexive tendencies toward overconfidence in a simple blame story, but it takes effort. The “joint contributory system” framework begins from a recognition that all parties contribute in some way (even if not equally) to a conversation or dynamic. The goal is to better understand each set of contributions. This is where the learning conversation comes to life.
Thinking from the orientation of a joint contributory system makes it easier to raise the hard conversations. Consider the author’s start-up question as a soft script to try: “What did we each do or not do to get ourselves into this mess?” Notice that this script doesn’t force you into the reverse position of taking on all responsibility for a dynamic gone wrong. Nor does it presuppose what fraction each person is responsible for, meaning, sure, you could discover it is mostly the other guy’s bad. This openly curious stance allows each person to wonder about the ways the hot mess was co-created. In this way, you pave the way towards co-creating a way out of it.
Concrete suggestions for putting the framework into practice have a lot to do with setting up a learning conversation. For instance, consider the following questions:
How did each person contributing to the dynamic?
From each person’s perspective, what didn’t work about the exchange?
What was each person hoping for from the other person?
How is each person feeling in the relationship?
How does each person’s feelings about the relationship contribute to how they showed up in the exchange?
Recognizing that virtually all interactions and relationships involve a joint contributory system helps us step out of our innate tendency to exist within our own stories and to over-index on the veracity of our own stories. It helps us refrain from dismissing other ways to see a difficult conversation (or relationship) than the way we are seeing it. It helps us unhook from our automatic assumptions about who the other person is, what they think or want, or the meaning behind their actions.
So, I challenge you to try this out in your next difficult conversation: Ask your difficult conversation partner(s) how they see each person’s contribution to the sticky situation.
Double bonus points if you use the words “joint contributory system.”
1 Ok, ok, this is the first time a Pulitzer Prize winning writer has ever recommended a book to me.
2 This was a topic I dug into in a recent Washington Post article about conversation types.
3 I’m probably dead wrong on that. I’m too uncool to spend time on TikTok, so for all I know, the tango is a regular feature.
Finally, congrats to Kathryn B. for winning the June book giveaway! I’ll be sending her a copy of David Robson’s terrific book, The Laws of Connection. To be eligible for book giveaways and attend our quarterly book club, consider becoming a paid subscriber.
This is such important information and a good reminder that maybe, just maybe, I’m not always right …