The Art of Conversation - is it dead?

I don’t know why there is so much noise in the system about email, Facebook, Twitter, text messaging and the rest – all of them apparently destroying the so-called Art of Conversation.

In reality they do exactly the reverse, bringing new forms of conversation (with old and new friends and acquaintances) via new media.

And the issues involved in dialogue are just the same as in face-to-face intercourse – inability to listen, not sharing the airtime, assuming negative intention, sarcasm masquerading as humour and so on.

Of course there are new social protocols which grow up around each new channel. Enjoyable to learn (and to ignore).

For example, “Hello” was first coined in response to the need for an ice-breaker on new-fangled telephone calls. It’s credited to Thomas Edison in 1877.

Listening and Creativity

At the start of innovation workshops, I ask the participants to come up with some groundrules for working together productively and creatively.

Usually second on the emerging shortlist is LISTENING.

Prompted, the person proposing it will often say how important it is to pay attention to what others are saying, both during any presentations and in the course of discussion.

It’s often comes as something of a shock when I add to this item that it’s important to listen to oneself. In fact, in sessions where the point is to tap into our creative selves, it’s more important, much more important, than listening to others.

In this situation, what others say is valuable primarily not as information, but as stimulus – to help us to trigger new thoughts, new perspectives, new ideas. Never more so than during a long, fact-filled presentation.

As usual, Mark Twain (above) caught this brilliantly: “Life does not consist mainly – or even largely – of facts and happenings,” he wrote. “It consists mainly of the storm of thoughts that is forever blowing through one’s head.”

The challenge, of course is not only to listen closely to that storm of thoughts, but also to catch plenty of them on the wing. For me, that means making brief notes as they flash by. And then reviewing them consistently for further consideration and development.

Richard Branson once told me that he does this every day( see blogpost 03/11/2009). And so do I!

Daydreaming and Creativity

It seems extraordinary that, when training people in creative thinking, I should need to spend such a large amount of time just getting them to listen to themselves.

For it is in our own thoughts and feelings that new thinking, new ideas, are born.

The problem usually stems from our educational pasts. At school it has always been consistently demanded that we pay attention to the teacher. There, “concentrating” means listening to him or her, not to oneself.

Yet so often what happens is that the teacher has said something interesting that stimulates us to go off on a fascinating internal journey, exploring the implications of what has been said. Yet, to the teacher, this can so easily be interpreted and censured as just not paying attention, “daydreaming”.

But how exciting and valuable daydreaming can be.

As the French poet, Arthur Rimbaud, put it (in a famous letter to Paul Demeny in 1871): “I witness the flowering of my thought: I gaze at it, I listen to it: I set my bow moving: the symphony stirs into life in the depths, or comes leaping on to the stage.”

[J'assiste à l'éclosion de ma pensée : je la regarde, je l'écoute : je lance un coup d'archet : la symphonie fait son remuement dans les profondeurs, ou vient d'un bond sur la scène.]