A guide to difficult conversations • Hacker News Board

Re: A guide to difficult conversations

#121

Post by el_cujo » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 3:28 PM UTC

tomp wrote: post #72

Another interesting idea: apparently, positive motivation (reward) works much better than negative motivation (punishment). Allegedly it's "scientifically proven" (for some definition of "scientifically") which I haven't yet taken the time to research, but I plan to. I've been thinking about how to apply this in two of the most important areas of interpersonal interaction in our lives, in our careers and in interpers…

I know I'm being pedantic here, but in psychology, negative motivation is when you take away something averse as a reward for a certain behavior. Negative here relates to the fact you're negating or removing something to act as motivation, whereas if something is positive, you're adding something (like a treat for a dog). What a lot of people refer to as "negative motivation" is actually positive punishment because you are adding something aversive (like a spanking) in response to a behavior you want to decrease.

It's important to keep this in mind when looking at scientific literature so that you know exactly what they're talking about.

Re: A guide to difficult conversations

#122

Post by everdrive » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 3:28 PM UTC

tome wrote: post #115

everdrive wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost any situation where we're trying to design a functional solution to a technical problem. I actually used to have a phrase for this: "You can't build a rocket ship with emotions." If my goal were really to successfully build a rocket ship (as noted in the maxim) then I'd be delighted to be proven wrong. Every correction would get us closer to our goal. Alternately, if someone were interested in empathizing with…

That's an interesting maxim. Do you think NASA ran the Apollo program by ignoring the emotions of everyone on the project? If it didn't, should it have?

I just think this is more of pendulum sort of thing. You can go too far in either direction. If I'm erring at all, it's because I've been in circumstances where a complex project suffered due to social agreement.

But for certain, you could go too far in in the other direction: completely ignoring everyone's emotions.

Specifically, if you're in an environment that's swung too hard in the direction of totally ignoring people's emotions, then my advice probably sounds awful.

Re: A guide to difficult conversations

#123

Post by codeape » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 3:31 PM UTC

So if I understand the article, one should use the communication pattern:

When ____[observation], I feel ____[emotion] because I’m needing some ____[universal needs]. Would you be able to ____[request]?

For instance:

When [you're acting like a dickhead], I feel [the urge to punch you] because I'm needing some [fking professionalism]. Would you be able to [stop acting like a dickhead]?

Re: A guide to difficult conversations

#124

Post by gowld » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 3:34 PM UTC

codeape wrote: post #123

So if I understand the article, one should use the communication pattern: When ____[observation], I feel ____[emotion] because I’m needing some ____[universal needs]. Would you be able to ____[request]? For instance: When [you're acting like a dickhead], I feel [the urge to punch you] because I'm needing some [f king professionalism]. Would you be able to [stop acting like a dickhead]?

Reading your post, I feel that you don't understand the article. I come to HN for substantive commentary that engages and expands upon the source material. Would you be able to read it again with a fresh perspective, and share your criticism in a less sarcastic and more informative way?

Re: A guide to difficult conversations

#125

Post by mercutio2 » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 3:36 PM UTC

codeape wrote: post #123

So if I understand the article, one should use the communication pattern: When ____[observation], I feel ____[emotion] because I’m needing some ____[universal needs]. Would you be able to ____[request]? For instance: When [you're acting like a dickhead], I feel [the urge to punch you] because I'm needing some [f king professionalism]. Would you be able to [stop acting like a dickhead]?

There are several sentences in the piece dedicated to explaining that treating the [emotion] section as a synonym for [attack that happens to be prefixed with the word feel] is a corruption of the practice.

There’s also a section explaining the difference between requests and demands.

But your formulation does tend to highlight why people get incensed at amateurish imitations of NVC.

Re: A guide to difficult conversations

#126

Post by leesalminen » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 3:37 PM UTC

I’m generally a good conversation participant, but this week has made me second guess myself.

My father-in-law is currently hospitalized after his heart stopped this weekend. He’s currently in an induced coma. Brain damage is a foregone conclusion at this point and they’re unsure if he will ever regain consciousness.

My wife and I happened to be on vacation in Costa Rica when this happened. We hopped on the next available flight and were at the hospital 21 hours later.

Because we were unavailable, my younger brother-in-law was given Power of Attorney. This “power” went to his head within minutes. He’s now decided that he is the sole arbiter of information. Nobody but him is allowed to talk to the doctors or ask questions.

I spent over 2 hours with him trying to talk it through. I never insulted or condescended him. My goal of the conversation was to allow his sister (both are the patients children) to participate in conversations with the medical staff.

At the end of the 2 hours, he attempted to assault me so I left. I felt like a failure. I’ve never not been able to talk someone down from an irrational position before.

I think I subconsciously used some of these NVC tactics, but failed miserably.

Is there an online course one can take on having these difficult conversations? I need to up my skills.

Re: A guide to difficult conversations

#127

Post by gowld » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 3:38 PM UTC

rsweeney21 wrote: post #119

The formative years of my career were spent as a software engineer at Microsoft where communication was direct and sometimes harsh. Code reviews could be particularly harsh with comments like "this code is bad because..." or "this is unreadable." At first it was really hard, but eventually my skin got pretty think. I even came to love the efficiency of direct communication in programming. When I became a founder, the…

It's an anti-pattern to call abrasiveness an "engineering" habit. It's an orthogonal axis. "saying things are 'unreadable' or 'bad'" is not efficiten -- that's not actional feedback. Skip the "this code is bad", and the unsupported univeral claims of "unreadable" (obviously the author and the compiler could both read it, and get directly to the point of your concern with the code -- this code has a logic bug, or is inneficient, or you can't follow the changing state or don't know what this variable refers to, or what have tou.

Re: A guide to difficult conversations

#128

Post by el_cujo » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 3:39 PM UTC

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #12

What's the purpose of expressing the feeling? It seems like it's there only to underline the urgency of the unmet needs. At the same time, it implies an emotional investment in the issue at hand, which I would see either as unnecessary or insincere in a work environment.

The article has the example:

>Thought: ‘I feel that you aren’t taking this seriously.’

>Emotion: ‘I feel frustrated.’

I definitely agree that the "emotional" way of looking at this statement is better. The "thought" here is accusatory and puts the other person on the defensive. Moreover, like the article says, saying the person is not taking things seriously is just an evaluation of their actions; you don't know that its true, you don't know how the other person feels and its not good to tell them how they feel. That evaluation is based on how YOU feel, so its more honest to just share that than your own theory on how someone else feels.

In other words, it helps get past your own assumptions about people and deal with what you actually know.

Re: A guide to difficult conversations

#129

Post by tomp » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 3:41 PM UTC

el_cujo wrote: post #121

tomp wrote: post #72

Another interesting idea: apparently, positive motivation (reward) works much better than negative motivation (punishment). Allegedly it's "scientifically proven" (for some definition of "scientifically") which I haven't yet taken the time to research, but I plan to. I've been thinking about how to apply this in two of the most important areas of interpersonal interaction in our lives, in our careers and in interpers…

I know I'm being pedantic here, but in psychology, negative motivation is when you take away something averse as a reward for a certain behavior. Negative here relates to the fact you're negating or removing something to act as motivation, whereas if something is positive, you're adding something (like a treat for a dog). What a lot of people refer to as "negative motivation" is actually positive punishment because y…

Ah, useful to know. So I guess what my post was about, was preffering to scale the rewards between positive and negative ends of the spectrum, instead of punishment.

Re: A guide to difficult conversations

#130

Post by gowld » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 3:41 PM UTC

everdrive wrote: post #83

weeksie wrote: post #14

It's funny because few things make me seethe like someone talking to me in this way during a high stress moment. The artifice is transparent and if the conversation is tense the tone is quite easy to read as condescension. I'm hardly dismissing NVC as a tactic, just that when done poorly it's worse than simply being direct.

It's possible to do NVC well, and it's possible to do it poorly. It makes me wonder if this means that NVC is not inherently more useful. (ie, other methods may of communication may also be useful, and so NVC can't be called an inherent good.) Someone using NVC can still be forceful and rude. I'm struggling with how to describe this. I suppose all it does it remove unrestrained emotion and moral blame from the intera…

Programming can be done well, or poorly. Speaking English can be done well, or poorly. Agile methodology can be done well, or poorly. Cooking can be done well, or poorly. The possibility that something can be done poorly is not a strong argumetn that the thing should never be done.