Focused Conversation

Please have in mind these are field notes organized in a common structure that I use for myself or for my students, university classes and industrial activities. They may be messy, with errors and in some cases, without proper references. If you find your work (or part of it) here without proper acknowledgement, please let me know so I can fix it as soon as possible.

Is a tool that can be used to structure a conversation.

Stages

It states that conversations should have four phases: objective, reflective, interpretive and decisional [^1].

You don’t have to spend an hour on each category of question, but ignoring facts to jump to a decision or devaluing reflective questions because you just want to talk about data will not necessarily get you better results. [^2]

Objective

Facts gathering stage. Answer questions like:

• What are the actual facts?
• What didi you observe?

Reflective

Thoughts, feelings, and emotions sharing stage. Answer questions like:

• How does this topic make you feel?
• What emotions arise when you think about this objective?

Interpretive

Insights, interpretations, and analysis generation stage. Answer questions like:

• Are there any connections or relationships between the shared things?
• What patterns can we identify in the information we have gathered?

Decisional

Action and decision-making stage. Answer questions like:

• What experiments could you run?
• What action will you take?

[^1]: Stanfield, R. B., & Stanfield, J. M. (2000). The art of focused conversation: 100 ways to access group wisdom in the workplace. New Society Publishers.

[^2]: Facilitating with The Focused Conversation - https://helpingimprove.com/facilitating-with-the-focused-conversation/

Significant Revisions

May 18, 2023: Original publication on dariomac.com