Conversation creates a new kind of network within organizations. Current networks are used for competitive advantage, but conversation is focused on encouraging people to realize their potential.
Interpretation
Conversation fosters connections that help individuals discover and harness their abilities.
The quote by Theodore Zeldin emphasizes the transformative power of conversation within organizations. While existing networks serve to create competitive advantages, the act of conversing encourages individuals to unlock their potential, fostering a culture of growth and collaboration rather than mere competition. This shift from traditional networking to conversational connections can lead to deeper insights and enhanced performance among team members.
In practice
In a team-building workshop, I shared this quote to highlight the importance of communication in collaboration.
Conversation is a meeting of minds with different memories and habits. When minds meet, they don't just exchange facts: they transform them, reshape them, draw different implications from them, engage in new trains of thought. Conversation doesn't just reshuffle the cards: it creates new cards.
We think of speaking as something we do naturally, without any effort. But like playing music, it requires attention and knowledge and practice.
So much of what passes for conversation today is degraded. It's either about one-upmanship, or dreary trivia. Even the cut and thrust of wit and bons mots is a form of bedazzlement designed to stop conversations dead rather than broaden them.
It is in the power of everybody, with a little courage, to hold out a hand to someone different, to listen, to attempt to increase, by even a tiny amount, the quantity of kindness and humanity in the world.
I think one of the most important changes of our time has been our attitude to fear. Every civilisation defends itself by keeping fears out and saying 'we protect you from fear'. But it also produces new fears and throughout history people have changed the kind of fears which have worried them.
However fascinating you may think you are, there is a limit to what you can know about yourself.
Too many leaders are so caught up in the momentum of work that they lose sight of the opportunity to connect with people. I discovered that the more fully present I was with other people, the more fully present they were with me, and the more productive our relationship became over time.
Global security can be formed or threatened by heads of state whose wisdom, folly and obsessions shape global events. But often it is the security practitioners, those rarely in the headlines but whose craft and energy quietly break new ground, who keep us safe or put us in peril.
You cannot govern, you cannot administrate, with an ignoramus.
There is only one tactical principle which is not subject to change. It is to use the means at hand to inflict the maximum amount of wound, death, and destruction on the enemy in the minimum amount of time.
It is a great privilege, as well as our responsibility, to pray for our government leaders.
To make peace, one must be an uncompromising leader. To make peace, one must also embody compromise.
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