Publications

Deep knowledge, simple tools

Difficult Conversations of the Professional Kind

Difficult Conversations of the Professional Kind helps professionals with one of the most important aspects of their work: dealing with critical situations promtly and effectively. It combines a simple flow with profound concepts.

Imagine how much time and energy you could save by improving your capabilities in this area! The conversation may be with your boss, with a peer, with team-members or with a client. Whichever it is, being able to say what’s really on your mind is an invaluable skill. The tools and techniques described provide a safe way to start, allowing you to develop your own repertoire and style.

Client Encounters of the Technical Kind

“Client Encounters of the Technical Kind demystifies communication for field teams and, in doing so, renders a great service to high-tech companies. Its simple tools and processes promote productivity and effective business results. It’s the ONLY product I have seen that is effective in developing the ‘technical sales team’.” Jack Dunnigan

Coaching for Client Encounters

You already have a pretty good idea of the new skills and practices that your team needs. Perhaps they have already taken one of ICONDA’s training courses and you wish to help them realise the full potential of the tools and methods learned? So what’s holding you back?

Lack of time, for a start!

Given enough of it, you might create activities and materials, coach your team, give people more individual support and do everything necessary to lead them to higher ground – perhaps with some false turns and a few route corrections on the way.

ICONDA’s Team Leader Support puts you in a position to do these things by providing necessary processes and materials then coaching you to use them effectively.

In fact, we use the ICON9 toolset to facilitate the coaching process, ensuring complete consistency between our end goal – enabling your team to achieve higher performance – and the means employed to reach that goal.

If you don’t already know ICON9, don’t worry. Its tools are very simple and can be learnt as needed; and we employ plenty of other complementary tools and methods too.

The ICON9 Leadership Workshop is a stimulating event that allows technical teams to address urgent issues

Posts

Task Management Canvas

According to reliable sources, there are currently 8,045,311,447 people in the world. 35% of them are either under 15 or over 65, so they have nothing to do all day. However, this leaves 5,229,452,460 busy individuals managing a wide variety of tasks. Based on my knowledge of many of them (though not the majority), this means that there are over 5 billion task management systems out there! Because every individual seems to manage their tasks differently. Furthermore, these task management...

Interesting questions

Children ask the most amazing questions: “When lightning hits the sea, why don't all the fish die?”; “Do blind people see pictures when they dream?”; “Why are you sad, Mummy?”. Their questions are often thought-provoking and intimate. They are triggered by sincere curiosity. Their intention is inoffensive, they are short, sweet and, even if they’re not articulated perfectly, we understand them. Can we relearn the naïve art of asking straightforward, effective questions that provoke without...

Learn how to use active listening for difficult conversations

Closing the Loop on a Difficult Exchange

If you're hurtling downhill, over rocks and tree roots, on a cross-country bike, what do you concentrate on? If you're driving on a crowded motorway, with cars criss-crossing in front of you, what do you concentrate on? If you're in a meeting, with clever arguments coming at you from left and right, what do you concentrate on? Now, spot the wrong answer: The rocks and the roots The other cars What I'm going to say next Of course, I should be listening, not composing my next contribution. What...

Learn why expressing needs can help during difficult conversations

Understanding and Expressing Needs in a Difficult Exchange

A few weeks ago, in a parallel universe, a customer called and said, “Andy, we’ve been trying to use the software you sold us and have run into difficulties. In fact, we missed a critical delivery last week and management is telling me that failure this week is not an option. I’m very nervous, as well as frustrated and fed up. I need to feel secure in my job and confident of my own ability to manage this project. I also want to have real partnerships with our suppliers. However, working with...

Explaining feelings, a good way to deal with difficult exchange ?

Explaining Feelings Accurately and Sensitively in a Difficult Exchange

Imagine the following Difficult Conversations: I’ve messed up my calendar and have to explain to my partner that, instead of going out with them this evening, I must work late I’ve messed up my roadmap and have to explain to my boss that, instead of being able to supply a vaccine just in time to save the world from a pandemic, we have to go back to the drawing board while our competitors make a fortune As for any Difficult Conversation, emotions will be involved and we have been representing...

Difficult exchange can be avoid by being brief and factual

Starting a Difficult Exchange Safely by being Brief and Factual

Suraj and I broadcast a podcast on Difficult Conversations a few days ago and we asked participants for ideas on best practices. “Focus on the problem” was suggested and the person who’d suggested this explained: when confronting someone , talk about the issue and avoid any criticism, however indirect or discreet, of the person. In our view, this nicely captures one of the most important principles of dealing with difficult conversations. There's only one slight problem: how do we avoid being...

Adjusting Intentions when Leading a Difficult Conversation

My customer brings up supply chain issues again, just as they did last meeting and the one before, and for as long as I can remember now. As usual, this is done just when I’m getting to topics that are important to me and the question is accompanied by an agonized, apocalypse-is-nigh expression. Having been in this position before, I have relevant data and arguments to hand and my instinctive reaction is be to bring these out, prefixed with an inflammatory, “As I have explained several times...

A Troll-Taming Loop for Reconciling a Difficult Exchange

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" (Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 1878). We posit that a key attribute of happy families, and effective people in general, is that they can bring Difficult Conversations to a satisfactory conclusion. Such conversations are all alike - they finish with a calm discussion about what to do next. If a Difficult Conversation cannot be resolved, however, the results are varied and often disastrous. For evidence, just look in...

Difficult Conversations, Bridges and Trolls

Trolls are trouble when you want to cross a bridge. Especially when the bridge in question is slippery and swaying. They can takes ages to deal with and, of course, trolls present a health and safety hazard. A Difficult Conversation is like crossing a troll bridge. The bridge itself represents the underlying, “normal” conversation [1], with one or two challenges and an objective of attaining something on the other side. The troll represents the emotion associated with a particularly...

Possible Postures for Managing Up

Possible Postures for Managing Up Here’s some good news about diverse communication skills, applicable to any context: if you question professional people about this topic today, you’ll get some excellent answers – significantly better, I believe, than what you could have expected a generation ago. Somehow, something’s improving. As evidence of this, I cite a flash survey performed by my colleague, Suraj Ethirajan, as part of our preparation for a podcast on “managing up”. In brief, the...

Learning Objectives Enable Flexibility in STMicroelectronics Training

It may seem, when searching for training solutions, that the options are either Do It Yourself, represented here as Bleriot crossing the Channel in his own machine, or a low-risk, catalog-based solution - the P&O Ferry. Mega exciting on the one hand , but will it get you to where you want to go? As predictable as the tides on the other, but can such a standardized package take you to the leading edge of the subject? Fortunately, there are alternatives. Training can be created using mature...

Why it’s hardest to communicate when it matters most

See also this video. Communication has special challenges when it comes to science and technology. Have you ever noticed that when you are burning to explain …when it seems really important to convince other people that you know what you’re talking about …then this is precisely when it’s hardest to have impact? Why? It’s because the very thing that you want to share – your hard-won expertise – is actually an obstacle to communication. Your knowledge and technical instincts are like baggage...

Do Your Best Thinking!

If you are trying to solve tough problems at the moment, then be careful not to let your mind brood or worry. Brooding is where you get stuck in the past, ruminating, kicking yourself for not buying Zoom shares in January, for example. Worrying is letting fear take a hold, so that the future becomes a source of dread. In both cases, we would do well to remember Hamlet ‘s words: “nothing is ever good or bad, but thinking makes it so”. To do your best thinking and stay on track, consider taking...

Half and half

Anita Roddick* once said: If you think you're too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito in the room The corona virus seems to have taken the place of the mosquito 😉 So, making a virtue out of different necessities, my colleagues and I delivered two half-remote training courses last week. One to EDA Solutions FAEs where, for (political) reasons that had nothing to do with the famous virus, one of the FAEs could not leave his country of origin to attend. Proud to be the...

Bees and FAEs

At the start of a recent training course, each person introduced themselves by citing an animal that could do their job, then explaining why. One of the Field Application Engineers (FAEs) in the audience put forward a bee, saying that they buzzed around busily, collecting opportunities (pollen), working hard, doing great things for other people and generally being pretty amazing. Another FAE reminded us of the legendary observation that, at first glance, a bee’s job is almost impossible –...

A Goal Setting Tail

Don't worry, this isn’t the old story about the insecure dyslexic, insomniac atheist who lays awake at night wondering if there really is a Dog. It's about the strange but ultimately effective path that my dog takes when I call him and why this could be a valuable reminder about goal setting. Toby, you see, does eventually come back, fulfilling his contractual obligations to his master and ensuring that he gets fed. At the same time, he thoroughly enjoys himself. The route he takes is always...

The Hurry Monster, RIP

Apparently, I suffer from an affliction which most people manage to avoid. A weird mixture of intellectual laziness and hyperactivity, it once led me to attempt the reduction of German grammar to a handful of equations. Preferably to one equation. Einstein had managed it for physics, I reasoned … 😉 Self-deprecation notwithstanding, I'm still trying to simplify the world into something that I can understand/remember, and the above diagram is one result. I call the inner loop a Short-Circuit –...

A Problem-Solving Experience

Cycling quite fast down a narrow mountain road, I met a lorry coming up it. The result was eight broken ribs on one side, a broken shoulder on the other and a huge problem with getting out of bed. Problem-solving methodologies can be usefully classified as either Systemic or Analytical and this was a great occasion to try them both out. The first morning, desperate to get out of my hospital bed and service my needs, I wriggled, waved my legs in the air and groaned for over half an hour before...

Anna Karenina and Client Encounters

Anna Karenina and Client Encounters All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. This, the first phrase of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, is remarkable for how it sticks in the memory. In complex relationships such as with families or clients, Tolstoy teaches us, there is one way to get it right and an almost infinite number of ways to go wrong. To be happy, a family needs security , physical comfort, time together, rituals, mutual consideration, and so on. All happy...

Best practices Exchange for Engineering Team Leaders

I recently setup a Best Practices Exchange (BPXchange) as an experiment in learning through sharing for busy Engineering Team Leaders working in different companies. The challenge was to find a format that would allow added-value exchanges in a reasonable time, taking into account the logistics of scheduling and hosting the virtual meeting, the selection of topics and the facilitation of the exchange. And we did it! The first BPXchanges worked like magic! So, if you’re interested in...