More About Conversation

We absolutely know when we have had a good conversation and it felt like a meeting of minds. There is an intensity in the moment of thought, an energising moment that opens up new possibilities. It is quite short lived, nevertheless it leaves a form of a residue, a trace that lingers on in our mind’s eye. Good conversation is a precious commodity.

Theodore Zeldin, an academic and historian, wrote a fantastic little book called, Conversation: How Talk Can Change Your Life.  In it he says of conversations that; “when minds meet they don’t just exchange facts: they transform them, draw different conclusions from them, engage in different trains of thought.”
Zeldin also talks about the conventions of talking beyond our personal lives; about the barriers we have “which prevent us from sharing”. He suggests that the term, social exclusion, applies not only to the poor but to all whose mind-set is confined to a single profession”. We also know that there are very persistent tribal type jargons operating across divisions, departments and specialists.

Out of a good conversation can come not only fresh insights but a more considered and conscious appreciation of those things that anchor our own and other people’s perceptions and behaviours. In other words – mindset – We could do worse than think that there is a kind of craft aspect to conversation and we could all improve our mastery of it. Still, any real suggestion that conversation should become elevated to serve as one of the primary vehicles for collaboration and beyond raises challenges for those solidly embedded conventions of meetings and management processes.

For minds to meet there is an implication that they didn’t set out from the same place. Though as Zeldin suggests, within the professions and in many industry sectors the issue can be rather more the reverse, that broadly speaking the mind sets did all set out from the same place. Employing methods that might open up questioning and constructive conversation is probably even more desirable if anything new is to be countenanced and allowed to enter.

The use of metaphor and analogy helps us to open up different types of conversation. Here I am going to use the idea of the quantum world metaphorically as a way to think about the inexplicable nature of a good conversation. To explore the idea that there is a kind of quantum-ness that happens in a good conversation. Especially at the point where there begins to be a meeting of minds, because it is here when the stuff and substance of a good conversation is seemingly simultaneously in more than one state and place and may be potentially in many places and opening new potentials up is the energising moment and we know from experience it feels good but also that this is when the thoughts are not quite stable. The thoughts are precious in this moment, and are very far from being simply captured and what is more exasperating is that they can be so easily lost. We might have experienced this if, at this crucial moment, one person reaches for a notebook and/or moves to a flipchart in an attempt to capture it all or reduce it down. This is the “quantum” moment when somehow the real gem of the idea that is pivoting within the conversation can seem quite simply to have disappeared, to be not there anymore. What has been written down can seem just disappointingly to be not of the same order. We draw the conclusion that the conversation could not have been as good as we had initially thought, but what if it is the reverse that is true and it was the actual process of the attempt to capture them that degraded them and made them disappear?

Even when you are a mathematician or physicist, the nature of the quantum world can be challenging. The quantum world defies all conventional notions of measurement and simple logic. It is the case that merely attempting to observe the phenomena of quantum particles interrupts things and they revert to being classic (I think this is the term that is used). From my simplistic perspective, it would appear that in order to use quantum theories there has to be an acceptance of the less than understandable and it is this acceptance that has allowed quantum mechanics to move forward. The quantum world is a weird world, though increasingly it would appear that it is the world we live in and seemingly much of life will turn out to have quantum underpinnings.
Jim Al-Khalili, the physicist who is quite genius at quantum descriptions that make mental sketches for those of us who could not otherwise see, describes in one of his sketches  how particles can be said to be “in a carefully choreographed combination of a slow waltz and a faster jive, where however they are not dancing in either one or the other of these two states, but in both states at the same time – they are in a blur of waltz and jive simultaneously – and it is this that enables them to bind together”. We might take a moment to contemplate what the nature of a conversation might look like if we were to accept that there might bea degree of quantum ness about it and that we could be comfortable with the apparent lack of rationality and able to see beyond formulaic logic.