How to have the conversation you've been avoiding

You know the one. You've drafted it in the shower. You've had it, brilliantly, at 4am, where you were articulate and they were reasonable. In the daylight version you say nothing and then you're furious for a fortnight.

Here is the script. It is not clever. It works because it is not clever.

The four moves

Name the thing plainly, in one sentence, with no preamble. The preamble is where you lose. "I want to talk about how the Hendricks account was handled."

Say what you observed, not what you concluded. Observations are hard to argue with. Conclusions start wars.

Say what it cost. This is the move everybody skips, and it's the only one that creates movement. "It cost me two days and it cost the team their trust in the timeline."

Then — and this is the hard part — stop talking. Let it be silent. The silence is where the other person does the work, and if you fill it, you do their work for them and they never move.

The twenty percent

Sometimes it goes badly. Sometimes the other person is not able to hear it today, and the honest thing is to notice that and stop. That isn't failure. Saying the true thing to somebody who can't receive it is still better than not saying it — you just don't get the ending you wanted.

Watch the full thing above. There's a worksheet in the description that I use in the first session with almost everyone.