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Conversations for Effective Action

Written by: Sue Lindgren Hawkes

Article Overview: In your work, and in your life away from work, you participate in conversations. People speak, and people listen. And more is happening - promises are made, requests are made, invitations are issued, proposals for new projects are presented. Things happen in conversations. In fact, it is in conversations that people make things happen. Only four things can happen in a conversation. We call these Basic Linguistic Commitments. The four linguistic commitments for action are requests, promises, assertions and declarations, and they happen in conversation, and this is all that’s happening.

Conversations for Effective Action

Types of Speech Acts
Promise:
The act of pledging oneself to do, bring about, or provide. A declaration to do or refrain from doing something specified. A complete promised includes: 1) a committed speaker, 2) a committed listener, 3) terms of fulfillment (exactly what will be produced), and 4) a time agreement (by when).

Request:
The act of asking for something. A complete request include: 1) a committed speaker, 2) a committed listener, 3) terms of fulfillment (exactly what will be promised), 4) a time agreement (by when) and 5) a response (accept, decline, counter offer).

Declaration:
The act of reconstituting a set of relationships. Speaking declaration sculpts identities and defines possibilities; You shape reality by your declarations.

Assertion
The act of stating or putting forward positively. Affirmation. An assertion is an interpretation that you can back up with evidence.


The quality of a commitment is determined by the sincerity and competence of the speaker


Effective Action
In your work, and in your life away from work, you participate in conversations. People speak, and people listen. And more is happening, i.e. promises are made, requests are made, invitations are issued, proposals for new projects are presented. In other words (in our normal way of speaking of such matters), things happen. Things happen in conversations. In fact, it is in conversations that people make things happen.

A conversation requires a speaker and a listener. You may have conversations with yourself — then you are both speaker and listener. Further, when you are speaking, you are also listening to yourself. However, when we say listener, we will often leave implicit the speaker’s listening to himself. The term listener will normally be used to refer to the person to whom the speaker is speaking.

Conversations needn’t be face-to-face. You can speak and listen over the phone, on paper, etc. In every instance, the essential matter remains the same in any language and in any medium; someone speaks and someone listens.

Speaking and listening is always about something. You just don’t talk — you talk about something — about what new car to buy, who to hire, what restaurant to eat at, and a thousand other possibilities and commitments.

We said that in conversations people make things happen. We distinguish four things, and only four things that can happen in a conversation. We call these Basic Linguistic Commitments. The four linguistic commitments for action are requests, promises, assertions and declarations, and they happen in conversation, and this is all that’s happening.

Requests
You may request that someone perform an action for you at some time in the future. When you make a request, you sincerely commit yourself to being satisfied if the other person fulfills your request. You may, of course, commit later to withdraw your request. Then you are responsible for any action the person to whom you addressed your request has taken on your behalf.

When you request, you specify the time by which you request the action be performed (“Bring me the report on Wednesday, the eighth, before noon. “) and, you produce an agreement on the conditions of satisfaction for the fulfillment of the requests (presumably in the example you both know which report, how to deliver it, and so on).

Promises
You may promise to perform an action at some time in the future, perhaps in response to a request to you from someone (“I promise to bring you the report before noon, Wednesday the eighth. “). A proposal or offer is also a promise, conditional on the other person accepting your conditions of satisfaction (“I promise to bring you the report at noon on Tuesday the seventh, if you will approve my working on it at home on Monday.”)

In promising, you commit yourself to fulfilling the requestor’s conditions of satisfaction, or those you offered. If, for some reason, you later commit to revoke the promise, you are responsible for informing the person to whom you made the promise.

As with a request, you must specify time, and conditions of satisfaction must be mutually agreed upon and clear. Often, within your network, certain conditions of satisfaction can be assumed. For example, when you say, “Give me the report by Friday,” you mean typed, double-spaced, proofread, and on your desk by 5 PM.

Assertions
You may assert that something is so (e.g., “I received your communication.”) In making an assertion, you commit yourself to provide evidence in support of its truth, should you be asked for it.

Declarations
You may make a declaration. A declaration is not a claim that something is so, it is making something so. Judgments are declarations (e.g., “This report was done badly.”). Other declarations produce new possibilities (“We could begin to report by electronic mail...”), or even new institutions or situations (“We are now open for business...”), or even new objects—an inventor may declare his invention of a new device.

It is not the truth of declaration that is open to challenge. What is at stake (with judgments, for example) is not whether they are true or false, but whether they open the right possibilities, set us in a frame of mind conducive to dealing with the situation at hand.

Notice that acknowledgements can be simple assertions. (“I received your report.”) They can also be declarations of gratitude or recognition (“I received your report today — good work!”)
These are the human actions that happen in conversations. They are also all that happens in conversations, and they only happen in conversations — because someone speaks and someone listens.

We distinguish two kinds of conversations:
1. Conversations for Action
Here, requests and promises are primary. You ask your associate to present you with a new budget proposal by Friday. He promises to do so. Those are the crucial moves in a simple Conversation for Action. It produces a future action—the presenting of the new budget proposal. That is what is essential to a Conversation for Action—it produces action.

2. Conversations for Possibilities
Here, declarations are primary. In speaking with your associate, you jointly declare the possibility of a particular new product. You make no request to begin production or marketing, but you produce the possibility for such actions. The result of a Conversation for Possibility is the announcement of a possibility that is ready for, but not yet put into action.

Often, Conversations for Possibilities take place first with ourselves in a mood of wondering, of speculation, of exploration. “I wonder what would happen if …?”, “What can we make happen here?”
These types of conversations and the basic linguistic commitments are familiar to you, although probably not in the terms we have used to distinguish them. You already have Conversations for Possibilities and Conversations for Action; you already make and listen to requests and promises; and you already invent domains of possibilities and participate in conversations with them.
You may have already begun to conclude that we are saying it is important how you speak, that your speaking is directly connected to your possibilities in life. If you conclude that, you will make a mistake.

When we begin to look at coaching, we must concern ourselves with what happens in people’s listening. Remember when we say listening, we are not referring to listening to speech. Rather, we are concerned with your listening to your possibilities as they can be discovered in your circumstances and in your living; and we are concerned with your commitments, and the commitments of those with whom you are speaking.

You cannot avoid listening. You are a particular listening in every moment, and to listen alertly and openly is to let what we listen to unfold with a life of its own. We give room to our listening and try to keep our listening free from declarations about our limitations and preoccupations. At the same time, we give ourselves over to the possibilities, and we remain open to the ecology of our commitments. We listen to possibilities, and we listen from who and what we are.

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Article Tags: affirmation, assertion, competence, conversations, declarations, decline, effective action, fulfillment, invitations, listener, new projects, possibilities, promises, proposals, relationships, sincerity, speech acts, types of speech



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