Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

How Behavior Shows What we Value

“You don't step straight up to the front of the ATM line. You don't cut in front of people at the ticket desk. You take your turn. You can learn great life lessons from board games.” [Gary Oldman] The character of a person is in plain sight for everyone to see when they are faced with a choice —for example, waiting in line or stepping right up to the front of the queue in Oldman's quote. How people act (or react) shows you what they value. Based on John Le Carre's 1974 novel, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is one of... Read more →

The Importance of Understanding the Type of Problem we Have

“Barriers are the universal of human experience.” [Bruce Lee] We all want success and money. Our time is limited —as in physical time, because there are only so many things we can do in a day, and we don't know when our number is up— we have a window of opportunity to make an impact. Many of the things we want require us to figure out what will get us there, preferably faster and with fewer steps and less pain. Creating a big opportunity as we solve a problem commands a higher premium. Thus the importance of becoming adept at... Read more →

Number 539

People are networks of desires, needs, outlooks, and experience. We all have stories of where we came from, and ideas of where we're going. Sometimes we talk about our dreams, sometimes we make plans, and sometimes we just show up. Rob Lawless is interested in learning where people got their start, where they came from, and where they're headed next. In a world that speaks of drive, ambition, and advantage, Rob has purpose but no agenda. His personal mission is to meet 10,000 different people for one hour each to see what comes of opening doors —for no particular reason.... Read more →

The Third Way of Knowledge

Some things like autonomy, mastery, and purpose have become more valuable than others to satisfaction and general well-being. We desire to control our lives, how we spend our time. Mastery is an important aspect of motivation. And so is purpose, which is the main force changing how organizations and people do business. In a world where like-choices abound, values and value alignment becomes what is precious, and cannot be copied. Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly talks about eight value-based needs not easy to copy in What Technology Wants. These needs remain an attractive type of value we can provide that people... Read more →

Clarity in Business Comes from Staying Close to our "Why"

For 34 years, Cathy had a complicated relationship with food, mom, work, and love. Her public conversations gave voice to its readership’s family, professional, and social concerns and preoccupations. The comic strip's creator, advertising industry executive Cathy Guisewite, created a prototype of the character to placate her mother and was surprised when it hit a nerve. Universal Press Syndicate agreed to sign her up on her first submission because the character met an unfulfilled need, giving voice to the daily struggles of a large part of its readership. From the start, the daily comic strip addressed very personal issues women... Read more →

Sustainable Sources of Advantage

In our haste to simplify our understanding of the world we tend to categorize things in binary fashion—right or wrong, talking or doing, yes or no, light and dark. When in reality the question is more about the degrees of change (for example, temperature), the delta of in progress and done (for example, as humans we're work in progress), the space between knowledge and learning (there's even value in negative knowledge), hypothesis and testing (because big data will not replace thinking). There is value in the nature of human experience—thinking and developing an appreciation for the science of observation to... Read more →

Change is an Opportunity

Nearly three thousand people subscribe to Conversation Agent by daily email. If that's you, thank you for choosing that option. The current format was offered a while back by FeedBurner and is now unsupported by Google. So while it's not going away, the formatting is not ideal for readability. I don't like not having control, it doesn't allow me to serve you better. Because I also read a lot of what's important by email, I understand the importance of a good layout. So I'm planning more options for people who prefer a similar experience to reading directly on the blog.... Read more →

Where are we going?

Elaborating what we hear is important to listening and the process of conversation. Bill Fox is the co-founder of Container13, a company that helps people and organizations thrive naturally in a world of constant whitewater. There are simple ways to draw insights from interviews, and this is what we've been working on here and he's been building with global business leaders. Bill interviewed me recently for his Exploring Forward-Thinking Workplaces™ project. Six main questions: 1. How can we create workplaces where every voice matters, people thrive and find meaning, and change and innovation happen naturally? Here I talk about the... Read more →

Simple Ways to Draw Insights from Interviews

In addition to learning to make better decisions, we should appreciate the power of conversation as a discovery tool, when we use it smartly to suspend judgement and not try to fit data points into a neat narrative until we have enough information to make sense of things. This without making it too much of a fishing expedition. An example of fishing expeditions is when one of the two parties in a conversation is all questions and no information, withholding their role in the conversation, not sharing in it as it progresses. Which makes a conversation or an interview feel... Read more →

Asking the Question People Have Been Waiting their Whole Lives to Answer

This is part III of a series on interviews. Part I revealed the secret to how great interviews are the stuff of legends. Part II with some examples of worst and best interviews centered on increasing value with networking and practice. Sometimes we arm wrestle a little in conversation, until we find the sweet spot, the entry point to a person's story and they relent to tell their version of it. So it's a matter of energy and life force, as Marc Pachter put it. But there are also questions more related to empathy. In many cases, they are the... Read more →