In Ireland today the media is full of conversations about how to save €5 billion or so of public spending, except of course they are not really conversations at all ….

Conversations are where people genuinely try to listen to each other and understand each other, maybe try and see if there are other ways of looking at things, maybe try and get to the bottom of things, maybe try and work out a meaningful process for going forward.

What we get in the media is largely a series of statements of fixed positions.

And the media is the most public version of what might be called conversation.   It concerns me deeply what a poor model it sets, how it doesn’t model good listening, seeking to understand, seeking to design good process etc etc.

It also concerns me just how much time and energy we waste talking about things that are not the real thing, not the conversation that will actually make a difference.

I increasingly like definitions of leadership along the lines of ‘leadership is helping the right people to have the right conversations and ensuring that those conversations are linked to action’ – if you accept something like this definition then it becomes increasingly obvious that this kind of leadership is in short enough supply.

This is a very special and difficult time.  Today we are fully occupied with the economy and public finances – hopefully tomorrow we’ll recognise that all this, serious though it is, is dwarfed in importance by the potential impact of climate change  (or indeed the actual impact, depending where you live in the world) and maybe the day after tomorrow we might realise that there are fundamental issues behind all this about what responsibilities we do and don’t accept as human beings on this planet and how we organise ourselves to carry out these responsibilities.

Anyway, the point of all this is that there are particular skills to leading and enabling difficult and deep conversations and that now is the time for as many of us as possible to be practicing and spreading these skills.

How can we do this most effectively ?  That’s a conversation I’m very happy to join in with.