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I've seen this pattern a few times now: someone encounters NVC - claims that his interpersonal skills have massively increased - starts trying to recruit others

I've seen this pattern a few times now: someone encounters NVC - claims that his interpersonal skills have massively increased - starts trying to recruit others into it - others don't follow because he's mostly talking in canned robotic phrases - when others point it out to him, he uses NVC tools to ignore/deflect - all efforts to reach him fail. In contrast, I've never seen anyone who could be described as an NVC success story.

lmeyerov 7y ago
It helped us a lot by putting in a simple low bar for professional communication and conflict resolution, and as a training mechanism. Startups get wild in unpredictable diff ways, so need to have something. In practice, older team members did not need it as much to begin with, so they quickly got it. Mid/younger benifited more -- less experience in channeling passion and handling problems? Main issue IME can function as a smothering mechanism that lets things fester. Even if a discussion remains cordial and makes progress, that does not mean the conflict gets resolved. Ex: folks can just stop talking. So useful but incomplete, and the article title overclaims.
oconnor663 7y ago
I think the value of the canned phrases is in giving you an alternative to reach for in more difficult situations, where your default would've been either angry yelling or not communicating at all. When you take a typical business conversation -- which is definitely going to happen either way, and which isn't really at risk of becoming a screaming match -- and apply the canned phrases to it, I agree that it adds awkwardness for not much benefit.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  You might be lucky to be in an office where people don't scream at each other.
llamataboot 7y ago
IMHO this stage of NVC lasts about 6 months, and it is rarely "doing NVC" - ie; if you get really angry/scared/etc you prob haven't built up the muscle memory yet to even reach for those canned phrases (probably applies more in more intimate relationships than the workplace - partner(s), parents, kids, etc) but maybe you do, and surprisingly even a clumsy canned phrase about your own feelings or needs rather than jumping to an accusation of the other person can still help ratchet down the tension. After practicing NVC a fair amount (it is a /practice/, not a tool), you can literally start feeling your brain re-wire in a good way. You stop feeling so much responsible for other people's emotions, even if they are about something you did or needing to put your needs in contrast to someone elses, you start automatically being able to empathize with someone's feelings, even when they might scare you, and perhaps most importantly your own self-talk and the way you relate to parts of yourself that "you" are in conflict with starts to change. At this point, there is much less robotic phrases. In fact, watching someone who has many years of experience rewiring their own defenses through NVC practice responding to difficult situations seems near-magical because there are so many less ego defenses to get stuck on someone elses ego defenses so really difficult and hard things can be cut through like better and both people can feel heard and understoor.
- 0xff00ffee 7y ago
  > prob haven't built up the muscle memory yet For me, it took YEARS of practice, and it amazes my that my limbic system is still the first responder! It comes and goes and you're right, you really need to practice. The canned phrases are the training wheels.
  - llamataboot 7y ago
    yeah, it takes a while to really appreciate. I read a fair amount of NVC stuff and it always sounded a little bit stupid and wooden (oh, of course I could say that, but why would I even say something that dumb sounding) even though I liked the theories. Like most forms of awareness training, it takes a direct experience through lots of practice as to how your own bodymind is changing. The direct experience of being able to hear someone stating needs and empathizing directly with your commonality in having those needs regardless of how they are acting is a pretty strong one. Even now though when we are having a conflict where both my partner and I feel confused and hurt and we don't quite even understand what we are arguing about but we both feel something pretty intensely we will literally sit down with a typed sheet of feelings of needs and try to identify exactly what is happening for us, regardless of "content" of the fight. It still amazes me, especially as someone socialized to not feel my feelings, how often in those situations I actually have no idea what I'm /feeling/ (other than BAD) much less what I am needing...
dkarl 7y ago
This was my impression after reading the NVC book. It doesn't aim at resolving conflict. It aims at being able to talk about a conflict without joining into it. Most conflicts have a rhetorical side to them, and when you try to talk through them, you almost inevitably fall into the trap of fighting the conflict on the rhetorical level. Even an intermediator trying to be neutral will end up reciting one side's attack line followed by the other side's attack line. NVC is the art of avoiding this, usually at the price of not really speaking about the nominal content of the conflict. This can actually help if the ill will generated by talking about the conflict is a big factor in inflaming it and keeping it going. Other than that, it doesn't do anything to bring you closer to a resolution.
- pmichaud 7y ago
  I almost agree with you, but I think it actually does bring you much closer to resolution. The reason is that by default the rhetoric and content, (as you've put it) are deeply conflated in the minds of the people who are engaged in conflict. NVC can tease them apart, and often the content that is left is literally nothing (ie. it was all just a matter of feeling respected or whatever), or a trivial disagreement that can be quickly solved. But even when the conflict turns out to be non trivial, NVC is a boon. If all parties to the conflict are now in a non violent frame, then what has happened is the problem is quite clear, the stakes for everyone involved are quite clear, and all the people are in a collaboration together to figure out a solution that addresses what matters. So you're right that it doesn't automatically solve any specific, objective problem, but it sets up the environment so success becomes way more likely.
BeetleB 7y ago
Here's the deal: I've yet to come across someone who is critical of NVC but can provide something better. And in my experience, the status quo is rarely better. NVC has its flaws. It won't always work. Nor will anything else we know of. If something comes along that works better (higher "success rate"), I'll jump on that bandwagon. If you can't be bothered to read the rest of this long comment, here's a TLDR: Most communications books, written independently, have the same elements as NVC. The other books are better at explaining why these elements is important. But the NVC book is better at providing recipes, which is why it became more popular. A few years ago I did a deep dive on the topic, and read 4 books on communications: Difficult Conversations, NVC, Crucial Conversations and Getting Past No. Most of these were written/invented independently of one another. When I had read all 4, I looked over all my notes, and noticed that they all point to the same things, with only minor differences: 1. State your observation, without judgement, and be specific, not general. 2. Personalize and state its impact on you. The "feelings" part of NVC - all the books explicitly call out that you should explicitly state your feelings. The Difficult Conversations authors pointed out that many people in professional settings have the notion that discussions should be absent of emotions ("objective). Yet if a discussion at work is getting heated, emotions are clearly playing a big role. Don't assume you can solve the problem without bringing those emotions to the table. And indeed, many solutions fail because they failed to address the emotions which resulted in a lack of commitment. As one book put it: Unvalidated emotions are a minefield. Just yesterday there was a nasty discussion at work about whether to split a monorepo into smaller individual repos. One side's work is bogged down by it being a monorepo, and the other side would have trouble if it were split into monorepos. Both sides discussed the their problems, yet neither side acknowledged the other's pain. Validating the other's emotions is a core principle of all communications books I've read. (The issue did not get resolved by the end of the day). And personalize: Don't talk in vague principles, but talk about how you are affected. This is where a lot of the tech world fails. I recall one heated discussion at work where a person was strongly pushing for something, and using all kinds of principles/analogies. He wanted someone else to change his workflow because it was causing problems for him. Yet, he never explained how it was causing him problems! When queried, he kept invoking analogies and principles. The world rarely yields neatly to principles, and every analogy has a flaw. You'll often get competing principles. Invoking them alone will not solve the problem. The other element of stating the impact on you is discussing the needs. What need of yours is not being met? Is this impacting your efficiency? Are you wondering whether the work is futile, and not giving your purpose? Do you think you are being ignored and want consideration? I cannot stress this enough: If you have trouble putting a "need" to your problem, it is because you haven't thought this through, and it's a bad idea to go into a conversation about the issue. Even if you don't explicitly state your need, this is a valuable exercise to do internally. Feelings are easy: When you're mad you know you're upset. Most people stop there and go have an argument. NVC forces you to start introspecting: My teammate did X and now I'm mad. But why is his doing X bothering me? Yes, my teammate undid all my changes and replaced it with crappy code. But why exactly is this bothering me? Your needs and his needs may conflict. But unless you can determine both, the conversation is likely going to go south. All the communications books are part "therapy": Emphasizing introspection along with communication. 3. Request (optional - depends on the situation). Regarding the "canned robotic phrases": This is akin to any other book that becomes dogma (think TDD, unit tests, referential transparency, etc). And just like the others, the original author does not insist you use these phrases. The NVC author explicitly says that the elements must be present, but the order doesn't matter, and sometimes it can even be communicated in one phrase. It nevertheless provides those templates to make it easy on beginners. When I read the NVC book, I felt similar to you: These phrases are very artificial. And would annoy others. NVC is the only book that has these templates, and it is likely why it is very successful. The other books discuss the issues involved in conversations much better than NVC does - but they don't provide a template. Now how artificial are these? Surprisingly not very. All my skepticism went away once I started observing people destressing a situation at work. The majority of these situations involved someone using very similar templates. And many (most?) of those folks had never heard of NVC! It sounds very artificial when reading it, but no one thought it was off. This is the exercise I recommend everyone does: Observe someone handling a stressful situation at work, and note how often they touch on all 3 aspects of NVC (specific observation, referring to the feelings, and the needs that are unmet). Rosenberg didn't invent NVC. He just identified its existence. No one's forcing you to use the template. Here's an example "So this is bothering you because it's affecting your efficiency?" This is perfectly valid NVC. I think some of the problem arises in what is considered "good" communication. In the academic (and tech) world, we often describe good communication as concise and objective. This is great when communicating facts, science, etc. But in the workplace, we are not in the business of communicating facts and doing science. Most of us are in the business of making a product, that someone will buy, from which we will earn our living. And there are many competing motivations (some people want to "make" something, others are more interested in promotions, etc). Generally, we are heavily reliant on others. You can make a great thing but if the marketing folks refuse to market it, it will impact you (and vice versa). So "good communication" at the workplace involves dealing with a wider variety of people who have differing needs from you. Becoming better at that type of communication is a lot of effort over a long period of time. It's easy to dismiss one type of style (e.g. NVC), but recognize that the "default" alternative is very poor and merely dismissing means accepting a poor level of communication. Had I simply read the NVC book and not dived deep into other books, I wouldn't have improved at all. It is because I decided that I will try to find a way to improve it that I recognized the merits of NVC and recognized its effective usage in the real world. It's also why I didn't stop at "crappy templates" and focused on making it less artificial. Finally, NVC has a cult following. Ignore the cult. Just focus on the book.
brlewis 7y ago
If your comment is still editable, could you please change it to be a response to the article? Its current phrasing makes it sound like you stopped reading before the heading, "Why NVC Can Fail in Practice". The article describes failures similar to the one you mention, and has recommendations that your comment doesn't respond to.
peterwwillis 7y ago
This isn't just a NVC thing. Teach anyone a little bit of anything with the idea that they are now "better" because of it, and they'll be excited to share it with others. But they're still newbs, so not only do they fail at teaching, they also don't have the skills to respond to it not working. I've been that person many, many times. :)
booleandilemma 7y ago
When I see you write comments that put down NVC, I feel sad because I'm needing a framework that someone created to sell a book which I can shoehorn all of my behavior into. Would you be able to be a little more open-minded?
pmichaud 7y ago
I agree with the gist of the other people who responded to you -- NVC success stories just look like someone winning, so you're not going to necessarily notice them. The robotic phrases are a training tool, and in many unfortunate cases a crutch, but what they are trying to train is a big shift away from fundamentally adversarial framing. When people have really internalized the shift, they don't sound any particular way. It just seems like they really get where you're coming from, and it's a pleasure to work through things with them even when the things suck.
cheshire_cat 7y ago
This is actually a known and discussed issue in NVC circles. I highly recommend Miki Kashtans workshop "Naturalizing NVC" [0] to everyone. A shorter watch about the topic is a video from "Cup of Empathy"[1]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHtDZ98CTDc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHtDZ98CTDc [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiCtf5sZWHA&t=266s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiCtf5sZWHA&t=266s

lmeyerov 7y ago

It helped us a lot by putting in a simple low bar for professional communication and conflict resolution, and as a training mechanism. Startups get wild in unpredictable diff ways, so need to have something. In practice, older team members did not need it as much to begin with, so they quickly got it. Mid/younger benifited more -- less experience in channeling passion and handling problems? Main issue IME can function as a smothering mechanism that lets things fester. Even if a discussion remains cordial and makes progress, that does not mean the conflict gets resolved. Ex: folks can just stop talking. So useful but incomplete, and the article title overclaims.

oconnor663 7y ago

I think the value of the canned phrases is in giving you an alternative to reach for in more difficult situations, where your default would've been either angry yelling or not communicating at all. When you take a typical business conversation -- which is definitely going to happen either way, and which isn't really at risk of becoming a screaming match -- and apply the canned phrases to it, I agree that it adds awkwardness for not much benefit.

lonelappde 7y ago
You might be lucky to be in an office where people don't scream at each other.

llamataboot 7y ago

IMHO this stage of NVC lasts about 6 months, and it is rarely "doing NVC" - ie; if you get really angry/scared/etc you prob haven't built up the muscle memory yet to even reach for those canned phrases (probably applies more in more intimate relationships than the workplace - partner(s), parents, kids, etc) but maybe you do, and surprisingly even a clumsy canned phrase about your own feelings or needs rather than jumping to an accusation of the other person can still help ratchet down the tension. After practicing NVC a fair amount (it is a /practice/, not a tool), you can literally start feeling your brain re-wire in a good way. You stop feeling so much responsible for other people's emotions, even if they are about something you did or needing to put your needs in contrast to someone elses, you start automatically being able to empathize with someone's feelings, even when they might scare you, and perhaps most importantly your own self-talk and the way you relate to parts of yourself that "you" are in conflict with starts to change. At this point, there is much less robotic phrases. In fact, watching someone who has many years of experience rewiring their own defenses through NVC practice responding to difficult situations seems near-magical because there are so many less ego defenses to get stuck on someone elses ego defenses so really difficult and hard things can be cut through like better and both people can feel heard and understoor.

0xff00ffee 7y ago
> prob haven't built up the muscle memory yet For me, it took YEARS of practice, and it amazes my that my limbic system is still the first responder! It comes and goes and you're right, you really need to practice. The canned phrases are the training wheels.
- llamataboot 7y ago
  yeah, it takes a while to really appreciate. I read a fair amount of NVC stuff and it always sounded a little bit stupid and wooden (oh, of course I could say that, but why would I even say something that dumb sounding) even though I liked the theories. Like most forms of awareness training, it takes a direct experience through lots of practice as to how your own bodymind is changing. The direct experience of being able to hear someone stating needs and empathizing directly with your commonality in having those needs regardless of how they are acting is a pretty strong one. Even now though when we are having a conflict where both my partner and I feel confused and hurt and we don't quite even understand what we are arguing about but we both feel something pretty intensely we will literally sit down with a typed sheet of feelings of needs and try to identify exactly what is happening for us, regardless of "content" of the fight. It still amazes me, especially as someone socialized to not feel my feelings, how often in those situations I actually have no idea what I'm /feeling/ (other than BAD) much less what I am needing...

dkarl 7y ago

This was my impression after reading the NVC book. It doesn't aim at resolving conflict. It aims at being able to talk about a conflict without joining into it. Most conflicts have a rhetorical side to them, and when you try to talk through them, you almost inevitably fall into the trap of fighting the conflict on the rhetorical level. Even an intermediator trying to be neutral will end up reciting one side's attack line followed by the other side's attack line. NVC is the art of avoiding this, usually at the price of not really speaking about the nominal content of the conflict. This can actually help if the ill will generated by talking about the conflict is a big factor in inflaming it and keeping it going. Other than that, it doesn't do anything to bring you closer to a resolution.

pmichaud 7y ago
I almost agree with you, but I think it actually does bring you much closer to resolution. The reason is that by default the rhetoric and content, (as you've put it) are deeply conflated in the minds of the people who are engaged in conflict. NVC can tease them apart, and often the content that is left is literally nothing (ie. it was all just a matter of feeling respected or whatever), or a trivial disagreement that can be quickly solved. But even when the conflict turns out to be non trivial, NVC is a boon. If all parties to the conflict are now in a non violent frame, then what has happened is the problem is quite clear, the stakes for everyone involved are quite clear, and all the people are in a collaboration together to figure out a solution that addresses what matters. So you're right that it doesn't automatically solve any specific, objective problem, but it sets up the environment so success becomes way more likely.

BeetleB 7y ago

Here's the deal: I've yet to come across someone who is critical of NVC but can provide something better. And in my experience, the status quo is rarely better. NVC has its flaws. It won't always work. Nor will anything else we know of. If something comes along that works better (higher "success rate"), I'll jump on that bandwagon. If you can't be bothered to read the rest of this long comment, here's a TLDR: Most communications books, written independently, have the same elements as NVC. The other books are better at explaining why these elements is important. But the NVC book is better at providing recipes, which is why it became more popular. A few years ago I did a deep dive on the topic, and read 4 books on communications: Difficult Conversations, NVC, Crucial Conversations and Getting Past No. Most of these were written/invented independently of one another. When I had read all 4, I looked over all my notes, and noticed that they all point to the same things, with only minor differences: 1. State your observation, without judgement, and be specific, not general. 2. Personalize and state its impact on you. The "feelings" part of NVC - all the books explicitly call out that you should explicitly state your feelings. The Difficult Conversations authors pointed out that many people in professional settings have the notion that discussions should be absent of emotions ("objective). Yet if a discussion at work is getting heated, emotions are clearly playing a big role. Don't assume you can solve the problem without bringing those emotions to the table. And indeed, many solutions fail because they failed to address the emotions which resulted in a lack of commitment. As one book put it: Unvalidated emotions are a minefield. Just yesterday there was a nasty discussion at work about whether to split a monorepo into smaller individual repos. One side's work is bogged down by it being a monorepo, and the other side would have trouble if it were split into monorepos. Both sides discussed the their problems, yet neither side acknowledged the other's pain. Validating the other's emotions is a core principle of all communications books I've read. (The issue did not get resolved by the end of the day). And personalize: Don't talk in vague principles, but talk about how you are affected. This is where a lot of the tech world fails. I recall one heated discussion at work where a person was strongly pushing for something, and using all kinds of principles/analogies. He wanted someone else to change his workflow because it was causing problems for him. Yet, he never explained how it was causing him problems! When queried, he kept invoking analogies and principles. The world rarely yields neatly to principles, and every analogy has a flaw. You'll often get competing principles. Invoking them alone will not solve the problem. The other element of stating the impact on you is discussing the needs. What need of yours is not being met? Is this impacting your efficiency? Are you wondering whether the work is futile, and not giving your purpose? Do you think you are being ignored and want consideration? I cannot stress this enough: If you have trouble putting a "need" to your problem, it is because you haven't thought this through, and it's a bad idea to go into a conversation about the issue. Even if you don't explicitly state your need, this is a valuable exercise to do internally. Feelings are easy: When you're mad you know you're upset. Most people stop there and go have an argument. NVC forces you to start introspecting: My teammate did X and now I'm mad. But why is his doing X bothering me? Yes, my teammate undid all my changes and replaced it with crappy code. But why exactly is this bothering me? Your needs and his needs may conflict. But unless you can determine both, the conversation is likely going to go south. All the communications books are part "therapy": Emphasizing introspection along with communication. 3. Request (optional - depends on the situation). Regarding the "canned robotic phrases": This is akin to any other book that becomes dogma (think TDD, unit tests, referential transparency, etc). And just like the others, the original author does not insist you use these phrases. The NVC author explicitly says that the elements must be present, but the order doesn't matter, and sometimes it can even be communicated in one phrase. It nevertheless provides those templates to make it easy on beginners. When I read the NVC book, I felt similar to you: These phrases are very artificial. And would annoy others. NVC is the only book that has these templates, and it is likely why it is very successful. The other books discuss the issues involved in conversations much better than NVC does - but they don't provide a template. Now how artificial are these? Surprisingly not very. All my skepticism went away once I started observing people destressing a situation at work. The majority of these situations involved someone using very similar templates. And many (most?) of those folks had never heard of NVC! It sounds very artificial when reading it, but no one thought it was off. This is the exercise I recommend everyone does: Observe someone handling a stressful situation at work, and note how often they touch on all 3 aspects of NVC (specific observation, referring to the feelings, and the needs that are unmet). Rosenberg didn't invent NVC. He just identified its existence. No one's forcing you to use the template. Here's an example "So this is bothering you because it's affecting your efficiency?" This is perfectly valid NVC. I think some of the problem arises in what is considered "good" communication. In the academic (and tech) world, we often describe good communication as concise and objective. This is great when communicating facts, science, etc. But in the workplace, we are not in the business of communicating facts and doing science. Most of us are in the business of making a product, that someone will buy, from which we will earn our living. And there are many competing motivations (some people want to "make" something, others are more interested in promotions, etc). Generally, we are heavily reliant on others. You can make a great thing but if the marketing folks refuse to market it, it will impact you (and vice versa). So "good communication" at the workplace involves dealing with a wider variety of people who have differing needs from you. Becoming better at that type of communication is a lot of effort over a long period of time. It's easy to dismiss one type of style (e.g. NVC), but recognize that the "default" alternative is very poor and merely dismissing means accepting a poor level of communication. Had I simply read the NVC book and not dived deep into other books, I wouldn't have improved at all. It is because I decided that I will try to find a way to improve it that I recognized the merits of NVC and recognized its effective usage in the real world. It's also why I didn't stop at "crappy templates" and focused on making it less artificial. Finally, NVC has a cult following. Ignore the cult. Just focus on the book.

brlewis 7y ago

If your comment is still editable, could you please change it to be a response to the article? Its current phrasing makes it sound like you stopped reading before the heading, "Why NVC Can Fail in Practice". The article describes failures similar to the one you mention, and has recommendations that your comment doesn't respond to.

peterwwillis 7y ago

This isn't just a NVC thing. Teach anyone a little bit of anything with the idea that they are now "better" because of it, and they'll be excited to share it with others. But they're still newbs, so not only do they fail at teaching, they also don't have the skills to respond to it not working. I've been that person many, many times. :)

booleandilemma 7y ago

When I see you write comments that put down NVC, I feel sad because I'm needing a framework that someone created to sell a book which I can shoehorn all of my behavior into. Would you be able to be a little more open-minded?

pmichaud 7y ago

I agree with the gist of the other people who responded to you -- NVC success stories just look like someone winning, so you're not going to necessarily notice them. The robotic phrases are a training tool, and in many unfortunate cases a crutch, but what they are trying to train is a big shift away from fundamentally adversarial framing. When people have really internalized the shift, they don't sound any particular way. It just seems like they really get where you're coming from, and it's a pleasure to work through things with them even when the things suck.

cheshire_cat 7y ago

This is actually a known and discussed issue in NVC circles. I highly recommend Miki Kashtans workshop "Naturalizing NVC" [0] to everyone. A shorter watch about the topic is a video from "Cup of Empathy"[1]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHtDZ98CTDc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHtDZ98CTDc [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiCtf5sZWHA&t=266s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiCtf5sZWHA&t=266s