There is a particular kind of ‘theatre’ that often fuels organisational life, and the ‘difficult conversations’ workshop is one of its more regular productions.
Let’s say something surfaces in a team. A falling-out between two colleagues. A dire engagement-survey result that will not shift. A piece of work that has stalled because two people who share a remit have stopped being open with each other.
We get a call, and before we realise, the brief lands as a procurement question:
Can we run something on difficult conversations?
A day, ideally, with materials people can take away. Maybe with a framework or two.
Oh, and throw in some tools & techniques too!
The implicit expectation is that the friction will lessen. The collusion, mostly unspoken, is that no one will look too hard at whether it does.
The frameworks on offer are familiar.
- Crucial Conversations with its STATE acronym and pool-of-shared-meaning metaphor.[i]
- Difficult Conversations with its three interleaved conversations about “What Happened, feelings, and identity.”[ii]
- Radical Candor with its two-by-two.[iii]
- Nonviolent Communication with its grammar of observation, feeling, need, request.[iv]
Each is competently constructed. But each is premised on the same untested assumptions: that difficult conversations fail because individuals lack a skill, and that this skill can be acquired in one workshop. That assumption is misguided, not in a way that makes the frameworks worthless, but in a way that makes the workshop the wrong unit of intervention.
Forty years of training-transfer research provides the same conclusion from multiple directions:
What happens after the training, in the actual work environment, drives whether learning becomes behaviour. [v]
For open, interpersonal skills (exactly what communication training claims to teach), the work environment matters more than it does for closed, technical skills.[vi] [vii] The most generous estimates put behavioural transfer from training at between 10 – 40%.[viii] For relational skills exercised under emotional load (a useful definition of a ‘difficult conversation’), that figure drops sharply.
Given the research, a singular workshop presents as one of the smallest levers in the development and learning systems of an organisation (even though it is rarely priced that way).
Take a moment to reflect on this: a two-day off-site alone cannot reshape the structural permission for honesty, the peer behaviour that follows training, the political conditions that allow disagreement to be productive rather than career-limiting, or the unresolved questions of responsibility and accountability that regularly surface as interpersonal heat between colleagues sharing overlapping territory. It is those very conditions that produce the friction. Teaching individuals a communication script, without addressing these contexts, leaves the conditions intact.
The popular frameworks mentioned here (amongst others) share a deeper problem: as an example, the difficult conversation is modelled as a transaction between two autonomous communicators who can each be skilled up to perform it better. That is, the ‘dyad’. It is a cognitive-behavioural frame applied to a relational and structural phenomenon. The team itself (its history, its dynamics, the patterns it has settled into, the structural tensions that show up as personal friction) does not appear in the model. Consider a leadership team where two functional heads share a remit that was never properly articulated.
The friction between them is not a communication failure.
It is an unresolved structural problem that surfaces as interpersonal heat. A workshop that teaches both leaders to use the STATE framework when discussing their feelings will, predictably, fail to resolve what the organisational chart and relational norms created.
Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team (a book its author explicitly calls a leadership fable, not research) has become the scaffold of more team-development programs than any evidence-based model.[ix] Crucial Conversations has no independent randomised trial demonstrating sustained behavioural change at the team level. The evidence base for most frameworks in this genre consists of proprietary case studies produced by the very firms that sell them.
Most experienced buyers know this.
The purchase goes ahead anyway.
Steve Hearsum’s diagnosis of the organisational quick-fix economy is instructive here.[x] The workshop survives not because it works but because it performs. The leader needs to be seen acting on the perceived problem. The consultant supplies the action, and participants get a day out of the office – maybe even have fun together. Alvesson and Spicer identify the broader dynamic at work: organisations routinely suppress genuine inquiry in the name of value ‘coherence’ and short-term harmony, choosing the appearance of action over the discomfort of harder questions.[xi] The workshop teaches the script while foreclosing the larger question of what structural conditions makes a conversation difficult in the first place.
A more authentic program requires a different shape – sustained engagement over a minimum of six months, not a discrete event.
It takes work with the actual team in its actual context, which will include the structural tensions and relational history that singular workshops often ignore.
The process sets the work with real situations rather than constructed ones.[xii] And supported practices, which understand the team as a system rather than a collection of individuals within it,[xiii] are embedded into the program itself. Finally, structural redesign may need consideration in parallel with development work, because friction will reproduce itself if its conditions remain unchanged.
A workshop brings a ready-made framework into the room, teaches people to apply it, and then evaporates. It is simply assumed that what happens between people after the workshop will unfold ‘naturally’, and in a positive, linear fashion.
Sustained team development works differently: it stays with the team’s real situations over time, building a shared understanding of what is actually driving the friction and what the team needs to do differently.
One delivers a script and hopes it sticks over time. The other builds the capacity to have the conversation without a script. These are not variations on the same approach. They are different theories of change.[xiv]
The evidence has been available for decades. The field knows what produces sustained behavioural change and what doesn’t. Yet many L&D decision-makers continue to fund the latter at scale. For whatever reason, it is a choice, not an oversight. But what might be the impact on your organisation’s capability if a different choice were made?
Commissioning a workshop because it is easier to procure than a sustained programme is a legitimate organisational decision, but it should be made with eyes wide open and a genuine acknowledgment of its limitations.
If the goal is to sustainably shift how a team navigates difficulty, the approach has to match the ambition. A single workshop or offsite will not do it.
Something more sustained, more specific to the team and its context, and more honest about what is actually going on, might.
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References:
[i] Patterson, K., Grenny, J., McMillan, R., & Switzler, A. (2002). Crucial conversations: Tools for talking when stakes are high. McGraw-Hill.
[ii] Stone, D., Patton, B., & Heen, S. (1999). Difficult conversations: How to discuss what matters most. Viking.
[iii] Scott, K. (2017). Radical candor: Be a kick-ass boss without losing your humanity. St. Martin’s Press.
[iv] Rosenberg, M. B. (2003). Nonviolent communication: A language of life (2nd ed.). PuddleDancer Press.
[v] Baldwin, T. T., & Ford, J. K. (1988). Transfer of training: A review and directions for future research. Personnel Psychology, 41(1), 63–105.
[vi] Blume, B. D., Ford, J. K., Baldwin, T. T., & Huang, J. L. (2010). Transfer of training: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Management, 36(4), 1065–1105.
[vii] Bell, B. S., Tannenbaum, S. I., Ford, J. K., Noe, R. A., & Kraiger, K. (2017). 100 years of training and development research: What we know and where we should go. Journal of Applied Psychology, 102(3), 305–323.
[viii] Burke, L. A., & Hutchins, H. M. (2007). Training transfer: An integrative literature review. Human Resource Development Review, 6(3), 263–296.
[ix] Lencioni, P. (2002). The five dysfunctions of a team: A leadership fable. Jossey-Bass.
[x] Hearsum, S. (2024). No silver bullet: Bursting the bubble of the organisational quick fix. Funky Otter Press.
[xi] Alvesson, M., & Spicer, A. (2016). The stupidity paradox: The power and pitfalls of functional stupidity at work. Profile Books.
[xii] Revans, R. W. (1980). Action learning: New techniques for management. Blond & Briggs.
[xiii] Hawkins, P. (2021). Leadership team coaching: Developing collective transformational leadership (4th ed.). Kogan Page.
[xiv] Bushe, G. R., & Marshak, R. J. (Eds.). (2015). Dialogic organization development: The theory and practice of transformational change. Berrett-Koehler.