Conversational Capacity: The Secret to Building Successful Teams That Perform When the Pressure Is On

8The Work of Building a Disciplined Team

Good ideas are not adopted automatically.They must be driven into practice withcourageous patience.

HYMAN RICKOVER

When it comes to skill, it’s not what we know that counts, but what we can put into practice. It’s not uncommon for someone to say, “I know that to be more effective I must balance my win tendency with higher curiosity and humility,” and yet five minutes later that same person is berating a colleague who dared to disagree. So if we want to build our conversational capacity, how do we move beyond mere awareness toward real competence?

Unlike Neo in The Matrix, there is no red pill we can take to facilitate this transformative shift in our mindset, no computer into which we can be plugged to ...