Curious George, the storybook monkey, is over retirement age these days. So the odds are good you grew up with Curious George books, television shows or movies. The “good little monkey who was always very curious” is a great image to keep in mind during difficult conversations with clients. Just ask someone else from the family tree: the gorilla.

Several years ago a group of Harvard psychologists asked research subjects to view a videotape of six basketball players passing the ball. They asked the research subjects to count the number of passes made by one of the teams. In one of the videos, a tall woman with an open umbrella walked through the center of the action, clearly visible for about five seconds. In the other video, a shorter woman in a gorilla costume walked through the action, also for about five seconds.

After viewing the video, participants were asked if they’d seen anything odd. Thirty-five percent of the observers didn’t notice the woman and a whopping 56 percent didn’t notice the gorilla. At all. A control group was asked to watch the video and given no instruction to count passes and readily noticed the odd visitors walking through the game.

The assigned task caused the first group to filter out information extraneous to that task. Their focus meant they didn’t notice a gorilla walk through the middle of a basketball game. But participants in the control group, with no distracting directions, were open to noticing what their brains and eyes were observing.

Difficult conversations and other conflict situations tend to trigger your certainty, perhaps because certainty protects ego. But, just like the failure to see a gorilla walk through a basketball game, certainty’s selective perceptions cause you to notice information that supports your conclusions and filter out information that might disconfirm it. Certainty begets more certainty. And when you’re certain, you’re no longer learning, because you don’t think there’s anything else you need to know.

Effective conflict resolution invites you to be uncertain. It invites you to be Curious George, to see what you might notice and learn if you don’t limit yourself. Instead of engaging in a difficult conversation by looking for the faults in the other person’s argument, or the opportunities to correct their view, or the chance to prove that your approach is the best one, practice doing one thing only: being curious.

You may be surprised by what you learn and how much it can shift a difficult conversation into one rich with opportunity.

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This entry was posted on Friday, August 31st, 2007 at 12:34 pm and is filed under Design Careers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.