The Hard Conversations

Abstract

Most plans for shared ownership do not fail in the spreadsheet. They fail in a room: a board meeting where a director asks a question nobody prepared for, a union meeting where a representative hears a threat in a proposal meant as a gift, a kitchen table where a partner asks why the family's savings should sit with one employer, a corridor where a sceptical manager says what half the floor is thinking. The arithmetic of Chapter 5 can be right in every line and the plan can still stall, because nobody found words for the conversation that the arithmetic made necessary. This chapter is about those conversations. It takes six of them, the ones that come up in nearly every firm that tries, and for each it sets out what the other person is usually worried about, what the evidence in this book can and cannot say to that worry, and a short script: not words to recite, but a shape that has helped. The scripts are this book's; they are offered as starting points and should be changed to fit the people and the firm.