Mike Lehr's Blog

As a result of responses to my previous post, I’m following up with a related technique which I call the “Refer Back Technique” (RBT). As with Part I, it concerns itself with using questions to sustain conversations, but it’s also effective at demonstrating listening. Listening builds relationships, but it helps if the other person realizes you are doing it. This technique effectively demonstrates that.

Refer Back Conversation Technique

As the post “Computers Teaching Us About Being Human” shared, most informal conversations wander from one point to the next. Often, we can just jump right in because it’s only the last comment that is sustaining the conversation. It doesn’t matter what was said five or six comments ago. Thus, it’s easy to program a computer to sustain conversations.

RBT is different because it refers back to a previous comment in the conversation. The question is not about the recent comment, but about something the person said a while back. This frequently applies when the other person says much in a few minutes. It subtly tells the other person that you are listening.

RBT has two parts:

1. A transition statement referencing an earlier comment
2. A question about that comment

The figure to the right helps us visualize what is happening. It also has a sample transition statement along with seven sample questions. The two keys are:

1. Ensuring we listen for opportunities
2. Asking the right transition question to make the conversation seamless

Here are some other examples:

• I found your comment earlier about ____________ fascinating. What other insights can you share on that?
• I’d like to go back to something you said before about ____________. How would you apply that in a situation where____________?
• I thought what you said earlier about ____________ was important. What other reasons can you give?

Related post:

Related post:

• How to Become a Good (or Better) Conversationalist Overnight

Here is another site with some other good conversational techniques:

• 14 Methods and Mindset Tricks to Make you a More Interesting Conversationalist

I recently read in the Schumpeter column, “In Search of Serendipity,” of the July 24, 2010 edition of The Economist about the book, The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things In Motion, by John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison. Automatically, the vision of bell bottoms returning to vogue arose. The concept is very similar to Carl Jung’s 1920’s introduction of synchronicity.

As stated in Schumpeter, the basic premise of the book is that “success in business increasingly depends on chance encounters.” It’s these chance encounters that seem spontaneous in the present but more purposeful with future’s hindsight. This is synchronicity repackaged.

About ten years ago, a good colleague was asking about the connections I’ve made to see if I could support this conclusion about his connections: the most profitable ones tended to come outside of his traditional, planned sales efforts. They originated from “out of the blue” encounters at non-business events when he didn’t expect them. I could relate.

It’s a basic premise of my blog that technological advancements are allowing us to see better and better the powerful impact our emotional-related processes such as intuition have in our everyday lives. As Schumpeter supports, advances in the internet – with the social media that it delivers – increases our ability to connect. This is giving us a larger sample population in which to observe that chance encounters really might not be that coincidental. It’s easy to discard one or two coincidences, but a dozen? But, make no mistake that is a concept that has been around for thousands of years in many American Indian and Eastern philosophies.