Good morning. I'm here from Palm Springs, as I was just saying.

Why not? It's a gorgeous morning, and you might as well get a little bit of sunshine. I understand that it was hailing in New York yesterday. So, why not?

No, walking with a birder is a different experience than walking with somebody who doesn't know. I have a lot of friends who are birders, and what they're paying attention to is what they hear around themselves. And there are a lot of birders who do it by audio, they hear that song, and that's how they recognize the bird.

I think that's exactly right. I'm seeing a lot of people from Chicago, which is my hometown. So it's good to see you. Thank you so much.

When you write a book, you're like, "Oh, wait, it started a long time before you thought it did." But to be honest, I had done about six years working with the Obama administration. So, working with Elizabeth Warren, working with a lot of the major institutions. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is doing really interesting things. I was doing that and, at the same time working with media and large-scale philanthropy because I felt those were the key factors in large-scale social change. The last client that I was working with was Vivek Murthy, who was the surgeon general. He was about to announce an epidemic of anxiety and loneliness in America. What happened was that we were about to announce it on Friday. I emailed him on Wednesday. It got a bounce back, and it turns out Vivek has been fired, which is what happened to a lot of people who were part of the administration. And I just despaired. Everything I worked on for the last seven years had gone away. Much of the foundations had a shift. All the NGOs had to focus on fundamental human rights. What did I learn? I learned how to bring together multi coalition-based partners and get them into a conversation to move things forward rapidly. And so I was like maybe there's a book in that. So I gave a lecture for Fast Company. It's kind of a funny story. I gave a lecture at Fast Company, and an agent called me up. She was a very good agent. She's Eric Ries's agent. So I worked on the proposal and sold the proposal. Harper Collins pitched it back to me as a mindfulness or conversation book. They were thinking very carefully about the conversations you make and how you put them in the world. So I went with them. But my favorite moment was when you sell a book, they take you out to a fancy lunch like Nobu. You're having sushi, and it's amazing. They said we're not going to touch the books, but you can't touch the title. The book that I wrote was How We Lost Conversation in the World, and the book they needed was a relentlessly optimistic exploration of how we're going to find conversation in the world. I was like, "Well, that's a different book." My publisher was like, "I know, but that's the book we need." So I ended up taking a good extra year to write the book. It took a year and nine months to kind of become relentlessly optimistic about the way we can bring conversation back into our lives.

That's right. At the end of it, I felt like I was talking to a young person who, in the last paragraph of the book, was like, did you feel writing this book cured you? And I wasn't sick. He said, "Well, I think you were. I think you're right." I realized that I had been cured while writing the book.

I was in deep despair. I don't think I quite realized how deep the despair was, both from a political context, from a kind of polarization context, from the king of the divide we saw in the workplaces and the divide we were seeing amongst even the king of the endless canceling that was happening of people and then canceling people, some who deserved it, some who didn't. And then frankly, I think the premise of the book is that if you ride the news hook, which we were doing at that time, or I was at the time, you're going to end up living your life by the script of the news. The New York Times will be telling you what you should be thinking and how you should be feeling every day. To write the book, I had to break away and meet normal people, not luminaries but normal people who had somehow gotten through the hardest conversations of their lives using creativity. And that was endlessly redeeming. One of my favorite stories is about a group of women in Salt Lake City who were religiously conservative and started a sex-positive book club. I remember meeting with them, thinking this is going to be such a waste of time. Instead, it was the best lesson I've ever learned about noticing a change and when change happens in a conversation. So I just met people who are daily heroes. That was very encouraging for me.

Just to be perfectly frank, most of my best writing advice came from Uber drivers. You talk to an Uber driver in L.A., and you get a lot of writing tips. We were talking about India earlier, and it's not the best getting across Mumbai on a bad day can take six hours. So in six hours, you'd better just talk to your driver because otherwise, you're just sitting there, and I would say that it's often the people in these transitory moments that can bring out the depth and warmth of a conversation. What's fascinating about, for instance, just the physiological and spatial cues of talking to someone who's a driver is that often the only contact might be eye to eye through the mirror when they're looking back to you. But you can find yourself in an unguarded moment because you're sitting in the back seat talking to somebody. So you are not in a confrontational perspective. What happens when you sit side by side? What happens when you're going single file? What happens when you walk someplace with somebody? Those kinds of things matter. So those people who are, in essence, shepherds of our safe passage can also be remarkable conversationalists. When George Papandreou was grappling with the Greek crisis and trying to focus on the fundamental conversation about democracy in Greece, his first thought was, let's train the taxi drivers to have a great democratic debate in taxis because there are multiple people there. It's a great place to have a conversation. And one of the things that I learned during the pilgrimage is that if you're walking in the same direction as somebody, you're not going to be very discouraging. You're going to be mostly encouraging because you're going to the same place. You want everybody to get there. Going in the same direction is a great way to have a tough conversation.

I would say this takes practice. One of the things that I inherited from my mom is what I consider a resting nice face. So people just start conversations with me. But I feel it just takes putting yourself out there and practicing. I'll give you an example. This is very early. Before the pandemic had started in earnest in the U.S. I don't know if you remember, but the president then gave a very hate-filled speech about Asians. I was in a car listening to his state of the nation while with an Asian driver. We were listening. At some point, I was like, I think we need to turn this off. I think we just need to have a conversation because I can see him being hurt by what was happening. I was feeling hurt by what was happening. And it's also noticing how somebody is feeling, noticing when there needs to be an intervention when you need to have a conversation. I spent a lot of time thinking about when I felt a change. And that's a situation where I remember being in the back of the car. I wasn't even I wasn't mentally noticing the change. I felt the effect of the words in the car and was like, let's just have a conversation instead. So I would say most of it is practice. You don't become a virtuoso violinist just by picking up a violin. You do it by practicing. Sometimes it's easier to practice with strangers than it is to practice with the people we work with more closely or our loved ones.

It's very interesting. Just a little confession, the book has seven Cs, and that's a very classic business book or self-help book convention, which is that they'd like to have seven Cs even when it doesn't make sense. For instance, the chapter called Clarity was originally called Talk Normal, which I thought was the more basic way of saying clarity. But what's interesting is, people are like, oh, there's a methodology here. It's not a methodology. It's an approach. And the approach is to inspire you to think about how you would do something. So I don't want you to take me and do me. You can borrow some of the ideas in the book, but what do you feel you can do, and how do you feel like you can do it naturally and begin to adopt it in that way. So it's a very if-then approach. What's sort of surprising, I think, for people who read the book is that my opening chapter is about why you should commit to the people in the conversation and hold your ideals and values a little in the background so that you can hear what the person is saying. And what I say is commit, if you're going to be in a conversation and you believe in what's happening, commit to it until you don't like it. Until you feel this is freaking you out, or you're afraid, or this feels unfair, then don't commit. And so, I write this long chapter that says here's when you need to be good at naming things. And then until you don't have to worry about it. So I would say there's a lot of optionalities.

I mean, I think two things are interesting here. And by the way, this is a really fun one where I had to give a lecture, I then had six C.S., and somebody raised their hand, and they were like, hey, what happens if somebody just doesn't want to be in a conversation with you and they hate you from the beginning? And that can happen. I was like, well, you just have to commit to the conversation. What was interesting is that there are two ways this plays out. I see this a lot in a business context where people are like, I'm going to come to the meeting or I'm going to be on the board, or I'm going to do this, but I'm going to be the naysayer because we need a naysayer, somebody who disagrees with everything to push the organization forward because they're like, I don't quite think the organization can make it. And I'm not so sure we need a naysayer. Maybe we just need someone to roll up their sleeves and figure out how they're going to make it work. I would advise a lot of friends who find themselves to be the naysayers on boards to step off the board and give them room during the pandemic.

One of the things that I said, because I wrote a series of principles for Rockefeller Foundation and my other clients, is that if you're going to be in a meeting, a Zoom meeting, we need you to commit. You need to be there and connect. If you can't commit, and many days you can't, then don't come. And that just gives you more time. One of the things that we've done over time is to feel as if we need to be in everything. I think it's a great moment to learn that we don't have to be in everything. My one caveat is if you're the sole voice of difference or you're representing a different perspective, different cultural context, then don't step out too easily because we often do that, we'll be like, well I'll get out because I'm like the only gay person in a meeting. But the reality is like those are the voices that we need, the voices of difference in those meetings. So commitment is, as it turned out to be, a pretty significant component of Designing Dialogue and having creative conversations.

As I was researching the book, one of my favorite stories was talking to an oceanographer, and I have a whole section on naming and why you should name special things. And he talked about how oceanography had shifted over from the idea of ocean to oceans like this has been a kind of gradual move over the last ten years. And the idea being, it's not oceans because we're all one water system. If something's happening in this part of the sea somewhere else, it's still affecting the water system here in the U.S. They spent a long time changing it. And then the U.N., where they've been petitioning to have World Oceans Day for maybe 20 years, finally, a couple of years ago, was like we're going to do World Oceans Day. And they were like, but we just changed it to ocean. I wonder if we should go back to the U.N. and say, hey, can you make it oceans? And they were like, let's not lose a day for a word, so it's okay. It's the oceans. So I think the notion that you want to stick with something until, again, it doesn't feel like it's worth losing weight, losing a day for a single word, it doesn't feel exactly right.

It's fascinating. I was raised in France for a long time where plurality and plurality and formless and based, by the way, everything is gendered within the concept. And so it gives you a really different nuance. I think about this right now, where we're seeing so much difficulty with people adopting things like them as opposed to her or him, and when you start to think in the context of other languages, these things become quite simple. Where there's always been plural, there's always been the us or them kind of construct. So studying foreign languages can help, I think, in a lot of ways.

This is where you get the corny version of me. But just to give you a little bit of context, my mother had a severe stroke when I was twenty-four, and she was a good listener and a good communicator. And she was left paralyzed and aphasic for the rest of her life. And aphasia, for those of you who don't know, it's a problem between understanding the words being said or saying words that you think are right but may not be right. There's a lot of vagueness about what's going on with aphasia. But one of the interesting things is that very early on, I learned that I had a timestamp on my life. That I could die and that the only real thing I can do is go out and explore the world by meeting people. So that was the kind of the way you did it. But I do think that to do that you have to find your voice and live with it. By the way, I've had many people in my life like you have to change your voice. You have to deepen it or sound less gay. Or you have to not talk as quickly as you talk because I talk quite fast, and I was sort of like, yeah, not so much. It's my voice. Get used to it. I'll talk slowly if you ask me to.

I do think honing the authentic voice that's yours and kind of owning that is important. And I'll give you an example, and I think it's a really interesting one. I had a young woman on my team. She wasn't young. She was like she was just a little bit younger than me. She went on to run IDEO.org and now runs an amazing non-profit. She had this very high, tiny voice, and for years, she was like, "Men won't hear me. Can you help me with this?" And I said, "Okay, listen, I will get you a speech coach because you've been asking me for this for ten years." Got her a speech coach. About a year later, I walked out of the office in San Francisco, and she was smoking outside. And I'm like, Patrice, what are you doing? Why are you smoking? She's like, "Well, my voice coach told me the only way I'm going to deepen my voice is if I smoke." And I was like, "Well, that's not acceptable. Having you smoke is not the way we're going to kind of change your voice. In fact, let's not change your voice." What we did is as a collective, we just basically made sure that every time she said something, we would say, hey, everyone, listen to Patrice. She's saying something really smart. My favorite moment was when she was in a room giving a talk to about 50 Texan businessmen, all of them big. She was trying to get their attention. And suddenly, this Texan guy in the back said, "Hey, everyone, listen to her for a little bit." She knows what she's talking about and they all stop and listen to her. From that moment forward, you can see that people stopped to listen when Patrice would talk. Her voice was a key that something really smart was going to be said. I think sometimes, for us to have authentic voices, we need a collective around us to point to the voice. Let's call on this voice, and let's make sure that people know just how that works. So authenticity isn't our responsibility. The people around us need to help us do that as well. One thing that I've been feeling a lot is over the last 15 months. We've gotten a little more authenticity in our communications, in part because we see each other in context. We see ourselves in places where we might not have gotten glimpses before, something many CEOs were saying. My staff is more humanized for me. I see them as more complete individuals or vice versa. I think that could be a really interesting benefit to the mode of communication we've been grappling with over the last 15 months.

I think there's a tremendous amount of humanity that's been opened up for us, which is wonderful.

I think as a leader, I think what's interesting is that sometimes authenticity needs to be planned a little bit. So, what's interesting is I work for an institution where they're just not that great at recognizing women's voices. They're not that great at recognizing Asian women's voices specifically. And parts of my team are these amazing Asian women. And so there are moments over the last year where I would be in a session. I'd be like, oh, I forgot what comes next. Can I have you, Elaine, join us and explain and she'd have to take herself off mute, and she'd have to explain what's next. I knew what was happening next. It was a way for people to say, see, this person made this. She's behind the thinking here. And so you were purposely calling out that voice. So I think as a leader, sometimes we have to let the authenticity of other people or the voices of other people shine. I think that's part of our job.

Well, I'm highly biased because it's a condition of working with me that we establish principles for how the conversations happen. So I say I've found that in people. But I also find that once people have them in place, they recognize their value. So, even on March 1, with my team at Rockefeller, and this is last year, we established principles, we wrote down principles for how to have the hardest conversations of our lives during a pandemic. And those principles have stayed fairly intact all the way through. And I think they will stay intact once we come back into the real world. Some of the principles were like it was the same thing as commit or don't. If you can't show up for a meeting, don't show up. I would say that this year our principles shifted. We rewrote the principles at the beginning of the year because we made it. So, let's imagine that we're being celebratory. Let's imagine that we're being helpful. Let's imagine that that set of principles has helped us navigate the last four months, which is like, we're coming to a new moment. Let's understand that. So. I would say that it's always good. I think sometimes it's great if you can do it collectively.

I authored our principles. I often author principles for the convenience that we're doing. Here's a weird thing. I have not seen many of my old friends, and then I've made new friends during the pandemic, and they're closer than my old friends. And I think part of that has to do with the fact that we've had to negotiate rules together that made us feel comfortable engaging, and we had to see each other on days where one of us was not at our best, like one of us was crying or one of us was about to be evicted or whatever. And we would come together and try to fix things before we'd go into our meetings. And I think it's built a bond where many of my friends who were in their old companies, doing their old work, kind of looked inward. We've had to expand outwards in an interesting way, and it's made it so that whenever I see somebody who works with me. It's just this love fest because we're all so happy to get to meet each other in this real way.

It's hard to do, and it's counterintuitive because people feel like, oh, my job is to hold my values at the core of everything I do. It takes a long time to develop your values. So you don't want to sacrifice them very lightly. But at the same time, I think that I'll give you an example. We have a house in Maine, and I had a day where a guy was hunting our property, and he was out there shooting arrows for deer. And we had three kids running around. And I came up to his truck, and the truck had bumper stickers for a candidate that I didn't vote for, bumper stickers in general that I just didn't agree with. I was like, "Oh, I'm not going to talk to this person." And then I was like, "If I can talk to heads of state or prime ministers or whatever, I can talk to this hunter on my property." So I went up to him, and it was him and his son. And I walked up and said: "Hey, I'm Fred. What's your name?" And we just talked, and we talked about venison. It was a very light conversation. But it was quite terrifying to go into in the first place. I was prepared to just be like, we're not going to talk about politics or defense. We're going to talk about the things that we can agree on. It was the beginning of a very long conversation. We've had it for months and months now. So I would say that we get into a place where we cannot or feel like we cannot because our value difference goes into a conversation. I disagree with that, I also say, and it was asked earlier on, if there are people you cannot talk to who are important to be with, then just do something with them. That doing something with somebody creates the same kind of connection around that.

I love it. It's there. Because you were talking about that. We were talking about how you kind of got to creativity through mathematics. And I got to mathematics mostly because I had to run a business. But I mean, where did you end up on that? Is it discovered, or is it made?

I kind of agree with that. I believe that if we're highly attuned, the world will reveal itself to us in an interesting way. And that's one of the reasons why I believe that our job is to go out and have conversations with people, people who are different from us, people who are like who are afraid of people because I think we start to reveal the foundation of humanity. Once you kind of tune in that way, I mean, we live in a magical place, right? But it just becomes a bit more magical if you start to pay attention to what's around you.

I mean, it's funny like I was reaching for something, but I was giving a talk or doing an interview for Fortune, and it was in Hong Kong. Hong Kong hasn't been having a great time. It was in Hong Kong about six months ago. And it was just a series of really bad things that have been happening in Hong Kong. And the question was, what do you do? How do we have the conversations that we have? And if you're of this generation, go to your grandmother or your great grandmother and ask her to teach you how to make the soup that she makes that you always wanted to learn and don't even talk about politics. So the reality is that just like learning something from someone is a form of conversation, and it's a form of community building. I think it relates to your work in terms of the notion of leadership and the way we develop our leadership, which is one of the things that a boss can do, for instance, is ask to learn from somebody below them. And that's a tremendous art. That's a tremendous way of engaging. And it's rich for both people. We don't just learn from the people above us. We learn from the people who work for us as well.

Everyone loves that story. And she's known as the woman who wouldn't listen. And then she did. So that's a dear friend. I mean, her child is our godchild. But Beth was my business development person, my business person at IDEO for most of my life at IDEO. And she was a Stanford graduate. She was one of the people in the meeting who knew where we would go from the moment the meeting started. We would just kind of jump ahead. It was great, except for the fact that I'd be like "People need to get there with you. You can't just kind of jump straight ahead." There were two things that we said because we have our Friday morning business, all the meetings, and would almost always be in tears because people were like, that's not listening or whatever, and or it's just jumping ahead. The first thing I did was to cut back on the coffee. So less of the twenty-four-ounce venti espresso or maybe have some tea, that was like, my prescription.

But then this funny thing happened: there was a baby boom, and that's life. And she had promised that she would do blankets for every baby in her life. And to do that many blankets, she was crocheting nonstop. Gradually, she brought her crocheting into the meeting. Very gendered. Right. Here's a woman bringing baby blankets into a room where there's a lot of gender perceptions. What happened was that quiet act of basic mindfulness where she had to pay attention to what it was like to crochet. The conversation radically slowed down. Somebody mentioned silence. There was a lot more silence. She would wake up at certain moments and just kind of give her observations. It just shifted radically. It turns out there's quite a bit of science around knitting and other kinds of mindfulness activities like doodling. People often say that you retain more doodling than you do if you take notes, believe it or not. So I was with the indigenous historian in the Southwest, and he talked about husking corn and how the women of the village often husked the corn. And that's where the most important decisions are being made or, in my communities, upstate quilting circles where many of the key decisions are made by the communities' women. And so this notion of like the quiet, contemplative action that allows you to kind of tune in even more is a powerful thing. That was a huge discovery for Beth and me. It stuck with me for a long time afterward.

It's funny as a culture, we're so afraid of silence. Right? So one of the things that I often do is purposely build five minutes of silence into a meeting about two-thirds of the way through. And what that does is when we're in silence, a different kind of mental activity happens. The psychology of creativity says that silence allows you to make connections in ways you wouldn't otherwise. And so if you build a five-minute silence, why don't you just kind of take quiet notes in the middle of a meeting, you'll often find people are entirely refreshed for the last third and can often move forward into some kind of action. So there's something we often talk about, the silence at the beginning of a meeting as a way to kind of take a break from. I often find silence in the middle of a meeting helps us turn the corner to see the change that needs to happen and then move towards it.

It depends. In the groups, you feel like you can do it in an unstructured way. I did this throughout the day with a group. I coach a group of leaders, and we usually have a kind of silence. And yesterday, I was just like everybody in silence, walking away and bringing back one thing that they love from around them. And it was really interesting because what happened is that when they brought back the thing that they loved, it took about a minute of silence. The excitement of explaining why they loved it was so palpable. You can sort of feel this kind of rejuvenation. In the conversation, people were like, here's a chess set that I built when I was 12. And I'm 50. But it was incredible. You can do it just silently, or you can give a little task, and they both work.

And you learn so much. I learned so much about the people I coach. I mean, I always thought, like the opening prompt, if somebody broke up with you tomorrow, what movie would you watch? And learning about that. So it's these little human things that can kind of reveal and open up a group in a profound, beautiful way.

I had a very interesting experience. I lecture at Stern and what's interesting is last year when I gave my lecture, I would say maybe a third of the cameras were on. Interestingly, this year, when I got my day-long series of lectures, I would say all the cameras were on and, in that context, it was a really interesting thing. If I can't see you, I probably won't be focusing on you. So I won't necessarily give you the attention you need. And so I think that you're attending because you want to be seen and understood. So I feel very comfortable saying, "Hey, guys, cameras on unless you absolutely can't." It's honestly a great example of a principle: if you can't be there, then don't be there. And that's okay. It's a short chapter that I had to write in March on having the hardest conversations in your life during a pandemic on Zoom. And these are some of the things that we talk about which we establish principles. I had a thing called a wild card day, which is if somebody shows up and they cannot do it and they just want to cry for the whole time, then that's fine, we'll be there. I had clients who would show up, and would just cry for an hour, and that's great. I'm happy to do that.

So last thing, I would just charge you with the idea that making conversation and getting creative about the conversations in your life is probably one of the most important things we can do right now. I am unabashedly saying that this will save the world if we can just have the conversations that matter. And they will also make conversations less scary. One of the things I talk about is keeping a conversation notebook, moments where you've succeeded because that's stuff to learn from so you can figure out your approach to how conversations work. So look to yourself for the greatest inspiration or look to the people around you for that inspiration.

I will just say, I think that the next generations are mythical creatures. I mean, what they can do and where they're going is remarkable. I love being with them. It's remarkable.

I have to meet your wife at some point. I'll be in New York soon, so we'll figure out something.

Thank you so much. I'm going to go pack because we have to run to L.A. So it was great seeing you all.