What makes a good conversation

I was recently thinking about what makes a conversation good because we meet lots of people and some of them are utterly boring, some are OK to hang out with while others are a real pleasure to spend time with. In my previous blog post I mentioned the concept of three golden circles by Simon Sinek – The Why, How and What (you can watch the video here). I think we can apply them to a conversation as well.

The normal ones deal with the What. What have we been doing, seeing or whom have we been meeting. They are descriptive and quite dry, treating topics of conversation like black boxes – looking only on the outside.

More interesting conversations include also How. How did we do it, how was the experience structured? They look inside the black boxes but still do not move beyond a descriptive level; you purely understand how the black box moves inside, what it consists of.

 
The best one cover also Why. That is once you have understood what topics under discussion look like and how they are structured, you talk about the underlying principles which make them work the way they do. You can often extrapolate these principles and apply them to understanding other black boxes as well.