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How to Handle Difficult Conversations using the Clean Change Cycle

21st Jul 2014 by Marian Way in Coaching

What are the elements involved in good communication? And what can you do if communication goes wrong and you find yourself having a difficult conversation with someone?

The key elements of good communication can vary depending on the context and purpose of communication, but generally include:

Clarity: Making your communications clear and easy to understand - including avoiding jargon, technical terms, or ambiguous language that could lead to misunderstanding. Conciseness and appropriateness also aid clarity.
Listening: Good communication involves not only speaking but also actively listening to others. It means paying attention to the speaker, asking clarifying questions, and showing empathy to fully understand their message.
Feedback: Providing and receiving feedback is crucial for effective communication. It helps in understanding if the message was received as intended and allows for necessary adjustments or improvements.

The Clean Change Cycle developed by Caitlin Walker over a number of years and in collaboration with Dee Berridge, Nancy Doyle and me, is a set of tools that can help with these aspects of communication - and help you to sort things out if they go wrong.

It consists of three tools: Clean Feedback for separating out behaviours from inferences and impacts; Clean Set Up for developing desired outcomes and clarifying expectations; and Developmental Tasks for taking action. These tools can be used together or independently.

Clean Feedback

Giving Clean Feedback means describing what you have seen or heard and keeping it separate from what you’ve taken the behaviour to mean and what you think the consequences will be. Instead of saying “You were confident”, you might say, “When you held your head high, stood still and made eye contact across the whole group as you spoke, I interpreted it as you being confident – and this makes it likely that I’ll give you more client-facing assignments.”

Evidence: You held your head high, stood still and made eye contact across the whole group as you spoke.
Inference: You were confident.
Impact: I’m more likely to give you more client-facing assignments.

While this example deals with something someone did well, you can of course use the same structure to deliver feedback about something that has not gone so well (we recommend you do some of each).

It sounds simple – and you may not think that you need a tool or a model to be able to do this – but we’ve found that it often takes people a few goes before they can reliably separate out observable behaviour from their own inferences. The coaches we’ve trained find it a useful tool to use with their coachees – it makes them look for the behavioural evidence before giving any feedback. And they can also teach the coachees this model so they can use it for themselves in work situations.

Clean Set Up

Clean Set Up consists of three main questions:

1. For this … to be just the way you’d like it, it will be like what?
2. You’ll be like what?
3. What support or resources do you need?

Each of these questions can then be followed by one or two clean questions, and/or by the question: What will you see or hear? (Or for question 2, What will I see or hear?)

Starting a project, coaching relationship, team meeting or event with everyone doing this Clean Set Up can surface assumptions and expectations before you begin and create an atmosphere of mutual respect.

If you're dealing with poor performance issues, you can use Clean Feedback to help you and your employee to get clear about the specific behaviours that are a problem, and then the Clean Set Up to elicit your expectations going forward.

Developmental Tasks

Developmental Tasks are small tasks, designed to stretch you just enough without spoiling your performance. You can arrive at a suitable developmental task by thinking about what you want to try out or practise and then asking yourself, “What is the least I’ll need to do to be trying out a new skill or belief?” You can set developmental tasks for yourself or for others.

If you are dealing with a performance issue, you might ask yourself, “What’s the least (the employee) will need to do to demonstrate that they are meeting the expectations.”

A significant aspect of the Clean Change Model is that it is a two-way process for fostering mutual respect. When we teach the Clean Feedback Model, for example, we always start by asking the participants to give us feedback. We say that feedback says just as much about the giver as it does the receiver. While it is important to be clear about what you are expecting from an employee, it’s equally important to ask them the Clean Set Up questions and to find out what specific support or resources they need. It may turn out to be something relatively simple such as a desk in a quiet spot. And while you can certainly suggest a Developmental Task to someone, how about you offer them the chance to suggest one for you?

The Clean Change Cycle is a fantastic tool for gaining clarity and for improving performance. And it’s simple enough to teach to your whole team. And when everyone in your work place understands and can use Clean Feedback, Clean Set Up and Developmental Tasks then the number of ‘difficult’ conversations anyone needs to have will reduce significantly. Of course there will still be things to resolve but having structures like these in place will mean that even these can be dealt with in a more routine way.

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About Marian Way

A highly skilled facilitator and trainer, Marian, who founded Clean Learning in 2001, has developed and delivered training across the world. She is the author of Clean Approaches for Coaches, co-author, with James Lawley, of Insights in Space and co-author, with Caitlin Walker, of So you want to be… #DramaFree.

Marian is an expert Clean facilitator, an adept modeller, a programme writer and an inspirational trainer. She has a natural ability to model existing structures, find the connections between them and design new ways for people to learn. Marian was a leading innovator within the Weight Watchers organisation, which included developing the “points” strategy, a local idea that went on to become a global innovation. She is a director of both Clean Learning and Training Attention CIC, world leaders in clean applications for corporate, educational and community development. She designs our programmes and workbooks, leads workshops and teaches on all our courses. She’s trained people in Great Britain, Russia, Sweden, Germany, Australia, Japan and the USA. Marian is also a recognised Clean Assessor.