Conversational riffs: making meaning out of conflict

“The riff that any jamming musician plays will greatly influence the next passage of music that the others will then respond with,” says Neil Denny in his new book, Conversational Riffs. Conversational riffs are “short snippets of language, comments or responses that enable us to be creative when we are confronted by conflict.”

Neil, a conflict and communications writer and presenter based in the U.K., sent me a copy over the holidays and it delighted me so much I wanted to tell you about it.

The book’s content is spot-on for anyone who wants to improve the way they engage conflict at work or home. Neil offers up wisdom in bite-sized, jargon-free chunks that makes it accessible and actionable. And he does it in such a creative and delightful way that the journey through the short book is a pleasure.

Neil takes his obvious love for music and uses familiar imagery to create little mental hooks that help readers retain his ideas. The cover of the book is like the sleeve of a record, and images of records, along with references to tracks, are used throughout the book to introduce new chapters. And Neil compares improvisational riffs in jazz to the ways participants influence and shape conflict conversations:

Conversational Riffs takes its inspiration from the great blues guitarists such as Leadbelly, Robert Johnson, BB King and the like.

The history of blues guitar is inspirational. Here was an unassuming genre of music that grew out of the music of untrained black African Americans, which went on to define the whole of later 20th century rock and pop music across the world. It was a form of music that arose out of despair as a means of holding onto hope and humanity…

Remember that this was not the product of musical virtuosos, but individuals who longed to find a way to communicate their hardship.

If you learn classical guitar, then the structure of the lesson and the music you play is very rigid. You learn the music by heart and the technique through scales and fixed exercises. Virtuosity is reflected largely in the integrity of the performance. In other words, did you play it right?

Blues guitar is much more freeform and jazz even more so. It has a spontaneity all of its own. That is not to say that blues and jazz do not have structure or rules. They do, but the test is not “Did you play it right?” The question is “Did it feel right?”

I love that passage because it resonates so deeply with the way I teach conflict resolution and mediation – there is not a rigid recipe to learn and execute (because, really, have you ever met a conflict conversation that unfolded the same way each time and deserves the one-trick pony approach to resolving it?), but the development of key habits and skills that you learn to tap at the times they’re right to be used.

Conversational Riffs: Creating Meaning Out of Conflict is available for purchase in print and downloadable formats at Lulu.com.

Conflict Zen by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at ConflictZen.com.