My latest recommended reading for people who care about getting things done is Craig Weber’s Conversational Capacity: The Secret to Building Successful Teams That Perform When the Pressure Is On (McGraw-Hill, 2013). The awareness and ability to improve our conversational capacity is essential, especially for those of us engaged in kaizen, problem solving, and continuous improvement.

This book made me realize that the way in which most of lean thinking is taught leaves out a large and important element. Too often we fail to talk about our failure to talk about our problems. It’s a meta-conversation we aren’t having, and we must. True, there is a fair amount of this type of discussion that goes on within leadership development, executive coaching, and culture-shaping circles, but that is another silo that struggles to smoothly integrate with lean. Conversational capacity is an excellent bridge between the two.

 …