The Conversation Conversation: What is Conversation For?

Some 40 years ago I asked a workmate what conversation was for. Her reply was that I was “fu*ked”.

At the time we laughed, but the question never left me. It stayed with me for decades.

After some 32 years, countless conversations about conversation, and hearing many different reasons for having them, I came up with a couple of answers that seemed to resonate.

First I thought conversation was for converting. But that idea quickly became anathema to me. Conversion felt one-sided. It carried the smell of my earlier experience in a fundamentalist Christian group, and my subsequent expulsion for asking impertinent questions that were said to be “undermining members’ faith”.

What I eventually settled on was something else, something that seemed more consistent with my thinking: conversation is for converging.

Not necessarily agreeing. Not collapsing into one view. But moving closer to something more shared, more refined, more objective, or at least less subjective. A better understanding. A better question. A better way forward.

That leaves us with a choice every time we speak. Are we trying to converge, or are we trying to convert?

To me, that is one of the quiet fault lines in human interaction. The moment conversation shifts from mutual exploration to one-sided, one-eyed persuasion, the quality changes. The tension rises. Defensiveness creeps in. The discussion starts slipping off course.

That is also where I see SpatzAI fitting in.

SpatzAI is designed to help teams address that shift in real time. Not after the damage is done, but in the moment someone feels the conversation has moved from converging to converting. A caution, an objection, a pause, then a chance to reset and return to fairer, more level playing field, together.