A good conversation is one that provides the environment to genuinely learn something or to come to a deeper understanding of why the other person is holding a particular view. A great conversation should have the following elements – humility, critical thinking and sympathetic listening.

Humility in a conversation is understanding that none of us holds the absolute truth in the world, and that we only have insights from a specific point of view. This means we should initiate a conversation with the sense that we need the other person to helps us fill our knowledge gaps, and that they need us.

Critical thinking meanwhile, refers to our capacity to determine inconsistencies in someone’s logic and in their evidence-based argumentation. The exchange of ideas should flesh out our own thinking and makes the conversation more dynamic and interesting.

Lastly, the engagement to understand an idea is the final critical ingredient. This means settinng aside our search for logic and to listen with attention to what the other person is saying and why they are looking at the same thing as us, but are coming to a very different conclusion.

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