Good conversations are getting harder to start. When people disagree — about politics, their community, the things that matter — it often feels safer to say nothing at all.
Conversation Guide is a small attempt to help. It's built on four questions, used in two parts: first to understand the other person, then to make your own point. That's the whole tool. Ask what someone thinks, what they've experienced, what it means to them, and what would make it better — and a real conversation usually follows.
It's deliberately simple. Four questions you can keep on your phone, and carry into the next hard conversation.
Conversation Guide can be used by anybody, anytime — it stands on its own as a tool for anyone who wants to have better conversations.
It's typically deployed as part of a 90-minute live workshop via Zoom, conducted by EST Communications. In the workshop, participants get the guide explained to them and get to practice it together with a facilitator. If you're interested in hosting a workshop for your team or organization, reach out to EST Communications.
Conversation Guide is built on a simple idea with real support behind it: people open up, and soften, when they feel genuinely heard rather than argued at.
The strongest evidence comes from Broockman and Kalla's 2016 field experiment in Science, which found that a single ten-minute, nonjudgmental conversation that drew out a person's own experience produced a measurable, lasting drop in prejudice that held for at least three months. Their follow-up work across seven locations (Kalla and Broockman, 2020) showed the same pattern holds at scale.
Why does it work? Itzchakov, Kluger, and Castro (2017) found that high-quality listening, the empathic and nonjudgmental kind, lowers a speaker's defensiveness and lets them hold less rigid views. And Eyal, Steffel, and Epley (2018) found that actually asking someone what they think beats guessing at it.
A note on honesty: no study has tested this specific four-question tool. What the research validates are the principles underneath it: listen first, draw out experience, stay curious instead of combative. Conversation Guide is consistent with that evidence, not proven by it.
Created by EST Communications.