Can you take me back through the history of PULSE in terms of how this type of conversation came to be what it is today?
Yes, it went through quite an evolution, actually. Beginning with my own study of mediation and being influenced a lot by some of the research that I had done in a PhD program on conversations and how people manage change and accountability…I think the first influences were really around any kind of conversation that needed structure or organization, whether that was lesson planning, the way that Madeline Hunter taught it in the 1970's, and all the way through teaching my own students research structures and how to do research and how to even write. I used the PULSE Frame to write my dissertation. So, it’s really...a structure for any communication.
The mediation influence showed me how it could be used in a conversation. And so over the last five years, I’ve had the opportunity in the United States to work with Dan Dana and to incorporate some of the thinking he had done around conversations and how there are forces at work in conversation that allow people to come to resolution.
So, incorporating [Dan Dana's] piece into it over the last five years and actually sitting down with [Steve Critchley] from the Canadian military and looking at the battle-planning procedures that they use...we discovered ...the first stage in a battle-planning procedure is called Prepare. And the next stage was actually called Understand, but when we looked at that, we thought, “Okay, there’s something here.” Because there’s 16 battle-planning steps and I knew that was too many to teach in a leadership course, so we narrowed it down to five and then noticed that they spelled PULSE: Prepare, Uncover, Learn, Search, and Explain.
What triggered, for you, the need to develop a course like this?
The PULSE mediated conversation really evolved into the PULSE mediation course on a November morning in 2002 when Dan Dana called me from Kansas and asked if I would be interested in designing a 40-hour program to be taught across the United States. It was a mediation program that he wanted to offer to his clients. And I said, “Yes.” He said, “Could you take it on the road?” And I said, “Yes.”
So, that was the beginning of designing the course. To that point, I had been taking courses in mediation. I had been doing other work as a teacher and trainer, and this gave me the opportunity to marry the two, to bring the mediation side of it together, which was of great interest to me at the time, and the instructional design skills that I had used over the last 20 years in my career as a teacher. So, that’s really where the, I guess, the power came to develop the course and to put it on the market.
How can you use the PULSE Conversation?
Although it began as a mediated conversation, the PULSE conversation can be used and has many applications. You can use the frame to structure a negotiation, for example, so that you would approach someone when you’re vested in a negotiation and set some protocol, set a clear purpose for the conversation. And then ask the guiding questions, you know, how are we going to have this conversation? What exactly is it that we need to resolve here? Why is it important to you and why is it important to me, making sure that we both have our criteria on the table? And then what could we do about it, given the criteria? And so, you move through the past, present, and future questions in a one-on-one conversation, so that’s a negotiation.
You could also use it to structure customer service kinds of conversations. You could use it to do an appreciative inquiry into an organization to do some organizational development and change management within an organization. Structure the conversation, because the PULSE conversation is based in appreciative inquiry in that appreciative stance, the frame can also be used to guide a conversation that would uncover the circumstance that needed to be resolved, the criteria for that resolution, and to create a better future within an organization itself. So, it has widespread uses as an organizational development tool.
It can be used in a coaching situation, if you want to structure a coaching conversation where I’m going to coach you and how you might handle conflict. Then, I would use the same structure to do that. I could use it as a consulting tool. I could use it to do what I’ve done in my dissertation which is to structure writing. So, it can be used effectively to improve any kind of communication that people are having.
I mean, what we believe is that conversations are the medium through which most people do their work and what the PULSE Frame does is that it improves the quality of those conversations. By improving quality of the conversations, it can improve the quality of the organization itself.