In Defense of the Fumbled Conversation
I often say “Skip to the part below….” for whatever practical advice I want to offer. There is in fact some practical advice below. But skipping to it is actually antithetical to this particular newsletter. So, read the whole thing to see what I mean.
Over the past several months in this column, I’ve suggested ways to put AI to work: sharpening your thinking, preparing for meetings, getting a first draft moving. Blah, blah, blah. This month I was drafting another one. The idea came out of a brainstorm with an AI tool (yes, I use AI to help write this newsletter…including the one you’re reading now. Ha! ), and it was a good one: ask AI to play a fictional colleague so you can rehearse a difficult conversation before you have it. I’ve done this myself, and it helped.
Something about it gave me pause, though, and I’ve been trying to understand why.
Play the experiment out far enough. You rehearse the conversation, ask the AI to generate every plausible response, prepare for each one, and walk into the room ready for anything. That looks like the ideal outcome. I’m less sure it is, especially when I think about the up-and-coming leaders I coach.
What the Fumbled Conversation Teaches
I think there is real value in conversations that go badly. The ones where you lose your cool, or run out of words, or say exactly the wrong thing and spend the drive home replaying it. Then you have to decide whether to go back for a second attempt, and what you’ll say if you do.
Those experiences are uncomfortable, and they are also how we come to know ourselves as someone who can face difficulty. Albert Bandura’s work on self-efficacy found that mastery experiences, actually doing the hard thing, are its strongest source. He also observed that people who only ever succeed easily come to expect quick results and get discouraged the first time something goes wrong. Confidence built on a frictionless record is brittle. Confidence built on having fumbled, recovered, and gone back tends to be much more durable.
It is also worth being clear about what I’m not saying. This isn’t a moral panic about AI, and I’m not arguing against technology. Nearly every tool humans have built was designed to reduce friction, and most of us are glad for it. AI is different in scope from anything that came before, but it belongs to that same lineage. The question is what happens when friction keeps disappearing from more of our lives, including the parts that were developing character in us. I suspect that loss is tangled up with what we’re calling a mental health crisis and a loneliness epidemic. Somewhere along the way, many of us absorbed the belief that good conversations and healthy relationships shouldn’t have friction. Once we believe that, every bit of friction looks like evidence that something is wrong, and avoiding people altogether starts to feel like a reasonable life choice. Each conversation we skip is one less chance to learn that we can recover and repair, which makes the next one easier to skip.
Here’s the practical part I promised at the beginning. If friction is going to keep disappearing on its own, one answer is putting some back in on purpose.
Three Kinds of Friction Worth Keeping
Embodied friction. Our bodies were built for effort. For most of human history, staying alive meant moving heavy things and covering long distances. A hard workout is manufactured friction, and it may be the most direct way to practice choosing difficulty. You want to stop, you keep going, and your body learns something your thinking can’t teach it. John Ratey’s Spark lays out how exertion like this improves the brain’s capacity to handle stress.
Relational friction. Go toward whatever you usually avoid. I tend to sidestep conflict, so for me this means finding a friend I can spar with, someone I’ve made an explicit agreement with to disagree out loud from time to time. It doesn’t have to start with anything serious. I know a married couple who argue, with real heat, about whatever is happening in the board games they play. It’s a little startling to watch, yet it never seems to ruin the game. You can tell they’re playing, even when it sounds aggressive. I suspect they’re getting regular practice at something many couples avoid, which is disagreeing hard and finding out the relationship doesn’t crumble. If you reach for conflict easily, the friction may run the other direction, and the practice is holding your tongue and staying curious when you’d rather win. Sometimes it also means skipping the rehearsal and letting a hard conversation be imperfect.
Cognitive and attentional friction. This is the friction AI removes most directly, so it deserves the most intention. Before you ask for help, sit with the blank page, the unsolved problem, or the decision you’re unsure about a little longer than feels comfortable. Let yourself be bored in a waiting room without reaching for your phone. Or take up something you’re genuinely bad at, like a foreign language, a musical instrument, or a genre of book you’d normally pass over. Being a beginner again means spending real time confused, which is exactly the practice. The capacity to stay with not-knowing weakens when every gap gets filled the moment it opens.
What Becomes Available
I’ll keep writing about ways it can help, including to write this newsletter. The distinction I’m drawing is between friction that only slows you down and friction that forms you. When you choose some of the second kind, a conversation that goes sideways becomes one more rep in the gym of emotional development. instead of evidence that you’re not cut out for this. You walk into the next difficult room with less armor and more trust that you can handle whatever happens, including your own stumbles. And the person across the table gets to meet you, rather than your best rehearsed version.
