Adopt the learning stance

Trade "I know what happened" for "I want to understand what happened for you".

Why it works

Most of us enter hard talks to deliver our conclusion, which makes the other person a problem to overcome. The learning stance assumes your story is partial — you have your intentions and their impact, they have the reverse. Approaching it as a shared puzzle to solve keeps curiosity online, and curiosity is incompatible with the threat response that derails these talks.

How to do it

1. Go in with a real question you don’t know the answer to about their experience.
2. Assume you’re missing information, because you usually are — you can’t see their intentions or the full impact of your actions.
3. Let "I might be wrong about part of this" be a genuine option, not a rhetorical move.

Evidence

The learning stance is the organizing posture of the Harvard framework, aligned with research on curiosity, perspective-taking, and how openness reduces conflict escalation. (mechanistic)

Practitioner framework; the underlying perspective-taking and curiosity effects are studied, but the stance as packaged is not a tested intervention. It requires genuine openness, not a performance of it.

Common mistake

Faking curiosity — asking questions while privately certain you’re right — which the other person detects as a setup rather than real inquiry.