The saying “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are” strikes a chord with Aaron Tremblett, who works as a senior consultant of leadership development and coaching for the Government of Alberta, Canada. As humans, we make judgments and evaluations based on our biases and ways of doing things—but with the dynamic duo of Crucial Conversations and the SDI assessment, we’re able to check our biases, reduce conflict, and increase our understanding of others.
Tremblett handles the portfolios for both the SDI assessment and Crucial Conversations for Mastering Dialogue, and he’s facilitated both for about three years. In that time, he’s seen firsthand how pairing the two together creates an outcome greater than the sum of its parts.
“You could hit pause every five minutes in either training and reference the other,” Tremblett said. “The SDI will fill in all the gaps that Mastering Dialogue leaves. Mastering Dialogue can be a bit more intellectual, and SDI fills in and connects that to who you are as a person. It brings this finesse piece and more heart, humanizing the relationship rather than the process.”
Tremblett said that when it comes to coaching, the SDI provides an unparalleled assessment for self-awareness thanks to the way it simplifies a complex topic. The assessment provides insights about yourself and your relationships with others, and this works well with the process provided by Crucial Conversations, he said.
“Mastering Dialogue has a great set of skills to get yourself out of conflict, but it doesn’t tell you why something bothers you, and it doesn’t tell you how to prevent it necessarily,” he said. “What SDI brings in is why does that particular thing bother me so much based on my value system? Or also why am I a little bit nervous to have different conversations?”
The SDI assessment provides learners with a Motivational Value System (MVS), a picture of what motivates them when things are going well, and a picture of how their motives change in conflict. These are color coded for simplicity. Reds focus on performance, Blues focus on people, Greens focus on process. Each person has a blend of all three motives, landing them into one of seven MVS categories: Red, Blue, Green, Red-Blue, Red-Green, Blue-Green, and Hub, which is a blend of all three colors.
“One of the things I love about SDI is we understand that we’re different, but SDI gives you something to do about it,” he said. “The value systems are like a language, and it lets you tailor the way you communicate specifically to the person you’re in conflict with because you don’t speak to everyone the same way.”
For example, pairing the dialogue skills with SDI insights can help people speak to the values of another when in a Crucial Conversation.
“If I was in conflict and I was Blue, it’d be like, what’s this relationship to me? If I was Red, what’s the outcome I’m looking for? If I’m Green, what’s the process? And if I’m Hub, what are my options?”
Understanding both your own MVS and that of the other party in a Crucial Conversation can help you speak to both parties’ values and priorities—a synergy that Tremblett said creates exponentially better results.
“It’s like this synergistic effect, when two things come together and they make something bigger,” Tremblett said. “When you totally integrate Crucial Conversations and the SDI, you are literally going to go a 10X on your performance for both.”
