Conversation is usually described as an exchange of information, ideas or opinions. But every conversation is also an experience, and those experiences shape how people think, feel, and respond to one another. Understanding this dimension of conversation offers an important perspective on the practice of Conversational Leadership.
Conversation is an experience
In the earlier posts in this chapter, consciousness was explored as the capacity to have subjective experiences. Seeing a colour, hearing music, feeling pain or enjoying a conversation are not simply things the brain detects and processes. They are things that we experience.
A conversation is therefore not simply an exchange of words or information. It is also an experience for everyone involved. People may feel interested, bored, encouraged, uncomfortable, respected, ignored, anxious or excited. They may leave a conversation feeling more connected to others or more isolated from them.
These experiences are not incidental to what happens in a conversation. They influence what people are willing to say, how carefully they listen, whether they question their assumptions and how open they remain to different perspectives.
Someone who feels dismissed may withdraw from a discussion. Someone who feels respected may be more willing to express an uncertain or unpopular opinion. A thoughtful question can stimulate curiosity, while a careless remark can create embarrassment or defensiveness.
There is a continuous interaction between the conversation and the experiences of those involved. What people feel influences how they participate, and how they participate influences what others experience.
Conversation is not merely something we do. It is something we experience.
This connects the philosophical question of consciousness to the everyday practice of conversation. It also suggests that the quality of a conversation cannot be judged solely by the information exchanged or the decisions reached. How people experience the interaction matters too.
Separate inner worlds
One of the defining features of subjective experience is that it is personal. Each person experiences the world from their own perspective, and nobody can directly experience what it feels like to be someone else.
People can describe their feelings, thoughts and experiences, but words never provide complete access to another person’s inner world. Even when two people use the same words, they may be describing rather different experiences.
Consider two people leaving the same meeting. One describes it as open and constructive, while the other feels that their contributions were ignored. They attended the same meeting, heard the same words and observed the same events, but their experiences were different.
Their memories, expectations, emotions, beliefs and previous experiences may all have influenced how they interpreted what happened.
Conversation provides a way of exploring those differences. Through listening, asking questions and sharing experiences, people can begin to understand something of how others see and experience the world.
But this understanding is always incomplete. It depends on what people are able and willing to communicate, and on how accurately others interpret what they say.
This connects to the Johari Window, which explores the relationship between what people know about themselves and what others know about them. It reminds us that some aspects of ourselves are hidden from others, while other aspects may be apparent to others but not to us.
Conversation, feedback and openness can help reduce these gaps in understanding, although they can never eliminate them entirely.
This is why assumptions can be so damaging to conversation. It is easy to believe that others see a situation as we do, or that their words mean what they would mean if we had spoken them.
When disagreement arises, the immediate response may be to defend a position or explain why the other person is mistaken. Yet a more useful question may be: What are you seeing or experiencing that others are not?
Such a question does not require agreement. It invites exploration and creates an opportunity to understand a perspective that might otherwise remain hidden.
How conversation changes experience
Conversation does more than reveal what people are experiencing. It can change their experiences.
A difficult conversation may begin with anxiety and end with relief. A disagreement may develop into greater mutual understanding, or it may leave people feeling angry and alienated. A question may encourage someone to reconsider a long-held assumption, while a personal story may change how others feel about an issue.
These changes are not simply the result of information being transferred from one person to another. They emerge through the interaction itself.
The way someone listens can influence how comfortable another person feels about speaking. The tone of a question can make the difference between curiosity and interrogation. A moment of silence may give someone space to think, while an interruption may discourage them from continuing.
There is a reciprocal relationship between experience and conversation. People’s experiences influence their participation, while the conversation continually shapes what they experience.
This is particularly important when people are dealing with uncertainty, disagreement or complexity. In such situations, participants may need to question assumptions, acknowledge doubts or explore ideas that are not yet fully formed. Whether they are willing to do so depends partly on how they experience the conversation.
This connects closely to the principle of connection before content. The quality of the connection between people can influence the quality of the thinking that becomes possible.
Connection does not mean that everyone must agree or feel comfortable all the time. Difficult questions and disagreement are often essential. But people are generally better able to explore differences when they feel respected and believe that their contributions will be taken seriously.
The challenge is not to eliminate discomfort, but to create conditions in which people can engage with it constructively.
Consciousness and thinking together
Conversation also plays an important role in helping people develop their thinking.
People do not always arrive at a conversation with fully formed ideas. Sometimes they discover what they think by attempting to explain it to someone else. A question may reveal an assumption, an objection may expose a weakness, and another person’s experience may suggest a possibility that had not previously been considered.
This connects to the idea of interthinking, associated with the work of Neil Mercer and Rupert Wegerif, among others.
Interthinking involves using conversation to think together. Rather than simply exchanging existing ideas, participants develop their understanding through interaction. The resulting insights may be different from anything that individual participants brought to the conversation.
Consciousness and thinking are not the same thing, as explored earlier in this chapter. Nor does thinking together imply that a group possesses a collective consciousness.
Nevertheless, human participants bring their subjective experiences into the conversation. Their memories, feelings, concerns and personal interpretations influence what they notice, what they contribute and how they respond.
Through conversation, some of those experiences become available to others. A personal story may reveal an aspect of a problem that abstract analysis has overlooked. An expression of concern may prompt others to reconsider a decision. A different interpretation of events may challenge assumptions that the group had taken for granted.
The conversation can also change how participants experience the issue being discussed. What initially seemed threatening may become more understandable. What appeared straightforward may become more complex. A previously unnoticed possibility may become worth exploring.
In this sense, thinking together is not simply about combining information from different people. It is also about bringing different experiences and perspectives into contact and allowing them to influence one another.
Conversation can change not only what people think, but also how they experience and understand the world.
Conversational awareness and leadership
Consciousness as subjective experience should not be confused with being conscious of something. Having experiences is different from deliberately noticing our thoughts, feelings, behaviour or what is happening around us. Nevertheless, these forms of awareness are important to the practice of Conversational Leadership.
The earlier post Conversational Awareness explores this skill in greater detail. It involves paying attention to ourselves, other participants and the wider conversational situation. It means noticing not only what is said, but also how it is said, what remains unspoken and how the conversation is developing.
But there is an important limitation. Observing someone’s behaviour does not mean knowing what they are experiencing. Silence might indicate discomfort, disagreement, careful thought or simply a preference for listening. Conversational awareness therefore requires curiosity and inquiry, not just observation and interpretation.
This also connects to empathy, the ability to understand and respond to something of another person’s experience. Empathy does not mean feeling exactly what another person feels, nor does it guarantee that their experience has been understood correctly. It involves trying to appreciate their perspective while recognising the limits of that understanding.
Conversational Leadership involves taking responsibility for helping create the conditions in which people can think, learn and act together. Part of that responsibility is recognising that every participant is experiencing the conversation differently, and that those experiences may influence their willingness and ability to contribute.
The aim is not to control how others feel, but to remain attentive to what is happening, question assumptions and help create conditions in which different perspectives can be explored.
What changes when AI joins the conversation?
The emergence of conversational AI raises some particularly interesting questions.
AI systems can now participate in extended conversations, respond to questions, challenge ideas and help people explore difficult problems. Such interactions can be useful, stimulating and sometimes surprisingly engaging.
But as discussed in the earlier post Is AI Conscious?, it remains uncertain whether AI systems have subjective experiences.
This uncertainty introduces an important distinction.
An AI may help someone feel understood without itself experiencing understanding.
An AI can respond sensitively to a personal concern, ask thoughtful questions or help someone make sense of a difficult experience. The human participant may genuinely feel reassured, challenged or understood, regardless of whether the AI experiences anything.
The human experience of the conversation is real. But that does not establish that the AI has a corresponding experience.
Does this difference matter? The answer may depend on the purpose and nature of the conversation.
If the aim is to explore ideas, clarify thinking or examine alternative perspectives, an AI may be a valuable conversational participant without needing to possess subjective experience.
But when a conversation involves mutual vulnerability, emotional connection or a relationship between people who each have their own experiences and concerns, the question of consciousness becomes more significant.
There is a difference between receiving a response that expresses understanding and knowing that another experiencing being is trying to understand.
This does not make one form of conversation necessarily useful and the other useless. It suggests that they may offer different kinds of value.
The distinction becomes particularly important when AI participates in group conversations. An AI may introduce useful questions, challenge assumptions or help participants explore possibilities. But its presence may also change how people interact with one another.
Participants might defer to the AI’s apparent authority, become less willing to challenge its responses or direct their attention towards the system rather than towards one another. Alternatively, an AI might help people articulate ideas, introduce neglected perspectives or stimulate a more thoughtful discussion.
These effects depend on how AI is introduced and used, and on how the human participants respond to it.
For Conversational Leadership, the important question is therefore not simply whether AI can hold a conversation or whether it is conscious. It is also how the presence of AI changes the experience and quality of the conversation for the people involved.
This is something that can be explored through practice, observation and reflection, without waiting for the philosophical question of AI consciousness to be resolved.
A responsibility for the conversations we create
The earlier posts in this chapter explored what consciousness is, why subjective experience remains difficult to explain, how consciousness differs from intelligence and whether AI might possess it.
These questions remain important, even though many of them are unresolved. But consciousness also has a practical significance for everyday conversation.
People are not simply sources of information, holders of opinions or participants in decision-making processes. They are experiencing beings. What happens in a conversation can affect how they feel, what they understand, how they relate to others and what they become willing or able to do.
Conversation can help people understand experiences beyond their own. It can change their thinking, challenge assumptions, strengthen relationships and open up new possibilities. It can also leave people feeling excluded, misunderstood or unwilling to participate.
This does not mean that every conversation must be comfortable or harmonious. Disagreement, uncertainty and difficult questions are often necessary for learning and change. What matters is how people engage with those difficulties and the conditions they create for one another.
Conversational Leadership involves recognising these dimensions of conversation and taking responsibility for how we participate in them. It calls for curiosity about other people’s experiences, awareness of our own behaviour and attention to the relationships and dynamics that shape collective thinking.
The central insight is simple: conversation is not merely something people do together. It is something they experience together, although each experiences it in their own way.
And the experience of a conversation helps determine what becomes possible within it.
That raises a practical question worth carrying into every conversation:
What kind of experience are we helping to create for one another, and how might it affect our ability to think and act together?
(Public Domain)This coaching supports you in leading as a practice: initiating conversations that matter, deepening connection, and making space for reflection where it's often missing.