A book by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler, from 2002, about how to keep up constructive dialogue in difficult situations.
A short and somewhat fragmentary summary:
Crucial conversations are those where the stakes are high, opinions are different, and emotions run strong. Such conflict situations trigger our natural fight-or-flight response (releasing adrenaline, increasing blood supply of the muscles and thus decreasing blood supply of the brain) which makes it difficult to keep calm and to keep up the level of mental activity that is necessary in complex communication situations. To keep the dialogue constructive in spite of this interference, we should learn and practice a set of supportive skills.
Focus on what you really want, honestly, for yourself, for others, and for the relations. Think about how you should behave to best reach these goals. Now, is your current behavior consistent with your true goals, or maybe your motives have quietly shifted into defending yourself or trying to win at any cost? If you have managed to keep, or to bring back, your focus on your real goals, then is this also clearly understandable to the communication partners, or maybe your behavior tells a different story? Learn to notice when the conversation turns crucial. Learn to monitor the behavior of yourself and others, and, most importantly, the level of safety in each participant. When somebody feels unsafe, they will either start fighting for themselves or close up, which both stop the constructive dialogue. To maintain the safety, make sure that you all have some common (possibly higher level) goal in mind and that you honestly work toward that goal, and also keep up mutual respect, no matter how different the opinions and personalities. If the other participants do not engage in constructive dialogue, do NOT blame them -- it is your responsibility to try to create an atmosphere where they will become more and more open and constructive.
Separate facts from interpretations. Find out and discuss explicitly how the participants interpret their observations about the issue under discussion. Be ready to change your interpretations in the light of the new information and ideas you get from others. Find alternative solutions that everybody agrees on, even to those problems that initially seem to have only two mutually exclusive ones. Honestly apologize for your mistakes, but do not apologize for your honest standpoints. Fully explain why you have the opinions and standpoints that you have, but never try to force them upon others -- forcing tends to automatically create counterreactions, even if your ideas are indeed the best (but never assume that they are before finding out the others' viewpoints as well). Beware: if your belief in your ideas is very strong, you might not even notice that others get the feeling that you are forcing those ideas upon them -- pay close attention to your tone of voice, posture, talkativeness, aggressiveness. Calm down and give others enough time to explain their views, too.
If there is a decision to be made, make sure that everybody understands the process through which it will be made, and that decisionmaking is a separate process from the dialogue (which is the process of finding out and discussing the information and viewpoints that the participants have).
In the book these ideas are, obviously, presented in a more systematic and detailed way, and there are more of them than listed here.
The only thing that slightly bothered me about this book was the feeling that it could have easily been condensed down to half of its size -- some of the ideas were getting a bit repetitive and diluted. On the one hand, repetition with variations is surely helpful for better understanding, but on the other a concise presentation might maybe make it easier to imprint the information into the memory.
But overall I found this book very educative and would recommend it to almost everybody, because we all have crucial conversations on a daily basis -- with our families and friends, with our coworkers, bosses, clients, opponents, and so on.
More info at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0071401946
Note: The version that I read was not the English original, but a translation into Estonian, named "Otsustavad kõnelused": http://www.raamatuklubi.aripaev.ee/Book.aspx?ID=7d0ffb84-00ed-47eb-b392-a5fb4be3a42a
