On the surface, it's about how to have conversations about difficult topics. Often these are conflict resolution type conversations. These range all the way from "you never take the bins out" to marriage breakups to large international political conflicts. These conversations can often go off the rails and conflicts are made worse, not solved. Whatever the scale, these kinds of conversations tend to follow familiar routes.
If you dispair at the way that conversations tend to devolve into personal attacks in national politics, office politics or your day-to-day interactions, this book is a very insightful handbook.
The book is the result of a big study at Harvard Business School of a large number of case studies. It spots the patterns that humans tend toward. In each case it identifies the pattern, why it happens, what the result can be (usually negative) and how to spot it coming and mitigate it. It also has snippets of conversation as case studies.
It's been a while, so I can't remember each item. But one example is that people tend to connect their identity to the point they are trying to argue. You challenge the point but to your conversation partner it feels like a direct personal attack. If you can find a way to acknowledge that connection, gently separate it from the identity, you have a much better chance of resolving the conflict.
I find a particularly strong parallel in the Gang of Four Design Patterns book. These are the broad problems that people try to solve with software, the structures that tend to emerge as people solve problems.
And, like design patterns, some things are deeply insightful and some things are obvious. E.g. of course 'iterators' are a thing. But development is so much better for having vocabulary to talk about them.
I can give one tiny little bit of advice from several years about tutoring and teaching mathematics and physics...
Always start with examples.
If I am trying to teach the fundamental ideas of complex analysis, I want to show folks how to take derivatives of complex functions with several worked examples and then show them how to do line-integrals on the complex plane -- I want them to have a big repertoire of things that they have worked out. I want them to have done for themselves several "closed loop" integrals that have come out to zero, and some that have come out to one, before I ever imagine putting the residue theorem underneath their noses. When I explain that analytic functions are these conformal maps which preserve angles, I want them to understand that how we defined analytic functions requires them to locally look like scaled rotations, and to understand that neither scaling nor rotation can change an angle.
Same thing in computing. I wouldn't dream about explaining what a monad is until I've explained what a functor is, and I wouldn't dream about explaining what a functor is without thinking through how lists and maybes and functions and eithers and pairs are all "outputtish" in a certain hard-to-describe way, maybe even discussing how a `forall z. (a -> z) -> z` is actually outputtish in `a` too, before I could finally define some bad definitions ("can get an output out of it" -- well no, I can't do that with the function!) and then alight on "okay so here's a good definition of outputtish as mappable, you can take a function and map it over the output" and then the fact that this has a specific jargon name at that point is no longer of any consequence, "we call this a functor" -- great, some name to memorize, but the concept is "not hard."
In other words, abstractions are patterns in concrete topics. The Dewey Decimal System organizes a library. It is incredibly difficult to convince someone to use the Dewey Decimal System to organize a pile of five books: "What's the point in having this big abstract unifying theory about book contents? I only have five of them!". But what you do if you want to teach someone the Dewey Decimal System is to make sure that first they have a whole library that is in some mess of a state, they can't find what they need to find and they can't see where to file new "books" (examples, pieces of information) and then you come over the hill with this Dewey Decimal System and you look like a righteous force for justice, "aha! everything can be well-organized!"
I have tried so many times to lead with the "Here's how you want to think about this sort of problem!" theory for all of my tutees, and it always leaves them looking at me with that "what abyss of hell did this crazy tutor crawl out of?" face. By contrast if I am just encouraging about "okay, what do you know about this system?" and am very careful to snip the premature theory of "Uh, F = m a?" that they have been exposed to, we can often work through a problem in words and then work through it in numbers and then I can suggest that here is a different way to think about it in terms of, say, momentum conservation.
If you dispair at the way that conversations tend to devolve into personal attacks in national politics, office politics or your day-to-day interactions, this book is a very insightful handbook.
The book is the result of a big study at Harvard Business School of a large number of case studies. It spots the patterns that humans tend toward. In each case it identifies the pattern, why it happens, what the result can be (usually negative) and how to spot it coming and mitigate it. It also has snippets of conversation as case studies.
It's been a while, so I can't remember each item. But one example is that people tend to connect their identity to the point they are trying to argue. You challenge the point but to your conversation partner it feels like a direct personal attack. If you can find a way to acknowledge that connection, gently separate it from the identity, you have a much better chance of resolving the conflict.
I find a particularly strong parallel in the Gang of Four Design Patterns book. These are the broad problems that people try to solve with software, the structures that tend to emerge as people solve problems.
And, like design patterns, some things are deeply insightful and some things are obvious. E.g. of course 'iterators' are a thing. But development is so much better for having vocabulary to talk about them.