Improve your team conversations 

The CONVERSATE phone app is designed to provide you with a fun, simple but powerful way to get yourself and others to do quality thinking and creative problem-solving.   It is designed to assist in the process of asking questions that are truly curious by taking away the need for you to find the ‘right’ question, and also to expand your questioning vocabulary.  

The questions are not designed to be used in isolation, but for that part of the conversation where the desired outcome is new thinking or creative problem-solving.  

This app is a novel, yet highly effective way to challenge individuals and teams to stop and reflect on their thinking in a way that generates new perspectives or opens up new pathways of useful reflection.

Our brains are quite lazy and habitual and will tend to think along the same lines.  Humans will tend to apply the same thinking to a problem that they used when creating it. 

The CONVERSATE questions are designed to help you to think differently – to answer questions that you may not ask yourself or others – and to create new thinking or insight and hence provide you with new options and ideas for creative problem solving.

Only when we have a new insight or AHA moment or new thinking do we have new options and solutions to pursue.   

Humans will find it difficult to change their behaviour if they don’t change their thinking.   

CONVERSATE is designed to create the brain environment for thinking that leads to insight.

In creative problems you need to engage in DIVERGENT THINKING followed by CONVERGENT THINKING.   

Asking powerful 'questions that make you stop and think' in randomorder fast tracks the DIVERGENT THINKING process.  You will find in most situations that despite the randomness, the questions will make sense. 

We need to trust that the brain will find the right path when stimulated by non-typical questions.  

The TRIFECTA Questions (see next FAQ) provide the opportunity for CONVERGENT THINKING after the brain has explored different angles of the issue or decision.

Accordion Description After five random questions in each Curiosity Pack you will have the option to bring the conversation to a close using the TRIFECTA Questions.   

In the top left corner you will see the TRIFECTA Icon which will be greyed out until you have asked five question   The TRIFECTA Questions represent the three things we want from any powerful conversation:  

• New Thinking
• Next Steps
• No Excuses  

Five questions is a minimum.  Experiment and keep asking questions until new thinking emerges.  You can pause and ask the TRIFECTA Questions then keep going with the random questions if you wish to do further thinking.  

It is useful to end all your conversations and meetings powerfully with a version of these questions.

To appreciate the purpose and value of this creative thinking app it’s helpful to know a little bit about how your brain processes information.  

Your brain is a cognitive miser – it seeks always to conserve energy so it doesn’t like to work too hard.  When solving problems it prefers to access the well-used and habitual ways of thinking that have served you in the past. 

Unfortunately that thinking is unlikely to help you to creatively solve new problems that present themselves.  You can’t solve new problems using old thinking!  

We know both through experience, and through science, that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to think logically, strategically or creatively when you are highly emotional – and that’s the same whether that emotion is positive or negative.  

And finally, we know that one of the best ways to support people to think more creatively, or outside the box, is to firstly engage in what we call ‘divergent thinking’ – that is thinking outside your normal processing patterns; followed by ‘convergent thinking’ – finding a way to extract the nuggets of gold from the divergent thinking.