in email i said:
“Don’t engage in socially risky activity. It’s that simple. Don’t tell blonde jokes. Sure, you might get the occasional laugh, but there’s a good chance that you’ll offend someone too. […] If you know what you’re about to do is risky, then don’t do it. Stay five hundred yards away from all things dangerous. Stay away from the churning waters.”

please tell me kerry is testing us to see if we can effectively communicate our response to these quotes because here i go:

first and foremost i’m adding to the pool of shared meaning by saying i received an email in which the above quotations caught my attention. without immediate feedback in an email (something that forces one to take full responsibility for their perspective, a theme i’ll come back to later) i’ll continue to my tentative conclusion: i feel like kerry is basically telling us to be robots at our work place out of deference to fragile egos.

now it isn’t that i don’t appreciate him trying to help us avoid bad feelings at work because i certainly would like to be smoother in my social interactions, but i do want to avoid achieving these things at the cost of the variety i add to the workplace. i don’t want to victimize myself with others’s fragile egos.

in order to achieve these things i usually use a combination of bad jokes, inflammatory and hypocritical comments precisely because the people i work with agree that fragile egos have no place in an environment where everyone’s (not just the fragile ego’s) success is at stake; the comments preserve our right to be wrong as long as we keep our egos in check by not getting mad at people for thinking we’re wrong. certainly a lot of communication requires getting over the fragile ego and crucial skills help that process, but telling us to act like robot’s begs the question of why we should be so dedicated to helping these fragile egos.

we’ve all had the fragile ego experience at least as children and even later in life as artists or whenever we go out on a limb to express something unusual that we look for feedback on. the difference is that as adults we rely on the ability of other adults to take responsibility for their perspective. i.e. we rely on adults to tend their own egos to the extent compatible with not being a hypocrite.

Your “punch line” at the end overstates the lesson. By staying away from *all things dangerous* we’re going to miss out on a some of the richest conversations that are to be had. There’s a big difference between being stupidly insensitive to others and avoiding conversational risk. Given the messages of your books, Crucial Conversation and Crucial Confrontations, I suspect that’s not what you meant to say.

Keep writing!