Take the conversation held as two business travellers, Joe and Sally, prepare to depart a plane. Joe turns to Sally and offers his business card with the statement that he enjoyed their conversation and will call to follow up on one of the topics. Sally offers her business card in return, with the brief acknowledgement that she too enjoyed the conversation and looked forward to speaking again. As Sally is replying in this manner, she is actually thinking how dull their conversation was, how it kept her from getting some work done, and she is going to have her assistant intercept calls for the next couple of weeks. While Sally verbally indicated an interest in speaking again, her actions will be the opposite, in line with her private thoughts. The reason that Sally didn't communicate her opinion of the conversation and her plan to avoid a future conversation is quite obvious, as it's inappropriate to do so in most cultural settings and would have likely embarrassed and offended her traveling companion.

Interestingly, while Sally was inferring that Joe's stated intent to call was sincere, in fact, Joe's Internal Dialogue was that it had been a fruitless conversation but he felt it a norm in business travel today to swap cards and show some interest having spent two hours conversing with someone. He too did not communicate these thoughts as not offering his card might be considered rude by the other, although, yet again, his actions will follow his Internal Dialogue - he will not be calling.

This simple example illustrates that even a harmless interaction that occurs numerous times a day around the world, swapping business cards after a flight, comprises many private thoughts that one considers inappropriate to share. While the consequences of this particular example are fairly benign, the phenomena has expensive, wasteful impacts in many other aspects of business...

"But I'm Always Open!"

Having Internal Dialogue doesn't mean you are not open. Many people, particularly business leaders and managers, want to be considered 'open'. Unfortunately, just saying I'm open does not make your thoughts or others thoughts automatically discussable. It takes two to have a dialogue, and in practice, a person that's 'open' often produces the opposite result - the other person now feels unsafe sharing their thoughts.

Internal Dialogue, which is by definition "unsafe to share", cannot be accessed directly. Knowing that Internal Dialogue exists does not allow one to demand that the other party share it. The only way to access Internal Dialogue that drives how someone acts is to dissolve those factors that make it unsafe to discuss. SchellingPoint's tools are designed to increase the discussability of topics/sharing of Internal Dialogue.