There is a news article today about a Microsoft COO article trying to get rid of 'toxic culture' to make it a better company.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ceo-satya-nadella-first-joined-181500087.html
(Ironically, I do believe the release of Window10 a year later was extremely 'violent' upon its customers...)
Some bullet points from the article are:
"1. Effective communication has 4 components.
According to the book, there are four components of effective communication:
-Observing what is happening in a situation (such as someone saying or doing something you don't like).
-Stating how you feel when you observe the action.
-Expressing how your needs are connected to the feelings you identified.
-Addressing what you want by requesting a concrete action.
First off, I would like to say I did find some merit to the theory of it. It's a very different way into training oneself in listening to someone elses' highly emotional rant, absorbing it, and calculating and returning a response which does not have any emotional or judgemental content to it.
A "we are here to talk and not fight" kind of thing.
Hence the "non-violent" part of the name.
You attempt to make a connection regardless of whether you disagree, and be able to gloss over the triggers which tend to blow up most conversations and relationships these days. To maintain a connection and get through emotional road-blocks. To establish a bond at the end. The technique encourages a therapeutic feedback and almost a psychiatric relationship where you are encouraged to talk as much as you want until exhausted, then you deeply feel "you have been heard" by the other person.
I knew someone successful who works with a variety of important people, and is very big into this technique. We talked extensively and went through the basics. However, the other person may not have been doing the technique the right way because when we talked politics, with me using a chain of sequences to explain and rationalize my political opinion on a particular subject (backing emotion with facts and history) there was a complete emotional meltdown with refusal to talk any further on those subjects.
I did not understand what happened there, because I thought that communicating facts and background feelings was part of the interaction process of understanding where another person is coming from, in order to be able to relate to them.
That other person wanted to engage using (my)pure emotion apparently and did not even validate my experiences or extensive proven facts of the situation as even real.
In conclusion:
My experience in talking extensively with that person and together with another highly trained person was similar to talking into a well after all that.
The technique is great for keeping other people at the table and only pretending to validate their concern.
There would only be an acknowledgement echo with encouragement to talk further.
After hours of this I came to the conclusion it was all a one-sided conversation which actually frustrated me even more.
The technique encourage a person like myself to fully reveal everything about my opinion without the other person offering anything of equal value in return, That eventually led to mistrust.
It wasn't talking as equals.
Psychologically it inferred a subliminal master-servant relationship
This is similar to what Scientology does. The blackmail arrives later on.
It did feel a little cult-like with the insistence in communicating this way. I saw it in the swarmy eyes when they talked about it.
If does have some merit and is a challenge to use different social skill sets if nothing else,
But it's worth understanding so you can recognize it and be wary later on.