Bringing NVC into a company
We will share what worked.
If you are deploying Nonviolent Communication inside a business, we are happy to compare notes on what has and has not worked for us.
Get in touchNonviolence in business
Violence is not
only war.
It is found at every level of human interaction, including inside businesses, and it leaves behavioral patterns built on fear and trauma that limit our ability to live the life we want.
Why work, of all places
Whatever patterns live at work do not stay there.
Most people spend most of their waking hours at work. Whatever patterns live there do not stay there. They go home, they are modelled for children, they become the water everyone swims in.
And the ordinary vocabulary of business is unusually full of the patterns Marshall Rosenberg identified as alienating: labels applied to people rather than to behavior, demands dressed up as requests, responsibility deflected onto process, feedback delivered as diagnosis. None of it is malicious. Most of it is simply learned.
Which means it can be unlearned.
That is not a soft ambition. Teams that can say what they actually observe, name what they actually need, and ask clearly for it make better decisions faster than teams that cannot.
The practice · 01-04
Marshall Rosenberg's four moves
Four moves, in every difficult conversation.
01
Observation
Say what happened, as a camera would have recorded it, separated from your evaluation of it.
"The doc arrived after the review," not "you're unreliable."
02
Feeling
Name what you actually feel, rather than what you think about the other person.
"I'm anxious" is a feeling. "I feel ignored" is an interpretation wearing a feeling's clothes.
03
Need
Underneath the feeling is a need: for clarity, for rest, for trust, for competence. At the core of all anger is a need that is not being fulfilled.
Finding it is most of the work.
04
Request
Ask for something specific, doable, and refusable. If "no" is not an acceptable answer, it was never a request. It was a demand, and demands are where violence starts.
In practice
Inside Chili Piper
Fourteen months inside a company.
Chili Piper is a tech company with employees in more than 30 countries. Over the last fourteen months we have been deploying Nonviolent Communication training across it, with much success.
The thing that made the difference was not the training itself. It was refusing to teach it in the abstract. NVC delivered as a philosophy seminar gets nodded at and forgotten. So we built the training around what each role actually does all day.
What a salesperson needs from it is not what an engineer needs from it. A support agent absorbing a customer's anger, a manager giving hard feedback, a designer defending a decision in review, a leader announcing a change nobody asked for: each is a different conversation with a different pressure, and each deserves its own practice. That is the part we would pass on to any company thinking about this.
Teach it as a job skill, not as a worldview. The worldview arrives on its own.
Compare notes
We are still learning this, out loud.
Teaching it to students
We fund this work.
If you teach Nonviolent Communication to educators or students, tell us what you do, who it reaches, and what a grant would fund.
See what we fund