Nonviolent Communication

What Hacker News says

1. BeetleBDec 2025
   > I am a professional problem solver, you described a problem, yet you do not want it solved?

   This will be hard for you to believe, but I will easily wager good money that at times you yourself behave this way. You only become aware of it after both below are satisfied:

   1. You've encountered someone as annoying as yourself :-)

   2. You learn a bit more about the dynamics of conversations.

   If there's any time someone got mad at you and said "You just want to complain and not fix the problem!" chances are this dynamic was in play. Or "I've given you so many suggestions but you don't want to fix the problem and just complain!"

   Everyone acts that way to some extent. Some more than others.

   Here's a typical scenario (common amongst spouses, but even amongst friends). You're annoyed/down due to problem X. Your friend sees you that way and inquires why you're down. You tell them, and they spend all their time giving you suggestions. But you never asked for suggestions!

   It's not a big leap to go from there to someone simply telling you their problem because they want to get it out of their system.

   Some books I've read that made it easier to understand all of this:

   - Difficult Conversations

   - Nonviolent Communication[1]

   - Crucial Conversations

   All of these will emphasize the role emotions play in dialogue. And when you read them, chances are very high you'll find yourself in them (i.e. they will give examples that you can relate to - on both sides of the conversation).

   Once I read these, many, many "poor" conversations from my life earlier suddenly made sense to me. One nice outcome was learning that even though at times people were upset at me, it wasn't always "my fault". I had always taken for granted that because I didn't spend much time playing social games, that my social skills were poor and likely I did something wrong. Reading these made it clear how often the dysfunction was on the other side, and having good/poor conversations is not well correlated with "social skills".

   [1] HN has as strong knee jerk reaction when this book is mentioned, but in my experience, everyone who complained had not read the book, and almost all the complaints were semi-strawmen.

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2. no_wizardOct 2025
   >politeness and conflict avoidance over avoiding actual problems

   Those two things are not coupled. You can maintain a sense of politeness in face of conflict. This is the entire basis of Nonviolent Communication, a great book about handling and resolving conflict in such a manner.

   It’s extremely effective in my experience and results in overall better clarity and less conversational churn.

   >Why would anyone do that if they can't even be called out for messing something up, yet alone being held accountable

   You can be, that is in part a definition of accountability and you’re conflating a lack of accountability with some idea that it requires behaving in a manner that may be construed as rude, and that’s simply not true.

   So like anything, you hold them accountable. You can do that without being rude.

   >In all of those projects and organsiations which value respectful language and inclusivity and all sorts of non-results-oriented crap

   I’m getting a sense you have a predisposition to disliking these things. They’re really important because they are, when correctly understood, results oriented. It frees up people to feel comfortable saying things they may not have been otherwise. That is very productive.

   Abusive and abrasion language does not do that.

   >This is how you get design-by-committee lowest common denominator slop

   No, in my experience and many reports from others you get this for a myriad of reasons, but consistent theme is lack of ownership or organizational politics, not because people level up their communication skills

   >avoid criticising their ideas because they might feel offended". There was a recent HN thread about AI-written pull requests and how people have problems with them, because tactfully rejecting 10k lines of pure bullshit is very hard without making the submitter upset. Guess what, if they were allowed to say "no, you aren't going to be merging slop you can't even explain" the average code quality would skyrocket

   I don’t disagree with you because I don’t believe in proper criticism, I do. I disagree with you because the implicit messaging I’m getting here is the following

   - you sometimes have to be a jerk

   - therefore it’s okay to be a jerk sometimes

   - somehow having an expectation of treating others with respect somehow equates to poor accountability

   I’ve spent a good chunk of my years learning a lot about effective communication and none of it is about avoiding accountability, of yourself or others. It’s about respecting each other and creating an environment where you can talk about tough things and people are willing to do it again because they were treated respectfully

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3. KerrickApr 2025
   Also, Never Split The Difference is basically a negotiation-oriented, machismo-tinted version of Nonviolent Communication by Dr. Marshall Rosenberg. I highly recommend both books.
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4. FloorEggApr 2025
   Mr Stuck,

   I went through this and have strong feelings about it. I think the most important answer is to a question you aren't asking.

   *How to predict market demand for a new product.*

   It sounds like neither you or your co-founder know how to do this, and that's the problem.

   I don't have enough context to understand if the differences between you and your co-founder are unreconcilable, if they are, then maybe the answer is to move on, but if you mostly get along but are just struggling with an extremely uncomfortable and challenging situation, then here are some things to consider...

   First off, learn about Nonviolent Communication. If both you and your co-founder are willing to adopt it, that should help you improve your collaboration.

   Next, you probably need to cut your burn down to near-zero if you haven't already. Even if you have a decent amount of cash, if you and your co-founder still have enough control to make this decision, lay off everyone that isn't essential to servicing existing customers. If you have no customers, then cut everyone. Cut down to the smallest possible burn you can, to give you the most possible runway.

   Then, address your complete lack of market research skills, either by committing wholeheartedly to learning how to do it yourselves, or by finding a third co-founder who is really good at it. What you need is someone who has a decent grasp of technology trends and value-overhang, and who is very good at doing market research interviews (customer discovery interviews), and thinking through lenses like Jobs to be Done Theory, Outcome Driven Innovation and Design Thinking. When I say market research I don't mean some proctor and gamble quant nerd, I mean a scrappy startup bloodhound. Not all "business people" are built the same, and it would be good for you to ramp up the resolution of your evaluations of people in these roles.

   Then you need to come together to pick a group of people to focus on for AT LEAST 3 months. These need to be people you can access and talk to many of, and people who you have good reason to believe are all doing or trying to do very similar things. Read more about jobs to be done theory if you don't know what I mean. Here are some examples: (Startup founders, insurance brokers, nurses, teachers, parents raising two or more toddlers, robotics engineers, etc. - PICK ONE). Ideally you want to pick people who have money to spend themselves, have some authority or influence over how some money is spent, or whose work is important enough that making them more productive would be exciting to people who have influence. For example, elementary school teachers are probably not as attractive as a market as university professors, and private school elementary teachers are probably better than public school.

   If your founder is sensitive about engaging in this process without certainty that you will find an opportunity that's big enough to justify the VC investment, then consider focusing on a group of people like described above with high economic leverage (e.g. fintech CEOs, data-center architects, etc.) ~ focus on a set of people doing similar things close to where the money is flowing fast.

   Once you pick the group of people, you need to resist the urge to come up with any product ideas. Your next step isn't to ideate or innovate or whatever, its to go and empathize with the people. Get really fucking curious about what the people actually care about. Find a way to not want them to have specific wants. Read this again: Set yourself up to be curious about these people's actual wants, while not wanting them to have certain wants. It's way more fun to talk to people this way, you won't have the tension of "I hope they validate our idea", and they will enjoy talking to you because it will feel like therapy to them if you do it right. Ask things like "What's the most important thing to you that you are the least satisfied with?", and "What else?", "if you could wave a magic wand...?", ask follow up questions, "has anything changed about that recently? Is it getting worse? How does it work today? Why does it work that way? How important is that step?, etc.", make sure you understand all their answers. Listen actively. Stay curious. Empathize.

   Consider reading The Mom Test.

   You will be better off paying the targeted interviewees hundreds of dollars to spend an hour talking to you (2-3x their hourly salary), than spending that money on employees helping you flail around. If you can get their time for free, great! Once you start targeting a specific problem, it makes more sense to not pay for their time, since the chance of solving the problem can become the new motivation for speaking with you.

   After you have talked to ~30 or so people like this, you are fairly likely to spot an opportunity (You have also started to develop a very valuable skill). What you are looking for is something that a decent segment (e.g. 30%+) of the sample consider the most important thing they are trying to get done that they are the least satisfied with, or at least in the top 3, and that you think you can make a huge impact on with some emerging tech. Whatever you do needs to genuinely seem 10x better from the customers perspective, because the new benefit has to be worth the risk of spending time and money on something unproven / doesn't exist yet. The best opportunities will come from when you can re-frame the problems they are struggling with and understand them better than any one of the people you interviewed, because you got some unique perspective from talking to many people. Just don't rush this, because it has to be grounded in the reality of their existing values.

   After you gain the insight and have designed a new approach that you are highly confident at least a handful of the people will be excited about, go back to them and validate it. Ask the hard and scary questions (now with all that validation tension again), that they can and will pay money for it, or fight hard to get other people to pay for it, etc. If you did everything right up to this point, at least a handful of people will start pulling the product out of you.

   When you reach this point, at least 90% of the problems you described will be gone and you will have new (slightly better) problems. This is startups. <3

   If you can't bring yourself to do something at least close to what I described above, then you're probably better off moving on, since the odds of succeeding from your current situation by pure luck is near-zero. That said, I encourage you to take the courageous and responsible path if you have it in you, the world needs more of it, and you will grow a lot from it.

   Sincerely, FloorEgg

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5. CastFXNov 2024
   "Nonviolent Communication" by Marshall B. Rosenberg is a wonderful book (I picked up from HN) that explores this concept very well.

   Definitely recommend a read

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6. GregDavidsonOct 2024
   For finding awesome people, the BurningMan community has been the most effective for me, YMMV! For maintaining quality relationships, e.g. with my late wife, the most effective thing was studying NVC together with a small group of friends. We would take 1-2 weeks to explore each chapter of Marshall Rosenberg's "Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life" along with Lucy Leu's "Nonviolent Communication Companion Workbook". We would practicing what we were learning during the week and meet 1 evening per chapter to discuss our experience. This became an annual practice with a revolving group of participants.
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