What narrative practice actually looks like in a hard conversation
This week I recorded a live episode of Get Me to the Gray with Colorado’s First Judicial District Attorney Alexis King and asked her about deadly use of force cases — first abstractly and then about a specific case in which her office declined to file criminal charges.
What followed was a conversation about fatal police shootings, not around it: what accountability looks like inside a prosecutor’s office; where policy language breaks down in practice; what the community is owed and what the institution is actually delivering. The conversation went deeper instead of sideways. Nobody walked out. Nobody performed outrage for the room. We disagreed in places and kept going.
I’ve been thinking about why that’s remarkable — and why it shouldn’t be.
We have a diagnosis for what’s wrong with public discourse. It shows up in every op-ed, every podcast intro, every foundation grant about “bridging divides”: we are too polarized, too tribal, too online, too loud. The problem is volume. The problem is algorithms. The problem is that we’ve sorted ourselves into camps so sealed that genuine exchange is no longer possible.
I don’t buy it. Not entirely.
Volume is real. Algorithms are real. But I’ve spent two decades as an investigative journalist and the last several years building a narrative consulting practice, and what I’ve watched happen in rooms — actual rooms, with actual people — tells a different story. The problem isn’t that hard conversations are impossible. The problem is that almost nobody has built the skills to hold one.
Pushing without detonating is a skill. It is learnable. And its absence is costing us more than we’re accounting for.
Here’s what the skill actually requires.
First: you have to know what you’re actually asking and why. Not the surface question — the one underneath it. In the DA King conversation, the surface question was about deadly force policy. The real question was about the distance between institutional language and community trust. If I’d stayed on the surface, we’d have gotten talking points. Going underneath got us something true.
Second: you have to be genuinely prepared to hear the answer. This sounds obvious. It isn’t. Most hard conversations fail not because the questioner goes too hard but because they’ve already decided what the answer should be. The person across the table feels that. They close. What looks like polarization is often just two people performing positions at each other because neither one is actually listening.
Third: the framing has to hold space for complexity without collapsing into false balance. There’s a version of “both sides” that is intellectual cowardice dressed as fairness. That’s not what I mean. I mean framing that can hold a real contradiction — that a DA can be committed to accountability and still operating inside a system that resists it — without forcing a resolution that isn’t there yet.
These are narrative skills. They are also, I’d argue, civic skills. And we have systematically underinvested in both.
What we’ve invested in instead is performance. The sharp take. The ratio. The clapback that goes viral because it humiliates rather than illuminates. We’ve built an entire information architecture that rewards detonation and penalizes the slower, harder work of actually moving someone.
The result isn’t just bad discourse. It’s institutional paralysis. Organizations that can’t make their case to the people they need to reach. Leaders who’ve forgotten how to speak across disagreement. Communities that have stopped expecting public conversation to produce anything except heat.
That’s not inevitable. It’s a skills deficit. And skills deficits are fixable.
The DA King conversation was not a miracle of goodwill. It was a demonstration of what happens when two people come to a hard table having done the internal work first — knowing what they believe, knowing why it matters, knowing what they’re actually trying to accomplish in the room.
That preparation is available to anyone willing to do it.
The question is whether we decide it’s worth the effort — before the conversations we need to have become the ones we no longer know how to start.
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