In many self-help books that revolve around the ability to have conversations and communicate effectively with others—especially with those the subject might find difficult to engage with—the method involved largely centers around results. The approach involves a way of reaching a particular goal, or of guaranteeing a particular answer. This risk of implementing a results-based method is that it may disintegrate into one that prioritizes the end over the means, which, without appropriate scrutiny, could eventually become dehumanizing.

In Difficult Conversations, however, the approach is people-centered. It eschews any particular “method” in favor of a core process of approaching a conversation that could have any one of an infinite variety of outcomes. In the preface to the second edition, the authors say that the book has been read and employed in a wide variety of contexts and situations thanks to its more universal scope and more personal applicability; the people-centered approach allows the principles related over the course of the work to be applied in contexts that typically would not be favorable to an overly formulaic approach to problem-solving in conversation.