Notes on the Conversational View
Here is a running collection of notes on the bundle of ideas, practices, viewpoints and experiences that sit at the meeting point between social emergence, organizational development, complexity and living systems, dialogue, and conversational leadership. Sure to change over time.
Inbox
David Gurteen now has a whole online book about this area, citing many of the sources and people mentioned in the notes below, and beyond.
Jan 2017: Liberating Structures
Lipmanowicz and McCandless, in book / site, offer an extended set of “microstructures” for group conversation and action. They use different (more practical) language than some of the writers noted below, but they’re very much in the same vein. What we do together comes from the way we converse together.
Macrostructures (buildings, policies, hierarchies, supply chains, etc.)
+ People
+ Resources
…are the context and materials in which we apply
Microstructures — the way we arrange the room, the questions we ask, the way we have conversations
…and that is where results come from.
They point out that our culture hands us a very limited set of microstructures. Maybe five typical methods/structures of conversation in a typical organization: presentation, managed discussion, status report, open discussion, and brainstorm.
Which, by the way, are all comfortable homes for the status quo, for hierarchical power, and closed mode. (Even brainstorming dear friends, is typically a “closed-mode” activity because it is almost never preceded by deliberate and explicit steps to open.)
Their “elements of control” for microstructures :
- how we make the invitation
- how we sequence and allocate time
- how we distribute participation
- how we configure groups
- how we arrange space
Not going to make notes on the whole book here, or on the individual structures for now. But wanted to put the connection in these notes, and nod to Liberating Structures healthy and substantial connection to both social complexity and a conversational approach. More later on that….
Peter Block
From Block’s talk to the International Institute of Restorative Practices:
[About 10:00 minutes into the talk]
“We all have a story. But once you realize that it’s all fiction, it changes everything. …I’m always happy to hear your story. But I want to know if you’ve told it more than three times. If you’ve told it more than three times, then it’s a defense against the future. People’s story is their meaning-making of the world, and that’s the limitation to anything changing.”
His language parallel’s Whyte quite closely.
“I know when I hear your story that you made it up. So I really want to ask you what’s the fiction that you’re living in? The story becomes an excuse. We have this belief that my past determines [myself]. We have the notion that ‘I can be explained.’”
Nots on Peter Block’s Civic Engagement
Focus on “the public conversation” — the conversations we have together when we are not in private. In meetings, events, and in the media. [Shaw’s view is that it’s often the private conversations where things shift or get reinforced, where new things are born or find themselves caught in a clench.]
Block emphasizes “public conversation based on communal accountability and commitment.” Says that this is what restores community. [In our work (drawing from Whyte?) we are finding that accountability and commitment comes from shared purpose.]
Block might say that these things show up when people get close to one another. Here’s a quote from his short video on youtube, Touchy feely crap: “I don’t want to be seduced or distracted by people’s nervousness about getting close. That’s what really underlies the concern about focusing on ‘how we’re doing’ — saying, ‘I don’t know if I want to get too close to these people.’ I know that if we don’t get close we’re not going to create anything. So this is a huge shift for consultants: saying, ‘I’m here to help people get connected.’ It’s not complicated to do. But it takes saying, ‘Okay, that’s what I’m here for.’”
More about accountability and commitment:
Accountability
The dominant existing public conversation is retributive, not restorative. It is void of accountability and soft on commitment. In this way it drives us apart, it does not bring us together. The existing conversation is about entitlement, not accountability.
To be accountable, among other things, means you act as an owner and part creator of whatever it is that you wish to improve. In the absence of this, you are in the position of effect, not cause; a powerless stance.
Commitment
To be committed means you are willing to make a promise with no expectation of return; a promise void of barter and not conditional on another s action. In the absence of this, you are constantly in the position of reacting to the choices of others. The cost of constantly reacting is increased cynicism.
The goal is “civic engagement” — a shift from problem-focus to the bonds that foster collective commitment.
The conventional view of community action and development addresses what we usually call problems; areas such as public safety, jobs and local economy, affordable housing, universal health care, education. In the context of civic engagement, these are really symptoms. The deeper cause is in the un-reconciled and fragmented nature of our community. This fragmentation creates a context for solving the symptoms that only sustains them. Otherwise why have we been working on these symptoms for so long, and so hard, and even with so many successful programs, seen too little fundamental change?
The real intent of civic engagement is to shift the context within which traditional problem solving, investment, and social and community action takes place. It is aimed at the restoration of the experience and vitality of community. It is this shift in context, expressed through a shift in language, that creates the condition where traditional forms of action can make a difference.
Shifting the conversation
“A shift in the conversation is created by being strategic about the way we convene and the questions we address. …It is the shift in public conversation that, in our terms, constitutes transforming action.”
“The premise discussed here is that questions and the speaking they evoke constitute powerful action. This means that the nature of the questions we ask either keep the existing system in place or bring an alternative future into the room. Many of the traditional questions we ask have little power to create an alternative future. These are the set of questions that the world is constantly asking. They are important questions, but we have to be careful how we respond. For some of the questions are, in the asking, the very obstacle to what has given rise to the question in the first place.”
“Questions that have the power to make a difference are ones that engage people, especially opponents, with each other, confront them with their freedom, and invite them to co-create a future possibility.”
This involves a change in thinking about leadership
[The question holds the lantern. Conversational leadership.]
“The dominant belief system is that the task of leadership is to set a vision, enroll others in it, and hold people accountable through measurements and reward. The shift is to believe that the task of leadership is to produce engagement. To engage groups of people in a way that creates accountability, which is to care for the well being of the whole, and commitment, which is to make and fulfill a promise without expectation of return.”
“Leaders create the conditions for civic engagement. They do this through the power they have to focus attention and define the conversations for people when they gather. We might say that leadership is the capacity to name the debate and design gatherings.”
“Each gathering serves two functions: to address its stated purpose, its business issues, and to be an occasion for each person to decide to become engaged as an owner. The leader s task is to design the place and experience of these occasions to move the culture toward shared ownership.”
“This is in contrast to the conventional ideology of the default culture about leadership:
Leader and top are essential
The future destination can be blueprinted
The work is to bring others on board
More measurement produces better results
People need more training
Rewards are related to outcomes
What worked elsewhere can work here
The future is a problem to be solvedThe conventional thinking holds the leader responsible for assuring that these beliefs are planned and implemented.
All of these have face validity, but they have unintended consequences. They are the beliefs that support patriarchy and the dominion of a benevolent monarch. This creates a level of isolation, entitlement, and passivity that our communities cannot afford to carry. The alternative is to move towards partnership and away from parenting. To care more about the experience of citizens than the direction or behavior of leaders.”
The civic engagement we are talking about here holds leadership to two tasks:
• To create a context which nurtures an alternative future, one based on inclusiveness and hospitality.
- To initiate conversations that shift our experience, which occurs through the way we bring people together and the nature of the questions we use to engage them.
“The step from thinking of ourselves as effect to thinking of ourselves as cause is the primary act of inversion. …The heart of the matter is the question of cause. Have we chosen the present or has it been handed to us? The possibility of an alternative future rotates on this question. The primary inversion is our thinking about what is cause and what is effect. The default culture would have us believe that the past creates the future, that a change in individuals causes a change in organizations and community. That we are determined by everything aside from free will. That culture, organizations, and society drive our actions and our way of being. This is true, but the opposite is also true.
The shift in thinking is to take the stance that we are the creator of our world as well as the product of it. Free will trumps genetics, culture, and parental upbringing.”
Some examples of the inversion of thinking:
The audience creates the performance
The subordinate creates the boss
The child creates the parent
The citizen creates its leadership
Problem solving occurs to build relatedness
A room and a building are created by how it is occupied
The student creates the teacher
The future creates the present
The listening creates the speaker
The openness to learn creates the teaching
In each case, choice or destiny replaces fate.The question is not whether this is true or not. The question is which system of thinking is most useful? Which gives us power?
Change the conversation, change the future
“The strategy for an alternative future is to focus on ways a shift in conversation can shift the context and thereby create an intentional future.”
“Operationally, this means engaging in conversations we have not had before. The strategy is if you can change the room, you have changed the culture, at least for that moment. We change the room by changing the conversation. Not just any new conversation, but one that creates a communal accountability and commitment.”
Satisfying but unhelpful conversations
“Certain conversations are satisfying and true yet have no power and no accountability. For example:
Telling the history of how we got here
Giving explanations and opinions
Blaming and complaining
Making reports and descriptions
Carefully defining terms and conditions
These conversations are most often offered through conferences, press releases, trainings, master plans, and the call for more studies and expertise. They are well intentioned and valid, but hold little power.”
Conversational shifts
“Here are the conversational shfits that are other than just talk:
Invitation replaces mandate, policy and alignment
Possibility replaces problem solving
Ownership and Cause replace explanation and denial
Dissent and Refusal replace resignation and lip service
Commitment replaces hedge and barter
Gifts replace deficiencies
Each of these conversations leads to the others. Any one held wholeheartedly takes us to and resolves all the others. In the absence of these, it is all just talk. No matter how urgent the cause, how important the plan, how elegant the answer. These are the conversations through which the community is transformed.”
Six conversations
- The invitation
“Transformation occurs through choice, not mandate. Invitation is the call to create an alternative future. What is the invitation we can make for people to participate in and own the relationships, tasks, and process that lead to transformation?” […more in article]
2. Possibility
“This is framed as the choice to enter a possibility for the future as opposed to problem solving the past. This is based on an understanding that living systems are really propelled to the force of the future. The possibility conversation frees people to create new futures that make a difference.”
3. Ownership
“Accountability is the willingness to acknowledge that we have participated in creating, through commission or omission, the conditions that we wish to see changed. Without this capacity to see ourselves as cause, our efforts become either coercive or wishfully dependent on the transformation of others.”
4. Dissent
“Dissent is the cousin of diversity; the respect for a wide range of beliefs. This begins by allowing people the space to say “no”. If we cannot say “no” then our “yes” has no meaning. Each needs the chance to express their doubts and reservations, without having to justify them, or move quickly into problem solving. No is the beginning of the conversation for commitment. Doubt and “no” is a symbolic expression of people finding their space and role in the strategy. It is when we fully understand what people do not want that choice becomes possible. The leadership task is to surface doubts and dissent without having an answer to every question.”
5. Commitment
“Wholehearted commitment makes a promise to peers about our contribution to the success of the whole. It is centered in two questions: What promise am I willing to make? And, what is the price I am willing to pay for the success of the whole effort? It is a promise for the sake of a larger purpose, not for the sake of personal return. Commitment is the answer to lip service.”
6. Gifts
“The most infrequent conversation we hold is about our gifts. We tend to be deficiency obsessed. Rather than focus on our deficiencies and weaknesses, which will most likely not go away, we gain more leverage when we focus on the gifts we bring and capitalize on those. Instead of problematizing people and work, the conversation is about searching for the mystery that brings the highest achievement and success.
The focus on gifts confronts people with their essential core that has the potential to make the difference and change lives for good. This resolves the unnatural separation between work and life. The leadership task is to bring the gifts of those on the margin into the center.”
Tools
The rest of Block’s booklet contains recommended practices for invitation, assembly, and questions.
Examples of things whose value is mainly found in the way they change the conversation
…because they change the shared view / perspective
- Cynefin framework and Dave Snowden’s model of change. Much more material since I started these notes, which needs to be added to the pile.
Placeholder for “who are you in conversation with?”
Block, somewhere around 17:00 or 18:00, tells the story of working with urban youth in Cincinnati. He says, when they come into the program we ask them two questions. The first is, “What do you love?” The second is, “Do you have adults in your life who have your wellbeing at heart?” He says very often the answer is zero or one. But he knows that if they can get that number up to four or five, that kid will be okay, will not wind up in trouble.
Placeholder for “shallow” and “deep” — levels of dialogue, etc.
Isaacs, Scharmer, and Schein will go here, natch. (Though really I probably need separate notes on basic dialogue theory.)
Block has good words too, about the way attending to conversations leads us inevitably to questions about what really matters. And further, that people are brought together by a turn toward what really matters.
See this article, Leading change from within.
“Fixation with what works has relegated idealism to a cold room. Yet we know that “nothing much happens without a dream. Though it takes more than a dream to make it happen, but the dream must be there first.” (Greenleaf, The Servant Leader)
There is also very little room for intimacy, depth and engagement in modern organizations. Electronic communication has been used conveniently as an escape route for us to avoid intimacy and engagement with others. In exchange for the promise of greater efficiency and time, we succumbed to the great benefits technology has offered us, but subconsciously, we’ve also traded off our most primal means of connecting with people. Nowadays it is not uncommon for cubical mates to communicate to each other across the wall via email or text phone messages!
Intimacy means reaching out to others in the most fundamental way, not because of the position they hold and what we need from them, but for their true worth.
After awhile, colleagues are people we perform day-to-day trans-actions with, sometimes we even forget that they have families, children, identities beyond the title given to them by the institution.”
Starting the new conversation means stopping the old one
David Whyte has a lot to offer here.
Block hits this pretty hard in this article, Time for Change.
“The first step is to agree to stop having the old conversation. When you are in a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging. As a start I would like to see a six month moratorium on the following conversations.
The importance of having the support of top management
How workers do not want to be empowered
That leaders need to provide a good role model
How to hold people accountable
How to get people on board and aligned
[and many more…]All of these points are true. It is just that they have become useless to talk about. They have become habitual language and we have become anesthetized to their meaning and depth. These words, because of their popularity, now belong to someone else, not to us. …
That same article contains a recipe for facilitation, which insists that the room have a conversation they have not had before. Take the tables out of the room. Have groups no more than ten sit in a circle, with knees no more than nine inches apart. Give them the instruction that they are to have a conversation they have not had before, or if they can’t find what to say on those grounds, to sit in silence.
There’s more nuance in the instructions. Worth including in these notes.
Placeholder for tactical topics
- Space and place (aspect of Liberating Structures, etc.)
What if we replaced the word “relationship” with the word “conversation”?
Notes on Patricia Shaw, Changing Conversations in Organizations: a complexity approach to change
[And her other, also really good book: Experiencing spontaneity, risk, and improvisation in organizational life: working live]
p.2 Facilitation in organizations “has congealed into habitual patterns of response.” But the conversations that led to those patterns still have potential to lead to novel forms of practice.
We can see those “habitual patterns” in the agendas that are prepared for facilitated group sessions. A set time to gather people’s expectations, to “bring out hidden agendas,” to brainstorm, and so on, until results are delivered.
Author tells a story of being asked to act as facilitator for such an agenda that had already been prepared. Her instinct was that important conversations were already going on, which may in fact be hinted at by the “hidden agendas” point in the agenda. Her response: “Couldn’t we start the meeting by talking with the group about how things stand so far, what triggered the manager to call the gathering, what is on his mind, and so on. Then couldn’t we just see how others respond and take things from there?”
Her assessment (p. 5):
“Decades of a certain kind of business school education and writing; the rise and rise of expensive management consulting focused on packaging ‘best practice’ and promising to provide the expertise that will ‘deliver’ desired future success; the professionalization of all kinds of human communication into codified behavioral notions of ‘coaching,’ ‘counseling,’ or ‘leading’ —all these have given us a curiously rational, instrumental approach to ourselves.
“…It is hard to argue against against any element of such a proposed plan—it is perfectly logical, relentlessly so. Everyone knows that life isn’t quite like this, so implementing this idealized plan requires engaging someone who might be able to help the group navigate the murky shoals of ‘charged’ discussion so it ‘stays on track.’
Then, her way of seeing it…
“…it is possible for me to speak into another, more improvisational way of approaching how we might go on together. We have much practical knowledge and skill relevant to the everyday art of ‘going on together,’ knowledge that we create and use from within the conduct of our communicative activity. …Our mutual ongoing experience of the disorderly way order arises and dissolves and reconfigures in human affairs, a process we are never on top of or ahead of despite our inescapable attempts to be so. It is as though our capacity for for self-conscious reflection gives us delusions of omniscience and omnipotence. Our sophisticated capacity for observing our own participation tempts us to think we can grasp the whole picture and manage its dynamics to suit our well- or ill-meaning ends.”
“Most of what managers, leaders, consultants, and facilitators are asked to do is ‘to get ahead of the game’, ‘to be on top of the mess’, ‘to manage the process’, ‘to set the boundaries’, ‘to delve beneath the surface to change the deep structure’. It would seem that we want to think of ourselves anywhere other than where we are, in the flow of our live engagement, sustaining and transforming the patterning that simultaneously enables and constrains our movement into the future. Because we don’t seem to have a way to think and talk about what we are doing in this reciprocal engagement, we have become accustomed to a particular kind of systematic practice that is meant to help us do this.”
p. 9: “… facilitators, consultants and managers informed by this tradition [Edgar Schein, et al] work as if they must propose well-designed patterns for all interaction in advance of interacting, as though that is what being enabling entails. Thus they fill the looming openness of the future with exercises, frameworks, structured agendas, matrices and categories as though, without them, there will not be a useful structuring of interaction. However, as this need to design the form of communication is apparent on the one hand, on the other hand the sense that unwanted patterns will continue to arise remains. Thus there is an ongoing need for process facilitation to keep things on track. This account of change in patterns remains within the cybernetic tradition of using feedback to keep a system from drifting off course.”
p.10: “ So how might we begin to think differently about the way the patterning of human interaction patterns further patterning of human interaction? This is a book about the way we humans organize ourselves conversationally. The title, Changing Conversations in Organizations, is intended in several senses. I want to suggest a change in the way we often think of the part conversation plays in organizational life. We currently take it for granted as a background to more important activities through which we design and manage our organizations, as though conversation is carrying or transmitting the thing we should be focusing our attention on. Instead, this book will work with the assumption that the activity of conversation itself is the key process through which forms of organizing are dynamically sustained and changed. Our habits of thought and speech tend to blind us to the sheer flowing ubiquity of the communicative dance in which we are all engaged. Instead we focus mainly on the tangible products of conversation — the organizational designs, performance profiles, business models, strategic frameworks, action plans, lists and categories with which we seek to grasp the reified complexities of organizational life and render them ‘manageable’. We spend much time extracting and generalizing from our lived experience and then trying to apply the abstractions as templates for shaping the future as though we uncritically believe that this is how our future comes to have shape. How often have you found yourself in meetings where ‘tangible outputs’, ‘concrete results’ and ‘solid outcomes’ is a constant pressure and concern? Without this way of thinking we fear that we will be literally ‘at sea’, awash in formless transience, without a rudder. Must it be so? On the contrary, this book will continue the argument of this entire series in suggesting that this fear is a consequence of a way of thinking that has become habitual in corporate and institutional life. We seem to lack a capacity to articulate the nature of our participation in the activities which give evolving form to our organizational experience.”
[We might call Shaw’s work a participative approach.]
. . .
“We think about ‘an organization’ as something that has an existence separate from our own activity, even though often we are uneasily aware that it is not so.”
Not “conversations that take place ‘in’ an organization, but conversing as organizing.
[I like this language. Conversing as designing. Conversing as learning. Conversing as reflecting. Conversing as making.]
“…conversation as a process of communicative action which has the intrinsic capacity to pattern itself. No single individual or group has control over the forms that emerge, yet between us we are continuously shaping and being shaped by those forms from within the flow of our responsive relating.”
“… a shift in form and character of our conversations occurs when people meet to talk about strategy, change, organization, culture, and so on at meetings of one sort or another. Organizational meetings have acquired peculiarly unhelpful constraints on the mode of engagement that is judged effective and productive, even though people’s frustrations with meetings nearly always runs high. Again the way this frustration is understood tends to lead to a greater emphasis on managing meetings better, improving the pre-read, managing the agenda, managing the time, managing the discussion, polishing the presentations, capturing the outputs, identifying actions and managing the follow-up. Do people find this leads to more satisfying meetings? I do not think so. How can we approach the art of gathering and conversing in ways more conducive to the emergence of meaningful action, creative endeavor, and differentiated identities?”
“…I want to propose that if organizing is understood essentially as a conversational process, an inescapably self-organizing process of participating in the spontaneous emergence of continuity and change, then we need a rather different way of thinking about any kind of organizational practice that focuses on change. ..not systematic change methodologies based on abstract models of organization, but how we might make sense of our experiences of working with continuity and change day to day. …How are we to account to ourseles and to others for the activities we initiate, support or discourage? How are we to explain what we do and don’t do? How are we to think about our contribution? In other words, how are we to practice?”
The value of “just talking”
p. 18
Themes that led to a major shift in the author’s practice as an organization development consultant.
- The invisibility of ordinary everyday conversation
These mature and experienced managers did not believe they could justify an explicit investment in the free-flow of open-ended conversation despite their conviction that this kind of conversation was precisely what they needed. It was not that they did not create opportunities to engage in such conversation, indeed they were adept at finding many ways to do this, but the dominant way of thinking about managerial effectiveness that they subscribed to did not render this legitimate. Their ways of thinking together meant they could not take an aspect of their experience seriously. In order to justify meeting, you had to know in advance exactly what the topics for discussion would be and what the outcomes of discussion should be. The more uncertain and ambiguous their situation, the more they wanted to meet and talk, yet the less legitimate the expense of doing this became. In order to justify the expense they felt bound to organize the kind of meeting that would not serve them. Catch 22!
2. Acting into the unknown
The managers’ language was littered with references to continuous change, turmoil, discomfort, uncertainty and tensions. It was not obvious to them how to make sense of their situation, how to lead, how to act in particular circumstances, despite all the business models, strategic frameworks and key priorities that served as ‘shared’ representations of the organization’s activities. It was not that they disagreed with these models, they found them useful, yet ‘implementing’ them was far from straightforward. They believed they needed a structure of thought which made sense of acting prior to taking action. They would often say things like, ‘We know the problems, we can see the solutions, but we can’t make the delivery mechanisms work.’ They had excellent ways of discussing organizational strategy as idealized templates or blueprints for change, but they did not have ways of thinking about the unpredictability and ambiguity of their daily experience. It was not that they did not know themselves to be competent — they did work effectively in the midst of uncertainty, but it was as though they could not articulate what they were actually doing. In a way everything was clear and known and yet their experience was of acting into the unknown moment by moment. The world they inhabited and the world they presented to and discussed with each other seemed, at best, tenuously connected. There did not seem to be a way to talk about this officially other than to continue tinkering with models and implementation plans. Surely, they argued, either we know what we are doing or we don’t.
3. Organizing the unorganizable
As they reflected on their experience of the way a certain open-ended quality of conversation generated purpose, meaning and innovation, the managers repeatedly referred to this as being non-organized, or not organized in advance, not designed, not managed, not driven. They referred to structures, leadership and facilitation which hindered a meeting from ‘developing its own dynamic’. But at the same time, they experienced themselves individually as intentional, purposeful and strategic. Things were either organized or not organized. They were bemused at the prospect of trying to organize an unorganized meeting.
4. Wanting to capture knowledge
At the close of both my meeting with the MD and the subsequent meeting of the group of managers, a very satisfying sense of being able to go forward emerged. Yet, in both cases, most people were anxious that unless something — our ideas, our learning — was ‘captured’ in a report, a proposal, a summary, the satisfaction would prove illusory, would escape us, dissolve, cease to exist and, worst of all, that nothing further would happen. And yet my sense was that the conversations had changed things – our perceptions of ourselves in our situation — subtly but irrevocably. We could not easily undo these shifts, even if we wanted to.
From here: http://informalcoalitions.typepad.com/informal_coalitions/2006/12/changing_the_co.html
Notes on the board by Shaw….
Change
- Work from the process outwards.
- Change the conversation and then draw attention to it — does it make sense?
- Work with energy and intent; but it happens in the moment, through the conversation.
- There is no beginning of change — How did it come about? . . . And how did that come about? And how did. . .
- No start, just emergence — so work from here.
- Understanding comes with insight; and faith and trust come with understanding.
- Engage with people who have the motivation, interest and sense of urgency — invite them to take up the invitation to make sense of what’s happening.
- Beware the reification of models.
Mode of enquiry engaged through conversation
- What have you made of this conversation?
- How do we account for what we are doing, day-in-day-out?
- What kind of causality do we employ to make sense of our decisions and actions?
- How do we believe both change and continuity arises in human affairs — “enabling constraints”?
- How do we recognize leadership?
Paying attention to the movement of sensemaking
- What parts are we coming to play as we account for our continuing presence in the conversation?
- What are we finding ourselves talking about?
- How are our endeavors evolving as the conversation progresses?
- How are we reconfiguring constructs?
- How are power relations shifting?
- How are ‘rules of the game’ changing as we play?
- How is the meaning of our actions developing as we act?
- How are we opening up where we can go from here, as we rearticulate how we came to here?
Attributes of ‘good’ conversation
- Free flowing.
- Sensitivity to emerging themes.
- Alertness to rhetorical ploys.
- Introducing themes from other communities.
- Awareness of shifts in anxiety/ spontaneity.
- Holding ambiguity to allow the novel to emerge. Alertness to conscious processes which trap us.
From Patricia Shaw conference talk
Thoughts on leadership: What is leadership? What are some of the acts of leadership?
Convening conversations that might not happen otherwise
Having the courage for opening spaces for reflective inquiry in the midst of our institutional life
Taking action visibly. One of the things most demanding about leadership is that it is about taking up the voice, speaking out, saying and doing things when the consequences of that will ripple out beyond what you will ever know when you do it. Nevertheless you have to take the risk, make the judgment, try it.
Leadership engages, opens up, and shifts the conversational life of an organization. There are lots of small practices worth paying attention to.
Having the courage and skill to invite and sustain fairly open-ended and free flowing conversation, that isn’t always managed by a highly structured agenda.
Being able to invent, improvise on the spur of the moment, shifts in the configuration of speaking together that help to keep the conversation alive. Moving between people speaking all together, to people speaking in groups, in pairs, to listening carefully, reflecting in groups. Part of being a good leader is being able to work the conversation as an art.
Senior people are often used to giving confident and comprehensive abstract accounts of policy and direction, but are unable to connect it to what happened last week. leaders learn to link the large scale to the immediate reality of everyday life. The inability to do that is really problematic.
The ability to think intelligently about when to use written material and when to use oral communication is important. We have forgotten how much can be carried through oral exchange, which written documentation so often narrows. We need both. The move between the oral and the written is an art that leaders must consciously develop.
Many leaders are good at explanation, but poor at description. They are too quick to want to move to cause and effect and overly simplistic linear connections between events. They lack a kind of descriptive, reflective capacity to inquire into the way circumstances happen and change.
Being able to catch what Schein calls “critical incidents.” Vivid moments of experience which act as common points of reference which you can come to an understanding about together, which have meaning for people in their everyday activities.
Ability to pay a little less attention to generating yet another action plan, and more attention to what are the ways forward that are opening up in front of us that we might exploratively take as next steps, before we go too far in producing big action plans about what they’re meant to produce.
From Showkeir book
Showkeir and Showkeir, Authentic Conversations
Conversations create culture
First, conversations reveal what we see in the world and the meaning we attach to what we see. Second, as Autry says, we name things and create reality. Third, we invite others to see what we see, the way we see it. And fourth, through conversations we either sustain or change the meaning of what we see. All these things play a commanding role in creating and defining an organization’s culture.
Changing the culture requires changing conversations
P.9
The first, most critical step to creating a healthier, more productive culture is to change the conversations. Changing a conversation in the moment can change the culture in the room…. Changing the culture in the room in any given moment is the best any of us can do. If new conversations change the culture in the room enough times and in enough rooms, the organizations culture will change.
P.13
Change will not survive or thrive if we continue having the same conversations.
. . .
…The secret for sustaining successful change in organizations lies in consciously changing the nature of workplace conversations.
. . .
Conversation is the primary way of learning and sharing cultural norms, especially those ways that are informal and implicit. Messages are transmitted both in the words we use and in the relationship dynamics that drive how we talk to each other. For this reason, common workplace conversations can sabotage any attempt at significant organizational change. How we talk to each other in business settings and the way we deliberate decisions are revealing. In addition, some of the most powerful conversations take place outside the boardrooms, the auditoriums, and the meeting rooms. They happen in restrooms, coffee rooms, during smoke breaks, in people’s offices, on the assembly line, and during chance encounters in the hall. They continue in bars and cafés after work. Those ordinary conversations that people have thousands of times a day ultimately define the culture. Establishing new conversations is the most effective way — and the most underutilized — to create ongoing, long-lasting change in our lives, our organizations, and society. New conversations require us to see each other in a different way, and create an awareness of our role in perpetuating habits and behaviors that don’t serve us well.
Extract from Peter Block, Civic Engagement
Change the Conversation: Change the Question
These ideas are designed around the power of language. How we speak and listen to each other is the medium through which a more positive future is created or denied.
A shift in the conversation is created by being strategic about the way we convene and the questions we address. In other words, how we create and engage in the public debate. It is the shift in public conversation that, in our terms, constitutes transforming action.
All of us want action and to create a future we believe in. The premise discussed here is that questions and the speaking they evoke constitute powerful action. This means that the nature of the questions we ask either keep the existing system in place or bring an alternative future into the room. Many of the traditional questions we ask have little power to create an alternative future. These are the set of questions that the world is constantly asking. They are important questions, but we have to be careful how we respond. For some of the questions are, in the asking, the very obstacle to what has given rise to the question in the first place.
For example, all of us ask, or are asked:
- How do we hold those people accountable?
- How do we get people to show up and be committed?
- How do we get others to be more responsible?
- How do we get people on-board and to do the right thing?
- How do we get others to buy-in to our vision?
- How do we get those people to change?
- How much will it cost and where do we get the money?
- How do we negotiate for something better?
- What new policy or legislation will move our interests forward?
- Where is it working? Who has solved this elsewhere and how do we import that knowledge?
If we answer these questions in the form in which they are asked, we are supporting the dominant belief that an alternative future can be negotiated, mandated, and controlled into existence. They call us to try harder at what we have been doing. They urge us to raise standards, measure more closely, and return to basics, purportedly to create accountability, but in reality to maintain dominance. The questions imply that the one asking knows and others are a problem to be solved.
Questions that are designed to change other people are patriarchal and subtly colonial, and this sense, always the wrong questions. Wrong, not because they don’t matter or are based on ill intent, but wrong because they have no power to make a difference in the world. They are questions that are the cause of the very thing we are trying to shift: the fragmented and retributive nature of our communities.
Sources
Patricia Shaw, Changing conversations in organizations: a complexity approach to change. Routledge, 2002.
Dialogic Organizational Development
The org as process folks
Peter Block, Civic Engagement
Peter Block, Community: the structure of belonging
Showkier and Showkier, Authentic Conversations
