Initiating a Dialogue Event as a way to engage and ignite transformation
The secret to unlock human potential by learning how to think together in groups and teams.
Change is challenging. Every facet of your organisation resists it and, just like Newton’s First Law, an object requires an external force in order to change its state of motion. Even when there are external forces such as the pandemic, digitalisation, social media or value-chain disruption, organisations require significant amounts of time and energy to change.
While the focus of change is often process-oriented like a move to Agile, digitalisation and turning company in a new direction, a hidden force slowing down progress, just like inertia, is the lack of open, meaningful dialogue.
Dialogue for change is the exchange of ideas and opinions in order to foster a shared understanding and evoke action.
Ground rules for engaging in meaningful dialogue
- Suspend judgement — In order to achieve meaningful dialogue, each individual needs to have equal standing. Hierarchy may be necessary in an organisation but when engaging in dialogue, this needs to be set aside. All parties need to have mutual respect and every point of view needs to be heard without judgement. Openness to each other’s perspectives will create free flow of ideas and thoughts.
2. Active Listening — When we listen to someone speaking, we often listen and re-load, getting ready to respond. To practice active listening, we need to quiet the mind and listen for meaning. Listen with empathy so we gain understanding of the speaker’s point of view. Be open to shifting our point of view. And listen well enough to playback what we heard. Playing back has two benefits. It helps the speaker feel heard and clarify what they meant if necessary.
3. Discover Shared Meaning — Shared meaning starts with an evolution from being sure of our individual convictions to a position of thoughtful uncertainty to be more inclusive, fluid, and tentative in our thoughts. By adopting a reflective state of mind, we accept that our perceptions may be coloured by our prior experiences, biases or blind spots. By being curious we discover common ground, where our perspectives are the same and where we have unique points of view.
4. Tell/Sell Less, Ask Questions
Instead of delivering presentations to tell or sell, use effective workshop techniques to get the teams to engage their hearts and minds in the cause. Ask questions and let the teams think, reflect, share, adapt and realise.
“What are the most important issues we need to address in order to achieve our new vision?” “What are our challenges?” “What is our purpose?” “What do we need to do better?” What do we need to connect better with customers and suppliers?”
This will initiate dialogue and is not only meaningful but will also generate ideas, innovation and buy-in.
How to engage in dialogue that will produce outcomes? The go-to team-working approach of brainstorming has never really worked. Why?
Why brainstorming doesn’t work
Brainstorming in a group may feel good (“kumbaya-effect”) . But there is enough research published that shows why it seldom achieves outstanding results.
- Domination — the vocal minority and those in positions of authority influence the direction of the outcome — especially if they speak first
- Social Pressure — fear of looking stupid, need to impress — results is mediocre ideas
- Bias to Conformity, Consensus — people in groups generally have a bias to agree with each other
- Production Blocking — you can’t listen and think at the same time. Ideas forming in your head disappear as you listen to another idea being explained.
- Recency effect — ideas generated tend to be influenced by the last thing people heard resulting in ideas being less and less creative or different
The good part of brainstorming is that it brings people together and produces shared ownership. In other words, while brainstorming may not be good at harnessing divergent thinking, it is good at producing convergence.
Using Liberating Structures tools to generate dialogue
With the objective of igniting meaningful dialogue, a useful workshop facilitation toolkit that I rely on is Liberating Structures. Liberating Structures is a collection of team exercises created and curated by Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless (www.liberatingstructures.com).
A combination of 2 of these structures helps us achieve the outcomes we are looking for in igniting dialogue while avoiding the pitfalls associated with brainstorming workshops.
1–2–4-All This is a great workshop format for ensuring that everyone is heard. It avoids the problems of groupthink by starting off generating ideas alone. This starting method has been used with great effectiveness in Design Sprint by Jack Knapp of Google Ventures who calls it “Thinking Alone, Together.” This approach allows more and better ideas to be generated faster. It creates automatic buy-in and ownership.
Individuals are then successively formed into 2’s, 4’s and then all together, to share their ideas generated. Using the ground rules of dialogue explained above, divergence leads to convergence as common themes, great unique ideas and points for latter consideration are identified.
Together with this structure, I use the next one to help generate enquiry and support the dialogue.
What, So What, Now What (W3) is a foundational liberating structure that is a helpful way to frame our minds to engage in enquiry and dialogue. This helps us consider the current state, its meaning, explore implications and paths forward. It takes inspiration from the Ladder of Inference by Chris Argyris, expert on learning in organizations.
It structures our thinking by breaking our experience down into three steps: First, generate observations, perspectives by emptying what’s in our heads..”What ?” Then explore meaning, assumptions and beliefs with “So, what?” and then explore alternative paths to action with “Now What?”
