Conversation is critical to learning in an organization. Of course, it is not the only way employees learn, they also learn through reading and their own experience, but without open, honest, conversation, learning, and therefore the ability for an organization to change, is severely reduced. But employees often refrain from speaking up and voicing new ideas to avoid contradicting a superior or embarrassing a colleague. Sometimes they remain silent because they don’t want to risk looking ignorant or coming across as a know-it-all. But while keeping quiet can work for self-protection, it does little for group problem solving and helping an organization avoid serious mistakes.
I wrote about this problem and about and a solution in Speaking Up 101, an article I published in the Ivy Business Journal. In that article, I describe the most well researched, and internationally recognized conversation skill set that was developed by Chris Argyris at Harvard. It is the skill set I taught analysts at the Defense Intelligence Agency and is the subject of this article where I describe the learning process and the outcomes that we were able to achieve.
I hope you will have time to read the whole article, but as a sneak preview, here are charts of before and after analytic teams learned the Argyris skills of Speaking Up
- Analysts’ Actions Before Learning the Skill Set
- After Analysts Learned the Skill Set
The first column of the second chart mirrors the situations in the first chart because such conditions are a normal part of group life. What is different in the second chart is the intent of the speaker (second column). In the first chart, the intent is to win or to save embarrassment, while in the second chart the intent is to learn. The actions in the third column follow from that intent, in that team members seek to understand others’ points of view as well as actively advocating for their own. They also stay open to the idea that they may not yet have all the information about the issue. The last column illustrates the way the revised actions increased the knowledge gained by the team.
If these ideas are of interest please join us at the Conversational Leadership Workshop September 20-22 at the Elvetham Hotel in Fleet, near London, where participants will have an opportunity to learn the skill set and practice it over the three days.#conversation matters,#KMers, KM