This blog post is the third in a series of three. In the first, “The Most Important Knowledge KM is Ignoring,” I explain that the way we talk in organizations prevents us from solving the most challenging problems we face. In the second, “An Organization That Changed Its Culture by Implementing Dialogue,” I offer a brief case study of an organization that has implemented dialogue at every level. In this third post, I spell out the promise that dialogue holds.
In a world of increasing complexity, where there are no simple or obvious answers, dialogue brings a ray of hope to address the many troubling issues we face that do not lend themselves to resolution through scientific study or big data. In this post I am primarily focused on how dialogue can address our organizations’ adaptive issues, whether those organizations are for-profit, non-profit or governmental. Most of us spend as much as one-third of our lives inside an organization, so organizations must be places that promote well-being, including autonomy, mastery and purpose (Daniel Pink) of both employees and managers. Dialogue offers a pathway for organizations to achieve that goal by drawing on the understanding of all of its members to address the adaptive issues the organization faces.
The promise of dialogue is that if we can jointly make sense of the issues we face, we can find a way forward. Too often, when we come together to talk, we each arrive with our own ideas about how to address an issue, and much of our taking together is about convincing others that our view should prevail. Of course, the problem is that each of us has a limited perspective on any issue – limited to our own experience and knowledge base. When we can collectively make sense, new possibilities that no one could have conceived of on their own, emerge. Karl Weick once said “Small improvements in seeing can occur when individuals enlarge their personal repertoires of what they can do. But larger improvements in seeing should occur when people with more diverse skills, experience, and perspectives think together in a context of respectful interaction.”
Coming together in dialogue involves:
- a respectful relationship with those with whom we are talking
- acknowledgement that each person has a right to their own truth and has the intellectual capacity to make sense of their world
- a willingness to examine our own thinking process to understand how we have reached the assumptions we hold
- a willingness to hold our assumptions lightly
- the courage and humility to speak our own truth
- the acknowledgement that there can be no predetermined outcome of a dialogue
- the recognition that our talking together must support a moral purpose, as well as a practical one.
The list of attributes reveals that dialogue is about how we relate to others and our willingness to acknowledge our own limitations, including our blindness to our own assumptions and our unawareness of our implicit basis. I suggest that dialogue is not so much a difference in technique or skills as it is a difference in relationship and humility. I seriously question whether more technique is necessary. There is already a great deal of technique that relates to giving clear feedback, asking clarifying questions, sharing airtime, paraphrasing to check out what is understood, and so on. That is not to say that people always make use of the techniques that are available to them. But it is to say, that even when they do, using a technique may not change their intent to manipulate or control. People may have altered their words but not the nature of their relationship with others.
I acknowledge these seven attributes are a “big ask” of any group. They require each of us to take responsibility for how our organizations function. We accept that responsibility by creating opportunities for, and participating in dialogue, not just with those with whom we agree, but also with those with whom we disagree.