June
2007
Innovation Tips
…ideas
for building collaborative innovation
=======================================
The Power of
Conversations
Conversations. We have dozens everyday and in all kinds of situations:
in the supermarket, in the gym, at home, and at work. They can concern the
weather, the food, a meeting or leadership. Conversations can be casual or
formal, social or functional. But this dichotomy can be misleading.
Conversations, especially the casual type, are often seen as a nice by-product beside the more formal dialogue and talk in which we clarify information or develop plans, in other words where we do the “real work.”
But can you still remember the formal meetings you sat in or conferences you went to that just did not seem to be as fertile and valuable as you expected? Who remembers, instead, the informal “chats” at the coffee machine or during lunch break that seemed to be so much more relevant, informative and insightful?
The advantage of conversations is that they provide opportunities of prospective sense-making. Sidestepping the formal (managerial) language of agreements and outputs, conversations give us a chance to be actively involved in responding to each other, going back and forth in the process of speaking and listening, freely exploring each other's meaning. This iterative and constructive process transforms the here and now while creating new visions of a possible future. As such, conversations should not be driven by a pre-set agenda; we need to let the conversation flow where it needs to go.
Sense-making is one of most important factors in successful cultural change. We know that one of the pitfalls of culture change is the human side of the implementation, whether it is a lack of commitment, lack of knowledge, resistance or fear. Various change models have tried to solve this problem by stressing the importance of letting go of the 'old', experiencing the loss, before being able to embrace the “new.” However, cultural change does not proceed according to a linear system.
Cultural change is a complex, living landscape of multiple layers where new ideas, insights, and values grow organically at various paces. As Patricia Shaw argues, because of its emergent nature, "change does not happen at important meetings or retreats; it happens continuously in and between the 'ordinary' conversations we participate in everyday" (p. 44). Change does not happen to us or despite us but through us. Through our ongoing conversations, we create stories of success and failure and we make sense of what was and what can be.
So, why not discover the potential of opportunistic improvisation by allowing meetings to be more like conversations, that is, messy, self-organizing, and yes, somewhat unpredictable?
Conversations are not just a medium for change, conversations are the change. The topics we address, the questions we ask, and the approach we take, determine the result. To paraphrase physicist Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle: "When we talk about the world, we change it".
Reference
Shaw, P.
(2002). Changing conversations in
organizations: A complexity approach to change.
KCR
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