Fostering dialogue in your team
According to Isaacs, dialogue is more than two people conversing, it is the "art of thinking together." Photo by You X Ventures on Unsplash
It's relatively easy to get a sense of the quantity of conversations in a team once you pay attention to it. A trickier question is...
How do we assess the quality of conversations?
It's a good question to be asking ourselves and our teams. The inherent subjectivity of the question makes the question difficult to answer and there is certainly more than one right answer to this. One method of assessing the quality of the conversations is to use a framework developed by William Isaacs - Dialogue.
For lots of people, dialogue is simply people talking. According to Isaacs, dialogue is more than two people conversing, it is the "art of thinking together" and is about creating meaning together. In many ways, it is about creating a shared understanding that could not be achieved independently by the thinkers. For that reason, it is a great way to think about how teams are engaging with each other. After all, the intent of teaming is to produce something together that can't be done by the members separately.
Isaacs' model of dialogue distinguishes different types of conversation:
Dialogue
In these conversations, we can explore stories, make new insights allow new possibilities to emerge
Skillful conversation
In these conversations, we share our rational and considered thoughts in a respectful way
Controlled discussion
A competitive exchange of viewpoints (not necessarily based on rational data
Debate
The desire to win an argument
If you look at these types of conversations, you can make your own mind up about which types are more likely to be helpful in the teams that you work in. It is worth knowing that a key choice point in a conversation moving up or down that spectrum is whether we suspend or defend the views that we take into our conversations. It is challenging to achieve, but if we can suspend our desire to defend our own perspective, we can open up different levels of conversation and possibilities in our teams.
Suspending is one of four skills for achieving dialogue. Without it, though the others are less effective. I'll explore the other three next week. Some questions for you to consider this week:
Where would you place the BEST conversations in your teams using these criteria?
Where would you place the WORST conversations in your teams using these criteria?
How can you role model more of the better conversations?