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Conversational Leadership: Thinking Together for a Change
Juanita Brown and Thomas Hurley speak to Connecting for Change in their exploratory article Conversational Leadership: Thinking Together for a Change written for Connecting for Change as well as in the Kosmos Journal article, “Multi-Generational Collaboration: Shaping Tomorrow, Together” in which she, and her co-authors, David Isaacs and Samantha Tan point to the key role that intergenerational dialogue and engagement can play in addressing the critical issues of our time. Samantha, a dynamic young leader from Singapore, will be co-hosting a World Café dialogue with Juanita at our opening session.
By Juanita Brown and Thomas J. Hurley
The World Café Community Foundation
The real voyage of discovery lies not in
seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. --Marcel Proust
As leaders, we have an unprecedented opportunity to leverage our power as hosts and conveners of strategic conversations to support pioneering efforts that integrate traditional investments in key strategic issues (the what) with simultaneous investment in key process innovations (the how) as we seek new paths forward.
In so doing, we will be drawing on and extending lessons being learned over the last twenty years in both the for-profit and non-profit worlds. Research and “best practice” experience in every field and sector have consistently demonstrated that collaborative outcomes and measurable results are more likely to occur when we bring the voices of all key stakeholders to bear on critical issues using the most powerful face-to-face and online processes for effective engagement available in order to access collective intelligence and guide wise action.
These elements are represented in Figure One, which offers a simple framework that can be applied at several levels—from the design of single meetings or the development of multi-faceted programs to long-term, large-scale strategic change initiatives. Let’s look briefly at each element in turn. As you review the framework, consider the impact if any one of the elements is missing or dealt with ineffectively.
Figure One
Both individuals and organizations are naturally passionate about those issues that impact them or those they care about. However, a primary orientation toward issues and problems alone often neglects a simultaneous focus on and investment in the architectures of engagement for thinking together that are required to address critical issues. These include a sophisticated assessment of the system of stakeholders who are impacted by (or who impact) the issue, the creation of personal invitational processes to attract relevant stakeholders to the table, the choice of conversational processes appropriate to the issue, the framing of strategic questions at the heart of the issue, and the development of the convening and hosting skills required to assure that that issue-oriented strategic dialogues with key stakeholders across traditional boundaries yield constructive results.
Without a focus on critical issues and questions, there’s no reason to act.
All key stakeholders
In today’s increasingly complex, interdependent world, understanding and addressing critical issues and questions requires a multiplicity of perspectives. Yet the discovery of shared purpose, the emergence of collective intelligence, and the crafting of effective strategies for action don’t happen by accident. Bringing key stakeholders with diverse perspectives together often leads to polarized debate, chaos, or a proliferation of ideas without the ability to choose and act.
In my own thirty-five years of experimentation and practice, I’ve discovered that effective strategy evolution depends on creating a rich web of conversations that cuts across previously isolated knowledge sets and creates unexpected combinations of collective thought and insight. The cross-pollination of diverse perspectives among key stakeholders is essential for innovative solutions to reveal themselves and for mutual ownership of proposed ways forward to be achieved.
Without engaging key stakeholders, there is little chance of breakthrough thinking or finding innovative paths forward on critical issues.
Processes for effective engagement
Since the 1980s we have witnessed the development and skillful use of highly effective process technologies for dialogue and engagement, including The World Café, Appreciative Inquiry, Open Space, Future Search, and many others, along with increasingly sophisticated online architectures for collaboration. These approaches enable people in groups of all sizes, in any field, to connect in more generative ways, collaborate and think together across traditional boundaries, transform intractable conflict, discover shared purpose, and create innovative solutions to critical issues that draw on the contributions of all.
Developing a deeper understanding of current and emerging processes for effective engagement—both face-to-face and online—and integrating them into each of our own leadership capacities is one of the most powerful strategic choices we as leaders can make to increase our effectiveness and achieve desired results in these troubled times.
Without the skilled use of processes for effective engagement and thinking together, dialogue often devolves into diatribe and solutions are owned by those with the loudest voices or the most power.
Purpose / strategic intent
Designing powerful architectures for engaging all key stakeholders in thinking together around critical issues requires one additional element—purpose or strategic intent. It serves as a touchstone for every aspect of engagement, at every level of scale.
Clarity of purpose or strategic intent determines which issues or opportunities are important and which questions matter. It helps us, as leaders, discover who the relevant stakeholders are and choose which processes will support the type of engagement needed to fulfill that purpose. Clarity of intent is the “north star” that serves as the attractor around which effective approaches can be crafted.
Without clarity of purpose and strategic intent, issues remain vague, stakeholders become frustrated, and engagement is aimless.
Collective intelligence and wise action
Experience has shown that designs for innovation that integrate these elements—critical issues, clarity of purpose, all key stakeholders, and processes for effective engagement—can reliably evoke collective intelligence and catalyze wise action. Creativity, commitment, and compassion increase as people discover their potential to collaborate and think together in order to shape positive futures that reflect the contributions of all.
Conversely, familiar obstacles arise when any ingredient of the framework is missing or poorly executed. We experience meetings that are “all process”…dialogues in which polarized positions lead to paralyzing debate…or narrow consensus among a small group that doesn’t represent the whole or have access to critical information because important perspectives are missing.
In short, some of the most strategic work of our era may be integrating powerful process technologies like the World Café and other architectures for engagement into the efforts of leaders, groups, and ordinary citizens working on critical issues for positive change. When all elements in this simple framework are skillfully integrated—and when both conveners and participants possess the capacity to host as well as participate in transformative conversations—we will significantly increase the likelihood of bringing forth a world that reflects our highest aspirations.
As the pioneering evolutionary biologist, Humberto Maturana points out, “our human existence is one in which we can live whatever world we bring about in our conversations, even if it is a world that finally destroys us as the kind of being that we are.”
Without collective intelligence and wise action, the future of our human community and our beloved planet remain imperiled.
Innovative capacity development
In today’s rapidly changing world, leadership and capacity development are needed more than ever. An expanded concept of leadership development is needed—one that encompasses capacities for:
- Thinking systemically and recognizing key interdependencies
- Designing innovative change initiatives that call on our deeper human connections across traditional boundaries.
- Fostering sustained and increasingly inclusive collaborative effort
- Hosting and harvesting multi-stakeholder, multi-sector strategic dialogues using creative architectures of engagement which foster authentic conversation and committed action.
- Nurturing partnerships for innovation
- Cultivating the individual capacities for listening, love, compassion, and forgiveness required for success in all of these ventures.
These capacities and others are an integral part of the conversational leadership framework offered here. While its elements may seem obvious, most leaders from organizations in all three sectors have not been trained to see, think, or work from this lens.
Without leadership capacities that rise to today’s complex systemic challenges, we rely on limited approaches from an earlier era that, at best, are no longer adequate and at worst can derail our best intentions.
Conclusion—and questions for reflection
We offer this initial exploratory framework for our mutual consideration as one way to help leverage the financial, social, and intellectual capital needed to meet the challenges of the 21st century. Organizational leaders might use this framework to design and support pioneering initiatives that bring together key stakeholders around critical issues in order to form new partnerships that leverage financial resources and build social capital across diverse communities. Connecting for Change is a wonderful example of this approach.
We’d like to offer the following seed questions for further exploration. Given the current environment in which leaders in both the for-profit and non-profit sectors are operating:
- What questions and possibilities does reviewing this framework evoke?
- If key leaders were to adopt this lens, what difference might it make for:
- How you introduced “conversational leadership” within your own organization?
- How you approached convening and hosting multi-stakeholder, multi-sector conversations across traditional boundaries around key strategic issues and concerns?
- How you approached leadership development?
- How you approached partnering with grantees (if you are a philanthropist or a foundation) or with others whom you think are important to creating valued outcomes?
- In what ways might applying these perspectives influence your own leadership?
- Where might there be opportunities for these ideas to explored and refined?
- Given the current environment, what’s possible now that might not have been possible earlier?
Submitted by Juanita Brown on January 22, 2009 - 10:36am.