The document discusses developing conversation capabilities to enable organizations to adapt to changing environments. It introduces the Change Conversation capability spectrum, which ranges from conversations around emergent social impact issues to more defined conversations around projects. It outlines various Change Conversation offerings, including diagnosing conversation needs, assessments, and coaching. It also discusses the Requisite Conversations Framework, which provides a model for organizational conversations. The framework differentiates different conversational domains and habitats. The document advocates for developing adaptive expertise over routine expertise through conversations. It discusses capabilities around various systems of concern, including creating adaptive specialists, advanced design skills, and design thinking coaching.

1. Change Conversation Capability Set
Creating the
Adaptive Enterprise
How to talk to get work done in a complex world
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2. Creating the Adaptive Enterprise
Design and facilitation of conversations that enable adaption
There is a journey all human enterprises must be on in the present
era: Away from inflexible, technical and reductionist ways of
working toward conversational capabilities that unlock
individual capabilities and contributions, adaptive
expertise, and new ways of engaging with stakeholders.
No matter where on the journey your enterprise lies, there is a
next step you can take that is grounded in the way people are
talking to get work done:
From
To
inflexible routine expertise
Adaptive expertise
Traditional marketing tools
Customer focussed design
Exclusively analytical models
Design thinking tools
Top down social programs
This Capability Statement outlines the spectrum of Change
Conversation capabilities to assist your journey towards
adaptiveness. The Change Conversation offers are outlined
in the flow chart on the next page. They range in a spectrum
from (left to right) the emergent challenges of social impact and
culture change through to the more concrete conversational
environments of specialist work .
Emergent social impact
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3. The Change Conversation© capability spectrum
CHANGE
CONVERSATION
The flow of this chart from left to right
is from the most large-scale and
complex conversational contexts for
social change to the more defined and
technical conversation arena of projects
#0
Change Conversation can express each of these
capability areas as a
•
Diagnostic/needs analysis capability
•
Coaching capability
•
Training program, or
•
Project support/action learning delivery
Conversational
Leadership - Out of
the Box
*Pre-requirements
Post-requirements
Whole of system
#C
Conversations for
a Concerned
Community
#D
#C3
Culture is
Conversations
#C2
Conversations
for Emergence
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#S
Conversation
System Design
#S3
#C1
Conversations
for Shaping
Strategy
#D3
#D2
#D1
Conversation
Design
KDP System
Design
Measures
Design
Thinking
Conversations
for a System of
Concern
#S2
#S1
Advanced
Design Skills
Creating
Adaptive
Specialists
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4. A theory of “conversation” that unlocks value during change
The Requisite Conversations® Framework
What is the burning platform for you? Why do you need to
change? The drivers are as various and as individual as your
enterprise, but they keep you awake.
Where do we need to change? Ah, there is a common theme. We
need to change our level of competency in talking to
accomplish purposes.
Change Conversation provides a map of the territory – the
Requisite Conversation framework - and then uses that map to
devise a targeted set of value propositions that directly address
specific elements in a spectrum of organisation needs.
Conversation Design won’t fix everything. But it will make an
extraordinary difference in some places where we are so badly
equipped to face the challenges coming at us. Change
Conversation’s operating model provides services in:
•
•
•
•
Diagnosing your context, challenges and opportunities
Conducting analysis of the conversation capability needs
Capability assessments of systems and personnel
Coaching key players in the approach and requisite
conversation capabilities
• Facilitating new conversation design and deployment
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The Requisite Conversations® Framework is a model for those
systems and structures that usually go unseen as we go about
talking to get work done.
It provides a way of distinguishing the key different domains of
organisational talk, and ensuring that the ways we talk are “fit
for purpose”. The Framework differentiates 3 major
conversational terrains, and 3 conversation habitats. Together
these set up different interaction systems – predictable
patterns of interaction between people and people, and
between people and artefacts, from CEO’s to call centres, from
contexts of collective impact to entrepreneurial endeavours.
Each of these conversational
interactions plays out at
every level of human
enterprise – from the
• conversations we have with
ourselves, to the
• conversations with the
materials of the situation,
and
• conversations we have with
others in order to
collaborate, align and
execute at scale.
We use the same conversation
structures again and again, in the
same way that trees use selfsimilar branching to support ever
larger expressions of their
identity.
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5. Change Conversation® - has a research driven core….
…the Requisite Conversation® Framework
The Requisite Conversation® Framework (RCF) provides a
scaffolding that covers all the conversations necessary to
purposeful human enterprise.
Mercator's projection of the earth
This is Africa –
home of the
worlds biggest
desert, and
longest river (the
Nile)
It shouldn’t surprise you that is more like a map than just 5
dot points or a 4 box matrix.
It’s a little bit tricky, but not that hard when you think of
other scaffolds we have learned to carry around…It
doesn’t take that long to name and recognise the main
spaces – and even to know some pretty major features.
The RCF integrates all the major theories of conversation you
would expect to encounter in a robust model. A partial
list of the sources that have fed this model development
are on the next page.
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This is the
―Generate‖ terrain
of conversations –
Design is one of
the main
conversation
habitats in here
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6. The Requisite Conversation framework is based on leading theory
and practice from around the world.
Including theory from:
….and reflective insight from:
Austin – How to do things with words, of course…
Beer – the possibilities for fractal cybernetic structures vitalised in
conversation
Cooren – the ways organisation can arise from conversation itself
Corballis – the fundamentally recursive character of human
cognition
Dejours – legitimising personal cognition at work
Gadamer – How questions open the way to new knowledge
Heidegger – how we are already inside conversations, and how to
move to new meanings
Jordan – Rich insights to discourse analysis that work at scale
Koestler – the original and best on creative conversation dynamics
Kuhn – for making sense of the conversations of science
Moore – seeing the patterns of conversation that we need in IT
Prigogine – how conversation can be the way enterprises take in
energy from their environment
Shotter – for naming some really important things about
constructivism
Stacey – for unpacking the organisational conversations in terms
of complexity theory. Yep, Shaw as well.
Wittgenstein – for living the turning point from abstraction to
conversation
Zimmerman and partners for worked examples of conversation in
healthcare complexity
Bioss – seeing conversation forms in stratified work systems
Buchanan - 4 orders of design and doors opened in my head
Edmondsen – a classic case of not seeing the obvious role of
conversation
Hoebeke – for the richest unfinished work I’ve ever read
Hoffer-Gittell – for having a powerful idea but no hypothesis
Liedtka – for locating strategy in its generative conversation habitat
Maturana – for fuelling the life of language in the mind of a
microbiologist
Poythress – ever emboldening me to accept a judeo-christian
worldview as a platform for reflection about speech
Reos (Adam Kahane) – fearlessly taking conversation into ever
larger spaces
Rittel – for naming features of conversation and never calling it
conversation
Sealy-Brown – for being my favorite ever interpreter of
conversational ethnography
Second Road – the unabashed power of heuristic thought
Weick, and Winograd, and Hutchens – for soaking yourselves in the
real talk that gets work done
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7. #O Out of the Box
Conversational Leadership – why it matters
There is no shortage of consensus that the world has changed and that
different conversations are needed.
“When strategy, processes, metrics, and behaviour are stable and relatively
unchanging, conversational skill is less important than simply following the
proven path. When those same things are dynamic, in a state of change,
conversational skill becomes crucial. This is when I got deeply interested in
conversations as a catalyst for change”*
You have probably heard of many enterprise initiatives that have a
“70% failure rate”. My list of literature citations for “70% failure
rates” includes 70% of new product launches, customer
relationship marketing programs, failure rates for KM IT
implementations(70-80%) , safety programs, quality
management programs, mergers and acquisitions and in
short, “70% all business change initiatives” – a feature
unchanged in 3 decades of HBR reporting on the latest
possibilities.
It turns out that failure rate has a very high correlation with every
time we do something that is “outside the box” – ie when we
attempt changes that require implementation by humans, not
just installation by technocrats. The evidence is in. Change
failures arise because we can’t work with attitudes and
behaviours, not because of inadequate budgets, poor resource
deployment or poor strategic conception. We can’t recoil from
“the soft stuff” – we have to press on into that territory until
we get it right.
In that environment, skill with the requisite conversations for
achieving purposes together has a do-or-die premium.
In this module of work, Change Conversation introduces the
need for change, the benefits for enterprise, and the key
transformations that will occur in our new conversations.
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*Susan Burnett, HP’s vice president of Workforce Development and Organization
Effectiveness: Hewlett-Packard Takes the Waste Out of Leadership, 2003
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8. #S Conversations for a System of Concern
How to improve conversation capabilities inside key adaptive enterprise systems
Searle (“What is Language?”) talks of us moving to “desire
independent possibilities for action “. This is the whole point of
producing specifications for things we want to make. We may
love houses, and even be the designer of our own, but once we
have translated our desire into specifications, the
implementation can be to a large extent independent of our
involvement. That is how we amplify our effect in the world.
The opposite move – away from the world of specifications,
project plans and schedules, has the opposite effect.
When we move “upstream” from the world of implementation to
consider what might be different, and how we could make that
arise, we are confronted with two primary contexts of
knowledge work:
• Contexts where we know what we want, but not yet how to get
it. In this case we need to build the conversations for a system
of concern.
• Contexts where the need is so widespread, or the community
of stakeholders so diffuse, that we cannot say with any
confidence that “we” even know what we want. In this case we
need to build the conversations of a concerned community (see
#C1-3)
Change Conversation discerns three key points of value we can
add to the conversations around systems of concern:
#S1 - Creating Adaptive Specialists
Understanding the key points of difference between the cognition
and disposition of routine expertise versus adaptive expertise.
#S2 – Providing advanced design skills
Expanding the professional capability of soft system designers and
their workplace conversations.
#S3 - Coaching in Design Thinking
Providing proven ability to develop the cognition and dispositions
essential to 3rd and 4th Order Design (Richard Buchanan), in
both craft designers and non-designers.
Once we move out of the Box, we face the challenge of creating
and living within adaptive enterprise systems – systems of
concern to us because of their necessary contribution to
accomplishing our collective purposes.
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9. #S1 Adaptive Specialism
Supporting specialists on the journey to an ever changing context
People are being “trained” every day – patterned by the systems you
place them. Will you enact people for adaptive expertise or
routine expertise? Sadly, too much work is done by those with
routine expertise . Adaptive expertise is essential in working with
complexity. Let Change Conversation help you do that.
How serious is the failure to address
adaptive expertise? It can be lethal.
Recall the beautiful steam locomotives
of1949, at the pinnacle of their
evolution? Of all the
large, sophisticated firms which built
them, none went on to build dieselelectric engines. Because they had the
wrong tools? No. Because they failed
to have the right conversations.
“Hatano and Inagaki (1986) distinguish between routine-expertise and
adaptive expertise. Routine expertise is mainly developed by
constant and repeating requirements whereas adaptive expertise
develops especially in the context of changing requirements.
According to that differentiation, routine expertise is valuable in
order to implement context-specific strategies whereas adaptive
expertise represents meta-strategies which transfer knowledge to
new situations or generate new knowledge. As a consequence, both
types of experience work under different conditions but are equally
important.”*
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One of the inadvertent consequences of the Box culture forged by
technical rationalism is the suffocation of knowledge sharing:
a)
because there is no need for it, and thus
b)
it becomes an overhead, but also
c)
because there are no conversation structures for it to
naturally occur.
And so as we move into a more volatile, plastic enterprise context,
we have no conversation skills to support our change
challenges.
So we can make rigid silos of our workplace knowledge, or we can
make windows and doors for the future. We all have an
inherent/tacit capacity for connectedness - by virtue of
experience in all the other parts of our life and work. We can
leverage that and cultivate connectedness. How? By the
conversations we inhabit, and the capabilities they enact. We
can install and encourage Conversations that
•
Ask why, and establish a connection to purpose
•
Use heuristics to pattern – ie build an increasing repertoire of
patterns and patterning cognition habits
•
Structurally design and install “requirements conversation”
behaviours so they enact leadership and adaptive specialism
*Badke-Schaub, Petra 2004 Strategies of experts in engineering design: between
innovation and routine behaviour Journal of Design Research 4 (2)
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10. #S2 Advanced Design Skills
Heuristic Thinking; Multiperspectivalism; The Design practice Ecosystem
How can designers continue to be physicians for those who lack
innovation if they do not immunise themselves against their
diseases, or nourish their own distinctives. Change the
Conversation.
There are many skilled design practitioners increasingly applying
themselves to soft systems – crafters of personas and user pathway
illustrations, facilitators of concept generation, affinity diagrams,
card-sorts and insights. We want to extend and enrich its capability
based on our experience since 1991. David’s expertise in
conversation systems and conversational cognition is best
leveraged in two niches of enrichment of design practice:
• Skills for the practitioner: Heuristics & Multiperspectivalism
• Skills for entrepreneurial practice groups: Moving to the Design
Ecosystem
Both are directed towards deepening the designer’s capacity to
deliver on their distinctive contribution while caught in a dialectical
tension between:
• Execution oriented business, and
• Ever more complex and soft system challenges.
‘If a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left
standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a
revolution destroys a government, but the systematic patterns of
thought that produced that government are left intact, then those
patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There’s
so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.’*
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*Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, (1974 p92)
Skills for the practitioner: Heuristics & Multiperspectivalism
Design as a cognition is a habitat sandwiched between two others
– that of interpretation & meaning making, (the hermeneutical
habitat), and that of implementation , execution, and
performance. For most designers, their skill set has been
formed in driving upstream to escape the gravitational pull of
analysis and methodology, and they have no shortage of
awareness about the skills that can be drawn from that
environment. But there is real wisdom to be had from the
world of language, which designers glimpse when , for example,
they see the parallels between “reframing” and “renaming”.
Design practitioners dealing with softer and more complex systems
can substantially benefit from learning some tools from the
world of language. Two approaches with proven leverage for
design are the use of heuristics, and of perspectivalism.
Skills for entrepreneurial practice groups: Moving to the Design
Ecosystem
Design capability arises out of a context. It is either nurtured or
sucked down to less capable, less innovative expression by its
business context. Work in upstream design problems – as done
by designers of soft systems – cannot be managed in the way a
Web or graphic design studio might manage work. If you want a
powerful design practice ready for higher order design work,
you cannot ignore the power and resilience of social systems.
Key conversations of your workplace must be redesigned.
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11. #S3 Design Thinking for the design of intangibles
Getting traction in the conversations that are the substrate of ―Design Thinking‖
Design Thinking is the application of the developed human
disposition for design to intangible subject matters –
such as a corporations, customer experiences or business
systems. It is based on the assumption that the thinking
processes used to create physical products are insightful
for people grappling with intangibles like strategy.
Furthermore, the world of business and organizations is
a world of people and actions, and great designers are
renowned for their sensitivity to human needs and
context. So how do we harness this cognition?
Designers working with tangibles employ (aware or
unaware) certain modes of cognition as they proceed
from ideation to a physical product . People grappling
with intangibles like ‘wicked problems’ have intuited
some analogy between those processes and their own
work and asked :
a) How does a designer think when she works with wood,
etc.?
b) What do those ways of thinking have to offer to those
grappling with intangibles, such that we can talk of
“design thinking “?
That in turn leads to asking:
a) What ways of thinking does a person working on
intangibles need that designers of tangibles don’t need?
b) What are the unique dimensions of thinking provoked
by working on intangibles?
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The answer is that Design Thinking takes place in a distinctive set of
conversations – “conversations with the materials of the situation”*. This
requires a distinctive development of capabilities in design cognition,
different to those of the craft designer. It is a different way of thinking,
feeling and doing in the world.
The Change Conversation offer is based on in depth experience in discerning
and developing the distinctive requisite conversational cognition and
capabilities in design thinking. We conduct needs analysis for Design Thinking
capability, and provide coaching using reflective practice to develop
capabilities in those progressing to the demands of 3rd & 4th order design whether from previous work in craft design or other disciplines entirely.
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12. #D Conversation Design
A new discipline and some key adaptive applications
In the first trio of offers (#S1-3), we focus on hot spots in enterprise capability
to run the conversations necessary to adaptive systems. In the third trio
(#C1-3) we focus on how to proceed before we even understand what our
requirements are – as is often the case in increasingly complex social
contexts. In this trio (#D1-3) we turn our attention to the use of the
Requisite Conversation framework and other Change Conversation
tools - such as the Knowledge Development Pathway® (KDP) - to actually
design systems and conversations.
“The designer who knows the role of conversations in shaping future
reality and who has developed skills in facilitative leadership has
also gained power over those who do not have such knowledge
and skills.” Simpson, R. and Gill, R. Design for social systems:
Change as Conversation E:CO Issue Vol. 10 No. 1 2008 pp. 39-49
We cover 3 specific approaches to the design of conversations in
and for enterprise systems:
#D1 – Conversation and Metrics
A focus area called “Don’t Shoot the Messenger” – breaking free of
behaving as though data “just is”, understanding how
measurement works in complex systems, and how wrong
measurements extinguish adaptive capability.
#D2 – System Design based on the Requisite Conversations®
How to actually approach the task of system design through the
lens of the necessary and sufficient component conversations
for missional knowledge development.
#D3 – A new Framework and Discipline - Conversation Design
What does it mean to actually design conversations. Not just to run
a facilitated event, but to create new and satisfying interactions
within human enterprises from a disciplinary platform?
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13. #D1 From digits to words – Conversation and Metrics
―Averages can be misleading—on average, everyone in the world has one testicle...‖
“Grown-ups love figures. When you tell them that you have made a new
friend, they never ask you any questions about essential matters. They
never say to you “What does his voice sound like? What games does he
love best? Does he collect butterflies?” Instead they demand “How old is
he? How many brothers has he? How much does he weigh? How much
money does his father make?” Only from these figures do they think they
have learned anything about him." ––Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little
Prince
The “McKinsey Maxim” has had a long reign:
“What can’t be measured cant be managed.”
Sadly in a complex, high velocity world, the opposite becomes true.
What can’t be measured is all we have time to manage – all the rest is
what we see in the rear view mirror. If we only give credence what we
can measure, we become prisoners of our past.
As a manager observed:
“I would be in trouble if the accounting reports held
information I did not already have.”
But there is a deeper issue too.
Applying quantitative measures assumes Gaussian distributions;
whereas emergent environments are characterised by power laws
and Pareto distributions. Attention to quantification will actually
extinguish emergence. This is why the 70% phenomenon occurs (#0),
and why we have to shift attention from Systems of Concern to the
Concerned Community when working in complex contexts (#S1-3 vs.
#C1-3).
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"The most dangerous, hideously misused and thought-annihilating
piece of technology invented in the past 15 years has to be the
electronic spread sheet. Every day, millions of managers boot up
their Lotus 1-2-3s and Microsoft Excels, twiddle a few numbers and
diligently sucker themselves into thinking they're forecasting the
future. In truth, number-crunching with spreadsheets is like
computationally pumping iron: You bulk up data but do virtually
nothing for your conceptual quickness or flexibility. It's an
intellectual exercise that stretches the fingers more than the
mind.“*
So Change Conversation asks:
• What is the conversation AROUND the numbers?
How do we go from personal insight to collective action?
• What is the conversation AFTER the numbers?
How do we use the new insights to make a better business
systemically?
• What is the conversation INSTEAD OF the numbers?
When are quantification methods toxic to the very purpose we
are pursuing?
“Don’t Shoot the Messenger” is our capability focus area for
conversations about measurement– breaking free of behaving
as though data “just is”, understanding how measurement
works in complex systems, and how wrong measurements
extinguish adaptive capability.
* Little has changed since this was written in 1991 – now nearly 40 years since
the spread of electronic spreadsheets Michael Schrage Spreadsheets:
Bulking up on data Los Angeles Times, 1991
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14. #D2 - How to build sustainable systems for human enterprises
System design with the Knowledge Development Pathway® (KDP)
Combine these two ideas:
1. The Requisite Conversation framework provides a map to the
conversations of purposeful human activity systems.
2. Organisations are constituted by the conversations they hold:
“Conversations are the way workers discover what they know, share it with their
colleagues, and in the process create new knowledge for the organization.
In the new economy, conversations are the most important form of work ...
so much so that the conversation is the organization.” Alan Webber
“In fact, thoughtful conversations around questions that matter might be
the core process in any company…”
Juanita Brown and David Isaacs
We then have an opportunity – to design organisations. Not around
accidents of industrial history, nor old forms and structures, but around
the conversations necessary to get the work done. So Change
Conversation developed the Knowledge Development Pathway® - a
way of designing business systems based on the core conversations that
need to be held to realise a new purpose. We ask ourselves “What is the
operating system we would like to have in the world?” In particular, we
ask what would its Mission be? When the product of our efforts is
performing, what do we want it to be doing? And proceed from there.
This provides two great opportunities: to design systems that have all the
necessary parts to be viable; and to create frames for coordinating roles
where the organisations are constantly virtual.
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“…functional departments, often the main channels through which
information is shared, are being broken apart…In their place are cross
functional, team-based organisations that are focused on meeting the
needs of a particular customer or product, but often not designed to
share knowledge effectively across the enterprise. The configuration of
units that generate and apply knowledge is dynamic. Much work is
done through temporary systems…. Given these trends… carefully
controlled channelling of knowledge and information cannot work.
Knowledge management must transcend organisational units and
create a flexible and vibrant knowledge exchange.” Strategies for the
Knowledge Economy: From rhetoric to reality S A Morhman, DL
Feingold World Economic Forum Report, 2000
Against this backdrop, Change Conversation sees value in, for
example, fast building of planning systems for temporary alliances.,
or missional alignment of case-based teams such as health delivery
teams.
Intentionally
build a
system
3
2
4
5
6
1
A Mission
in the
world
Sustain and renew
our requirements
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15. #D3 – Designing Conversations
Working with the Requisite Conversation framework and doing Conversation Design
“Designers are traditionally identified not so much by the kinds of
problems they tackle is by the kinds of solutions they produce. Thus
industrial designers are so-called because they create products for
industrial and commercial organisations whereas interior
designers are expected to create interior spaces... This is to some
extent the result of the range of technologies understood by the
designer.” Lawson, Brian 2005 How Designers Think: The Design
Process Demystified 4th Ed. Architectural Press p. 53
So what then are the technologies for “Conversation Design?” It
helps to think of the parallel patterns we are aware of in:
• Grammar as being the system and structure of putting words
and sentences together in intelligible language;
• Logic as the laws of putting things together for verification.
So Conversation is the laws of putting people and “texts” together
for the enactment of purpose.
“Conversation” is the system and structure of language for
coordinating purposeful human enterprise.
Conversation design, then, is the art of crafting conversations
(assemblies of interactions between people and “texts”) to
more effectively achieve a stated purpose.
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To do Conversation design we need a model for how conversational
events, (speech acts, ways of talking, discourses and dialogs, etc)
vary and offer distinctive cognitive features and contributions on
our journey towards purpose.
The Requisite Conversations® framework provides a heuristic
scaffolding for all the necessary conversations involved in the
pursuit of purpose in human activity systems. It distinguishes
between major cognitive “terrains” and nested, recursive
conversational “habitats”. It enables mapping of what is,
accumulation of extensive, discussable knowledge about situated
conversation dynamics, and the intentional crafting of new forms of
human and human-artefact interactions.
In all human endeavour, refinements in our methods of recognition
have been turned into opportunities to be more proactive and
productive in our environment. This ranges from being able to tell
dolphins from sharks to the more sophisticated enabling that arises
from a periodic table of the elements. In the latter case, the
framework unlocks our ability to see wide and deep patterns, and
unlocks a “hybrid vigor” in relation to other disciplines.
Because the act of talking to coordinate our human activity in
systems is so foundational to purposeful enterprise, the range of
applications from the Requisite Conversations® insight is extensive
and kaleidoscopic. What enterprise are you pursuing that could
benefit from Change Conversation?
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16. #C – Conversations for a Concerned Community
Designing the quality of the conversations in & for a concerned community
“(The)premise that (all our)work settings are language communities
brings us to a corollary premise: all leaders are leading language
communities. Though every person, in any setting, has some
opportunity to influence the nature of the language, leaders have
exponentially greater access and opportunity to shape, alter, or
ratify the existing language rules.... We have a choice whether to
be thoughtful and intentional about this aspect of our leadership..
to make much of the opportunity, or little… to be responsible or
not for the meaning of our leadership as it affects our language
community. But we have no choice about whether we are or are
not language leaders. The only question is what kind of language
leaders we will be.“ *
Kegan & Lahey had in view incorporated contexts, but what they
say applies to all who aspire to lead change. Change and
leadership both take place in language. The more diffuse,
diverse and complex the arena for desired change, the more all
we have is the way we construct and lead conversations. We
find ourselves outside the arenas where power is vested in
owners or even authorities. This is the realm where we must
address the community of concern, because it is in their
interactions that possibilities will arise.
Between the drivers
• to ever larger social interventions (eg the work of Kahane at the
level of nation forming),
• to the exploding role of social media, and
• to the perfect storm of velocity of change, complexity of
interactions and plasticity of arrangements in human activity
systems,
there is an unprecedented amount of generative effort going into
new conversation forms.
In this environment, Change Conversation models provide
insight and a pathway in:
#C1 - Conversations for “Shaping Strategies”
Even corporations eventually face open systems – ones they
cannot control, but can shape by their contributions. How do they
talk together to do that?
#C2 - Conversations to create and maintain Concerned
Communities
A capacity to self-consciously call out, develop and benchmark a
capability/maturity journey for skilled participants in the
conversations of emergence
#C3 – Conversational interventions for Culture Change
Conversations are the fabric of culture. What does this mean and
where can we leverage this insight?
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*Kegan, R. & Lahey, L.L. How the Way We Talk Can
Change the Way We Work: Seven Languages for
Transformation John Wiley & Sons 2001 p8
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17. #C1 - Conversations for Shaping Strategy
Conversations for the ―Power of Pull‖
If we continue to use the mindsets we have learned in traditional
language of strategy, we will continue to create closed systems
that are poor subsets of what we hope to create new in the
world. Shaping Strategy requires change in ourselves toward
adaptive dispositions, it requires design thinking to envisage its
core componentry, and it requires new conversations beyond
the organisation for its possibilities to be realised.
“An organization’s results are determined
through webs of human commitments,
born in webs of human conversations.”
Fernando Flores
Pursuing a Shaping Strategy is not a
technical choice – it involves reworking the
sociology of our organisation, its
interactions, and what it counts as
knowledge. These dimensions are all
carried in our enterprise conversations,
and require Change Conversation.
Shaping strategy is exegeted at length in The Power of Pull: How
Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion (Basic
Books; April 2010) by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown,
and Lang Davison
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18. #C2 Before you know what you want….
Shaping the Concerned Community: Conversations for Emergence
Like Seel, 2006, I believe that:
“while emergence is neither predictable nor controllable there are
some factors which predispose an organisation towards emergent
change. I will also argue that these factors can be ‘tuned’ in such a
way that not only is the emergence of new patterns made more
likely but also that these patterns will be similar to the patterns
which are desired by the members of the organisation.”
Understanding the basic structures of conversation means we can
provide “selective pressure toward a self-organising criticality”.
What is the constant material that is present for us to attend to,
and apply selective pressure to?
Q. Where does the selective pressure on biological systems express
itself and get preserved/ propagated /perpetuated?
A. In the DNA
Q. What is the DNA of a social system?
A. It’s conversations.
Q. What is conversation?
A. Conversation is the coordinating systems and structures in
language that are (often unconsciously) active when people work
together toward a purpose.
Change Conversation uses the Requisite Conversations
framework to navigate complexity, recognising the fractal
recursions of human conversations even when the “phase space”
is at its most tenuous.
“…conversation constitutes the only non-manipulatory mode of
apprehending truth which does not pre-determine what counts as
true in advance.“ Anthony Thiselton
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19. #C3 - Conversation, which IS culture…
Culture Change insights from conversation theory
“Your organization’s culture is nothing more than what individuals say to
each other and what they think to themselves. When you shift the
conversations, you shift the culture.”*
“Culture” is a word surrounded in mystery, myth and mystique. But
the answer to “What is a culture” is not so hard. It is the “nature” of a
human enterprise – the way it betrays its deepest drivers and its real
motivations, irrespective of its espoused image. Corporations have
“bodies” and they have “characters”.
Nor is the question “Where do we find the roots of culture that we
might change it?” so hard to answer. All the quotes in the adjacent
column say the same thing: our culture is our conversations. As with
humans, character – culture, is formed by the conversations we hold
value, and participate in.
“Organisation culture is the emergent result of the continuing negotiations
about values, meanings and proprieties between the members of that
organisation and with its environment. In other words, culture is the result
of all the daily conversations and negotiations between the members of an
organisation. They are continually agreeing (sometimes explicitly, usually
tacitly) about the ‘proper’ way to do things and how to make meanings
about the events of the world around them. If you want to change a culture
you have to change all these conversations—or at least the majority of
them. And changing conversations is not the focus of most change
programmes, which tend to concentrate on organisational structures or
reward systems or other large-scale interventions.”.**
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It is impossible for us to have an exhaustive map of culture. It is vital
for us to have a sufficient map of how to access the core culture forming conversations. Change Conversation proposes a model for
the conversational terrain of culture that makes cultural interventions
via the way we talk discussable and doable.
Artwork with apologies/thanks to Culture_by_AagaardDS and Andre Malraux
*Stephen Shapiro, Innovate the Way You Innovate, European Business Review
**Seel, R. (2006) ‗Emergence in Organisations
Actually setting about changing a culture may turn out to be quite
“easy”, or very hard. But it sure helps to know where to look.
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20. What’s behind the Requisite Conversation® framework ?
The story of the cliff path
If you go out onto any headland jutting out from a coast line that is
within regular reach of a number of people, you will find a strange
phenomenon. There will be a path to the headland. Not a paved
path, but a packed earth, grass-bare, slightly meandering track, that
in all likelihood, unless mud deters you, you too will walk along. Your
behavior is understandable. The path now represents the clearest,
most snake-revealing, least shoe-messing way to the destination. But
how did the path arise?
Well, not because 1000 people tramped the earth into submission in
a conga line. Nor because a different 100 people, in fortuitously short
succession, all slavishly tracked the previous blades of broken grass
and walked the line of the previous traveler, doing so in sufficient
volumes and frequency that they impressed a path, an intentional
legacy for future wayfarers.
No. The path arose simply because people are made that way.
Confronted with the same terrain – the same cognitive-behavioral
problem, however subliminal - their proprioceptors and problem
solving minds traversed staggeringly similar pathways. So
staggeringly similar, that in the whole breadth of the headland, and
not only on this headland but on every other piece of regularly
traversed landscape all points north and south of here, a pathway,
often only centimeters wide, will emerge as a legacy of the
programmed footsteps of humankind. And once found, the path is
obvious. That is, it is easy to see. It feels right – you have to choose to
leave it. And it is the path of least resistance – the way that provides
a rhythm to your feet that demands the least attention to itself.
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The Requisite Conversation framework is based on another
pathway. A pathway we traverse with equal predictability,
leaving trails of similar “obviousness”, once we have chosen to
notice them. It is a “knowledge development pathway®” – the
pathway we traverse whenever we want to make something new
in the world. From a new song to a new sewing machine; from a
new relationship to a new space project, humans traversing the
terrain of a social space, a creative expression, or a technical
pursuit will beat out a familiar path, for the simple reason that
they are following the most natural contours of the mind. This is
the pathway of “conversational cognition”.
The image is of a foot worn path on Mount Coolum in Queensland, Australia
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21. Change Conversation
Bringing the new conversations for purposeful human enterprises
David is a specialist in the new ways we need to talk to get work
done… which often turn out to be old ways we have forgotten.
He provides insight, capabilities and skills transfer for the new
conversations of enterprise
David Jones earned two postgraduate degrees in the science of
conversation – hermeneutics and speech act theory – and has
been growing practice-based expertise in conversation design
for over 25 years. From 2005 -2010 he provided leadership in
conversation practices to the design and strategy staff of 2nd
Road, and now continues to consult to his own client base.
Use the contact details below to explore further with
David, or simply to request a paper cited here that is of
particular interest to you.
Change Conversation
M: +61 (0)4 29 39 49 84P: +612 4369 1866
F: +612 4369 1866
L: http://au.linkedin.com/pub/david-jones/12/a05/25b
W: http://justknowledge.com.au/
Changing the ways people talk to get work done.
New work? New conversation! Change Conversation.
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Commercial in Confidence 2010
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