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Season 2, Episode 6

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Leading in Conversation
Leading in Conversation
Season 2, Episode 6
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Shownotes

Peter Block’s three characteristics of powerful questions: personal, ambiguous and provoke anxiety.

Adaptive/ technical problems – Heifetz & Linsky

Steve Cuss : Managing leadership anxiety, theirs and yours.

Jim Wilder, neuropsychologist

Kegan and Leahey “Immunity to Change” framework – one explanation

David Erlichman, Impact Networks

Contact Dano: Dan@focusdconsulting.us 

Transcript

Kate: Hello, and welcome back to Leading in Conversation, to our sixth episode of season 2. And we’re really happy to have another guest with us today, Dano, and I will let Nelis introduce him to you.

Nelis: Well, I will actually leave most of the introduction to himself, Kate. But it’s kind of nice to show the connection. Dano and I have gotten to know each other in a leadership training course and really connected on a number of fronts around leadership experiences and leadership hopes and also collaboration between organisations. And we wanted to make that concrete by doing leadership mentoring together. So we had a cohort of leaders that we mentored jointly, and it was great fun to work with him on this. And that’s when we really wrestled with a lot of the kind of issues that are so related to conversational leadership. So I always wanted to bring Dano onto our podcast at some point, because he’s got a lot to contribute. So here you are. Welcome, Dano. I’m really excited for you to finally be with us. And why don’t you introduce – a little bit more – yourself, your background, so that our listeners have an idea of who you actually are.

Dano: Thanks, Nelis, and thanks, Kate. I have been leading in numerous settings for over 25 years, in business and nonprofit segments while I was still living in the US. And then my family moved to India in 2008, and launched a number of different businesses. I was in the manufacturing field, and also education. And the challenges and the dynamics of business in South Asia, in a very emerging market, it punished me in many ways, but it also grew me up. And I think in the midst of that, after I

ended one of those businesses I felt like… coaching… when, while I was still running with the manufacturing, I got involved in coaching, got some coach training, and it was so transformational to realise the power of a question. And the capacity, what had to happen inside me? My interior life, to be able to listen, actually listen to people. I think it’s Peter Block. He says. Great questions have 3 components. They’re ambiguous, personal, and they evoke anxiety. And I love that dimension of a really great question, and I think I’m always on the hunt for an elegant and beautiful question at just the right moment.

Kate: Can I ask you to repeat that quote again from Peter Block? I love it.

Dano: He said, great questions have 3 components. They’re ambiguous, personal, and they evoke anxiety in the listener.

Kate: Really interesting, isn’t it? Especially if you think about using coaching, aiming to achieve those kinds of goals in the business environment, work environment, because we don’t tend to invite ambiguity, anxiety, or personal things into our work. Can you expand a little bit on how you have worked that out in your leadership experiences?

Dano: Yeah. Block is certainly a thought mentor for me. And of course, actually, I’m always trying to

create psychological safety and manage my own anxiety. But there’s something about a question when you are hoping to help the whole system be engaged, when you’re inviting everybody to bring their best, and to not just verbally talk about, “Yeah, I’m in this. I’m with you. I’m committed”. But these 3 key elements or essential elements of a great question, they cultivate ownership.

Block would also say that these kinds of questions are this kind of attitude or mindset pushes creativity to the bottom and the edge of a given system. And I think that describes a lot of what I try to accomplish in organisational spaces is cultivating, unleash, unleash everybody, so that the people at the edges, people far away from the centre, maybe far away from whatever is perceived as the top, feel like they are living an expression of what’s becoming a passion, or a calling, or a sense of like ownership. Some people call it ownership. I’m not sure I love that word exactly, but it communicates clearly what people oftentimes are doing.

Kate: There’s a sense in ownership of, there’s that danger of kind of like, “Here’s our vision. Now we want you to own it. Here’s the thing we want you to do. Now you own it.”. That’s what the word ownership evokes for me, and that, of course, is the antithesis of what we want to achieve in conversational leadership.

Dano: I feel the same way about the word empowerment. Empowerment feels like, “I have the power, and I’ll dispense it wherever I want. I have all the power. You don’t. So I’m gonna empower you.” But it’s actually quite patriarchal, and it’s a word that I’d never wanna use. I recognize when people use it, they don’t always mean that. But the intent gets too mixed up in the idea that I hold all the power, and I’ll give it to you as I plead.

Nelis: So, you talked about ownership and about empowerment as two of those concepts of sort of traditional management speak and you’re contrasting that with another approach. And I think I’ve heard you talk about co-creation as the alternative to that. And that’s what we often talk about in our podcast as well. So I want to come back to that with you. But before we do that, I’d like to hear a little bit more concretely about those questions about those anxiety, inducing questions, personal, ambiguous. And because can you give some examples to that? So that we’re not talking just theoretically, but also make it concrete for people, and maybe contrast that with the types of questions we don’t want to ask.

Dano: Yeah, I love that, that you want to get serious about and concrete about them. So an example of a great, a personal and ambiguous and evoking anxiety kind of question might be, “Where are you at on the crossroads of your life? And maybe you know, if there’s 2 signs, just tell me the 2 signs that you’re at.

Kate: You immediately take it really, really deep, really personal.

Dano: And what I like to usually say is, now you can just throw a fluff thing out there. You can just kind of be fake, but everybody’s going to know it. And I think we’re going to be really honest right now. So I’m going to invite everybody to another level of honesty. And so what that does is it’s ambiguous like, there’s no right answer. I wonder what he wants me to say?

In South Asia, in quite a dominant culture… and of course I came in as a non-Indian, and Indians are always navigating with me: “Okay, do I wanna get something from him? Do I need to respect him? Do I need to put him down?” The nexus of power in that cross-cultural setting was confusing, because many of them hadn’t worked with an expat before. The idea of ambiguous is, “Well, what is the right answer? I need you to tell me what the right answer is, so I can give you the right answer.”. And so that’s why I like to cultivate ambiguous questions. And then take time and be really patient, because it is for someone coming from a background that, there was a very clear right and wrong, and you were acknowledged or approved, or given some kind of benefits that came from complying. It takes time to work that muscle. So that’s what I mean by, as an example. Another example is, “What part do you play in how our organisation got to the place it’s at?” And so it’s just especially in the moment when there’s like lots of squeaky frustration or “things are bad”, or “they did this” or “hear what they did again”, especially if you hear it, like, I hear that going on over here, it’s a great time to raise it in a group setting. And once again, “What part do you play?” says I acknowledge that other people have a part to play. I took on a new leadership setting and we would usually say, “I inherited a bunch of problems. But by about 18 months they’re my problems”. I can’t blame anybody else for them. So I try to cultivate those kinds of things in these kinds of questions.

Kate: I love it. I know that you’ve worked with Josiah who we interviewed, I think it was the first episode of this season, and Josiah is another master of the question that takes you immediately bypassing levels 1, 2, 3, 4 of conversation from the superficial right into deep and meaningful questions. It’s definitely a superpower you guys share. So how do you use these kinds of questions in your work?

Dano: Well, I do a lot of executive coaching, C-suite coaching, and so maybe I’ll start there. Getting to know someone and having them tell their story, but not tell their story from the perspective of trying to earn something with me or prove something to me. You have to change the kinds of questions that you ask, and so usually… actually, this is a good moment to mention, you know, Nelis also asked, what are some bad questions? Those kinds of people oftentimes want to ask questions like, “Why aren’t we getting those kinds of people in the room? Or why don’t we have better people? Or how do we get those people to change?” And it’s very reactive. And it’s a simple path toward getting things fixed. And so I oftentimes will want to ask, like C-suite leaders, what’s the question that you know what’s the question you need someone to ask you right now. And whenever they ask it, then I say, let’s let’s massage that question. Let’s make a better question. Because, just because someone got into senior leadership doesn’t necessarily mean they ask good questions. They might just be getting good results. But they haven’t cultivated an interior curiosity that unleashes flourishing for everyone, and they have a lot of assumptions that come along with that. Yeah, I like asking powerful questions there and then also, you know, using, “Tell me more”. So it isn’t a question, it’s a way of double clicking on something someone said. I think, being, you know, immensely curious. When people aren’t used to anyone being curious around them, it strikes them, some people are afraid of it.

Kate: It can feel very threatening and puts you on the spot. But there’s also something like, “This person is interested in me”. I’ve done some coaching training recently, and just when the coach, the trainer, asked me questions about my life suddenly it takes you into a whole, another domain, a whole nother realm, doesn’t it? Of focus and interest? And wow, somebody’s actually asking about me. And this is serious. And this is gonna help me. Yeah.

Dano: And I think, too, that’s something that right now, I think across the corporate world, I mean, that’s the real integration of whole life, the spiritual life in the sense of my deepest values and the things that matter to me, who I am, when no one’s looking, my values and my integrity. When you invite people to explore those dimensions, it can be a little scary, but they are bringing them to the workplace. They just don’t know it. They think they’ve kind of compartmentalised that. And you wanna call them out and say, “Are you kidding me? You are lying to yourself, and therefore you’re lying to other people, and we can all see it. You’re only hiding from yourself. You’re not really hiding from anybody else”. That isn’t normally what people want to hire me to do.

Dano: But the result, when they see a greater sense of integration, they appreciate it, or I’ve also had somebody who paid me upfront for 10 coaching appointments, and constantly gives excuses and doesn’t want to do anymore. I’m just glad they paid upfront. So, yeah, well. But it wasn’t really what they wanted, or they’re not sure now they really want to enter that again. And I mean, I have to balance that. 

Nelis: When you’re not in a coaching environment, but in a leadership environment, do you get those negative reactions as well? Or is it generally people are ready to bring their whole selves

to the situation?

Dano: Well, you can’t make adults do anything, but you can create environments and you can ask permission. “I’d like to ask permission to do something that’s probably gonna feel very uncomfortable and challenging.” “Do I have permission?”. So I use a permission question that gets there. And then in group settings, I allow people to opt out. But those people that opt out don’t have a voice in contributing. So I was in a gathering of large, probably 35 mid-level leaders that would directly relate to the international director. And we were doing – I don’t know if you’re familiar with Keegan and Leahy’s “immunity to change”? – So we were doing immunity to change framework at an individual level with the hope to do it at a group level. We needed to do an individual level. Then, maybe 6 months later, we were hoping to do a group level or a whole team level. And I had given my own map, which is uncovering of some deep assumptions that underpin my life, and it was quite transparent. I felt like I was being as transparent as I could possibly be.

Kate: And you have to be when you’re using that tool. Otherwise it doesn’t work.

Dano: No one will believe you if you don’t. 

Kate: You have to lead as you want them to participate. Yeah.

Dano: So I could see his eyes as he was reading my map, and we were talking about it, and there was a feeling of real uncomfortableness in the room. Meaning like, you’re kind of exposed, and I don’t know how I feel about you leading up front now that you’ve been authentic about what have been some things inside you that have happened. And he just basically opted out. At one point I came back and I said, “Hey, I noticed that you haven’t connected, haven’t paired up or connected with anyone”. He goes, “Nah, I’m good. I don’t need this. It’s like, okay”. And I realised from that point forward, danger, danger, danger, someone that wasn’t willing. He didn’t say for any other reason. “You know, I don’t really need this, I’m good”. And so finding ways to ask questions but then also creating a psychological safety. So for him, there was nothing I was going to do that was going to create enough psychological safety to enter in. For others a degree of sharing authentically at certain levels before you go straight to, you know, the deepest assumptions that are going to expose you. You know, staging that. I think also pre-work. I noticed that some pre-work can do work like that. So having them ask powerful questions of others. Or maybe do an appreciative inquiry of another person coming to the meeting, and you say to them, “You’re going to be telling their story and so be ready to tell it like you’d want someone to tell your story”. So there’s a sense of empathy that’s cultivated. I think those, Nelis, are ways that I found to do that.

Nelis: Yeah, that’s really helpful. I think that element of permission and gradually easing people in. I think those are. Those are really helpful concepts to go deeper and to really tackle things more profoundly, because if you throw people in at the deep end, you may get that reaction of that

leader that you just talked about like, “Whoa, I’m I’m not ready for this”. 

Kate: We’ll definitely put a link to that particular tool you mentioned – immunity to change – in our show notes. I did it last year sometime, and it was incredibly powerful for me in overcoming a real blockage in my leadership. Nelis is nodding, people can’t see it. He actually worked through some of it afterwards with me, working out the implications for how I show up. I did it as part of that Use-of-self module on the course we’ve all taken, and was very, very powerful. And I’m still, I think, reaping the benefits of that so definitely, let’s share that in our show notes.

Nelis: And it’s fascinating. I haven’t thought of it in that terms – I came across it when you introduced that, Kate – to do that at an organisation level. I’ve been aware of it as a personal tool, but as an organisational tool I find that a fascinating idea. What would it take as a group to look at this? What is our organisational assumption? Deep assumptions that we have?

Kate: That block us from reaching the goal we want to reach. 


Nelis: Exactly. And how do we, as an organisation, tend to respond or want to respond? And why? So yeah, that would be fascinating.

Kate: I rocked up to that session, thinking it was about immunity to change, “How can we get these people to change?” and realised, “Oh, wait, the finger’s pointing at me”. You have to start with yourself and work through this, and be willing to look at your deeply-held assumptions and blockages and things like that, and I think that’s the best way around to do it.

Dano: I don’t think I found another tool that surfaces hidden, of course it’s hidden commitments, hidden assumptions. I don’t know. There’s another tool that surfaces it faster, and I don’t say fast, like fast as the goal, but efficiently. I mean, if somebody went into therapy for a year, they could probably surface some of those things, but high cost, not easy to disperse across a whole organisational setting, doesn’t deal with the whole system. So it’s very powerful in that way. And I think too, then, I would also say appreciative inquiry. “Who are we when we’re at our best?”. “What is us? What is the sense of us-ness?”. Again, cross-culturally, this can be very challenging. In one way, there’s an advantage cross-culturally. But if you have people who come from individualistic and collectivist cultures, they can sometimes mean different things. And yet that’s one of the most beautiful moments of making meaning of what it means to be us or who we’re at when we’re at our best. That surfaces a different kind of thing. But it’s a really positive and an encouraging thing. That also is a great moment to contrast. Who are we at when we’re at our worst, or even, I’m gonna jump in too quickly into another kind of mental model. But there’s some neuroscientists that talk about fast twitch and slow twitch brain activity, and how being able to cultivate joy and express empathy, and renew the connections in our brain toward joyful experiences. They give us a greater sense of trust, relational trust. I can believe you. I don’t assume the worst, and that most of us are at a joy deficiency. And so they had some very simple practices that are really powerful. And I’ve done it in lots of different settings. And it’s almost like it renews the circuitry in the room. Another way to describe it would be, it softens up the soil of the ground that the whole group is working in, and everybody’s just a little more soft toward each other a little more. It doesn’t mean that they’re just limp and unengaged. It means there’s a sense of empathy and psychological safety that pervades the space. Jim Wilder is one of the neuroscientists that I follow. And I’m just totally fascinated by that as anxiety reducer that doesn’t attack anxiety or try to address the anxiety. But instead, it says your anxiety is coming from a place you don’t really know about. We’re going to work on cultivating some of that space and the soil of your life, and then the soil of our whole system. And what I’ve been saying these days is good soil, bad soil will kill the best seed. Doesn’t matter how great your idea is, if you have bad soil, if you don’t have psychological safety, radical trust, a shared sense of empathy, and a meaning-making mechanism between you, your best idea, your best seed will just be eaten up. But if you have good soil, even a below average seed can grow, and it could improve because there’s a capacity to renew. In my organisational design work I’ve been spending a lot of time on “what’s the soil like?”. And as a leader, don’t focus on a great idea, a great seed, or trying to get everybody to move in your direction, focus on creating great soil. And then, everything that’s happening will be more positive. There’ll be more progress, less resistance. You’ll retain more people. There’ll be a sense of continuity. Yeah, I could keep going. But you get the point.

Kate: That’s really interesting. Dano. That sense of the soil is what’s important. You can have the best strategy, the best idea, but if the soil’s not ready for something to grow in it, then you’re not going to go anywhere. How would you go about working on the soil, in an organisation, for example?

Dano: Well, I like to ask many leaders. I’m gonna touch on co-creation, which maybe we’ll get to later, too. But I like to invite a team of leaders – that’s a mixture of upper level and mid-level leaders, and maybe even a couple people that are more like line workers – to join a co-creation team which could be, you could also call it a change agent, team, or kind of change work. But sometimes it’s connected to an event. And sometimes an event is a great catalytic opportunity for more extended change, because you’re going to see everyone face-to-face. I always ask each of them. “Hey, we’re gonna do lots of survey work. So how about everybody does 5 interviews? Not the same people, and try to get out as wide as possible and ask questions like the questions I mentioned earlier about you know where you’re at in the intersection of your life, or what part you play and how we got to where we are. Those kinds of survey questions, they cultivate empathy and they also require the co-creation team to carry the voice of another, and so they don’t just summarise when they come back. We’ll oftentimes use a mural board, so we can visualise all that’s happening, we can see it more clearly. And so we capture the different post-it notes that go on to a mural and that means that the co-creation team doesn’t just bring their voice. We don’t just want them to be the change agents. We want them to amplify the voice of the people they interviewed. And they have a much deeper sense of compassion and empathy for those people. Some people really got hurt, or have really been marginalised or don’t feel like they’ve been heard. And so both that happens. And then especially for emerging leaders who’ve maybe not been invited to this space before. They realise it’s not about me trying to drive my outcome. It’s way bigger than that, and so… trying to find ways to get them to listen well, and then to bring that together and interpret, like, what are we sensing is the – I like to call it – the inner voice. What’s the, if it’s the personification of the organisation, if the organisation was a person, what would they be having nightmares about? What would they be saying to themselves, what’s the internal dialogue that’s happening? So we’re trying to surface that for the whole and then pay attention to it. Like, really, listen, you heard somebody really hurt, or really in a lot of pain. You heard someone that felt like they were thriving. How do we put all that together? That’s how real humans are. We’re almost schizophrenic in that way. One time we can have great experience, and we can have a terrible one the next day. And then we’re still the same person. So trying to navigate and manage and make meaning of that together, and then let that work of kind of observing and interpreting lead us to action. Or sometimes it’s just experimentation, let’s try something. But oftentimes it’s just saying it’s not good enough to assume we know what they want, but we need to listen and do a better job of listening, and then bring that into whatever the next season might be characterised by, or whatever the event might be characterised by. And then, use quotes and things like that from those people. That makes the co-creation team, I think, on a different posture. They’re not trying to drive their own outcomes, but they feel like they’re carrying the voice from the edges. At the same time, sometimes there’s a leader there that can say, “There is a future” and they’re trying to interpret or understand the future that maybe some people at the edges might be feeling they want, but still be able to cast a vision, for there is a future. There’s hope. We have a direction we’re going, and we need to be living out this way. But it doesn’t ignore any of the edges, and it really to me it creates a lot of cohesiveness and I found I can’t trust anybody on a co-creation team that hasn’t done a lot of good survey work and doesn’t feel responsible for carrying the voices of the people at the edges for the the main purpose of the work that we share together.

Kate: There’s something really important there about authenticity and integrity, I think, at the start of a process which really resonates. 

Nelis: Yeah, I love how you bring together the collective part, the organisation as a person, and I really like that sort of image. What would the nightmares be? What is the internal dialogue? What is? If you imagine the organisation as a person, what does that tell you? So that’s a very collective way of looking at it, and then at the same time saying, okay, but it’s not just all collective. There may be a leader who can tell “There is a future”. There is an individual responsibility. It’s not just passive, the organisation thinks this because there is a need for, yeah, stepping up and sometimes being that different voice. So that individual versus collective tension that you described there I find fascinating. And I think that’s part of where our conversations about conversational leadership go, isn’t it, Kate? Where you talk about okay, there is a huge collective part, and conversational leadership is not 1% at the top knowing everything. But there is still a leadership role. And what is that leadership role? And how do you manage that polarity?

Dano: Yes.

Nelis: So I am not sure I followed you a hundred percent on your fast twitch versus slow twitch image. The image you created there is about, I think, the quick bursts of action, the things that need immediate resolution versus the long term things that you talked about. This joy, the context that allows you to go for it in the long haul, and I think the picture is athletes who can do 100 metre dashes versus the marathon. The marathon needs slow twitch, the fast twitch is the 100 metre dash. Is that correct? And how are you using that in your leadership experience?

Dano: I don’t know how it works exactly in athletics, but in terms of the mental, the neuroscience, the neuroscientists are saying these days, we respond out of a deficit for joy, or out of a deficit of a feeling of being heard, or a feeling of safety and the immediate thing, it’s not something we think about. It’s not actually part of our cognitive process. It’s a collection of our woundings and trauma. And we react oftentimes. This is another book by Steve Cuss, Managing leadership anxiety, yours and theirs. He talks about, in a moment of uncertainty, what do you need to be okay? In a moment of uncertainty what do you think you need to be okay? In a trauma unit he was a chaplain in a hospital, and saw 250 people die right before his eyes in a 2 year span. So he would just be like, he showed up, and the person just died, and the whole family’s there, and they’re expecting him to say something. Really scary. And, what do you think you need? And I had to come to realise, I think I need to be in control. Others I know, they think they need to be able to be responsible for everything. Others, they want to punctuate that sense of anxiety or uncertainty with humour. Other people demand respect. You can have the whole gambit of potential things. Those are the fast twitch. We don’t control it. It’s the overflow of the condition of the soil of our life. And if our interior life is riddled with wounding, with pain, with betrayal that’s unprocessed. We might have all those experiences, but if we’ve worked through it, we can actually respond and not react or not want to fight instead, we can come from a different source. I think that’s why leaders need to cultivate a really healthy interior life. But then also be able to cultivate organisational health in the whole system or the whole landscape can be characterised by a greater sense of health in the soil, and it shows up like a sense of mutuality and respect and empathy and less “I’m trying to drive my outcome” and how can we be the best version of who we are. And even accountability is a great example of this. Accountability in this setting says, “Kate, I noticed that you showed up this way. That isn’t like us. I felt like you’re not being us”. Or maybe even, “ I noticed you weren’t being yourself in that moment. But you, I want you to say, it’s tough for me, because you’re also not being like what we committed to. We committed to being people who do the… whatever it is. And I noticed you didn’t do that and I want to call you back to your best self. I want to call you back to who we agreed on being together”. There’s an example of cultivating great health and not saying, did you check it off the list, or did you do the right thing or demanding allegiance, but more like drawing you back to the sense of that collective calling that we agreed to. So it has to be a moment of calling where we collectively share, “Yeah, that’s who we’re going to be”. That’s an example of accountability that works when someone betrays the deepest values.

Nelis: I love what you’re saying there, and that’s quite hard. We’ve had conversations recently about people or about issues. I think we all know those, where there’s an unhealthy soil and unhealthy environment, either at an individual or at the organisational level. And the question is, do you let it go because that is so much easier? Or do you find a way to confront it? And my experience is that if you don’t find a healthy way to confront that, to help see a healthy soil, it always comes back to bite you in the long run.

Dano: Mhmm.

Nelis van den Berg: But that’s hard work, because it doesn’t always get a positive response.

Dano: No, and people aren’t expecting that’s what leaders are going do.

Kate: I’m just thinking of my last annual review with Nelis. Nelis is very good at pulling me up on stuff like that. I hate it at the time, but it always yields growth. It’s horrible when it happens, when someone has the courage to challenge you and say, “You know this thing you do, or the way you show up, that’s not helping us”. He doesn’t use the same language as you, but you know, as my supervisor, he’s been very good at that over the years. And it’s tough to do but you have to do it if you want people to flourish and grow in their roles. And if you want the soil organisationally to be healthy, I mean particularly as leaders. It’s that use-of-self, that self awareness, is so critical.

Nelis: It’s massive. I’m just thinking back over my conversations in my regular leadership today and yesterday. And this kind of issue has cropped up 3 times, and 3 times the question is, do we drop it or do we address it? I think my consistent response was, let’s address it. But woah, this is hard. This is really hard, how do we do it? What’s the best way of engaging with that? So yeah, I really appreciate that.

Dano: The leaders that want to, that choose to ignore this and just drive toward organisational outcomes… I don’t know if you call them, you know Level one leaders, or something like that. They could get pretty high up in the organisation, but all they talk about is outcome, outcome, outcome. They are the leaders that drive organisations into the ground. And it requires another bridge building, healing leader, to come after them, to recover from the pain of drive, drive, drive, drive, drive. But there’s, I think, a kind of leader, and I would call them another…. I don’t know what you call them, maybe they’re deeper level. Maybe they’re not. They’re not actually ascending the ladder to try something different, but the ones that cultivate this interior life, that cultivate the soil, that want to see flourishing happening, all at the edges, not just at the top, those are the kinds of leaders that oftentimes, I think, actually, the results in those organisations of larger health and wider health, those are the kinds of spaces where other organisations come and go. We heard about some good stuff that’s happening there, can you tell us more? I think they’re deliberately developmental, to use a Keegan and Leahy. They’re spaces where people thrive and where individual contribution is actually eclipsed by the collective, like a comprehensive and collective capacity to do really hard work that is not just defined by the outcome that the organisation might be going after. I do think they make money. They’re successful. They thrive. But especially in this environment, when retention of employees, managing stakeholder outcomes, just creating health everywhere. It’s a surprising antidote to the kinds of corporate anxiety that I think, drive a lot of organisations and burn people out. To me it’s inhuman, and I feel like as a leader, I can’t do that. I’m not. It’s just not part of how I’m wired.

Kate: I think it’s a great antidote to where we find ourselves in the world right now. I was just talking earlier with someone about change fatigue and recognizing that change isn’t something that has a beginning and end anymore. We’ve said this before in the podcast, we’re in a state of continuous change, and we’re moving into that chaos zone we talked about another podcast. We’re living in the volatile, uncertain, complex. ambiguous, is that right? And it’s a difficult place to navigate these days and leadership within that. I think you just look at our newspapers, television screens to see how our politicians are navigating that not well, in many cases, and across the board, across the world  I think we have a real crisis of leadership, because I think we’re being called to lead in an environment that is so VUCA, that is so challenging. And I love what you’ve been sharing here, I was thinking this feels a little bit like leadership therapy or something. I think this going back to the soil, the health of the organisation, getting real with people is something I’m going to be chewing over for a while.

Dano: Well, I also love that you mentioned politics because the autocrat loves to say to the masses, “If you vote for me, I’ll keep you safe. I’ll give you a predictable future. I’ll give you certainty”. Those are all lies. But the courageous leader, the empathetic leader, says “I don’t know what the future holds, but together, if we learn to trust each other, if we learn to create space where we actually share meaning, and we stand side by side, we can endure a future that’s unknowable”. And that’s so much more authentic and honest and not manipulative. But I don’t know, have you seen a politician do that? 

Kate: I don’t know how you begin to achieve that across a nation? I’m sure there are leaders that have done that. I’d like to think about how you even do that in an organisation with 4,000 people. Can you tell us some examples from your context, how you create that, or how you would go about creating that environment of safety?

Dano: Well, I was on a recent co-creation team in a large organisational setting, and we prepared for maybe 9, 10 months to head into a large gathering. We did a lot of survey work about the theme. And when we asked people questions, there was a lot of dissatisfaction and a lot of like, “Well, what else can we do? We’re just kind of stuck with the model we have, and we can’t reimagine it”. And so as a co-creation team we spent a lot of time at the beginning, like listening, listening to each other, telling stories, surfacing metaphors. One of the activities we did was, what’s the metaphor you bring to, I think it was oversight was one of the themes, and so it was lovely to hear the Argentineans talk about this tree that’s down near Patagonia, whose roots get connected to each other, and it was interesting to hear another Brit tell the story of how the metaphor they used was like a Indian train station. I mean, it’s fascinating to see what creativity surfaced. Another one did something about the solar system, it was very lovely. And then we spent time gallery walking, looking around, watching, what stood out to you? And then we did some work around adaptive challenges, identifying that the challenge in front of us wasn’t just a technical challenge that if we just applied a solution, it would be fixed. Instead, as Warren Bennett says, what you resist persists. So it’s a persistent problem. We keep attacking it head on, and head on is not going, it’s just getting stronger, we’re just reinforcing it. And so. The next day, when we went after an activity that comes from the book Impact Networks, by David Erlichman. Fascinating book. One of my favourite books.

Nelis van den Berg: I love it!

Dano: David has an interaction that he recommended roughly, that essentially has 3 rounds. We said to them, we’re gonna do a social experiment. And we divided the group by their last names. And the first group, we said, “All right, who’s someone that’s had an impact on your life?”. We had 3 questions, and so you reached out and connected to them. And then there was another question, and it was a different kind of dimension question. It might have been like, “Who have you learned the most from? So then, you and the person that you’re with would go and connect with the other person. But that other person might be connected to someone else’s chain. So there’s this emerging network or chains of people that start to form. And so the chains got very interconnected of course. I personally underestimated how even at a senior leader level how sensitive it would feel to not be picked. I was really surprised. For me, I just thought of it as a social experiment. I probably could have chosen some questions that were a little more benign. What I was hoping to accomplish was, “How well networked are you?”. Change flows through people who are connected and have capacity for depth and are doing the interior work. But a couple of people didn’t get picked, and they felt upset by that. And then a few people heard that someone was hurt, and then they got more hurt for them than the people that actually got hurt. So I had to stand up at the end and apologise. I said “I apologise, and never intended for anybody to feel excluded or left at the edges”. It was dicey, and I overestimated the capacity of this group to endure ambiguity and to do a real experiment on how well connected you were. I have not had this much negative feedback from my leadership, I don’t know ever. It was pretty rough.

At the same time one of my partners… we borrowed a ladder from the conference centre, and he was taking some video on the ladder, a 25 foot ladder… And he said, he helped us see it. He said the amount of chronic anxiety in this room full of senior leaders was striking. One of our insights was that in the conference before –  this is like the post conference – in the conference before these were the leaders that people came to for answers and direction. They stood up in front. They had a microphone in their hand. They had the marker, the whiteboard marker in their hand. They were the ones rolling out, and then in this setting, they were all completely just, they were just equal, and if your influence, or your willingness to coach or contribute to others, if it wasn’t apparent, then it showed up.

So I think we were talking about adaptive challenges going into this, but I would say I didn’t mean to create quite so much anxiety, but in reality, I think what happened was we made that anxiety more apparent. We just surfaced what was already there. 

Kate: It’s there, and I think across the board, I think we have a lot of leaders who listen to this podcast. And I think they probably will be nodding their heads, saying. “Yeah, there’s anxiety there. This world is a hard place to lead in right now”. Really interesting to hear that story. Thank you. Thank you for sharing vulnerably, honestly, about something you received a lot of critique for. 

Kate: Nelis, can you just summarise for us a couple of things that you’ve heard Dano sharing?

Nelis: Yeah, I really appreciate what you just shared too, Dano, and what I’m hearing you say is, get beyond the immediate results, get beyond the delivery of quick outcomes, and really go deep into what is the organisational mindset? Where are the individuals? Where are we as leaders at? And how can we bring out the best we could be as an organisation and as people. And so, yeah, you talked about that from different angles. And I think that’s a challenge that I’m going to take home and again work with, in our different organisations. How can we be the best we can be? And how can we create that future together in a way that challenges, in the way we talked, started our conversation with the right kind of questions, exploring. That’s exciting. I appreciate your insights and your vulnerability in sharing here. So thank you, Dano.

Dano: Thanks, Nelis, thanks for the invitation. Thank you, Kate.

Nelis: It was wonderful to have you on our podcast.

Kate: Yes, thanks so much, Dano, for sharing. I’m looking forward to chewing over what you have shared, I think it’s really relevant, really helpful at this time. As always, thank you to our listeners for showing up, and do head over to leadinginconversation.net if you have any comments, thoughts, questions, or if you want to check out the show notes for resources that Dano has mentioned. See you next time. Bye.

Episode 5

podcast with shownotes

Shownotes

Reinhold recommended three short articles to introduce people to conversational leadership:

Suchman, A. L. (2017) ‘Avoiding the most common and fatal pitfalls of organizational change’, on Relationship Centered Health Care website. 

Part 1: Change how you think about change!

Part 2: Attend to the losses that are part of every change

Part 3: Hold the tension of change

A longer article:

Suchman, A. (2011) ‘Organizations as Machines, Organizations as Conversations: Two Core Metaphors and Their Consequences’, in Medical Care  Vol 49, No 12 Suppl 1

And a book: Winters, M. F. (2020), Inclusive Conversations: Fostering Equity, Empathy and Belonging Across Differences.

Transcript

Nelis: I’m really pleased to introduce a guest into our podcast, Reinhold Titus. He has agreed to walk with us through his experience in his organisational context around conversational leadership and doing that cross-culturally. So, Reinhold, why don’t you introduce yourself a little bit? 

Reinhold: Thanks so much Nelis, and Kate, for having me. Looking forward to the next few minutes together. My name is Reinhold Titus. I am from Namibia. That’s my primary passport country. I grew up in a cross-cultural context and in Namibia mostly, a few of my childhood years in South Africa. My first career was in the medical field in radiology, and then left and joined an international NGO and have been involved in that for over 20 years now. Lived in six different countries. Actually my family and I are currently living in Germany. So, this is the sixth country that we’re living in. Been involved with NGO work in leadership and strategy and leadership development, but also lived in South Africa for just over 10 years and during that time ran an intercultural consultancy, so working with profit and nonprofit sector around the whole issue of cultural intelligence, diversity and inclusion, coaching expats who were relocating around the world. And so some of the multinational companies were bringing me in to coach them, just as they were navigating their own sense of identity, transitions and leading in a very different context and so forth. But yeah, currently living in Germany involved in an organisation where I am responsible for our strategy alignment. And then also looking at what we just term inclusion, but the whole diversity and inclusion within the organisation. 

Nelis: We’re looking forward to hearing from that incredibly rich background.

Kate: Yes, and I must add that Reinhold and I met in England during our Master studies. We both encountered conversational leadership there and were very interested in each other’s research topics so stayed in touch. And we recently invited Reinhold to speak at a leaders event on his research into the inclusion of majority world staff into Western-founded organisations. And for those of you who’ve listened to episode 4, you might have picked up that the group there was referring to the outsider who came and spoke, and that was Reinhold!

Reinhold: I actually still have to listen to that, Kate. 

Kate: Yes, you should listen to that episode. They’re very complimentary about your input into our time together. But Reinhold’s also interested in conversational approaches to change in the intersection of that with inclusion and belonging. So I’m really looking forward to what he has to say today. 

Nelis: Yes, I am too. Let’s start off. Kate just said you’re interested in conversational leadership as well. So, what interests you there? 

Reinhold: I think there were three things for me that triggered my interest around conversational leadership. One was, just as I looked at the world, and then of course for me personally, faith is an integral aspect of my life. But even as I look at it from a faith perspective, I realised that conversations have so much potential in terms of helping us cross divides, overcome differences, political, whatever it might be. If we can get to healthy places of conversations, honest, vulnerable conversations, it has a potential for bringing so much healing and change and all of that. So that was certainly an aspect that interested me. But also from a cultural perspective. I’m an African and many of our cultures are oral cultures. Generally, knowledge is transferred, sense is made, in conversation rather than reading a book and sitting there by myself and reflecting, then writing another chapter about what I think. It’s in the conversation that we sense what’s happening, that we connect relationally with one another, at a heart, human fundamental needs level. And then, just what the future holds and sensing that together. So, in fact, in my father’s language, which is Xhosa, and Zulu, we have a word that we call, that is, indaba. And indaba is really a time and space where people come together to talk together as a community, or even as representatives of a community to solve issues or find ways forward and strengthen community. It just resonated with me from where I come from, culturally in the world.

Kate: That’s very much the case in other parts of the world as well, not just Africa. I experienced that in Papua New Guinea: everything is done through conversation, through storying, as they call it. “Let’s sit down and stori”. And for me coming from the West, when we were sitting by the fire and someone first said “Stori!”, I was like, do I have to tell a story, you know, thinking of fictitious… No, it’s just that conversational “let’s just sit here and talk things out”. I love that about the culture there.

Nelis: Yeah, so that’s interesting because often I hear that conversational leadership is difficult in a non-western context because it assumes a sort of egalitarian way of approaching things. You’re saying the opposite. You’re saying, actually, oral cultures are incredibly well suited for conversational leadership. 

Reinhold: Well, now you’re talking about conversations and you’re bringing leadership into it. And those are two that we then bring together in terms of conversations and leadership. And of course, leadership  is culturally constructed. What leadership looks like in context, you know, again, this is where I can critique some of our literature a little bit. But often, when we read books about leadership, there’s a prescribed way about how leadership works and what leadership looks like and all of that. But no, it comes out of a particular cultural paradigm that defines leadership and then we try and uncritically export it around the world and say this is the way you should lead and so on. And there are equally legitimate, perhaps different, but equally legitimate ways of leading in different contexts. And so when you put that together, yes, there’s often a bit more hierarchical ways of leadership in some of the majority world cultures, but you also have leaders who perhaps in a different way, will engage in conversation. And of course, for many of us from that part of the world Nelson Mandela would be an amazing example of an African leader who employed conversational styles of leadership and yet, understood the hierarchical issues. There is, of course, the cultural element to that and hierarchy that needs to be navigated, but there are many leaders who are employing this and just finding the culturally appropriate ways of doing it. So again, even with conversational leadership that we don’t try and uncritically export that to the rest of the world and say, this is the way it should be done. It’s to recognize what is in the culture, leverage that which is already in the culture that can actually help you to get there, but also be aware of those elements that may not be the same as where people come from the West, how they would do things. So for me, in a sense, is it again you cannot do this well in a global multicultural context without some level of cultural intelligence or savvy, to be able to do this well, in different contexts, or with diverse groups. 

Nelis: Yeah, and I hope that this podcast will be sort of an encouragement for that research, for that exploration and actually the practice of leadership cross-culturally and conversational leadership bringing that together would be fascinating and I’m hoping for more of that. 

…

Nelis: You said there are three things that sort of interested you. I’ve heard two, if I’m not mistaken. 

Reinhold: Yeah. So the third one for me would be the opportunity that it presents to us to get input from the outside of the hierarchical spaces, where if you just had a certain group of people: just what it unleashes, you know, in terms of creativity, innovation, the engagement it creates when people are involved in that process. So it’s just what it unleashes is something that triggered me because I’ve seen it whenever we employ in culturally relevant ways, but it energises people. And so for me, that was the third one, that inspires me towards exploring this, that wisdom exists throughout organisations. Insights, perspectives, different ways of doing things, understanding of contexts, exist in places in our organisations that leadership have no idea of and no access to. And so how do we tap into that? I can give you examples… Just speaking to my teenage goddaughter, many years ago and asking her questions and she gave me an answer that I would never have thought about as an adult and it sort of guided my parenting just getting wisdom from an 11 year old at the time. So you know, just wisdom that exists within the organisation that you often do not tap into. 

Kate: Absolutely–and we’ve discussed that in previous episodes–that actually when we stick to a small group of leaders with just one perspective or one set of experiences we limit ourselves and we limit the potential for change as well. And you need diversity in order to be able to discern the way forward often as a leader because you don’t have the perspective that others have. So yeah, that resonated with me as well that the wisdom of all is really needed. 

Nelis: Just yesterday I was in a conversation where I was confronted again with the fact that we as leaders tend to look at just one layer of the organisation: the one hundred people that we always go to. And it is quite a challenge to try to really reach well beyond that. You’re right, conversational leadership opens those kinds of avenues if we employ it well. 

…

Kate: Reinhold, would you share a little bit about, what are your experiences using conversational leadership in your organisational context, in your NGO? 

Reinhold: Yeah, and again, context is important and I’m glad to be using that word because it would look differently in different contexts. I wouldn’t say we are there not by any means at all. And in fact, what is “there”? It always depends. I’ve studied strategic management before and I’ve been involved in strategic management. And when I took on this particular role in the organisation, there was a level of complexity there that was just beyond anything that I’d experienced before. We have people from within the wider organisation, more than 100 different countries. In one of the units that we run, over 60 different countries. So that level of diversity and that’s just nationalities, you’re not even talking about the languages, the ethnicities, and the life experiences that everybody brings with them. So we were dealing with a very diverse staff, we were engaging with people in national and regional contexts who are very, very different from each other. And so our organisational strategy needs to be set up in such a way that we can have that flexibility and not just, “This is the Five-Year Plan and this is how we’re going to work”. And then, of course, the awareness of the fast and continuous changes in the world. And of course Covid over the last two years ago, that that has exponentially enhanced that sense of the VUCA world that we often talk about that we live in. So I just realised, even my skill set was not suited for what I needed to do. And so what do I do? Do I just go back to the toolbox I have and use the tools I have even though the job requires different tools, because that’s what I know. And quite, frankly that’s what people expect. That’s what makes people feel comfortable as well, the traditional change management approaches. When I got introduced to this and I think what was helpful is, it takes a lot of self worth for a leader because it takes you into a lot of uncertainty, insecurity, questioning, opening yourself up for questioning, the traditional change management leaders come and stand up, advisors would come in stand in front of you and say, “Okay. This is how we’re going to do things”. Now, this would say “We don’t know, you know, I don’t know. We need to sense this together”. “Well, what are we paying you for if you come and tell us you don’t know?”. So I think it took a lot of self-worth for me to be comfortable with what was required of me, comfortable with “I don’t know” and it’s okay if people know, I don’t know. That sense of humility and embrace of my own insecurities and all of that. So I think that that was one of the biggest things that I needed to work through, is to be comfortable with this. 

I remember one of our earlier conversations. I wanted to get a much wider part of engagement, much wider groups and people involved. But as I was sensing the organisation, I realised perhaps I was trying to push too much too soon. If I could just get a sector or group of the organisation together, it would be more than what we’ve ever done before. And then even thinking about that group that we get together. Can we intentionally work diversity into that instead of, as you said, we go to the hundred people that we always go to. It’s “No, who are the other voices out there that would not automatically end up on that list of 100 people?” And how do we get them into the conversation?

…

Nelis: You say that you realised you needed to start with a subsection of the organisation because biting off everything at the same time was too much. Can you say a bit more on that, is that like an experiment? Or is that something that you see as gradually expanding outward? How does that work from your perspective? 

Reinhold: I think it comes back to leadership again. What I realised that will provide the greatest leverage is not for me to try and push that we do this throughout the organisation, but to take leaders on a journey to help them see the value of it because they lead in spaces that I will never get to, to help them see the value to help give them some kind of language and tools on how to do that. And some leaders have caught on to this more so than others. Particularly one of our leaders I just found incredibly encouraging to see, as he started working with me and there was even a period during the Covid time in lockdown, that I couldn’t travel to get to a significant group of our people. And he travelled, and we talked about it beforehand, how to engage. And then hearing him afterwards talking about how he facilitated, constantly just using the conversational language that he used. And even a few days ago we had a conversation and he just goes back again to the conversational way of engaging and leading. And so for me, that was a win, that some of the leaders really caught on to it then and then started doing that wherever they found themselves. 

Kate: Yes, that was very much something we were trying to do with the event a couple of weeks ago that you joined us at, that is pass on the vision for using a conversational approach in the organisation. And I do think that people got that in a new way from having spent a couple of days working with a different approach to how to do a meeting, for example. But also to continue the conversation after they leave with others and use a conversational approach with their staff. One question I have is that, I guess, you like us have globally scattered staff and you can’t possibly be with everyone all at once. You can’t gather everyone into one room. And I envy people who work in organisations, where everyone’s in the same building or on the same site, or maybe they have three sites. And they think that’s difficult! We have, you know, over 4,000 staff scattered around the world and we can never get everyone in one room, or even on one Zoom call. So I’m interested to hear how other people engage and create these conversations, whether virtually or by travelling around? 

Reinhold: I think it’s about leaders, and taking leaders on a journey, and equipping them to do that and they need to discern their own contexts as well. You know, because the global context is also different from what people experience in regions, or on a national level.[21:13] One of the things that I realised as I reflected back on those earlier days and even that initial intervention, debriefing the intervention, reflecting on the intervention myself and also with others. And you always ask yourself “How could you have done this better?”. And one of the things that I realised was I could have given people who are coming to this for the first time… because there was quite a bit of tension because people didn’t know what to expect, it wasn’t the normal way of doing things. And sometimes the tension is good because it brings out things. And I later on came across just a few short articles that describe this a little bit more. And I realised even if I had access to that and just had given that to them beforehand to start framing what conversational leadership, conversational organisations, are all about, that may have helped a little bit. When we debriefed afterwards, people then said, “Okay, I understand now to a degree”. And then, even the ones that I spoke to, they still pushed back and had questions. I then sent them these articles, and then we had conversations, again and they said, “Now some of these things make sense to me”. So I realised, leadership and some of the equipping resources, language, that we give to leaders as they do this is critical for them to do that and make sure that it actually goes throughout the organisation. 

Kate: It’s very much a process, a journey of learning, of adjusting, to seeing things differently.

…

Nelis:  I find it fascinating, what you are saying Reinhold, that it’s got to be done sort of in dialogue with people with whom we actually have contact. You can’t you can’t just mandate this across the organisation from a distance. It requires a sense of proximity and that’s of course immediately the challenge  because the topic you’re dealing with, of inclusion and diversity, these are deeply personal topics that you can’t just mandate. Can you share some of your practical stories of some of how that works in your organisation?

Reinhold: At the moment I say a lot of that revolves around interventions. For me, the whole diversity is important, who do we have in the room? Even looking at it from a hierarchical point of view, to make sure that it’s not just your executive or middle-level leaders. That actually, I’m inviting some of the people who just joined a few months ago, younger people, into this conversation. Even with this intervention, one of the key things that we will be working on is leadership, leadership styles, how do we see leadership? Just the whole transactional versus relational leadership. And, again, if you grow in terms of relational leadership, then it opens up spaces for conversation. Then you do this more, more and more. So for me a big part of that is just looking at how we model this, but also in tension with our leadership development, to help expand their understanding of what leadership is and how to make sense as leaders and how to navigate things as leaders] So right now it’s around these interventions and then, and trusting, we’re always talking about capacity building, we’re talk about multiplication. How can we multiply people who can do this throughout the organisation rather than, again, being dependent on a few experts that can facilitate more conversational approaches to organisational life.

Kate: Can you share something with us about your experience, your organisation’s experience, of change processes, the positives and the negatives, whether traditional or conversational, how have you seen that working out? 

Reinhold: Yeah, and that’s an important question Kate. Because again if we study this, there are proponents of conversational leadership and then there are those  who are more traditional change management approaches, and then there are people who are perhaps more in the middle between those two. And I think, you know, the traditional approaches – whether that’s a reality or an assumption– but the predictability that it provides the people know, how we are going to do this process, you know, there’s a research phase, and then you come up with a strategic plan and a rollout and measurement and all of that. And so it gives people that sense of, they know what to expect, the predictability. And then there’s often for some humans a need for them.

Nelis: For safety? 

Reinhold: For safety, yes. I realised with our organisations that some of our structures and systems and processes are so deeply embedded, that to just have a conversational approach it will always raise questions about, “Okay, what does this mean in terms of our structures or processes? How do we measure these things, particularly, how do we evaluate this?” You know, which is a little bit more difficult with conversational approaches. So I think it gives people that sense of predictability. Whereas the conversational approach, some of the benefits, is that it enables wider participation, it enables creativity, greater creativity within an organisation, innovation, novelty, new ways of things coming up. I think it must be Suchman who wrote about this, that one person makes a suggestion, somebody else, person B, hears the suggestion and then they add to that, and it takes on a new form. And person C takes that suggestion, it takes on a whole new form. None of them on their own would have come up with this, but because the conversation takes place there’s novelty that emerges, that you couldn’t even say one person would have come up with this genius idea. Just the fact that it allows space for that. But I think there’s also challenges with a conversational approach. It takes a lot of time. It can provoke resistance because, you know, time is money. People want to plan. People want to know exactly. And so the uncertainty can provoke resistance, and how to navigate that. And just a willingness to sit with the unknown. I think those are some of the challenges for me with the conversational approaches.

Kate: I’m interested that you mentioned speed there. Clare raised an issue in our last episode about what do you do when things are urgent?  A conversational approach takes time. And sometimes you just can’t take the time to do that, and you have to make decisions urgently. I just wanted to ask for your perspective on that. 

Reinhold: Of course, there are times that, you know, an urgent issue can mean life or death and you need to make those decisions. But sometimes, whose “urgent” is it, you know, how urgent is it, really? Can we take a few more days? Or is it just because we’re used to this is the way it should be done? So who assesses, who determines how urgent something is? So one of the things that I’ve done in this includes just coming to terms with who I am in leadership and working in a context where there’s a certain defined way of leadership that I’m not comfortable with, but I’ve assimilated and done it that way many times, or for a long time. I remember having to facilitate a conversation with our leadership team. And I know what our expectations at the end of those discussions are: “Okay. Now, we need to summarise it. What are the key points? What are the action points? What is the timeline? When is this going to happen?” That’s the expectation. And I said to the team, you know, I’m grateful for all of the input. I’ve heard that, but I also want to be transparent that I’m not ready to actually come to that point of saying, okay summarise this and next steps and all of that. Because even as I sat there, I recognized that there were voices in the meeting that I have not heard on this issue that I believe have something to say. And maybe it’s because of the fact that we speak in English sometimes. Sometimes, it’s a personality issue, that some of us need a little bit more time to process and then we just feel we need to make this rushed decision. So I said, “Well for one, I feel there’s a few people, other people I want to engage with and get their input, before I can actually make this decision”. But at the same time I can’t keep them waiting indefinitely. So my arrangement with them was, “I will come back to you in a week and have it summarised and give some kind of way forward, rather than doing it now. And we leave it where it is right now.” And once they heard me explain this to them, it was “Okay, no, we can live with that”. 

Kate: And even if something is urgent we need to make sure we have the right people speaking into this. You know, we can often default to just getting into a little huddle of leaders when we have an urgent decision to be made quickly. And actually, we would benefit from taking a few more hours, maybe a few more days to reach out and ask people at different levels in the organisation for their input on the decision and then it will be a better decision as a result. 

Reinhold: It helps people to at least have some time frame, that is what I find. You can say to them, “Okay. We will come back to you in a certain period of time”. Then, at least for those who are more linear, they have some marker. And then you can do the work that needs to be done and then get to that particular space. And even if it requires more conversation because sometimes it’s not that urgent anymore, but at least they have some kind of idea as to when we get feedback, or take a look at next steps. 

Nelis: I like your balance there, maintaining forward movement, but also framing the time, but also creating space for the right voices to speak into that. And I was fascinated by your comment about language being an issue there, or people who need more time to think. I think there’s a huge cultural component, actually. I constantly see that. You’ve got, often, the loud dominant Western voices who speak up first. And if you don’t give it more time, those will be the only voices. 

Reinhold: Conversational approaches have inherent biases built into them. And sometimes they are unconscious and we need to surface them in order to help us. So one of them would be the language bias that we talked about, the fact that we speak in English, you know, even for somebody like me English is my third language. I can express myself reasonably well in English. But English speakers don’t see the mental energy that it takes, you know, to be able to engage with them on a conversation around the table and having to quickly make a decision. You’re global leaders, you are aware of this. And, Nelis, English is not your first language, either. 

Nelis: So, Kate is the only one who doesn’t have to think right now!

Kate: I’ve lived in other countries and I’m aware of the strain and the tiredness of speaking in another language that’s not your own. One thing we’ve done is when we’ve had global staff conversations where we haven’t all been in the same space and we’ve asked people to group in their organisational units having conversations. Some of those have taken place in French, or Spanish or Korean, and then we ask for the feedback, and feedback is usually in English. We ask for all the groups to feed back to the leadership. So that is one way around it, having language specific groupings. 

…

Nelis: Are there other aspects than language that you would like to bring out when you look at those cultural dynamics? 

Reinhold: Yes, so language would be one. And I like what you said Kate, and I think, you know, just the issue of affinity group conversations. So, even if you have a larger group, larger conversation, can you have affinity group conversations? And how that is fed back, whether that affinity group being a language group, but it could be a gender issue as well. And so, the other issue at play here is the power issue. Particularly in multicultural, diverse contexts, we come in with an assumption of a very egalitarian worldview that everybody’s equal because we’re in the room, but that’s not true. We need to discern when we are together in these rooms, what are the power factors at play in this room that would affect how well we engage in this conversation. And I just mentioned gender. In some places being a man, it implicitly carries a certain weight, what I say. And so what does it mean for women in that room? Well, how do we create space for them perhaps to have a conversation around their own table? And say, this is how we feel, but one woman cannot necessarily speak up on behalf of all, you know, so…  Or, generationally as well, you know, one of the things that I’ve learned even in these diverse conversations is, there would be younger people there who feel that they can speak up because perhaps they even come from an egalitarian worldview. So they’ve always been encouraged in their families with their parents and so on. And this is just how it’s nurtured over the years. But then there are young people who are in that room, that just because of how they grew up, that they would not speak up. So for me, just during those coffee breaks or lunch breaks to go and sit with them or take them aside or go for a walk and say, “What do you make of this meeting? What do you sense in all of that?”. And I always get incredible insights from them. And I may challenge and encourage them and say I will create space and safety for you in the room to actually come and say what you just said, depending on where the person is at. But you know, just between a leader, when they feel affirmed, “Oh, this matters, this is important. Oh, I can say it in the meeting”. So we build people up. So to be aware of the power dynamics in the room, and again, power dynamics can be diverse. Race is a power, and I speak to many people in the majority world… Being from a particular ethnic group, can mean you have power in a group. So whether you’re white or whether you’re, black African, but from a particular ethnic background in a certain group, you know. So the issue of racism can be a power issue. The issue of socio-economic background and where we come from, and money can be a power issue. So, it’s important to be aware of what are the power dynamics at play that determines who speaks up. This is the work that I’m really leaning into, that as we create these inclusive conversations, I believe that certain conditions need to be in place for truly inclusive conversations to take place, because merely having diversity in the room doesn’t mean it’s inclusive. 

Kate: No, not at all. In fact, one of the things we’re doing in our organisation right now is wanting to have a conversation around inclusion and belonging. But knowing if we open that up, we would probably mostly hear the Western voices. So we’re starting out with what we’re calling a Listening Project, deliberately going to our majority world colleagues, and interviewing around 50 actually, and making sure we create space to hear their voices, before we start the conversation. And I hope that that will give people the confidence to speak up when we have the whole staff conversation. But also we will then be able to bring those voices to the whole and sort of amplify them, because of those power issues that you mentioned.

Nelis: I realise often how invisible power is to the person who actually has it, because it’s sort of the air you breathe, and to be aware of that takes time and effort. I was just at an elders’ meeting of our church, and we talked about a very sensitive issue about a younger female person. It’s like well, do you realise that you go as the pastor, as the man, as the older person… It’s that sense of you don’t even know, you’re not even aware of how power plays into this conversation. I think it’s really important to bring that out and often across races, as you said… 

Kate: …and genders. I’ve definitely experienced that.

Nelis: And genders. Exactly, we’ve got to learn to see that, as the ones who have it, and I think every leader has to wrestle with that. 

Reinhold: Absolutely. And de-centre power, acknowledge it, recognize it, and power is not a bad thing in itself, it’s how power is used. Somebody once said, “Power needs to turn up trustworthy”. Can we trust power for the good of all? So, it’s a recognising it exists, but then de-centre it. And there’s a number of other conditions that are critical for us to consider if we are to have really inclusive conversations. 

Nelis: We need to start closing off. Is there any final piece that you would like to mention, an insight, you would like to share with our listeners, that you’re like, wow, if only they retain that we’re good? 

Reinhold: Conversational leadership, it opens up space for so much change in ourselves, in interpersonal relationships, in communities. We are in a very unhealthy space, virtual space, that we are in, where we see a lot of toxicity in terms of how we engage with one another. We need to foster this. And maybe just to the story, Nelis, when I’m in these international diverse meetings that we talk about certain issues. And yet when I walk out of the room and I find people from my affinity group, whatever that might be, then we talk about the meeting in the room. And we say, “Did you hear this? Did you notice this? This should have been talked about”. And somehow we don’t feel the freedom to have these conversations in the room. And really, those are the things that are generative, that will take us forward, get us to grow. And so, really to ask ourselves, “Why don’t we feel we can have these conversations?”. And it goes back to these issues around power in the room, around psychological safety. How do we create psychological safe spaces for us to have these conversations? But being brave to speak up.  I love the work of Mary Frances Winters. If there’s one resource that I’d recommend it’s a book that she wrote around inclusive conversations. She talks about grace and forgiveness, that we are going to make mistakes, we are going to step on each other’s toes. How do we extend that to each other? Facing our fear, our fragility. So, we need to work on those things in order to really have interpersonal relationships and team and organisational conversations that really take us forward. It’s focus on that but recognise that there need to be certain things in place to really generate inclusive generative conversations. 

Kate: Thank you Reinhold. I think we could talk for several more hours, but we’ll stop for now. We really appreciate you coming and sharing with us today, particularly on this intersection between conversational processes and inclusivity, which is so critical. 

Thank you for listening, everyone. We will be adding more resources and links to the show notes. So do check that out. And as always the transcript will be there as well. Thank you, Reinhold. Nelis, until next time! Thank you.

Episode 2

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Leading in Conversations
Leading in Conversations
Leading in Conversation – Episode 2
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It’s good to be together again to talk together about conversational leadership. 

Yes. Definitely. I’ve been looking forward to this. 

So have I. In today’s episode we’re going to dig into the fundamentals of conversational leadership. What does it look like in practice? How does it actually work? In the first episode, we gave an overview of the six key principles of conversational leadership, and for those who haven’t heard that they may want to go and listen to that first podcast. But today we’re looking at what it is, how it actually works. And Kate, maybe you can start this off by saying something about that. Why is conversational leadership actually important? 

Well, I think we started to look at this last episode. For me, conversation has the power to generate new ideas, to help people come to new insights themselves, to help all of us come to new insights ourselves. I think that often emerges in conversation, more than we recognize or realise, and that leads us to make commitments, to change what we do in reality and then that leads to change in our lives. Both small changes and large changes, in our personal lives, in our organisational lives, etc. 

So it actually creates a chain of events, doesn’t it? Conversation starts with that generation of ideas, to new insights, to new commitments, to actual change. That’s quite cool, actually. 

Yes, and I think it happens so unconsciously, most of the time that we don’t realise we’re doing it. I bring an idea to you or just just mention something in a conversation. That changes somehow how you think. You bring something from your experience to add to that. The idea grows. It bounces back and forwards. You may mention it to someone else over coffee in the office. And then in it, things grow through those acts of relating to each other. 

Yes, and that can be both in the small things and the big things. And it’s conversations at an individual level and organisation-wide that are the core of real change.

I was just looking at the blue wall behind you. Our listeners can’t see that but I’m remembering a comment I made about how white your office was, and that led to a chain of events where now, you have beautiful blue walls! You know, just just a throwaway comment brought that change about. That’s a really small change. 

Yes, and even the big changes happen the same way. One example of that is in a conversation I was in earlier. We talked about the difference between survival mindset and opportunity mindset. That triggered for me all sorts of recognition in the organisation and then saying, “I want to talk about that”, and that then triggered other people talking about that. 

Yes, you brought it to us and now it’s an expression that we have started using and that changes our thinking. 

It becomes a thing, people start acting it out. And it’s not something you can control, it just happens.

We’ll touch on that later when we talk about changing the narrative. Because I think that’s a good example, about changing the narrative from survival to opportunity. 

Yes, exactly. But it’s important to note that those changes don’t happen overnight. You can’t force that kind of change to happen. It’s got to come from the inside of us. We’ve got to embrace something ourselves. 

Yes, absolutely. So, I think we were going to talk a little bit about the different uses of conversational leadership today. We in our own organisation have used conversational leadership quite a lot in big change processes. Concrete examples would be, we held a staff consultation about a financial issue that touched people personally. We also held a conversational process to set a new vision and mission for the organisation. We had direction-setting conversations with a group of staff delegates at our International Conference. So we’ve used it in those big processes and I think we’re becoming more comfortable and confident about doing that now, but it can also apply in our daily life as leaders. And that’s I think where we’re both experimenting still. 

Yes, I’m glad you mentioned that. It’s not just the big things, it’s also in the small things. Just recently I’ve worked with our leadership team to change the way we meet, to be more emergent, to not have everything nailed down ahead of time as to how we’re going to go through the agenda, and to really have more of a flow of unpredictable conversations and to embrace that. It feels kind of risky, but to trust ourselves that it’s going to go somewhere.

Yes, I think that’s really improved the quality of our meetings recently. It’s opening them up a bit more.

Another example is that I just recently started conversations with groupings of staff throughout the organisation where I don’t come with an agenda ahead of time, but basically say, “I want to hear where you’re at. I want to get into your skin in a way. What does it feel like where you are?” And that triggers a new dynamic and ideas to follow up on and people saying “Yes!”, and there’s a real appreciation of that. I think that again, that creates a dynamic of trust and small changes that allow us to move forward in new ways. 

I’ll admit, this is hard to do. I’ve been wrestling with this a little bit recently. Our default as leaders is often to speak before we listen, and these ingrained habits are hard to change. And also there’s the expectation that as a leader you will lead, you will have ideas. I think we mentioned this last time. It also takes a lot more time to open up a decision to conversation and consultation. It means being willing to pay attention to feedback, and reconsider decisions. I had an example recently, with one of the teams that reports to me where the team leader and I had made a decision about a new publication we were going to do and she took it to the team and they were like, “Actually, we don’t think that’s a good idea. We don’t think that works”. I had to stop myself and go “Oh, bother. I really should have done this in a more conversational, consultative way with that team”, rather than just the two leaders at the top making a decision that we were going to produce this publication and do this. It would have been so much better to start out saying. “Well, you know, here’s the challenge. Here’s the situation. How are we going to approach this? What publication will work? What channels, etc?” So it’s a constant sort of reorientation of our own habits as leaders, I think. 

Yes. It’s good to know also when that is needed and when it’s not. It’s an art. It’s not a science. 

Yes. There’s no list of when to use conversational leadership and when to be more directive. There are certain situations where it’s just inappropriate: in a crisis where a decision needs to be made very quickly, you can’t say, “Well wait, we’re going to set up a conversational process, and invite all these people”. Sometimes you just have to make a decision. 

Yes, and sometimes it’s something that’s small enough that it really doesn’t have much impact beyond a small group of people. So you can just make that decision. Sometimes it’s a very short conversation that can be done in 30 minutes. Sometimes it’s a very prolonged process. And knowing that is something we all need to learn. 

So Nelis, what do you think it takes to use conversation leadership well in day-to-day management? How does that work for you, for example? 

There are two aspects of that – and I think we need to go into this more deeply in a separate podcast – but there is an element of things to do and there’s an element of attitudes. So the “things to do” is, you need to consciously empower others. So, to help people come up with their own solutions, rather than present the solution to people, and basically say, “Yay, or nay?”. Secondly, I think it requires that you build connections with all the different stakeholders. So as a leader your role is to bring all the key people together. That’s I think a key aspect that you bring in as a leader. And as a leader, you also need to ensure that there is a diversity of opinions. We’ve talked about that earlier ,on our earlier podcast. It’s ensuring diversity is key there. Again, conversational leadership is about action. You need to in the end make sure that solutions are actually implementable, that there is actual progress, there’s a sense of accountability about that too, it’s taking it into action, which is again, a role of leadership. I want to underline those two things: the leader continues to have a key role, you’re not just a bystander, and the leader has a key role in ensuring action. 

Yes. Absolutely. You mentioned, it’s about attitudes. Can you elaborate on that a little bit? What should be the attitudes of the leader? 

Yes, I think a key attitude of the leader is openness. So that means that you allow this process of thinking out loud together. I find myself constantly saying that, I am just thinking out loud here. Please give your ideas, feedback, etc.

Secondly, I think it requires transparency, honesty and open-handedness and that’s linked to what I said earlier, and that requires an attitude of withholding judgement. You talked about that earlier, that you don’t come even subconsciously with the attitude that you have all the answers. That you truly think that the answers of others may be or actually very likely are superior. That’s hard.

Yes, it’s hard. Leaders tend to have a certain personality type and are often quite confident about the solutions they’ve come up with, so it takes humility. It takes stepping back and saying, you know what, these people probably have better answers or solutions than I do. 

Because as a leader you think you’re the expert but many many times, you’re actually not. 

All of this is attitudes and approaches and that’s all great but it may be helpful to explore a little bit what the actual steps are, what are the things you need to do concretely in a process? So let’s explore that. And I think the first step in the process is framing the issue. Can you say a little bit about that.

Yes, definitely. You can all gather for a conversation, but you need to know what you are talking about. This can be a problem, a question we want to solve, or an exploration of an issue before the problem is even identified, is even clear. The leader can frame the issue or you can do that as a group, I guess. It’s important that there’s clarity about what needs addressing. But at the same time that may shift as part of the conversation, actually, the really important problem at the root of something may not be the thing you’ve identified but it may emerge, the deeper issue, may emerge as you’re talking, so you need to be ready to keep an eye on that really and sense what the real issue is, and let the conversation flow in that direction if it needs to.

Always with this sense of “What are we trying to address?” There is always this framing, but realising that that frame may actually shift throughout the conversation. And that you’re framing that together, but constantly keep in mind that it’s not just a free-for-all about anything. 

Because you want the conversation to be productive and it needs to be framed well, in order to be productive. Otherwise, you’re going to range all over the place and touch on lots of interesting things, but not actually get anywhere. 

Yes, another word to use maybe is to have clear intent.

So the next stage I think is then… well, you’ve got to have invited people to join the conversation, probably before you frame the issue for them, but you probably want to frame the issue so that you can invite people to join you. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? 

For me that’s a key second part of a process: having the right people in the room or in the conversation. The room may be a lot of rooms over a lot of time, and that may actually take time. Who the right people are may actually be a process of discovery. I think it is important to have a feel for who are some of the key people I know about. And then have these people point to others, that they’re saying, “I think these people would be good at being part of this conversation”. And I think there’s some good examples of that. 

Yes, we both read this book by Patricia Shaw, Changing conversations in organisations. I love her case study at this company in Italy – I’m not sure if it’s a fictitious or not – Ferrovia – the process of adding people to the conversation. I don’t know if the phrase “the coalition of the willing” came from from her or someone else, but it’s that sometimes chaotic process of just pulling people in and someone saying, “Oh, wait, we need to go invite that guy”—and they all had great Italian names—”in that department over there”. Obviously, that’s easier when you all work on one site than if you’re remote, like us, but still you can say, “Well, let’s schedule another meeting and pull that person in”. It’s almost spontaneous, but engaging the energy and passion of those involved or those they know, rather than sitting down with your list as a leader and sort of writing up who the logical people are to be involved in this whether they’re interested or not. And I love that expression, “the coalition of the willing” because sometimes the most obvious people, the most obvious stakeholders, are not actually willing or interested, but there might be somebody completely out there you hadn’t thought of who’s actually got so much to bring. I always talk about getting beyond “the usual suspects”. Again as we’ve said many times, the novelty comes, the innovation comes, when you invite diversity into the process.

Yes, it’s actually an invitation to the people. It also shows respect to people who have ideas, that even if they don’t have a formal position, they are allowed to be part of that process. They would be invited in. I think that can be very powerful.

We need to get better at that, better at looking beyond our immediate circle of connections, beyond the usual suspects, and finding out who those people are.

Yes, because we only know who we know. You and I know only  a limited set of people and that’s true for any leader.

For these people to function well, it may be good to be aware that people need to feel safe. So you need to create safe spaces or “containers”. So can you say a little bit more about that? 

Two people who have written a lot about this are Jacob Storch and Chris Corrigan. I have a little quote from Chris Corrigan, defining containers as “intangible yet real spaces in which the potential and possibility of a group can unfold”. Containers can be, you know, a one-off event or a series of events or a series of conversations. I think we should probably give this another whole episode at some point. Focusing on creating a safe space or a container can involve anything from the physical environment of where you’re meeting, to the code of conduct for participation, the tools you use and other intangible aspects that ensure the psychological safety of the group and the openness to share and explore new ideas, to make it a really generative space. It’s really important that people feel safe. Safe from the repercussions of sharing honestly. Especially if you’re in a leadership role, the dynamic, the power dynamic… you have to be really careful that you make people feel safe, that what they share is not going to be repeated somewhere else, or it’s going to come back to haunt them.

Yes, I think that’s really important. Because people hold back if they think they’re going to be hurt by it. That sense of holding back will kill the conversation and I think that is often the case actually, people are like, “Well can I safely contribute this or not?”. That’s really important.

I think we’ve both experienced that in cross-cultural situations as well with our multicultural teams, that very often the loudest voices in the rooms are those of the Westerners. Others are holding back and we really need the voices of everyone, not just our Western expat colleagues, but our Majority World staff, especially as we are often working in their cultures, in their contexts, in their languages. 

One example, I was just thinking earlier about this, when I was first learning about participatory methods, I was using the Consensus Workshop method of the The Canadian Institute for Cultural Affairs, the ICA. They had this thing they call “Workshop Assumptions”. We had written the assumptions up on a big poster at the front of the room and it really struck me. We kept drawing people’s attention back to the workshop assumptions. Things like “Everyone has wisdom”. “Everyone’s wisdom is needed”. Because often in group conversations, you have those dominant people, who consume the sound space, and as a facilitator, or as a leader facilitating, you need to make sure that those assumptions are respected, that we need to hear from everyone. 

You’re talking about facilitation and that actually brings us nicely to the next point. It’s a great segue into structure and tools for hosting a conversation. We’ll explore a little bit the difference between facilitating and hosting. I think it’s good for you to maybe say a little bit about participatory methods that are often used in this field. 

I must say, at the outset, I am not an expert in this at all. We’ll have to bring some of our participatory methods colleagues in at some point. But I’m a big fan of participatory methods and I’m very much still learning. I think there are so many great tools out there: participatory methods, facilitation tools. Some of the ones we’ve used are: World Cafe, Appreciative Inquiry, Outcome Mapping, Consensus Workshop, Focused Conversations, Polarity Management. Maybe some of those ring bells with our listeners, but there are so many more. But one lesson that we’ve learned is that, while the methods and tools are excellent, we need to keep an eye on the overall flow of conversations. Sometimes the tools and methods can get in the way and take centre stage and that becomes unhelpful. I’m thinking of sessions where I’ve seen groups figuring out how to use the tool and that’s really eclipsed or taken the space of the conversation. So we’ve got to be careful, not to over-structure, and not to sort of focus on the tool and the perfect implementation of the method to the extent that the process becomes transactional, rather than transformational. I’m still trying to figure that one out, to be honest.

Yes, we’re still figuring that out. And that comes back to that comment I made earlier about hosting and facilitating because most of those tools assume a facilitator and as a leader or even as an outside consultant you are then a facilitator and everything kind of flows back to that facilitator. It’s the facilitator who draws the conclusions, it’s the facilitator who people talk to, and so they become the core focus, whereas a normal of free-flowing conversation shifts all the time around, people don’t talk to one person, but they talk to each other. It’s quite dynamic. That’s when I think you’re hosting, when the dynamic flow, the ebb and flow of conversation happens naturally. I love that concept of hosting. But as you said, we’re still figuring out what that looks like and how to do that in practice.

But it’s hard to host as a participant as well, isn’t it? I’ve observed you doing this in our leadership team meetings where you’re hosting, but you’re also wanting to contribute as yourself. Any reflections on that experience?

Yes, actually it’s interesting because I think that’s the power of it. Because if you’re facilitating, you can’t. But if you’re hosting you are actually a participant yourself as well. I mean, think of the host of a dinner party. The host participates, the host makes sure that the conversation keeps flowing, but at the same time participates and engages and has his or her own opinions, asks questions, brings people in who are quiet. I think that idea is actually quite powerful because as a leader you’re not just a facilitator. You have to participate because you’ve got a lot to contribute, others have a lot to contribute, but you do too. So, I find that a very powerful concept. And maybe that takes us, then actually quite naturally, to the next element of our process thoughts: you need to make space for the spontaneous. You already quoted Patricia Shaw. Anything more you want to say about that?

This is such a challenge, especially for someone who’s a bit of a planner like me. A bit of a “J” on the Myers-Briggs inventory. Yes, spontaneity, going with the flow. We referred to this earlier when we were talking about framing as well – watching for the real issue that emerges, but being ready to flex and change your plans at the last minute, and even mid-session is, I think, hard for us as leaders, but essential as hosts. This is where leading by feel and intuition comes in. I was thinking about an example from our International Conference in 2016 where I was on the facilitation team. While we were planning, a couple of months before, I had this sense that one session, I think it was the Saturday morning, it was a real pivotal moment. I think it was actually exactly halfway through the event. I just had this sense that that session would be pivotal and that we should hold our plans lightly. And that was really sort of scary paying attention to my intuition there. But sure enough that session came round and got completely diverted into a topic that had arisen during the event that one of the participants had brought to the facilitation team and said, “I think we need to actually pay attention to what’s arisen here and talk about some of the things people shared”. I was standing at the back with my notes for the day, you know, almost throwing away a page at a time as the minutes ticked on through the session. But I was okay because I had had that sense before that this was going to happen. For me, that was probably a bit of a God moment being sort of given that nudge beforehand. So I was ready to abandon my session plans, and flex. Actually I think we had 15 minutes left at the end to try and fit everything from the session and we didn’t, we reworked it, but that change was exactly what we needed at the time in that overall process. So I think that making space for the spontaneous is really important. And also as part of that, paying attention to the small things that happen, the throwaway comments with people outside of these containers, outside of these formal processes, picking up on things. I remember we did a conversational process about one of our action plans. We got our operational units to give feedback. In the margin of one of the group’s notes, they’d done some doodles for a way to express the action plan goals. It was such a great sort of global thing. I think we had a very linear representation at the time—an arrow—I think you might have actually created it. They had this little doodle and we gave that to our designer who then came up with that and it became a sort of logo. Asia had it printed on mugs, somebody else had a key ring or something, and it was just really fun to see. It’s paying attention to those small things, as well as the big things, and, and just being spontaneous and adding those in.

Yes, I love that. That requires something else we’ve talked about in the process, is that you need to stay long enough in the groan zone.

What’s “the groan zone”, Nelis?

Sam Kaner has done some work on that: The Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making talks about that. But the groan zone is this area, the time in the process, where you have no idea how it’s going to ever come to a good conclusion. I’ve often seen that. You’ve got this sense of “This plane is not going to land!”

Yes, it’s horrible. What are we doing? Where are we going to end up on this? 

Exactly. That sense of staying there. Not trying to quickly move out of it and get to the comfortable solution. Staying in that exploratory phase where things seem to go in every direction. To embrace that chaos and then consciously stay at it. I think that’s quite important. It feels very messy. It feels disorganised. It feels frustrating. It’s not for nothing called the groan zone. That is where in a way, the creativity happens. That’s where people are forced outside of their comfort zone and to explore new ways of looking at things. 

Yes. The way that Kaner brings it up in his book, he’s talking about a process where you have a time of gathering as much input as you can, a sort of divergent phase. And it’s the turning point before you head into the convergent phase, where you’re trying to sort of settle and come to conclusions and action items, etc. If you try to jump too quickly into that convergence, you’ll miss that essential kind of magic that happens in the groan zone where suddenly everything sort of settles out and people come to a realisation and then agreements start to form and directions flow. I think we’ve all been there. I loved it when I came across this, in this book, The Facilitators Guide to Participatory Decision-making, he calls it the groan zone. I was like, “Yes! That perfectly describes it”. I often tell people beforehand now. “There’s going to be this thing called the groan zone and you’ll know when we get there because it’s horrible, and you just think, “Why are we doing this? Can we have a coffee break now? Can we leave? Can we finish?””. 

And there’s a comfort in knowing that isn’t there? That, yes, this is normal.

We need to grow our tolerance for uncertainty, and ambiguity and chaos, I think, and our patience and trust in each other and trust in the process.

But you do need to come to conclusions, which is then the last part we wanted to talk about, the last part of the process we want to explore, is you need to come to conclusions. That actually means that all of the conversations need to then be translated into commitments to do something, to act. I think it’s really important to note here that those conclusions are not about the prescriptions for everyone else, what they need to do. It is actually what you commit to yourself. What am I going to do? What do I commit to? And that’s quite different. But I think that’s important. The conclusions are about my commitment to the change.

Yes, Dialogic Organisation Development – Bushe and Marshak – they talk about probes as one of the as the outcome, where you go from a dialogic process. This is giving the people involved in the process the permission, the space, to then launch probes. That means to try things out, to put their innovations into practice. You create space for them to do that in their job. And you give them budget, you give them the permissions necessary for them to try things out and attempt to work out the conclusions reached in the conversation. That’s again another area we need to look into experimenting with. Because what you don’t want is a great conversation to happen and then everything to get handed back to the leaders, who we all know are often the bottleneck in processes, in change. As leaders we need to start opening up space for others to experiment and try things out and also to fail because we can learn from our failures as much from, or more probably, than from our successes. 

I think that’s great, because otherwise you abandon the conversational leadership approach immediately after the first conversation. It’s an ongoing thing, it’s a repeated thing, and even that sense of conclusion is always a temporary conclusion, it’s a conclusion for now and then the cycle restarts. It gets repeated in different places throughout the organisation.

This has been great, Kate, I really enjoyed this. I really hope it inspires people to do this experimentation, to be part of such a cycle, to create space, to be in the groan zone, to innovate, to start those probes, this invitation to experimentation. It’s good to say again that this is something that’s an art, it’s not a science. It’s something that needs to be learned through practice. I’m really looking forward to people experimenting with this and sharing back with us what they are learning, where they have struggled, where they have seen it work, what’s been exciting. So bring your comments!

On that point, leadinginconversation.net. Please add your comments and continue the conversation with us. 

Yes, and we’ll see what emerges. 

Yes. Okay, that’s all for today. Thank you for listening!