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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!