Topic 3.1: Organisations as conversations
When you think about the group, team, key projects or the organisation you are a part of, what is it that makes it work? What creates the energy, outputs, creativity and learning that is essential to its work and progress? It might be surprising to realise that one of the fundamental and powerful resources we rely upon is the humble conversation.
Organisations and groups are connected together by information flow through conversations. The conversation that you have with a colleague, the conversation they have with others in a meeting, the conversation that stakeholders have about the work you are doing – all of these combine to create the reality of the organisations of which we are part.
“Conversations lie at the heart of managerial work. Managers talk. It is through talk that they teach and inspire, motivate and provide feedback, plan and take decisions,” say Lynda Gratton and Sumantra Ghoshal (2002: 209)[1] of the London Business School.
Gratton and Ghoshal suggest that some conversations in organisational life fall into the category of ‘dehydrated talk’ or ‘ritual fulfilment’ – where we go through the motions of a meeting or conversation without any energy or emotional investment. This is a sobering thought when you consider how much time we all spend in meetings with others.
“… the most powerful change interventions occur at the level of everyday conversation. Good and powerful conversation is vocal, reciprocating, issues-oriented, rational, imaginative and honest. Change agents produce change through various combinations of these six kinds of speech.”
20 min
Hurley and Brown highlight the practical and crucial role that conversations play as a “core process” in working with others.
“As defined by educator Carolyn Baldwin, conversational leadership is ‘the leader’s intentional use of conversation as a core process to cultivate the collective intelligence needed to create business and social value.’ It encompasses a way of seeing, a pattern of thinking, and a set of practices that are particularly important today, when the most important questions we face are complex ones that require us to develop new ways of thinking together to foster positive change.”
This article also poses some valuable questions about how conversations can be used more effectively in our workplaces.
2 min
This thought about the power of conversation is beautifully and simply captured by one of our greatest minds, the late Stephen Hawking, in this short video.
So, let’s keep communicating
- Gratton, L. & Ghoshal, S. (2002). Improving the quality of conversations, Organisational Dynamics, 31:3, p209-223 ↵