Of talking heads and smarter ideas

Font Size

Print

Feedback

Email

Discuss

Related Articles

Wanted: CEOs from India

: Passion killers remain in place, despite their evident destructive impact, because to confront them would require re-engineering fundamental attitudes and beliefs that show up most evidently in relationships. The passion killers either sprout in the first place due to poor relationships (for example being caused by inadequate consultation, collaboration or alignment) or else aren’t challenged openly when in place because of the paltry relationships that prevail.

Some years ago an Hewlett-Packard (HP) safety leader, Bob Veazle, influenced by his experience with the “network of conversations” approach exemplified by the World Caf’e methodology, launched a series of conversations about safety across various HP units.

The World Cafe’ works by setting up multiple rounds of conversations between diverse groups of people with each round of conversation building on the last. In each round, you dialogue with a different group of people. At each dialogue location, a host remains from the last conversation, who updates the new group as to what the conversation has been at that location. Each of the joining members inputs insights and points from their own last round of conversations. Then, collectively, they build on and extend from the distilled inputs that were shared. Multiple rounds occur, each time a different host remains, and the dialogue groups always shift. In short, World Cafe’s is a set of cross-pollinating, iterative conversations on a core topic.

Bob Veazle realised that a network of crucial conversations was an exciting and empowering paradigm by which to conceive of organisations and organisational communication. Accordingly, he envisaged boxes on the organisational chart as “webs of conversations.” So instead of multiple rounds of dialogue in a conference room, he realised multiple dialogues between functions and leaders and locations could be set up.