Story & Conversation in Organisations: A Survey

Richard Seel, 2003.

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Introduction—Images of Organisation

Gareth Morgan (1986) has taught us the value of using different metaphors to look at organisations. For most of the last century the mechanical metaphor, associated with Taylor (1947) & Fayol (1949), was dominant. Managers have been urged to find ‘levers’ for change; consultants have a ‘tool kit’ which can be used to implement new ways of working; team ‘building’ is seen as an appropriate activity; and so on.

Since the 1980s, and before, writers and consultants have been urging organisations to see themselves as living systems, employing a different set of metaphors. People must now be ‘nurtured’; managers are like gardeners, change happens in ‘ecocycles’ (Hurst 1995). These are sometimes coupled with metaphors taken from complexity theory: teams ‘self-organise’ (Macready & Meyer 1999); strategy ‘emerges’ (Mintzberg 1985); and so on.

Most recently we have seen the rise of linguistic metaphors: organisations are seen as a network of interacting stories (Denning 2001); culture is the emergent result of conversations (Seel 2000); the core elements of a process are the commitments made by individuals to one another (Winograd & Flores 1986).

I want to concentrate here on these linguistic metaphors because I believe they have something very important to say to us about the nature of organisations and organisation change. This is not the only, or even the best, way of seeing—there are times when the mechanical model is still best; times when organic metaphors will be most helpful. But stories and conversations are where much of the creative energy is currently being expended and that is where the focus of this piece will be.

The nature of organisation

I sometimes approach the nature of organisation by looking at kinds of change.

Most change initiatives focus on process, system or structure, even when they claim to be focusing on the organisation or the culture (culture is what we call the emergent result of all the patterns of relationship which make the organisation.)

To use another natural world metaphor: organisations are like whirlpools or tornados—there is a reasonably stable and recognisable pattern which is only sustained because there is a constant throughput of energy and matter. This is the paradox of far-from-equilibrium dynamics: without constant change there would be no stability.

Conditions for emergence

In a system like this, fundamental change—that is to say, a move from one pattern to another—will always be emergent and self-organising, that is to say it will be the result of changes in the interactions between the people in the organisation and cannot be predicted or controlled. We still don’t know much about emergence in complex systems but I have come up with a list of possible factors which might have an influence:

Connectivity

Diversity

Rate of information flow

Lack of inhibitors

Good constraints to action

Intention

Watchful anticipation

The interactions between people are what make up organisation. Patterns of meaning and commitment swirl and dissipate minute-by-minute without ceasing. The effectiveness of these conversations is, in large part, a measure of the effectiveness of the organisation. If the conversations are rich, diverse and unconstrained there is the possibility of creative and adaptive change. If not, the organisation will be doomed to repeat itself until it is so far out of alignment with its environment that it will die.

Conversations

Perhaps the most common complaint about modern organisational life is ‘poor communication’. Nothing could be more eloquent in support of the position that organisational life is essentially about conversation. Good conversations lead to high productivity and customer satisfaction; poor conversations do the converse.

It is also clear that most of us are not very good at workplace conversations. We say things which we ought not to say and we do not say things which we ought to say and there is no health in the organisation (with apologies to the Book of Common Prayer).

A simple example will suffice. Patterson et al (2002:22) tell of a woman who went to hospital to have her tonsils removed. The surgeon amputated part of her foot! Of course, there was an inquiry and the chilling fact emerged that seven people had thought that there was something wrong happening and not one of them spoke up. Mistakes will happen in any system, but here, because the culture did not permit open conversation (or because the conversations had not created an open culture—it’s co-creating) an avoidable accident turned into a culpable disaster for the poor patient.

There are no quick fixes for poor conversations and toxic cultures but a number of the approaches indicated below offer some food for thought. Many of them try to put forward effective ways of having good conversations; or else they are concerned to try to disclose the ‘atomic units’ of conversation.

Dialogue

The physicist David Bohm developed an approach to conversation which he called dialogue. Dialogue, “creates the opportunity for each participant to examine the preconceptions, prejudices and the characteristic patterns that lie behind his or her thoughts, opinions, beliefs and feelings, along with the roles he or she tends habitually to play. And it offers an opportunity to share these insights.” (Bohm et al 1991)

Bohm contrasts dialogue (derived from Greek words implying ‘a flow of meaning’) with discussion (derived from Latin words implying, ‘a shaking apart’). The former is generative and collaborative, the latter analytical and often competitive. Table 1 gives a flavour of the difference between the two:

Table 1. Dialogue & Discussion

Dialogue can often be frustrating. David Bohm viewed this frustration as essential and felt that it should be experienced and valued rather than dissipated. This generally requires a lot of meeting time and a lack of ‘escape routes’. Dialogue, for Bohm, is essentially subversive. It will therefore always tend to destroy or at least re-make an organisation. Furthermore, dialogue does not have a ‘purpose’ or outcome in mind. It is its own justification and so will probably not be useful in organisational life.

Bohm’s view has not stopped people trying to use and develop forms of dialogue for use in organisations and a few of these are given below.

Dialogic Leadership

William Isaacs, director of the MIT dialogue project, is also interested in dialogue though his approach is somewhat different from Bohm’s. Using ideas from Donald Kantor, a family systems therapist, Isaacs offers a ‘four player model’ of conversation.

Figure 1. Four player model.

Any effective conversation has four aspects, or roles. Although each of us has a preferred role, we can play all of them. The art of good conversation is to find the right balance between roles; if one dominates, conversation will be stilted and ineffective. Dialogue tends to break down if one or more of the participants gets ‘stuck’ in a role or if patterns arise which exclude one or more of the roles.

Isaacs also fits Argyris & Schön’s distinction (1978) between ‘inquiry’ and ‘advocacy into his four player model. Inquiry requires bystanding and following; advocacy requires a good balance between moving and opposing (figure 2). An effective leader will work to find a balance between inquiry and advocacy in conversations.

 Figure 2. Inquiry & Advocacy

Isaacs also offers four conversational skills which can help each of the four roles to be more effective (figure 3). Learning to voice effectively is important if we are to be heard by others in the conversation; the better we can listen the more effective we will be in the role of following; respect for the other participants is key if we are to oppose in a constructive way, keeping the conversational flow intact; and finally, it is essential for the bystander that we are able to suspend our own ideas and opinions in such a way that both we and others can examine them and see their strengths and weaknesses.

(See more at http://www.duversity.org/ideas)

Circular questioning

The Milan Group of systematic family therapists was greatly influenced by the work of Gregory Bateson who came to believe that families are systems of individuals who are themselves systems. Mind, body, action and the bodies acted upon are all part of a circuit of  mental activity. The mind/body dichotomy is thereby dissolved. What in linear dualistic thinking might be called a disease of the mind became for Bateson a result of patterns of interaction in the client’s system, probably the family system. The Milan therapists developed a range of interventions designed to help family members become aware of some of the patterns of interaction which they habitually repeated.

Some consultants have used some of these interventions in their work in organisations. One of the most widely-used is ‘circular questioning.’ Essentially, it consists of avoiding the direct question and instead asking a less direct question, often of someone else—“Peter, what is your sense of the way John is feeling about Jane’s point of view?”

There are three aspects to circular questioning as practiced by the Milan therapists. The first is to do with helping people shift perspective. Instead of asking John, as a first-person participant, why he feels the meeting is a waste of time, Peter is asked to act as observer and offer his comments. In this way the patterns of interaction start to become explicit and John receives feedback about his interactions with Jane.

Secondly, circular questioning can help with neutrality—instead of the therapist or consultant engaging directly with the client or offering feedback, the responsibility is put back into the system. This is not to say that the consultant or therapist is outside the system; family therapists will ask themselves circular questions in the presence of the client: “What do you think the biggest challenge this board is currently facing?” Again, being confronted with this indirect feedback from the consultants can help make the tacit assumptions of the group become clearer.

The third aspect of the Milan approach involves hypothesising. The therapists will ask questions which trigger exploration of possible explanations for behaviour patterns: “what benefits do you think there might be for the board in failing to come to a decision about this matter?”

Circular questioning can also be used to connect past and present, future and present: “Peter, you mentioned that things were different when you joined the organisation. How would it be if we still did things that way?”

Systemic interventions such as circular questioning or ‘circulating conversation’ (break into a number of small groups; one group starts discussing a topic, the other listen; after a few minutes the next group takes up the topic, building on what they have heard; and so on at least twice round the whole circle) are not widely used in organisational work, yet as more people experiment with them I am sure that they will become more common and more useful.

(See, e.g. http://www.exchangesjournal.org/classroom/1065_Rossmann_pg2.html and http://www.newtherapist.com/cecchin.html)

Conversation mapping

The work of Marcial Losada (1999) is not as widely known as it should be. He observed a number of business teams at work, mainly involved in planning activities and coded the interactions on according to a number of criteria—ration of advocacy to inquiry; ratio of positive to negative statements; ratio of internally-focused statements (self) to externally focused statements (other) and the amount of connectivity between team members. He also assessed the effectiveness of the teams on a number of dimensions. His results were as follows:

Table 2. Characteristics of high performance teams

I have used this model as the basis for a conversation mapping exercise with an executive team. Together with a colleague I coded the interactions between the members of the team while they were engaged in one of their regular meetings. The subsequent feedback was very illuminating for them.

Conversing as Organising

Patricia Shaw uses conversation as the basis of her organisational work. Indeed, she is explicit: “I will not be writing about conversations that take place ‘in’ an organization, but about conversing as organizing.” (2002:11)

Shaw works by joining conversations which are already taking place between people. Using her skill and experience (she is a Gestalt therapist as well as an experienced consultant) she enables people to have conversations about the things that interest and matter to them, rather than the things they think they ‘ought’ to talk about. From this, new patterns of relating, influencing and energising may emerge. Her way of working is subtle and not easily explained unless experienced. One way in which she attempts to uncover it is by using a hypothetical questioner to interrogate herself about her practice. For instance:

Questioner: What part did you play? Were you facilitating the meeting?

Responder: If by facilitating you mean participating as fully and responsively as I can in the conversation, voicing my opinions, associations and ideas along with everyone else, then yes.

Questioner: But surely that is what everyone is doing! Why engage you?

Responder: Yes, exactly. But I have slowly developed a practical feel for the process of shaping and patterning in communication as I participate. (2002:32)

Of course, that’s not most people’s definition of facilitation but this is key to Shaw’s work—the notion of a detached facilitator does not make sense in this way of viewing organisation. One of Patricia Shaw’s opening questions is often something like, “Who else would be interested in having a conversation about this? Why don’t we invite them along?” She is interested in people who are interested in conversing. The Q&A is continued after an account of a meeting Shaw had had with a client group.

Questioner: You seem to have picked out a key group of informal influencers to gather together to initiate further change at the plant.

Responder: Be careful. You are looking at the process of how informal leadership emerges and then ascribing this as something ‘in’ the individuals who came together….I am paying attention to the way influence arises in webs of relationships in particular contexts… (2002:38)

Questioner: You do not seem to discuss any ‘ground rules’ for making the most of the gatherings or discuss any kind of objectives, you just seem to start.

Responder: Yes, I am not trying to set up a special kind of interaction. These discussions have an ‘everyday quality’—they are messy, branching, meandering, associative and engaging. (2002:39)

Crucial conversations

Kerry Patterson and his colleagues have produced a somewhat different guide to have more effective conversation in organisation. They concentrate on crucial conversations (2002); on how to be effective when the stakes are high. The perspective is very much focused on the individual and how individuals can become more effective communicators.

They emphasise the need to get the ‘pool of shared meaning’ as full as possible, preferably by using dialogue. But in crucial conversations we are likely to become anxious and if we do, primitive flight or fight reflexes—or silence or violence, as they call it—are likely to take over. Three styles of each are identified. Silence can take the form of masking, avoiding or withdrawing. Violence can be controlling, labelling or attacking.

The book is full of useful information and perspectives but has a rather ‘old paradigm’ flavour—for instance, the subtitle is “tools for talking when stakes are high.”

Nevertheless, there is a lot of good advice, packaged in a series of charts and acronyms. For instance, if you need to confront someone in a situation where you might otherwise either keep silent or else make muttered asides or explode into full anger, remember STATE (2002:124). That is Share your facts; Tell your story; Ask for others’ paths; Talk tentatively; Encourage testing. The ‘path’ referred to is their term for the route from perception to action:

“See/hear Ù Tell a story (to yourself)  Ù  Feel  Ù  Act”

This is similar to Senge’s ‘ladder of inference’ (Senge et al 1994:242ff): The key point is that the story we tell ourselves belongs to us alone and we have the option of telling a different story and so evoking different feelings within ourselves and thus different actions. By sharing our stories we increase the pool of meaning and offer the chance for genuine dialogue to take place.

(See also http://www.crucialconversations.com)

Organisation as a network of commitments

One of the first books to look at organisations as networks of conversation was Computers & Cognition by Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores. In it they propose the idea that organisations are networks of commitments. A commitment is an implied promise made in a speech act (1986:59). There is an implied contract made between speaker and listener even if the speech act itself is not a commissive (a commitment to future action). For instance an assertive such as, “This ring is pure gold” implies a commitment to truth. If the listener subsequently discovers that the ring was brass, a commitment will have been broken. Similarly, a declarative such as, “You’ve definitely got the job” implies a commitment to future action; the speaker may not be in a position to undertake the action personally but does imply that they have certain knowledge that the action will occur.

Because there is an implied contract in every speech act, all conversations are relational. Meaning arises in listening to the commitments expressed in speech acts. Furthermore, how we talk about the world emerges in recurrent patterns of breakdown (where one party believes that the commitment is satisfied and the other does not) and the potential for discourse about grounding (one party persuades the other that the commitment is indeed satisfied). (1986:68)

It is these ever-shifting networks of requests and promises which make up the fabric of the organisation. Flores hypothesises that work flow consists of a series of interlocking loops of speech acts of the following basic shape:

Of course, the performer will often need to engage others in order to satisfy the request. He or she will then become the customer in one or more loops and so the interactions ripple out throughout the organisation. For more on Flores' methods see an article in Center for Quality of Management Journal. Flores started his own consultancy to use his approach. This was later taken over by VISION Consulting, which still uses a commitments-based approach.

Flores has developed his insights further with work on Trust and Assessment. A 1998 article in Fast Company offers an insight into how he works with organisations.

Stories

Some patterns of narrative flow and meaning spread out from individual conversations and seem to take on a life of their own. We call these stories. We tell stories all the time. Even the simplest story can have a great impact. While I was at the BBC a new head of department arrived, having been recruited from a commercial environment. She told a lot of new stories. The simplest was only one word long—she started referring to the ‘business’ instead of to the ‘department’. The implications were huge and the responses were sharp. Some people hated it, others began to see new possibilities. Eventually a new culture emerged as people started to have different conversations about the way we did things and the way we might do things in the future. In the following sections I am going offer some notes on a number of approaches to storytelling and conversation in organisational life.

Springboard stories

Stephen Denning (2001), writes about his experience of discovering and telling stories which can make a significant different in helping people see new possibilities for the future. Denning worked at the World Bank and was keen that they should share their knowledge and expertise with the developing world. Yet whenever he put forward his ideas they seemed to fall on stony ground.

One day he heard of a health worker in a remote town in Zambia who was able to log onto a health website and immediately access the latest information about the treatment of malaria. “Wouldn’t it be good if the Bank were able to share its knowledge in the same way?”, he wonders. In the coming weeks Denning uses the story in presentations. What he notices is that this little episode, with the same question he asked himself, is remarkably effective in opening people to explore new options—much more so than reams of analysis and clever PowerPoint presentations.

Denning’s book explores the beginnings of his discovery and the way in which he developed his approach. Interestingly, he also notes that, “…my experience was that storytelling, more than stories per se, was having the impact. The look of the eye, the intonation of the voice, the way the body was held, the import of a subtle pause, and my own response to the audience’s responses—all these seemed to make an immense contribution to the meaning of a story for my audiences.” (Denning 2001:xxii).

One particular power attributed to storytelling is that it offers the potential for each listener to incorporate the story within their own framework and situation and the re-tell it in ways which are relevant and appropriate for them. In this way unity of purpose can be obtained without any need for bureaucratic uniformity.

(More at http://stevedenning.com)

“Squirrel Inc”

Stephen Denning has taken this work further in his 2004 book Squirrel Inc which identifies seven different kinds of story which may be effective in different organisational situations. The following table gives an overview of his approach here: