Your organization’s culture is nothing more than what individuals say to each other and what they think to themselves. When you shift the conversations, you shift the culture.
Stephen Shapiro, Innovate the Way You Innovate, European Business Review
We define another person’s friendship, courage, or loyalty by talking about that individual in certain ways, both to ourselves and others. Our mental scripts and verbal behavior are powerful – giving useful meaning to concepts that define the very essence of human existence. When groups, organizations, or communities communicate to define these concepts, we get a ‘culture.’ Perhaps, it is fair to say that culture is conversation – both spoken and unspoken.
E. Scott Geller, The Psychology of Safety Handbook
Setting aside legal and aesthetic questions about the nature of creation, it’s clear that we are in a period of ever-increasing co-creation. Updating the neo-Platonists and Mystics of old, we experience creativity as something that emanates and emerges through frisson, friction and inspiration, and often best when in collaboration and conversation with others. We create culture, and all culture is conversation, a creative conversation. So wherever two or more are gathered, the conditions for imagining a future into reality emerge. And this becomes the story of our lives.
Bill Wilkie, Stori / View source of quoted text
Change the Conversation: Change the Future
The strategy for an alternative future is to focus on ways a shift in conversation can shift the context and thereby create an intentional future. Reconciliation of community, or a future different and not determined by the past, occurs through a shift in language. Operationally, this means engaging in conversations we have not had before.
Peter Block, Civic Engagement and the Restoration of Community: Changing the Nature of the Conversation (download pdf)
A more empowering way of thinking about organisational culture
The traditional definition of culture is “The way we do things around here”.
A more empowering definition might be “The way we talk about things around here”.
Among the most important ‘things’ that need to be talked about are possibilities—what might be brought into being to generate value for customers and other stakeholders; how essential resources might be acquired; how obstacles might be surmounted; how the product, service or project might enrich society.
Some categories of conversation that contribute to a culture of innovation
Conversations for relationship
“Who are you? What do you care about? Can I trust you? How can we deepen our connection?”
Conversations for possibility
“What might we create together? What more is possible if we accomplish our goals? What is the bigger game we want to play?”
Conversations for purpose
“Why are we considering creating something together? What is our joint or collective purpose? How does this contribute to the organisation’s overarching purpose?”
Conversations for co-creation
These are conversations for collaborative action.
“How are we going to create this together? What action is called for?”
“Yes, but how do we shift the conversations in our organisation?”
I don’t know how to respond to this question without sounding glib and superficial.
Here are my initial thoughts. For the purposes of this article we’ll imagine that you are the CEO of the organisation in question.
Read Peter Block’s essay, Civic Engagement and the Restoration of Community: Changing the Nature of the Conversation, and heed its content.
Commission the services of a leadership coach. He or she will need to be highly skilled, wise, courageous, and have a possibility mindset.
If you do not know such a person, I recommend my three colleagues at InterBe, a UK-based transformation practice.
Seek the wholehearted commitment of each member of the senior leadership team, and the collective commitment of the team as a whole.
Each senior leadership team member will need to acquire a possibility mindset.
Invite the senior leadership team, the next tier of managers and a large sample of employees to a co-creative conference. During this conference, the participants engage in conversations for possibility, and commit to creating an organisation in which each person coaches, and is coached by, another.
A cadre of coaches is established.
Each member of the cadre establishes a new cadre.
This process is repeated, rippling through the organisation until every employee is:
- Coaching another.
- Coached by another.
- A member of a cadre, which functions as a community of practice.
The work I have described is reinforced by further co-creative conferences, internal communications programmes and a reinvented performance management system.
There you have it. Those are my top-of-the-head thoughts.
I’m acutely aware that I’ve made culture transformation seem very easy. It may not be easy, but it is possible. And when you believe it to be possible, and others share that belief, it becomes possible.
Further reading
- What Is Organizational Culture? And Why Should We Care? by Michael Watkins, in Harvard Business Review
- Start Changing Your Organisation’s Culture Using Storytelling & Startup Techniques (video by Jonathan Kahn)
- The Four Conversations: Daily Communication That Gets Results, by Jeffrey D. Ford and Laurie W. Ford
- Coaching ‘Triple A’ Leaders to Become More People-Focused, by Kristin Cobble (discusses conversations for relationship, possibility, action and results, referencing Fernando Flores, J.L. Austin and John Searle)
- Fernando Flores Wants to Make You an Offer, by Lawrence M. Fisher, in Strategy+Business
- Changing Conversations in Organizations: A complexity approach to change, by Patricia Shaw | Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com | Google Books
- Civic Engagement and the Restoration of Community: Changing the Nature of the Conversation, by Peter Block (download pdf)
- Good Companies Are Storytellers. Great Companies Are Storydoers. By Ty Montague in Harvard Business Review