At the heart of every relationship is communication. At the heart of communication is conversation.
Conversation is the new innovative discovery of an old business practice. Remember business deals made with a handshake and on someone's word? Those deals were made by people talking with each other, not at each other.
I want to engage your thinking about conversation. I want to talk about interpersonal conversation as a leadership tool. But first, I want to place this in some context.
Doc Searls, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto and Senior Editor of the Linux Journal, recently gave a presentation on conversational marketing. He's a portion of what he said.
The framing for conversational marketing should be conversation, not
marketing. Think about what you want in a conversation, and let that
lead your marketing.
- The purpose of conversation is to create and improve understanding,
not for one party to “deliver messages” to the other. That would be
rude.
- There is no “audience” in a conversation. If we must label others in conversation, let’s call them partners.
- People in productive conversation don’t repeat what they’re saying
over and over. They learn from each other and move topics forward.
- Conversations are about talking, not announcing. They’re about
listening, not surveying. They’re about paying attention, not getting
attention. They’re about talking, not announcing.
- “Driving” is for cars and cattle, not conversation.
- Conversation is live. Its constantly moving and changing, flowing
where the interests and ideas of the participants take it. Even when
conversations take the form of email, what makes them live is current
interest on both sides.
What this means for conversational marketing is that brands must be
living things too. Not just emblems. Those that succeed will be as
live as open to the flow and diversion of ideasas the market
conversations they participate in.
Over the course of the past twenty five years, I've been following a string of ideas out to their logical conclusion. This process led me into strategic planning. I'm far from a typical strategic planner because I have put conversation at the forefront of the planning process. Unless your issues are financial, most of what needs to happen in organizations is a clarification of direction and the building of support for that direction. My experience has been that most planners, unconsciously, think that you can sell a plan to the implementers. I don't. It is a plan for failure.
As conversation emerged more and more in my planning practice, I began to realize that most of the problems in organizations are at their core problems of communication. Not formal communication using websites and print items. No, the interpersonal kind that happens between people.
One of the central experiences of people in organizations are meetings. They exist for communication, decision-making and team building. The reality is that they are venues for posturing. Everyone around the table or in the room feels obliged to make their own final declarative statement about the subject so that they are on record. As a result, meetings take longer, achieve less and reinforce the idea that business is simply about the projection of one's ego into organizational process.
Where conversation is tried, it is too often oriented around building consensus. Consensus is a good tool and a bad goal. It is good to have everyone on the same page. It is bad when all that matters is that we agree. It tends to lead to a lowering of standards.
I've come to the conclusion that informal conversation needs to be developed as an interactive technology, just as webinars, instant messaging and push-to-talk cell phones are interactive tools. We need to think of conversation in the same way we think of innovative tools that bring people together so that they are able to work more closely and effectively together.
This line of thought has come to me as I've read Bill Moggridge's Designing Interactions. It is a fascinating book of interviews about interactive design. Reading this I feel I missed my calling, to a degree. Moggridge has gone to the people who designed the first laptop computer, the first computer mouse, the personal digital assistant (PDA) and a host of other innovative technologies, to learn how they discovered how people interact with technology. If we think of strategic planning processes as a form of technology, then we need to think about how people interact with the process.
In the book, Bill Moggridge interviews Bill Verplank about his three simple interactive technology questions. If find his thinking very relevant to what I call conversational planning. Verplank is one of the foremost interactive designers, and was one of the early designers at Xerox of what we now know as the WYSIWYG graphical user interface.
Here's a drawing he did as he described the process to Moggridge. The three questions are described in the drawing.
"How do you do?"
How do you do planning? Is it data collection and reporting out? Or is it more a developmental process where by the people who will implement are included in the process?
Verplank says,
"How do you affect the world? A human, a person that we are designing for, does something, and we provide affordances. We either present handles that they can continuously control, or we give them buttons for discrete control, pressing the button and giving up control to the machine."
Planning is a handle that puts control of the organization into the hands of the people who create the future. We create that handle through conversation that gathers insight into how the organization will do its work.
The adoption of a plan is the pushing of a button that allows for the organizational system that is the business to begin to implement. The handle is the strategies that are implemented to achieve the plan's objectives.
"How do you feel?"
When conversation is used as a planning tool, and the resulting plan is based on what the planning group has heard, then the people "feel" validation, ownership and commitment.
Conversation is a type of feedback loop. A question is asked. An answer is given. That answer is recorded, interpreted and recommendations based on the overall perspective derived from all the answers is made. The plan is a way of responding back by saying, "We heard what you said, so we are going to make the following decisions and take subsequent action in this way."
Verplank speaks of feedback in interactive technological design in the following way.
"We design the way that the machine, or the system, gives feedback to the user, or the book looks to the user, or the sign communicates. That's where a lot of feelings come from; a lot of our emotions about the world come from the sensory qualities of those media that we present things with."
Understanding the feeling component of planning is very important. But feelings are hard to capture, so we look at those aspects of an organization that are connected to feelings. For example, I look at the core values that guide the organization. We know what those are by identifying what people are passionate about. Passion is an emotional attachment to purpose or mission. When people share the same passion for a mission, they also share values that united them in a common purpose and give them reason to be committed to the organization as a team or group.
Conversation is more closely tied to feelings than it is to logical thought. Logic is something that a person can do as they seek to make sense of conflicting information. Conversation may be logical, but it isn't abstract, but tangible at the feeling level. When people say they have a gut-feeling about something, there is a type of logic involved, but it is revealed through their feelings. In planning, it is important to engage this level of conversation as it is a better indicator of what people's true commitments are.
It is also where the greatest battles of organizations take place. For example, look at this posting by Virginia Postrel as she points to a quote on swearing by Steven Pinker from his book The Stuff of Thought. Here's a portion from Pinker's book.
I think the reason that swearing is both so offensive and so attractive
is that it is a way to push people's emotional buttons, and especially
their negative emotional buttons. Because words soak up emotional
connotations and are processed involuntarily by the listener, you can't
will yourself not to treat the word in terms of what it means. You
can't hear a word and just hear it as raw sound; it always evokes an
associated meaning and emotion in the brain. So I think that words give
us a little probe into other people's brains. We can press someone's
emotional buttons anytime we want.
If this is so, and I believe it is, then how conversation is conducted within a planning process must pay respect to what gives people a way to speak truthfully and candidly without fear of judgment or retribution.
What I've done as a result is to make most of my surveys anonymous. On the surface, it may seem that an anonymous online survey is the farthest thing from conversation. However, the survey functions within a formal system of conversation. The survey provides each person the opportunity to speak candidly and passionately about the topic. The group's individual responses then become the basis for a deeper conversation about their organization.
"How do you know?"
This question gets to the rub of what an effective strategic plan should be. Verplank describes two kinds of knowledge.
As we design products with computers in them, it is very difficult for a user to know exactly what they are going to do. A map gives the knowledge that you may need if you are designing complex systems. A path offers the kind of understanding that is more about skill and doing the right thing at the right moment. It is the responsibility of the designer to help people understand what is happening by showing them a map or a path. The map shows the user an overview of how everything works, and the path shows them what to do, what they need to know moment by moment.
This is as good a description of the difference between traditional and emerging strategic planning processes. The traditional approach is a map for the next ten years. It is assuming that the landscape is not going to change. It is based on the idea that you can determine the future before it happens. If you've read Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan, then you know that this is foolhardy. You'll realize that what you don't know is more important than what you do know. If you approach strategic planning from the standpoint of not knowing, then you'll be open to learning what you actually need to know, instead of looking for that information that validates a preconceived notion of what is right.
The path approach to strategic planning is more practical for an age of dramatic, accelerating and discontinuous change. The knowledge that is needed is not where will I be in ten years. Instead, it is what do I need to know to take advantage of the change that is afflicting my organization today. It is about the skills of adaptation.
This is why I find the story of the Lewis & Clark Expedition so compelling for 21st century leaders. Here is a team that sets off on an ambitious journey into a foreign, unknown land. They don't have a map. All that have are bits and pieces of information that provide a measure of help along the way. As a result, their ability to adapt to the trail as it presented itself is a historical example of what most of us have to do today. Continuously throughout their journey, they are conversing as a whole team about the decisions that confront them. In this respect, they are the first 21st century leadership team.
It is for this reason that conversation is so vital. If your team is going to adapt to changing circumstances, they better be on the same page. In order for that to happen, they have to be able to communicate well. It is conversation, not a GPS unit, that enables a band of explorers to manage the changing terrain of the future.
I am suggesting that organizations need a formal structure for informal conversation. This can take different forms depending upon the organization. But some form of asking questions, listening to responses and foster further conversation about the responses is key to making conversation effective.
I found this approach particularly effective with organizations like churches. Recently, I provided a chapter - The Technology of Congregational Conversation - for the book Wikiklesia Vol.1: Voices of the Virtual World: Participative Technology and the Ecclesial Revolution. Here I describe in more depth my approach to using conversation as an organizational development tool.
People will talk. They will talk freely if you let them. Or, they'll talk in the shadows, but talk they will. The choice that leaders have is whether they will take advantage of the commitment building aspects of conversation when they conduct planning projects in the future. It may be informal, but it isn't chit-chat.
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