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Change Conversation Capability Set

Creating theAdaptive EnterpriseHow to talk to get work done in a complex world


Commercial in Confidence 2010

There is a journey all human enterprises must be on in the present era: Away from inflexible, technical and reductionist ways of working toward conversational capabilities that unlock individual capabilities and contributions, adaptive expertise, and new ways of engaging with stakeholders.

No matter where on the journey your enterprise lies, there is a next step you can take that is grounded in the way people are talking to get work done:

Design and facilitation of conversations that enable adaption

This Capability Statement outlines the spectrum of Change Conversation capabilities to assist your journey towards adaptiveness. The Change Conversation offers are outlined in the flow chart on the next page. They range in a spectrum from (left to right) the emergent challenges of social impact and culture change through to the more concrete conversational environments of specialist work .

Creating the Adaptive Enterprise

From To

inflexible routine expertise Adaptive expertise

Traditional marketing tools Customer focussed design

Exclusively analytical models Design thinking tools

Top down social programs Emergent social impact



The Change Conversation© capability spectrum

CHANGE CONVERSATION

Culture is Conversations

Conversations for Emergence

Conversations for Shaping

Strategy

Conversational Leadership - Out of

the Box

Conversations for a Concerned Community

Conversation Design

KDP System Design

Measures

Conversation System Design

Design Thinking

Advanced Design Skills

Creating Adaptive

Specialists

Conversations for a System of

Concern

*Pre-requirements

Whole of system

Post-requirements

#0

#D

#D3 #D2 #D1

#S#C

Change Conversation can express each of these capability areas as a• Diagnostic/needs analysis capability• Coaching capability• Training program, or• Project support/action learning delivery

#S3 #S2 #S1#C3 #C2 #C1

The flow of this chart from left to right is from the most large-scale and complex conversational contexts for social change to the more defined and technical conversation arena of projects


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What is the burning platform for you? Why do you need to change? The drivers are as various and as individual as your enterprise, but they keep you awake.

Where do we need to change? Ah, there is a common theme. We need to change our level of competency in talking to accomplish purposes.

Change Conversation provides a map of the territory – the Requisite Conversation framework - and then uses that map to devise a targeted set of value propositions that directly address specific elements in a spectrum of organisation needs.

Conversation Design won’t fix everything. But it will make an extraordinary difference in some places where we are so badly equipped to face the challenges coming at us. Change Conversation’s operating model provides services in:

• Diagnosing your context, challenges and opportunities• Conducting analysis of the conversation capability needs • Capability assessments of systems and personnel• Coaching key players in the approach and requisite

conversation capabilities• Facilitating new conversation design and deployment

The Requisite Conversations® Framework

The Requisite Conversations® Framework is a model for those systems and structures that usually go unseen as we go about talking to get work done.

It provides a way of distinguishing the key different domains of organisational talk, and ensuring that the ways we talk are “fit for purpose”. The Framework differentiates 3 major conversational terrains, and 3 conversation habitats. Together these set up different interaction systems – predictable patterns of interaction between people and people, and between people and artefacts, from CEO’s to call centres, from contexts of collective impact to entrepreneurial endeavours.

A theory of “conversation” that unlocks value during change

Each of these conversational interactions plays out at every level of human enterprise – from the

• conversations we have with ourselves, to the

• conversations with the materials of the situation, and

• conversations we have with others in order to collaborate, align and execute at scale.

We use the same conversation structures again and again, in the same way that trees use self-similar branching to support ever larger expressions of their identity.


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…the Requisite Conversation® Framework

Change Conversation® - has a research driven core….

This is Africa – home of the

worlds biggest desert, and

longest river (the Nile)Mercator's projection of the earth

The Requisite Conversation® Framework (RCF) provides a scaffolding that covers all the conversations necessary to purposeful human enterprise.

It shouldn’t surprise you that is more like a map than just 5 dot points or a 4 box matrix.

It’s a little bit tricky, but not that hard when you think of other scaffolds we have learned to carry around…It doesn’t take that long to name and recognise the main spaces – and even to know some pretty major features.

The RCF integrates all the major theories of conversation you would expect to encounter in a robust model. A partial list of the sources that have fed this model development are on the next page.

This is the “Generate” terrain of conversations – Design is one of

the main conversation

habitats in here


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Austin – How to do things with words, of course…Beer – the possibilities for fractal cybernetic structures vitalised in

conversationCooren – the ways organisation can arise from conversation itselfCorballis – the fundamentally recursive character of human

cognitionDejours – legitimising personal cognition at workGadamer – How questions open the way to new knowledge Heidegger – how we are already inside conversations, and how to

move to new meanings Jordan – Rich insights to discourse analysis that work at scaleKoestler – the original and best on creative conversation dynamicsKuhn – for making sense of the conversations of scienceMoore – seeing the patterns of conversation that we need in ITPrigogine – how conversation can be the way enterprises take in

energy from their environmentShotter – for naming some really important things about

constructivismStacey – for unpacking the organisational conversations in terms

of complexity theory. Yep, Shaw as well.Wittgenstein – for living the turning point from abstraction to

conversationZimmerman and partners for worked examples of conversation in

healthcare complexity

Including theory from:

Bioss – seeing conversation forms in stratified work systemsBuchanan - 4 orders of design and doors opened in my headEdmondsen – a classic case of not seeing the obvious role of

conversationHoebeke – for the richest unfinished work I’ve ever read Hoffer-Gittell – for having a powerful idea but no hypothesisLiedtka – for locating strategy in its generative conversation habitatMaturana – for fuelling the life of language in the mind of a

microbiologistPoythress – ever emboldening me to accept a judeo-christian

worldview as a platform for reflection about speechReos (Adam Kahane) – fearlessly taking conversation into ever

larger spacesRittel – for naming features of conversation and never calling it

conversationSealy-Brown – for being my favorite ever interpreter of

conversational ethnographySecond Road – the unabashed power of heuristic thoughtWeick, and Winograd, and Hutchens – for soaking yourselves in the

real talk that gets work done

The Requisite Conversation framework is based on leading theory and practice from around the world.

….and reflective insight from:


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You have probably heard of many enterprise initiatives that have a “70% failure rate”. My list of literature citations for “70% failure rates” includes 70% of new product launches, customer relationship marketing programs, failure rates for KM IT implementations(70-80%) , safety programs, quality management programs, mergers and acquisitions and in short, “70% all business change initiatives” – a feature unchanged in 3 decades of HBR reporting on the latest possibilities.

It turns out that failure rate has a very high correlation with every time we do something that is “outside the box” – ie when we attempt changes that require implementation by humans, not just installation by technocrats. The evidence is in. Change failures arise because we can’t work with attitudes and behaviours, not because of inadequate budgets, poor resource deployment or poor strategic conception. We can’t recoil from “the soft stuff” – we have to press on into that territory until we get it right.

In that environment, skill with the requisite conversations for achieving purposes together has a do-or-die premium.

In this module of work, Change Conversation introduces the need for change, the benefits for enterprise, and the key transformations that will occur in our new conversations.

Conversational Leadership – why it mattersThere is no shortage of consensus that the world has changed and that

different conversations are needed.“When strategy, processes, metrics, and behaviour are stable and relatively

unchanging, conversational skill is less important than simply following the proven path. When those same things are dynamic, in a state of change, conversational skill becomes crucial. This is when I got deeply interested in conversations as a catalyst for change”*

#O Out of the Box

*Susan Burnett, HP’s vice president of Workforce Development and Organization Effectiveness: Hewlett-Packard Takes the Waste Out of Leadership, 2003


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Searle (“What is Language?”) talks of us moving to “desire independent possibilities for action “. This is the whole point of producing specifications for things we want to make. We may love houses, and even be the designer of our own, but once we have translated our desire into specifications, the implementation can be to a large extent independent of our involvement. That is how we amplify our effect in the world.

The opposite move – away from the world of specifications, project plans and schedules, has the opposite effect.

When we move “upstream” from the world of implementation to consider what might be different, and how we could make that arise, we are confronted with two primary contexts of knowledge work:

• Contexts where we know what we want, but not yet how to get it. In this case we need to build the conversations for a system of concern.

• Contexts where the need is so widespread, or the community of stakeholders so diffuse, that we cannot say with any confidence that “we” even know what we want. In this case we need to build the conversations of a concerned community (see #C1-3)

Once we move out of the Box, we face the challenge of creating and living within adaptive enterprise systems – systems of concern to us because of their necessary contribution to accomplishing our collective purposes.

How to improve conversation capabilities inside key adaptive enterprise systems

Change Conversation discerns three key points of value we can add to the conversations around systems of concern:

#S1 - Creating Adaptive SpecialistsUnderstanding the key points of difference between the cognition

and disposition of routine expertise versus adaptive expertise.

#S2 – Providing advanced design skillsExpanding the professional capability of soft system designers and

their workplace conversations.

#S3 - Coaching in Design ThinkingProviding proven ability to develop the cognition and dispositions

essential to 3rd and 4th Order Design (Richard Buchanan), in both craft designers and non-designers.

#S Conversations for a System of Concern


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People are being “trained” every day – patterned by the systems you place them. Will you enact people for adaptive expertise or routine expertise? Sadly, too much work is done by those with routine expertise . Adaptive expertise is essential in working with complexity. Let Change Conversation help you do that.

“Hatano and Inagaki (1986) distinguish between routine-expertise and adaptive expertise. Routine expertise is mainly developed by constant and repeating requirements whereas adaptive expertise develops especially in the context of changing requirements. According to that differentiation, routine expertise is valuable in order to implement context-specific strategies whereas adaptive expertise represents meta-strategies which transfer knowledge to new situations or generate new knowledge. As a consequence, both types of experience work under different conditions but are equally important.”*

Supporting specialists on the journey to an ever changing context

One of the inadvertent consequences of the Box culture forged by technical rationalism is the suffocation of knowledge sharing:

a) because there is no need for it, and thusb) it becomes an overhead, but also c) because there are no conversation structures for it to

naturally occur.And so as we move into a more volatile, plastic enterprise context,

we have no conversation skills to support our change challenges.

So we can make rigid silos of our workplace knowledge, or we can make windows and doors for the future. We all have an inherent/tacit capacity for connectedness - by virtue of experience in all the other parts of our life and work. We can leverage that and cultivate connectedness. How? By the conversations we inhabit, and the capabilities they enact. We can install and encourage Conversations that

• Ask why, and establish a connection to purpose• Use heuristics to pattern – ie build an increasing repertoire of

patterns and patterning cognition habits• Structurally design and install “requirements conversation”

behaviours so they enact leadership and adaptive specialism

#S1 Adaptive Specialism

How serious is the failure to address adaptive expertise? It can be lethal. Recall the beautiful steam locomotives of1949, at the pinnacle of their evolution? Of all the large, sophisticated firms which built them, none went on to build diesel-electric engines. Because they had the wrong tools? No. Because they failed to have the right conversations.

*Badke-Schaub, Petra 2004 Strategies of experts in engineering design: between innovation and routine behaviour Journal of Design Research 4 (2)


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How can designers continue to be physicians for those who lack innovation if they do not immunise themselves against their diseases, or nourish their own distinctives. Change the Conversation.

There are many skilled design practitioners increasingly applying themselves to soft systems – crafters of personas and user pathway illustrations, facilitators of concept generation, affinity diagrams, card-sorts and insights. We want to extend and enrich its capability based on our experience since 1991. David’s expertise in conversation systems and conversational cognition is best leveraged in two niches of enrichment of design practice:

• Skills for the practitioner: Heuristics & Multiperspectivalism • Skills for entrepreneurial practice groups: Moving to the Design

Ecosystem Both are directed towards deepening the designer’s capacity to

deliver on their distinctive contribution while caught in a dialectical tension between:

• Execution oriented business, and• Ever more complex and soft system challenges.

‘If a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.’*

Heuristic Thinking; Multiperspectivalism; The Design practice Ecosystem

Skills for the practitioner: Heuristics & Multiperspectivalism Design as a cognition is a habitat sandwiched between two others

– that of interpretation & meaning making, (the hermeneutical habitat), and that of implementation , execution, and performance. For most designers, their skill set has been formed in driving upstream to escape the gravitational pull of analysis and methodology, and they have no shortage of awareness about the skills that can be drawn from that environment. But there is real wisdom to be had from the world of language, which designers glimpse when , for example, they see the parallels between “reframing” and “renaming”.

Design practitioners dealing with softer and more complex systems can substantially benefit from learning some tools from the world of language. Two approaches with proven leverage for design are the use of heuristics, and of perspectivalism.

Skills for entrepreneurial practice groups: Moving to the Design Ecosystem

Design capability arises out of a context. It is either nurtured or sucked down to less capable, less innovative expression by its business context. Work in upstream design problems – as done by designers of soft systems – cannot be managed in the way a Web or graphic design studio might manage work. If you want a powerful design practice ready for higher order design work, you cannot ignore the power and resilience of social systems. Key conversations of your workplace must be redesigned.

#S2 Advanced Design Skills

*Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, (1974 p92)


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Design Thinking is the application of the developed human disposition for design to intangible subject matters – such as a corporations, customer experiences or business systems. It is based on the assumption that the thinking processes used to create physical products are insightful for people grappling with intangibles like strategy. Furthermore, the world of business and organizations is a world of people and actions, and great designers are renowned for their sensitivity to human needs and context. So how do we harness this cognition?

Designers working with tangibles employ (aware or unaware) certain modes of cognition as they proceed from ideation to a physical product . People grappling with intangibles like ‘wicked problems’ have intuited some analogy between those processes and their own work and asked :

a) How does a designer think when she works with wood, etc.?

b) What do those ways of thinking have to offer to those grappling with intangibles, such that we can talk of “design thinking “?

That in turn leads to asking:c) What ways of thinking does a person working on

intangibles need that designers of tangibles don’t need?d) What are the unique dimensions of thinking provoked

by working on intangibles?

Getting traction in the conversations that are the substrate of “Design Thinking”

The answer is that Design Thinking takes place in a distinctive set of conversations – “conversations with the materials of the situation”*. This requires a distinctive development of capabilities in design cognition, different to those of the craft designer. It is a different way of thinking, feeling and doing in the world.

The Change Conversation offer is based on in depth experience in discerning and developing the distinctive requisite conversational cognition and capabilities in design thinking. We conduct needs analysis for Design Thinking capability, and provide coaching using reflective practice to develop capabilities in those progressing to the demands of 3rd & 4th order design - whether from previous work in craft design or other disciplines entirely.

#S3 Design Thinking for the design of intangibles


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In the first trio of offers (#S1-3), we focus on hot spots in enterprise capability to run the conversations necessary to adaptive systems. In the third trio (#C1-3) we focus on how to proceed before we even understand what our requirements are – as is often the case in increasingly complex social contexts. In this trio (#D1-3) we turn our attention to the use of the Requisite Conversation framework and other Change Conversation tools - such as the Knowledge Development Pathway® (KDP) - to actually design systems and conversations.

A new discipline and some key adaptive applications

“The designer who knows the role of conversations in shaping future reality and who has developed skills in facilitative leadership has also gained power over those who do not have such knowledge and skills.” Simpson, R. and Gill, R. Design for social systems: Change as Conversation E:CO Issue Vol. 10 No. 1 2008 pp. 39-49

We cover 3 specific approaches to the design of conversations in and for enterprise systems:

#D1 – Conversation and MetricsA focus area called “Don’t Shoot the Messenger” – breaking free

of behaving as though data “just is”, understanding how measurement works in complex systems, and how wrong measurements extinguish adaptive capability.

#D2 – System Design based on the Requisite Conversations®How to actually approach the task of system design through the

lens of the necessary and sufficient component conversations for missional knowledge development.

#D3 – A new Framework and Discipline - Conversation DesignWhat does it mean to actually design conversations. Not just to

run a facilitated event, but to create new and satisfying interactions within human enterprises from a disciplinary platform?

#D Conversation Design


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“Grown-ups love figures. When you tell them that you have made a new friend, they never ask you any questions about essential matters. They never say to you “What does his voice sound like? What games does he love best? Does he collect butterflies?” Instead they demand “How old is he? How many brothers has he? How much does he weigh? How much money does his father make?” Only from these figures do they think they have learned anything about him." ––Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

The “McKinsey Maxim” has had a long reign: “What can’t be measured cant be managed.”

Sadly in a complex, high velocity world, the opposite becomes true. What can’t be measured is all we have time to manage – all the rest is what we see in the rear view mirror. If we only give credence what we can measure, we become prisoners of our past. As a manager observed:

“I would be in trouble if the accounting reports held information I did not already have.”

But there is a deeper issue too. Applying quantitative measures assumes Gaussian distributions; whereas emergent environments are characterised by power laws and Pareto distributions. Attention to quantification will actually extinguish emergence. This is why the 70% phenomenon occurs (#0), and why we have to shift attention from Systems of Concern to the Concerned Community when working in complex contexts (#S1-3 vs. #C1-3).

“Averages can be misleading—on average, everyone in the world has one testicle...”

"The most dangerous, hideously misused and thought-annihilating piece of technology invented in the past 15 years has to be the electronic spread sheet. Every day, millions of managers boot up their Lotus 1-2-3s and Microsoft Excels, twiddle a few numbers and diligently sucker themselves into thinking they're forecasting the future. In truth, number-crunching with spreadsheets is like computationally pumping iron: You bulk up data but do virtually nothing for your conceptual quickness or flexibility. It's an intellectual exercise that stretches the fingers more than the mind.“*

So Change Conversation asks:• What is the conversation AROUND the numbers?

How do we go from personal insight to collective action?

• What is the conversation AFTER the numbers?How do we use the new insights to make a better business systemically?

• What is the conversation INSTEAD OF the numbers? When are quantification methods toxic to the very purpose we are pursuing?

“Don’t Shoot the Messenger” is our capability focus area for conversations about measurement– breaking free of behaving as though data “just is”, understanding how measurement works in complex systems, and how wrong measurements extinguish adaptive capability.

#D1 From digits to words – Conversation and Metrics

* Little has changed since this was written in 1991 – now nearly 40 years since the spread of electronic spreadsheets Michael Schrage Spreadsheets: Bulking up on data Los Angeles Times, 1991


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Combine these two ideas:

1. The Requisite Conversation framework provides a map to the conversations of purposeful human activity systems.

2. Organisations are constituted by the conversations they hold: “Conversations are the way workers discover what they know, share it with their

colleagues, and in the process create new knowledge for the organization. In the new economy, conversations are the most important form of work ... so much so that the conversation is the organization.” Alan Webber“In fact, thoughtful conversations around questions that matter might be the core process in any company…”Juanita Brown and David Isaacs

We then have an opportunity – to design organisations. Not around accidents of industrial history, nor old forms and structures, but around the conversations necessary to get the work done. So Change Conversation developed the Knowledge Development Pathway® - a way of designing business systems based on the core conversations that need to be held to realise a new purpose. We ask ourselves “What is the operating system we would like to have in the world?” In particular, we ask what would its Mission be? When the product of our efforts is performing, what do we want it to be doing? And proceed from there.

This provides two great opportunities: to design systems that have all the necessary parts to be viable; and to create frames for coordinating roles where the organisations are constantly virtual.

System design with the Knowledge Development Pathway® (KDP)

“…functional departments, often the main channels through which information is shared, are being broken apart…In their place are cross functional, team-based organisations that are focused on meeting the needs of a particular customer or product, but often not designed to share knowledge effectively across the enterprise. The configuration of units that generate and apply knowledge is dynamic. Much work is done through temporary systems…. Given these trends… carefully controlled channelling of knowledge and information cannot work. Knowledge management must transcend organisational units and create a flexible and vibrant knowledge exchange.” Strategies for the Knowledge Economy: From rhetoric to reality S A Morhman, DL Feingold World Economic Forum Report, 2000

Against this backdrop, Change Conversation sees value in, for example, fast building of planning systems for temporary alliances., or missional alignment of case-based teams such as health delivery teams.

#D2 - How to build sustainable systems for human enterprises

41

23

5

6

Sustain and renew our requirements

Intentionally build a system

A Mission in the world


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“Designers are traditionally identified not so much by the kinds of problems they tackle is by the kinds of solutions they produce. Thus industrial designers are so-called because they create products for industrial and commercial organisations whereas interior designers are expected to create interior spaces... This is to some extent the result of the range of technologies understood by the designer.” Lawson, Brian 2005 How Designers Think: The Design Process Demystified 4th Ed. Architectural Press p. 53

So what then are the technologies for “Conversation Design?” It helps to think of the parallel patterns we are aware of in:

• Grammar as being the system and structure of putting words and sentences together in intelligible language;

• Logic as the laws of putting things together for verification.So Conversation is the laws of putting people and “texts” together for the enactment of purpose.

“Conversation” is the system and structure of language for coordinating purposeful human enterprise.

Conversation design, then, is the art of crafting conversations (assemblies of interactions between people and “texts”) to more effectively achieve a stated purpose.

Working with the Requisite Conversation framework and doing Conversation Design

To do Conversation design we need a model for how conversational events, (speech acts, ways of talking, discourses and dialogs, etc) vary and offer distinctive cognitive features and contributions on our journey towards purpose.

The Requisite Conversations® framework provides a heuristic scaffolding for all the necessary conversations involved in the pursuit of purpose in human activity systems. It distinguishes between major cognitive “terrains” and nested, recursive conversational “habitats”. It enables mapping of what is, accumulation of extensive, discussable knowledge about situated conversation dynamics, and the intentional crafting of new forms of human and human-artefact interactions.

In all human endeavour, refinements in our methods of recognition have been turned into opportunities to be more proactive and productive in our environment. This ranges from being able to tell dolphins from sharks to the more sophisticated enabling that arises from a periodic table of the elements. In the latter case, the framework unlocks our ability to see wide and deep patterns, and unlocks a “hybrid vigor” in relation to other disciplines.

Because the act of talking to coordinate our human activity in systems is so foundational to purposeful enterprise, the range of applications from the Requisite Conversations® insight is extensive and kaleidoscopic. What enterprise are you pursuing that could benefit from Change Conversation?

#D3 – Designing Conversations


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“(The)premise that (all our)work settings are language communities brings us to a corollary premise: all leaders are leading language communities. Though every person, in any setting, has some opportunity to influence the nature of the language, leaders have exponentially greater access and opportunity to shape, alter, or ratify the existing language rules.... We have a choice whether to be thoughtful and intentional about this aspect of our leadership.. to make much of the opportunity, or little… to be responsible or not for the meaning of our leadership as it affects our language community. But we have no choice about whether we are or are not language leaders. The only question is what kind of language leaders we will be.“ *

Kegan & Lahey had in view incorporated contexts, but what they say applies to all who aspire to lead change. Change and leadership both take place in language. The more diffuse, diverse and complex the arena for desired change, the more all we have is the way we construct and lead conversations. We find ourselves outside the arenas where power is vested in owners or even authorities. This is the realm where we must address the community of concern, because it is in their interactions that possibilities will arise.

Designing the quality of the conversations in & for a concerned community

Between the drivers • to ever larger social interventions (eg the work of Kahane at the

level of nation forming), • to the exploding role of social media, and • to the perfect storm of velocity of change, complexity of

interactions and plasticity of arrangements in human activity systems,

there is an unprecedented amount of generative effort going into new conversation forms.In this environment, Change Conversation models provide insight and a pathway in:

#C1 - Conversations for “Shaping Strategies”Even corporations eventually face open systems – ones they cannot control, but can shape by their contributions. How do they talk together to do that?

#C2 - Conversations to create and maintain Concerned CommunitiesA capacity to self-consciously call out, develop and benchmark a capability/maturity journey for skilled participants in the conversations of emergence

#C3 – Conversational interventions for Culture ChangeConversations are the fabric of culture. What does this mean and where can we leverage this insight?

#C – Conversations for a Concerned Community

*Kegan, R. & Lahey, L.L. How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work: Seven Languages for Transformation John Wiley & Sons 2001 p8


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Shaping strategy is exegeted at length in The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion (Basic Books; April 2010) by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison

Conversations for the “Power of Pull”

If we continue to use the mindsets we have learned in traditional language of strategy, we will continue to create closed systems that are poor subsets of what we hope to create new in the world. Shaping Strategy requires change in ourselves toward adaptive dispositions, it requires design thinking to envisage its core componentry, and it requires new conversations beyond the organisation for its possibilities to be realised.

#C1 - Conversations for Shaping Strategy

“An organization’s results are determined through webs of human commitments, born in webs of human conversations.” Fernando Flores

Pursuing a Shaping Strategy is not a technical choice – it involves reworking the sociology of our organisation, its interactions, and what it counts as knowledge. These dimensions are all carried in our enterprise conversations, and require Change Conversation.


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Like Seel, 2006, I believe that:“while emergence is neither predictable nor controllable there are

some factors which predispose an organisation towards emergent change. I will also argue that these factors can be ‘tuned’ in such a way that not only is the emergence of new patterns made more likely but also that these patterns will be similar to the patterns which are desired by the members of the organisation.”

Understanding the basic structures of conversation means we can provide “selective pressure toward a self-organising criticality”.

Shaping the Concerned Community: Conversations for Emergence

What is the constant material that is present for us to attend to, and apply selective pressure to?

Q. Where does the selective pressure on biological systems express itself and get preserved/ propagated /perpetuated?

A. In the DNAQ. What is the DNA of a social system?

A. It’s conversations. Q. What is conversation?A. Conversation is the coordinating systems and structures in language that are (often unconsciously) active when people work together toward a purpose.

Change Conversation uses the Requisite Conversations framework to navigate complexity, recognising the fractal recursions of human conversations even when the “phase space” is at its most tenuous.

“…conversation constitutes the only non-manipulatory mode of apprehending truth which does not pre-determine what counts as true in advance.“ Anthony Thiselton

#C2 Before you know what you want….


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Culture Change insights from conversation theory

#C3 - Conversation, which IS culture…

“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.”*

“Organisation culture is the emergent result of the continuing negotiations about values, meanings and proprieties between the members of that organisation and with its environment. In other words, culture is the result of all the daily conversations and negotiations between the members of an organisation. They are continually agreeing (sometimes explicitly, usually tacitly) about the ‘proper’ way to do things and how to make meanings about the events of the world around them. If you want to change a culture you have to change all these conversations—or at least the majority of them. And changing conversations is not the focus of most change programmes, which tend to concentrate on organisational structures or reward systems or other large-scale interventions.”.**

“Culture” is a word surrounded in mystery, myth and mystique. But the answer to “What is a culture” is not so hard. It is the “nature” of a human enterprise – the way it betrays its deepest drivers and its real motivations, irrespective of its espoused image. Corporations have “bodies” and they have “characters”. Nor is the question “Where do we find the roots of culture that we might change it?” so hard to answer. All the quotes in the adjacent column say the same thing: our culture is our conversations. As with humans, character – culture, is formed by the conversations we hold value, and participate in.

It is impossible for us to have an exhaustive map of culture. It is vital for us to have a sufficient map of how to access the core culture -forming conversations. Change Conversation proposes a model for the conversational terrain of culture that makes cultural interventions via the way we talk discussable and doable.

Actually setting about changing a culture may turn out to be quite “easy”, or very hard. But it sure helps to know where to look.

Artwork with apologies/thanks to Culture_by_AagaardDS and Andre Malraux *Stephen Shapiro, Innovate the Way You Innovate, European Business Review**Seel, R. (2006) ‘Emergence in Organisations



The story of the cliff path

If you go out onto any headland jutting out from a coast line that is within regular reach of a number of people, you will find a strange phenomenon. There will be a path to the headland. Not a paved path, but a packed earth, grass-bare, slightly meandering track, that in all likelihood, unless mud deters you, you too will walk along. Your behavior is understandable. The path now represents the clearest, most snake-revealing, least shoe-messing way to the destination. But how did the path arise? Well, not because 1000 people tramped the earth into submission in a conga line. Nor because a different 100 people, in fortuitously short succession, all slavishly tracked the previous blades of broken grass and walked the line of the previous traveler, doing so in sufficient volumes and frequency that they impressed a path, an intentional legacy for future wayfarers. No. The path arose simply because people are made that way. Confronted with the same terrain – the same cognitive-behavioral problem, however subliminal - their proprioceptors and problem solving minds traversed staggeringly similar pathways. So staggeringly similar, that in the whole breadth of the headland, and not only on this headland but on every other piece of regularly traversed landscape all points north and south of here, a pathway, often only centimeters wide, will emerge as a legacy of the programmed footsteps of humankind. And once found, the path is obvious. That is, it is easy to see. It feels right – you have to choose to leave it. And it is the path of least resistance – the way that provides a rhythm to your feet that demands the least attention to itself.

The Requisite Conversation framework is based on another pathway. A pathway we traverse with equal predictability, leaving trails of similar “obviousness”, once we have chosen to notice them. It is a “knowledge development pathway®” – the pathway we traverse whenever we want to make something new in the world. From a new song to a new sewing machine; from a new relationship to a new space project, humans traversing the terrain of a social space, a creative expression, or a technical pursuit will beat out a familiar path, for the simple reason that they are following the most natural contours of the mind. This is the pathway of “conversational cognition”.

The image is of a foot worn path on Mount Coolum in Queensland, Australia

What’s behind the Requisite Conversation® framework ?



Bringing the new conversations for purposeful human enterprises

David is a specialist in the new ways we need to talk to get work done… which often turn out to be old ways we have forgotten.

He provides insight, capabilities and skills transfer for the new conversations of enterprise

David Jones earned two postgraduate degrees in the science of conversation – hermeneutics and speech act theory – and has been growing practice-based expertise in conversation design for over 25 years. From 2005 -2010 he provided leadership in conversation practices to the design and strategy staff of 2nd Road, and now continues to consult to his own client base.

Change Conversation

Use the contact details below to explore further with David, or simply to request a paper cited here that is of particular interest to you.

Change Conversation M: +61 (0)4 29 39 49 84-P: +612 4369 1866F: +612 4369 1866L: http://au.linkedin.com/pub/david-jones/12/a05/25bW: http://justknowledge.com.au/ Changing the ways people talk to get work done.New work? New conversation! Change Conversation.