The Guided Conversation: Harnessing the Energy of Change

by Dawn-Marie Turner, PhD

Organizationally, conversation is often given a bad rap. For many organizational leaders, it symbolizes the informal and unstructured talking that employees engage in when they should be “working”. The reality, however, is that conversation is the backbone of every organization — especially during change. Change happens through conversation. Your change conversations can pull your organization together and rally its energy around your change or they can drain its collective energy and send your organization into a downward spiral.

We, humans, naturally use conversation to make sense of a situation. Conversation helps us create the context, meaning and structures we need to interact effectively with our environment. It is through the collection of new and continuous conversations that our reality is formed. Perhaps even more importantly, our conversations help create the energy (positive or negative) that we will bring to the situation.

Your ability to create the environment, tools, and timing of change conversations is a strong predictor of success. The Guided Conversation technique helps you frame and use conversation to enable change. First by helping you set the intention for a conversation. Then shows you how to use a series of conversations starters, activities, and structured dialogues to help create new insights. Through the conversations, people build the structure and meaning necessary to move through change.

The Guided Conversation Technique is not one conversation. It is a series of conversations conducted at multiple levels of the organization. Through these conversations, you are able to define the nature, flow, and timing of information to tap into and use the collective energy of the organization to enable change.

Using Guided Conversation to Facilitate Organizational Change

The Guided Conversation technique enables you to tap into the natural rhythm of the change conversation. It is a powerful tool to focus the energy of your organization on successfully implementing the change.

Using the Guided Conversation technique will help you:

• • prevent resistance and raise readiness
  • encourage ownership and commitment to take action towards change
    
  • surface barriers to change sooner
  • encourage active involvement in problem-solving to enable change
  • build a critical mass of individuals to enable the change
  • help manage and grow a healthy grapevine

Where are the conversations in your organization taking your change efforts?

To learn more about the guided conversation give us a call.