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to integrate and use their new skills effectively. Therefore, an important ingredient to the transfer of collaborative capabilities is the availability of follow-up coaching and process consulting services. Trainees should have access to skilled people who can assist them in designing effective involvement processes, as well as facilitate difficult meetings. Increasingly, these support services should be offered by internal consultants. This point leads to the fourth approach to building a collaborative culture.

Transfer Collaborative Capacity to the Organization

The fourth prong is to develop and deploy internal training, facilitation, consulting, and coaching capability.

A truly collaborative culture must be self-sustaining. It cannot be dependent on external intervention. Our job as facilitators and change agents is to work ourselves out of a job. Ultimately our goal should be to transfer as much collaborative capability as possible to client organizations. This transfer process usually has three phases.

In the initial phase, you and your colleagues provide most of the consulting and training services externally. The client organization may be testing the effectiveness of large-scale collaborative planning and not be ready to invest in the internalization of the collaborative capabilities.

Even so, you should be identifying internal resources, especially in the HR and training departments, to work with you as allies and members of your team. They should understand the implications for their role if this intervention is successful. The transformation from a more command-and-control culture to a more participatory one creates a legitimacy and demand for people with process skills. This demand is usually met by the HR and training departments, whose role expands to include a more strategic, task-oriented role of process consultants and facilitators. It is essential to build a partnership with these internal resources from the beginning of an intervention so they do not see you as a threat and sabotage the effort.

Often a large collaborative effort requires a dedicated, internal process manager to coordinate the project, manage the logistics and staffing of the various committees, and serve as liaison with external consultants. The process manager needs advanced training in process skills and will become a strong advocate for the change process.

As the intervention proceeds and other collaborative projects spin off, the question of the availability and cost of external consultants eventually arises. A good

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response is to advocate for the creation and training of an internal corps of process consultants and trainers. The rationale is that an increasing amount of facilitation, process management, and training services can be delivered more conveniently and at a lower cost by internal personnel. This is the time to begin to co-envision what a more collaborative environment might consist of, including such elements as better meeting spaces, support technology, and just-in-time training in process skills.

Therefore, the second phase of the transfer of advanced collaborative capabilities involves actively partnering with internal people to plan and facilitate meetings and deliver training programs. In the same way as you would train a new associate, you will gradually and deliberately move into the background, allowing internal consultants to lead new interventions. This transfer of responsibilities can happen only if you are very clear in your own mind that success means having the client prefer to have someone else lead a new intervention. It is natural for a client to “love the one they’re with.” You can easily justify your indispensability by saying, “They insist on my doing this work.” Often this means that you are not willing to let go and are somehow communicating to the client that you are the better choice. Sometimes the weaning process may involve just saying that you are not available (when you really are) or even not showing up at the last moment so that your internal partner must take the lead. This process is very hard for both sides but necessary. However, if your client is going to own and sustain the change, this process of letting go and transferring responsibilities must take place. Many change efforts flounder at this point.

The third phase involves indirect support where you are less or not at all involved in delivering direct services, but instead are supporting internal consultants to deliver the services themselves. This support may consist of a range of activities, including on-site meetings with internal consultants, advanced training, and a support hot line. It is also very helpful to create a support network, or community of practice, by linking internal change agents from different organizations involved in similar interventions. Sustaining a change effort requires a tremendous output of leadership energy. It can be reinvigorating to talk with others who have completed a similar effort successfully or are struggling with similar issues.

Measure and Monitor Progress

The final prong is to measure and monitor progress of the change effort.

Evaluation is an essential component of the heuristic cycle of problem solving. We need to know if our strategy is working. If it is not, we need to try something

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else. One of the advantages of facilitation is that it is immediately clear to all participants that it works in the three dimensions of results, process, and relationship. Formal evaluation instruments do not seem necessary. However, the benefits of creating a collaborative culture take longer to become evident and are harder to assess quantitatively. While we may believe intuitively in the value of collaborative cultures, there have been very few formal studies of the benefits of collaborative organizations and few validated assessment tools to measure progress in the development of collaborative cultures. (Examples of assessment instruments can be found at the Management Research Group Web site, http://www.mrg.com, 2003, and Vroom, 2003. A cross-cultural card game is described in Chapter Sixteen.) Naturally, clients want to know that they will recoup the costs and reap the bottom-line benefits of large-scale change efforts. They want to know, step by step, the progress they are making. I believe the lack of validated, easy-to-administer assessment tools is a serious deficit in our profession. Evaluation is important to a successful change effort, but I do not have many tools to offer. (For related information on evaluation, see Chapters Twenty-Four and Twenty-Five.)

The closest tool I have found, but have not applied in an intervention, is the Denison Organizational Culture Survey. Using a validated assessment instrument, Daniel Denison at the University of Michigan tested and scored twelve hundred companies in relation to four cultural traits: mission, involvement, adaptability, and consistency. Caroline J. Fisher (2000), a student of Denison’s work, describes these traits as follows:

Mission: The degree to which the company knows why it exists and what its direction is. This is not about your company having a mission that the executive team designed which is framed nicely on the wall over the copier. It is about shared understanding, alignment, and ownership of that vision throughout your company— with line of sight from job to mission.

Involvement: The degree to which individuals at all levels of the company are engaged in and hold that direction as their own. This is not about how involved your managers “say” your front-line workers are. This is about how involved your front-line workers say they are. And how well people at all levels are positioned, through personal responsibility, authority, accountability, skills, and team orientation, to achieve goals that support the company’s mission.

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Adaptability: The ability of the company to know what customers want, and the degree to which it can respond to external forces and demands. True customer focus is not just knowing what the customer wants—it is also knowing what you have to learn to provide it, and infusing your organization with that learning.

Consistency: The company’s systems and processes which support efficiency and effectiveness in reaching goals. This is not about having a nice set of values that are printed on coffee mugs. This is about a defined set of behavioral standards that allow the organization to move beyond restrictive policies and procedures and move to general guidelines for effective interaction. It is about walking the talk from the top to the front lines. It is about creating a shared language which helps everyone work more smoothly together—increasing speed in movement and efficiency in achieving results [p. 4].

These four traits do a good job of describing a collaborative culture. Indeed, collaborative action is essential to scoring highly in all four dimensions. And what Denison discovered is that companies with high performance (an average return on investment of 30 percent) scored well on all four traits, compared with companies with low performance (an average return on investment of 9 percent), which scored poorly in these four areas. The survey consists of sixty questions scored on a five-point Likert scale, which can be administered on-line. There is also a leadership development instrument.

Using whatever assessment tools are available, including employee surveys and focus groups, the KRA cultural change committee should attempt to assess and measure the progress of the cultural change effort. Ideally, baseline measurements should be taken at the beginning of the intervention and administered annually thereafter. Not only do you need to see progress on the way to becoming a more collaborative environment, you should also check to see if there is any slippage or regression after the new norms have been established. Our collective mission of building collaborative organizations will be greatly enhanced if new tailored, validated assessment tools are developed, and the linkages to the bottomline benefits can be clearly established.

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CONCLUSION

It is possible to build collaborative cultures. I have experienced the joy and productivity of having led and worked in a collaborative environment for more than thirty years. And I have witnessed client systems become more collaborative and reap the rewards. All it takes is a facilitative leader who believes in the power of collaborative action and is willing to model and promote the essential values, behaviors, and skills. With this leadership commitment and by following the five-pronged approach I have presented, collaborative environments can be built and sustained. I believe organizations that know how to collaborate across functions and geographies will have a competitive advantage in the future. I believe our ultimate mission as professional facilitators should be to assist people to build collaborative environments through demonstrating the power and transferring the skills of collaborative action.

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Effective Strategies for Designing and Facilitating Dialogue

c h a p t e r

T H I R T E E N

Steven N. Pyser

Diversity initiatives in American corporations have created opportunities and challenges. Not all executives, managers, or employees have embraced cultural differences and workplace programs or under-

stand the benefits of learning and working with a diverse community.

Managers and labor representatives of a public transit agency are scheduled to negotiate a new collective bargaining agreement. There is a history of conflict, strikes, misunderstanding, and intractable conflict. Each team does not believe the other will negotiate in good faith.

Multiple communities and business stakeholders have different visions for redeveloping the World Trade Center site after September 11, 2001. All parties are concerned that government is not responsive to their concerns.

These vignettes contain comparable themes involving disagreement and conflict among stakeholders—anyone with some form of interest or a share. Each person is unique and holds viewpoints developed through divergent life events. Each thus brings to these scenarios identities comprising “ideas, beliefs, opinions, feelings, desires, patterns, hopes and fears” (Hunter, Bailey, and Taylor, 1995, p. 5). Fortunately, these situations are not deadlocked, and there are potential opportunities for facilitators to use dialogue to help uncover interests and needs, build understanding,

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and find common ground. “Dialogue is a structured form of communication which emphasizes respectful and attentive listening about deep-rooted feelings, beliefs and experiences” (Conflict Research Consortium, 1998a). Many participants emerge from dialogue with compelling stories of powerful, life-altering experiences that motivate personal growth and mutual action.

One interpretation of these fact patterns is that the stakeholders are concurrently trying to occupy (and perhaps control) the same physical, psychological, and political space to achieve their goals. Their histories and manner of contact and communication (or miscommunication) are factors that can influence or decide the outcomes. The reader might relate to these vignettes to personal circumstances or professional facilitation experiences where adversarial interactions unraveled into blame or similar negative and unproductive behaviors. Unfortunately, these exchanges often present as blocked communication channels and can quickly intensify in conflict. Too often, many people employ these tactics as unspoken default modes of conduct during interpersonal encounters. Dialogue is a viable and productive alternative way to communicate, build understanding, and be understood by others. As facilitators, we can use dialogue to help clients (and ourselves) understand different stakeholders’ viewpoints and create a collaborative environment in which to work out ideas and alternatives for collective action.

Noted physicist and Nobel laureate Albert Einstein once stated, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” What if a process existed where the goal is not to change the views of the participant but rather to listen deeply with other unique individuals and a personal intention to gain understanding in a nonjudgmental, emotionally, and physically safe environment? What if as a facilitator you could help create and apply guidelines for group behavior to encourage respect and keeping an open mind? Assume further that you can guide a process where each participant is recognized, valued, and allowed to share his or her stories without interruption, ask difficult questions, engage in conversation, present viewpoints, and talk about issues of concern. Finally, what if this process provided structure that allowed participants to examine the basis of their opinions and perceptions of other stakeholders in a different light? Would you be interested in learning about these benefits and potential uses of dialogue?

This chapter examines foundational skills for designing and moderating a dialogue. A story binding different facilitation skills and an example from actual practice are presented through a diversity vignette drawn from business, management, law, and organizational ethics. These lessons can help readers develop services for

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clients by learning to facilitate conversations that can change a focus from continuing problems involving stubborn disagreements to opportunities to explore opposing opinions, positions, and interests. A list of support organizations and resources for designing and facilitating dialogue is provided at the end of this chapter.

WHAT IS DIALOGUE?

The Oxford English Dictionary defines dialogue as “a conversation carried on between two or more persons; a colloquy, talk together.” It has been suggested the ancient meaning of the word dialogue (dia and lagos) is a “flow of meaning” (Jaworski, 1998, p. 13). “This stands in stark contrast to the word ‘debate,’ which means ‘to beat down,’ or even ‘discussion,’ which has the same root as ‘percussion’ and ‘concussion’—‘to break things up’” (Jaworski, 1998, p. 110). Discussion occupies a different location in the communication continuum. Gerard and Ellinor (2004) suggest that people use discussion “to tell, sell, persuade; to gain agreement on one meaning; to evaluate and select the best; to justify/defend assumptions.”

It is important to recognize that dialogue is a process where participants commit to listen, challenge, reflect, and continue to talk over time; it is not an event (Schoem and others, 2001, p. 6). “Dialogue . . . is about a shared inquiry, a way of thinking and reflecting together. It is not something you do to another person. It is something you do with people” (Isaacs, 1999, p. 9). Participants seek a shared understanding to find meaning in dialogue. “During the dialogue process, people learn how to think together—not just in the sense of analyzing a shared problem or creating new pieces of shared knowledge, but in the sense of occupying a collective sensibility, in which the thoughts, emotions, and resulting actions belong not to one individual, but to all of them together” (Isaacs, 1994, p. 358).

Dialogue can play an important role in the facilitator’s toolbox. Sandy Heierbacher (2004), convener of the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation, has assembled quotations and descriptions from expert practitioners and researchers about the dynamic processes of various models and methods of dialogue and deliberation. In this collection of quotations, Harold Saunders has artfully described dialogue as a “process of genuine interaction through which human beings listen to each other deeply enough to be changed by what they learn. Each makes a serious effort to take others’ concerns into her or his own picture, even when disagreement persists. No participant gives up her or his identity, but each recognizes enough of the other’s valid human claims that he or she will act differently toward the other.”

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An Ethiopian proverb that reflects the power and spirit of dialogue states: “When spider webs unite, they can halt even a lion.” From this wisdom, it becomes apparent that even small and focused efforts have far-reaching consequences among interdependent people. There are untapped intellectual, emotional, and spiritual energies that can be revealed and used through dialogue. Through talking and listening to other individuals, dialogue affords an opportunity to grasp and identify our experiences and disclose our beliefs and opinions.

The current dialogue movement can be traced to the pioneering work of physicist David Bohm and philosopher Martin Buber and more recent innovators such as William Isaacs, Peter Senge, Daniel Yankelovich, Ambassador John W. McDonald, Ambassador Harold Saunders, and Deborah L. Flick. We are now at an important crossroad in the evolution and development of applications for dialogue. Commentator Tom Atlee (2003) has suggested, “In the midst of all of the challenges and difficulties we’re facing, I believe that we are witnessing the emergence of the larger culture of dialogue. The phenomenon includes many forms of dialogue— from therapy sessions to open space conferences, from Internet chat room to conflict resolution work, from workplace team meetings to private heart-to-heart talks, from interracial dinners to creative radio interviews to weekly salons and café conversations” (p. 218).

The terms dialogue and deliberation are often mentioned together. Deliberation is associated with dialogue and is a method with a different emphasis. “Deliberation promotes the use of critical reasoning and logical argument in decisionmaking. Instead of decision-making by power, coercion or hierarchy, deliberative decision-making emphasizes the examination of facts and arguments and the weighing of pros and cons of various options” (Heierbacher, 2004). This chapter is limited in scope to the topic of dialogue. Exhibit 13.1 compares and contrasts debate and dialogue and the benefits of using a dialogue process.

Dialogue as Possible Agent of Change

Dialogue is an important emerging method of facilitation and holds enormous promise as a versatile and successful communication process. It offers unlimited possibilities for transforming the manner in which we communicate and share knowledge. In addition, it has the potential to resolve differences and clashes of interests between individuals, organizations, and communities. Various models and techniques of dialogue are in worldwide use and are affecting the lives of people, workplaces, and society.

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