Conversation at Work

My belief is that the great untapped potential of Organisational Development is how people talk to each other: what they say, what they don’t say, and how the nature and quality of their conversations creates the ‘field’ which they then say they ‘experience’. The challenge is that this field is a result of the talking, rather than the instinctive understanding we tend to hold that our talking simply describes the field and the experiences therein. The clearest demonstration of this is when I ask you to tell me about your company, or its culture, or the problems it is facing: you can’t do that without including some stuff, and leaving other stuff out. And in this natural, often unconscious, editing of ‘reality’, you have your company be as you want it to be, for whatever reason you have for doing that. So you tell me about the problems, and you describe and justify those problems with data - and of course I do that too when I want you to know how unique and special my own personal problems are -  and what we all end up with is the story of a problem-saturated company.

It may even be ‘true’ that your company faces these problems, but even if it’s true, it’s not especially helpful or empowering to talk about them in this way. On the contrary, it probably results in us both being agreed that there’s an awful lot of intractable problems in your company, and dismayed that we’ll ever be able to do anything about them.

The work therefore becomes exploring what is left unsaid, what is being edited out. And that’s where the potential comes alive again.

So a good question to ask is: “Tell me - what’s working around here?”