conversation

I love Jamie Oliver - he's by far my favorite celebrity chef.  Every since I first saw him stuff a leg of lamb, I knew he was my 'culinary muse'.  Over the last few years, he's been on a mission to change the eating habits of various communities, including schools in the UK and US.  

There is a growing awareness of how important conversations are within our organisations. Dialogue has always been key, but the new economy requires a new way of facilitating business conversations.
When it comes to facing the adaptive challenges in our organisation, conversation is a very useful tool for leadership to engage with staff on addressing problems.

A Conversation Journey is an intentional, facilitated approach that helps an organisation understand their existing conversation culture and assists in creating a culture that supports the organisations strategic objectives.

“Conversations are the way workers discover what they know, share it with their colleagues, and in the process create new knowledge for the organisation. 
In the new economy, conversations are the most important form of work ... so much so that the conversation is the organisation.”

Alan Webber -  Harvard Business Review

There are typically 4 main types of conversation that occur in organisations.  When one type (usually Action conversations) dominates the conversation landscape to the detriment of the other types of conversation it creates an unhealthy culture in the organisation.

TNL partners with and accompanies organisations on a journey to discover how to harness the  conversation threads that are already occurring and stimulate those that need to occur.

Main objectives include:

• Providing strategic direction on how to harness the power of conversations
• Assessing existing conversation cultures
• Articulating a preferred conversation culture
• Formulating a conversation strategy to move towards the desired culture
• Equipping & training of conversation agents to seed and nurture strategic conversations
• Using narrative to augment the conversations
• Monitor how the conversations evolve

To learn more about this offering please contact us on our Contact page, or download the brochure below.

We love working with cartoonists and doing things differently.  We also believe that conversation is of much greater value than simply sitting passively listening to the guru's speak (as is the case in most conferences). 

I found this approach to conferencing, and also conference reporting really refreshing.  Let's hope that more and more conferences will be run this way!

I've recently begun an experiment ... I've joined Twitter. Some have admonished me for being so late in joining the party, and others have responded with a quizzical look that says "is this the thing that geeks do?"

A week into it and I have found it to be quite a natural extension to the status updates I do on Facebook, but with an edge. Twitter interests me because of the unstructured way in which people can broadcast thoughts, activities, links to interesting material, and well, just about anything that can be converted into 140 characters of text. In short, each "tweet" is a fragment of narrative. It is, as Scott Stratten wrote, the conversation that's happening, right now. It is also a platform that exposes our human desire to broadcast and share our stories - the stories about who we are, where we are and what we are.

Now, lets turn the thinking from a social network towards how this might work in organisations ...