This document discusses conversational leadership and methods for improving organizational conversations. It defines conversational leadership as a style that understands the power of conversation and takes a conversational approach to leading and managing others. Conversational leaders nurture natural conversations, listen to ignite new ideas rather than just reply, and design conversational processes. The document provides examples of how organizations have used knowledge cafes and other conversational methods to surface issues, break down silos, transform meetings and management training, and increase connections. It positions conversational leaders as architects who identify problems to address through targeted conversations.

1. Conversational Leadership
The Middle East Leadership Communications Conference 2014

2. Birth of the Gurteen Knowledge Café
London, September 2002

3. Global Knowledge Cafés
• Run them all over the world
• Interesting cultural issues
• Format always works
• People naturally love to talk

4. Café Applications
• Not just alternative for death-by-PowerPoint
– Surfacing hidden problems
– Management training tool
– A way of transforming meetings
– Obtaining buy-in to a project
– Sharing good-practice
– Instigating action
– Giving people a voice

5. Conversational Methods
• Dialogue
• Knowledge Cafes
• Peer assists
• After action reviews
• De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats
• Storytelling
• Randomised Coffee Trials
• Communities of Practice
• Brainstorming
• Open Space Technology
• Anecdote circles
• World Cafes
• Post project reviews
• Collective Sensemaking
A few examples of
Conversational
Methods

6. What people say about
conversation

7. The most widespread and pervasive
learning in your organization
may not be happening in training rooms,
conference rooms or board rooms
but in the cafeteria, the hallways and the
cafe across the street.
Junita Brown & David Isaacs

8. Conversation is the most
powerful learning technology ever
invented
Conversations carry news, create
meaning, foster cooperation, and
spark innovation.
Encouraging open, honest
conversation through work space
design, setting ground rules for
conversing productively,
and baking conversation into the
corporate culture spreads
intellectual capital, improves
cooperation, and strengthens
personal relationships.
Jay Cross, Informal Learning

9. Our most effective KM tool is
conversation
The words we choose, the
questions we ask, and the
metaphors we use to explain
ourselves
are what determine our success in
creating new knowledge
as well as sharing that knowledge
with each other.
Nancy Dixon
Common Knowledge

10. Organizational Conversation
Conversation permeates our organisational lives

11. Business is a conversation
because the defining work of
business is conversation -
literally.
And 'knowledge workers' are
simply those people whose job
consists of having interesting
conversations.
David Weinberger
The Cluetrain Manifesto

12. 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 Weber
Harvard Business Review

13. Conversations

14. Conversations to …
• Transform leadership
• Improve understanding
• Build relationships
• Improve engagement
• Improve decision making
• Break-down organizational silos
• Stimulate action
• Spur innovation
• Surface opportunities
• Explore possibilities
• Surface problems
• Solve problems
• Identify risks
• Share knowledge
• Give people a voice
• Generate ideas
• Coach people

15. Surface Issues &
Break Down Silos

16. ISN Zurich
• Dramatic improvement in
inter-team dialog,
collaboration & knowledge
sharing
• Many internal work processes
overhauled as a result
• Explosion of new ideas &
initiatives on the part of staff at
all levels of the organization
• Empowered staff to speak up
and take the initiative
Chris Pallaris
Chief Editor, ISN, Zurich

17. Transform Meetings

18. Transform Decision Making Meetings
• Break meetings into two parts
• To better understand the issues
– Dialogue - Café style
– Divergent
– Understanding
• To make decisions and plans
– Debate
– Convergent
– Making a decision Too often we rush to make
decisions without taking
sufficient time to understand
the issues

19. Transform Management
Training

20. Challenging Minds
ING Bank Academy Amsterdam
• Education programme for
mid-level managers
• Abandoned lecture style
training
• Small Knowledge Café
style conversations
around specific topics
• Short videos downloaded
from YouTube

21. Increase Connections &
Serendipity

22. Randomised Coffee Trials
• Pair people at random for
coffee once a week
• Bank of England connects 4
people & call it “Coffee
Fours”
• Serendipity
Randomized Coffee Trials
• Nesta
• Cabinet Office
• Bank of England
• Mars
• RSA
• KHDA (Dubai)
• DfE
• Scottish Government

23. Organizational Conversation
Conversation permeates our organisational lives

24. Organizational Conversation
"Organizational Conversation" is the myriad of
conversations, both formal and informal, that
take place everyday, minute to minute, within an
organization.
Conversation is the life blood of an organization.
David Gurteen

25. Conversational Leadership
"Conversational Leadership" is a
style of working where everyone
in an organization, especially
managers, understand the
transformative power of
conversation
and take a conversational
approach to the way that they
lead, manage and interact with
people.
David Gurteen

26. Conversational Leaders
• Purposefully nurture & stimulate natural conversations
– are a catalyst
• Talk “with people” and not “at people”
• Ask questions of people rather than have all the
answers
• Listen to ignite rather than reply
• Practice dialogue more than they do debate
• Speak up and allow others to speak their minds
• Take every opportunity to turn a sterile formal process
such as many meetings into a conversational one
• Make good use of all the conversational methods
available
• Make the time
I view anyone with a
sphere of influence as a
“leader,” whether or not
she has that explicit job
description
Daniel Goleman

27. To be a catalyst is the
ambition most appropriate
for those who see the
world as being in constant
change
and who, without thinking
that they can control it,
wish to influence its
direction.
Theodore Zeldin
Conversation

28. Listening to ignite rather than reply
• Listening is not a passive act, it is very
powerful action
• The attention of one human being to another is an
act of creation.
• If I can be profoundly interested in what you
think and what you will think next and where
you will go with your thinking, you will
generate ideas and insights and ways forward
that you wouldn’t do without this attention.
• I want to be listening in a way that is more
interested in where you will go next than I am in
what I am going to say next.
• And so I like to think of it as listening to ignite
rather then listening to reply which I think is a
profound difference
Credit: Nancy Kline

29. Conversational Architects
• Conversational Leaders are “conversational
architects”
• Identify the problems and challenges that
need to be addressed
• Identify the conversations that are needed &
the questions that trigger new thinking
• Design conversational processes, convene &
host them (typically Knowledge Cafes)
• Invite the right people – ensuring diversity
• Participate as an equal group member

30. Who is talking about Conversational Leadership?
• World Café: Juanita Brown & David Isaacs
• Talk Inc. by Boris Groysberg & Michael Slind
• Nancy Dixon
• Henry Mintzberg
• Gervase Bushe
• Peter Block

31. Question

32. How do we become better
conversational leaders?

33. www.gurteen.com
David GURTEEN
Gurteen Knowledge
Fleet, United Kingdom
Tel: +44 7774 178 650
Email: david.gurteen@gurteen.com