This document outlines an interactive workshop on using deliberate developmental conversations (DDC) techniques to help participants uncover and reshape their meaning-making systems for navigating complexity. The workshop will explore inner complexity, sensing, meaning-making, and how developmental conversations can reveal these for oneself and others. Participants will have conversations using probing, provoking, supporting and reflecting questions to help reveal each other's sense-making systems. They will also practice using acknowledgment, articulation and reframing moves. The goal is for participants to gain insights into their own meaning-making and learn techniques that can be applied to future conversations.
2. Route
• Opening apetizer
• Check-in
• A little bit of theory
• Activity: Discover yourself
• A little bit of theory about levels Listening with activity
• Snapshot of theory: DDC with activity
• Something to consider
• Debrief in Group
3. Our topic Today
Conversations can indeed be powerful catalysts for
changing mindsets and navigating complex
transformations.
In this interactive workshop we will dive into the world
of deliberate developmental conversation (DDC)
techniques. Discover how these powerful techniques
can help you uncover and reshape your meaning-
making operating system, enabling personal growth
and resilience in an increasingly complex environment.
Learn how to identify and address the underlying
factors that hinder your growth, and develop strategies
to enhance your meaning-making system for
navigating complexity.
4. We will focus on inner complexity,
sensing and meaning making and
how developmental conversations
can help to reveal that for yourself
and others and how that leads to
collective meaning making in
complex situations. It can help you
in coaching, co-mentoring, actually
in any kind of conversation.
You will hopefully get some insights
in your own meaning making and
some techniques that might be
usefull for future conversations.
7. Activity
Think about a situation in which a conversation
was going surprisingly different than you expected
it to be.
• Go back to the moment where that happened
• How did you know that it turned out different
• What happened in your body
• How did you (innerly react?)
• What were you assuming about the situation?
About your conversational partner.
• What inner beliefs were at play?
• How did you see the other?
• What did you notice about the other?
9. Activity
• In Triads,
• Share about your writings: for the speaker: how was it to
write about your conversation? What did you discover about
yourself?
• For the listener: what are you listening for?
Structure: rounds of 3 minutes
- Triadmember 1 shares 2 minutes
- Triadmember 2 listens (and noticing about his/her listening)
- Triadmember 2: observers
12. Activity
Have a conversation with a
member of this group about a
dillema/conversation and try to be
present with what is present for
the speaker and help him to reveal
his sense making system by using
helpful questions.
13. Probing Questions
Probing questions help the other person probe into the
underlying meaning-making they may be bringing to the
current situation under discussion. Examples of probing
questions are:
• What did you make up about that?
• What is the most significant thing about that?
• What in your thinking makes [the situation] seem the way it is?
• What if what that other person did [which was upsetting to you] made perfect
sense?
• What might be the nature of that sense?
14. Provoking Questions
Provoking questions help to stimulate
the other person to possibly generate a
different perspective on the situation for
themselves. They are intended to evoke
a kind of cognitive disorientation in
order to shift the ground of the other
person’s sense-making
• Questions derived from the thought-openers introduced
above are good candidates.
• For this current situation, what might a different perspective
be? What’s another? And another?
• What might you take responsibility for in all of this, that you
are not?
• How is this even a problem for you?
15. Supporting Questions
Supporting questions help the other person to see
and connect to some deeper capability they already
have, or to look around them to see where they
might go for support. They are designed to help the
other person discover—or recover—their own
inherent resourcefulness. Here are a few examples:
• What’s a way of looking at this that connects you to your deeper vision?
• What is your intuition telling you?
• You know “self-confidence” can be arranged. What can you do to arrange
to get self-confidence? 5
16. Reflecting Questions
Reflecting Questions. Reflecting questions help
the person explicitly reflect on their own
meaning-making and Action Logic. For example:
• How might you describe the nature of the perspective that has you see it that way?
• What assumption might you be making about that?
• What needs to shift in how you are making meaning of this?
• How might this look from the perspective of [Action Logic]? What might be different if
you were to look at this from the perspective of [different Action Logic]?
• Asking questions is not the only conversational move in a deliberately developmental
conversation. The other moves are Acknowledgment, Articulation, and Reframing.
17. Acknowledgement
Acknowledgement is a verbal recognition of
a quality in another which you see, but
which they may or may not see in
themselves. A couple of examples:
• I acknowledge you for the courage it took to stand
your ground with me just now.
• I acknowledge you for the generosity of spirit it takes
to allow others on the team to take credit for those
things that you did.
18. Conversational Moves
• Articulating whats going on for me: you now said, i am
frustrated three times, what do you make of that. I notice
myself feeling a little anxious in this conversation
• Reframing: reframe the context: help the other to find a
different freame.
• Challenging: notice incongruence between what they say
and how they show up.
• I have twice asked you a direct question about what
happened in the conversation you had this morning with
Sally, and both times when you responded I find myself
more confused than before.
19. Material based on/derived
from Michael Hamman
Evolveagilty
• https://www.infoq.com/articles/book-review-evolvagility-
agile-leadership/
• www.michaelhamman.com
20. Things to Consider
• We dont know what we dont know
• Complexity is not only in our environment but also in us and between us
• Complexity is co-existence of dialectics, multiperspectives, now, past future and entanglement at the same time
• Listening is as important as speaking: listening is giving and speaking is taking
• What we think, feel, notice, experience is all human
• What we think, feel, notice, experience reflects all that is in us, between us, in the past, now and in the future
• How we express what we think, feel, notice, experience is carried by our inner ability to conceptualize, word, express and by the ability to share that with
others
• Being ourselfes and witnessing ourselfes and ourselfes in the realm of others
• Our meaning making system influences our meaning making in the future
• Language is a key to open up the unknown, new language is needed to create a new realm
• By conversations we reveal our (own) sense and meaning making and impact to ourselfes and others
• Conversations is therefore a human/social technology that we need to make sense of our being/environment
• Inquiry is the way to discover
