Changeworksblog.com

Productive dialogue is more important now than ever.  With social media and social networks supplementing many of our face to face coversations, learning the ABC of productive conversations can help you leverage your social networks through online media. In this post I continue to look at the components of productive dialogue.

Once you have fully grapsed the idea of the ladder of inference and become a good thinking detective you are ready to leverage the two key tools of productive dialogue; the first one being high quality advocacy.

Advocacy is about sharing your thinking effectively. This could include disclosing how you feel, expressing an opinion, urging a course of action or asking someone to do something. Good ‘thinking detectives’ leverage high quality advocacy so that they are not simply offering opinions or requests. But they actually provide the data on which they based their thinking (rather than interpretations of data) and share how they arrived at their conclusions from the data they used.

Emotional state or ‘frame of mind’ is crucial to this.  Think of the last time when you assumed you were right about something and in dialogue with someone ; perhaps you were having a Twitter conversation or chatting on Facebook. Notice how, in this frame of mind, you are driven to get others to realise what you ‘already know’.   You are trying to influence others to your way of thinking and this feels very one way.  In this type of conversation there is a notable lack of mutual learning. The whole point in having productive conversations is to promote and enforce mutual learning; this is what social networking and social media is brilliant for.  But you have to approach it with the right frame of mind.

Here are some tips about how to maintain the right frame of mind for productive conversations:

1. See every conversation as an opportunity to learn and promote mutual learning
2. Assume you may be missing things others see, and seeing things others miss
3. Stay curious
4. Assume others are acting in ways that make sense to them

Related posts you may enjoy reading:

• Why productive dialogue is key to accelerating organisational success
• Accelerate your business through conversation
• Communication boosts learning and innovation
• Good communication or 41 years of mistruths?
• How to accelerate behavioural change out of recession