We're in the home stretch now of our journey through epistemology. Today we'll look into how a team leader would implement Senge's discipline of dialogue.
As Senge (2006/1990) emphasized, the skill of dialogue is an important prerequisite element to the discipline of team learning. In the follow-up book to The Fifth Discipline (Senge, Kleiner, Roberts, Ross, & Smith, 1994), William Isaacs outlines the levels and stages of dialogue beginning with conversation and ideally ending with true dialogue rather than discussion or debate. Isaacs and Smith go on to discuss the basic components of a dialogue session and how to design a dialogue session. For example, key elements of a positive dialogue session include an invitation to the dialogue session, generative listening, allowing for silence to consider individual and team thoughts, suspending judgment, and using disagreements as an opportunity to identify areas the team needs to explore further. Additional dialogue session guidelines offered by Isaacs and Smith include allowing at least two hours, checking in with every team member at the beginning and end of each session, not having an agenda or being overly prepared, not meeting over a meal, speaking to the center of the group and not to each other, and agreeing to meet for at least three times to allow adequate opportunity for the conversation to grow into dialogue (Senge, Kleiner, Roberts, Ross, & Smith, 1994, pp. 377-380).
With these recommendations in mind, as a team leader I would take a multi-pronged approach for implementing a discipline of dialogue. First, ensure that upper management supports and models the use of dialogue within the organization. Second, provide training and practice in critical dialogue skills such as listening, suspending judgment, and brainstorming. Third, implement a method—similar to the Army’s After Action Reviews—that uses dialogue to capture key learnings at the end of project efforts, posts those to a shared knowledge base, and then uses those key learnings to help shape future projects. Fourth, publicly recognize and privately reward those who practice positive and productive dialoguing. Also, another important element per Senge (2006/1990) to support dialogue and the learning organization is to allow time for reflection (both within and between dialogue sessions). For this, I would recommend adopting 3M’s “Fifteen-Percent Rule” that supports employees spending up to 15% of their time in individual learning and knowledge-building pursuits that benefit not only them as individuals but also the organization in innovation (McElroy, 2003).
- Robin
References:
McElroy, M. (2003). The new knowledge management: Complexity, learning, and sustainable innovation. Burlington, MA: Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann.
S
enge, P. M. (2006). The fifth discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization (Rev. ed ed.). New York: Doubleday. (Original work published 1990)
Senge, P. M., Kleiner, A., Roberts, C., Ross, R. B., & Smith, B. J. (1994). The fifth discipline fieldbook. New York: Doubleday.
