ConvoLIFE

While catching up on my podcast listening recently, I came across an episode of Exponent (a podcast about tech and society) where the hosts talked about the importance of local news and the challenges of the changing media landscape. It's worth a listen, using the analogy that the forest fire of change has been through and now we're looking for the new shoots. Some key points from the podcast that are worthy of further thought: When facing major change, organisations will end up in a different place if they focus on "taking things out" of the old model rather than starting from scratch; The "taking things out" approach will tend to protect the things that used to matter, but no longer do. Propping up an existing model that will not last will only delay something better emerging. Change is painful (but not changing leads to doom). Propping up an existing model that will not last will only delay something better emerging. We'll pick up so...

Our view of entrepreneurship has been shaped by a definition David developed in teaching “Creativity & Entrepreneurship” to Bachelor of Business classes: Entrepreneuring is the ability to install a new meaning in the marketplace. This is the key to rare capability of an entrepreneur. It is an “end to end” capacity. And it is a conversational capacity from end to end. Making new meaning is a conversational process –even if it has a large chunk of that special form of conversation with ourselves called “thinking”. Conveying our idea to others is a conversational process. Recruiting others to invest in   the development of our idea – investing their money or even a chunk of their lives – is a conversational process – and one that takes a lot of conversations to sustain! Getting our idea into production, distribution or use is a conversational process Few indeed can walk that talk from end to end. The sheer complexity and r...

That’s a strange question. Because we presume you are not asking about the intrapsychic or sociological phenomenon in humans that goes by that title. We presume you’re asking rather in what order in whom do we put our faith? The answer is both profoundly simple: “But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God…” John1:12 (ESV) and as endlessly complicated and hair splitting as you could want any conversation in the universe to be (Google “Christianity” and get 122,000,000 results   in 0.90 seconds) . So I guess were not going to try and answer that in the abstract. You’ll have to discover who we are in a sense even as we do so ourselves.   "We say that we ‘conduct’ a conversation, but the more genuine a conversation is, the less its conduct lies within the will of either partner. Thus, a genuine conversation is never the one that we wanted to conduct. Rather, it is generally more correct to say that we fall into ...

Hmmm.   Leadership. So much easier to talk about when we were all managers! Because then we knew that what we wanted to be was leaders, but we were just managers. Our way into this one actually comes through an understanding of conversation, and some of the ways we hold the word “conversation” – that is, that we give it more weight than just chat, or just what happens after the first few beers. Mark Strom, the author of Lead with Wisdom (Wiley, 2013), found a pithy way of making a key distinction about organisational talk. He writes: “Communication is sharing created meaning. Conversation is creating shared meaning… At a certain level communication and conversation are synonyms. Yet the distinction is not just playing with words. The bigger picture is our assumptions about knowing and meaning. Communication — sharing created meaning — suggests there already exists some knowledge that others need to know. We need to communicate: clearly, concisely, and relevantly.… Communi...

At one level you’ll find us using the word “conversation” like everyone else – a word that we unreflectively mix in with words like “talk”, “chat” or even “interaction”. We don’t actually have that many words in our lexical stock for an action that is amazingly general and yet powerful, all pervasive and yet transformative. But at times you will find us using the word “conversation” to mean something more focussed. And that is that we are specifically interested in how we can talk together to get things done when we are focused on an outcome. It is our belief, our assertion, and our distinctive when we talk about conversation is that we're talking about the systems and structures of language that allow us to cooperate in purposeful human enterprises. Take an example. In Euro Western culture (perhaps now more as an aspiration than as an achievable goal), an imaginable topic of outcome-focussed conversation could be about how we might build our own home. What typically happe...