Transforming Conversations: the Bridge from Individual Leadership to Organisational Change

Conversations should be the bridge between leadership development and organisational performance. As leaders develop, they become capable of raising different kinds of issues, asking different kinds of questions, initiating different kinds of conversations. These conversations, or their absence, shape group dynamics and drive or limit organisational effectiveness.

For example, many groups will find it easy to discuss starting new activities but harder to discuss stopping existing ones; others will be at ease with both, perhaps because they focus more explicitly on outcomes; and some may better at challenging the underlying assumptions behind their goals and considering radical alternatives.

Transforming Conversations claims that dynamics such as these are pivotal to any group's success. It proposes a series of developmental stages for these dynamics, where organisations moving to later stages acquire greater agility, resilience, and effectiveness by being able to have different kinds of conversations – a bit like an organisational operating system upgrade.

The approach is based on the stage models of adult development created by Bill Torbert, Bob Kegan, and Ken Wilber. Specifically, it builds on Torbert's action-logics model of leadership, making organisational action-logics more practical and accessible, and introducing conversational action-logics to represent the conversations leaders become capable of at different stages.

From Torbert's Foreword to the book: "How has Ian Harcus managed to take the example of a small cafe (as well as examples from Facebook, U.S. Steel, McKinsey, Tesla, and other major organisations) to produce the most usable primer I can imagine, to help managers and leaders in all sectors in transforming your outside-in understanding of 'organisations' into an inside-out experience of 'organising differently' through different kinds of conversations."

Those seeking a more open, collaborative and non-hierarchical approach – such as Frederic Laloux's Teal organisations, Kegan and Lahey's Deliberately Developmental Organisations, or decentralised, self-organising structures like holacracy – are likely to find it especially relevant.