DIALOGIC LEADERSHIP

BY WILLIAM N. ISAACS

hen Monsanto and American Home Products dissolved

W their intended merger last year, it was not due to a lack of
strategic or market synergy, or to regulator intrusion.
According to a New York Times report, the deal failed “because of
an insurmountable power struggle between the two companies’
chairmen…” (The New York Times, October 14, 1998, p. C1).

Breakdowns in human interaction and communication play a

pivotal role in organizational life. In the case of Monsanto and
American Home Products, the CEOs of the two companies had very
di erent approaches to leadership. One spent his lunch hour
playing basketball with employees. The other refused to move to
the company’s new headquarters, preferring to stay in touch with
key employees by email. The two leaders gradually began to
question each other’s motives and moves. For instance, when one
of the chairmen recommended a candidate for CFO, the other
circulated a memo asserting that this man would never ll the role.
Each felt that the other was undermining him and the company.
They eventually proved unable to work together, and the merger fell
through.

Sometimes apparently successful mergers also quickly show signs

of strain. Eight months into their venture, Citigroup, the new
amalgamation of Travelers Group and Citicorp, red James Dimon,
the man who acted as peacemaker between, and was assumed to be
the heir apparent to, this rm’s two co-chief executives. Dimon was
widely respected; his departure came not as a result of poor
performance but, as one manager put it, “corporate politics.”

Executives interviewed later said that the collapsed Monsanto and

American Home Products deal was “not in the best interests of the
shareholders” and that Dimon’s surprising exit “was the best thing
for the business.” Yet this kind of talk covers up more honest
accounts about what happened. According to reports, the leaders in
each of these situations hit awkward con icts about a range of
substantive issues: ultimate control in a “co-CEO” scenario,
membership of important executive teams, and the timing of
integrating disparate cultures and businesses. In the end, these
people failed to nd a way to talk and think together e ectively to
resolve these di cult issues.

Although we all may not be dealing with strained or failing

multibillion dollar corporate mergers, we are probably quite
familiar with such di culties in communication and trust and the
way these can dramatically a ect organizational performance. So
how do we create environments that can transform these
di culties into successes?

This article explores how “dialogic leadership,” an approach that

has evolved from the core principles from the eld of “dialogue,”
can lead to the creation of environments that can dissolve
fragmentation and bring out people’s collective wisdom.

The Concept of Dialogue

In the new knowledge-based, networked economy, the ability to
talk and think together well is a vital source of competitive
advantage and organizational e ectiveness. This is because human
beings create, re ne, and share knowledge through conversation. In
a world where technology has led to the erosion of traditional
hierarchical boundaries, and where former competitors (such as
Exxon and Mobil) contemplate becoming bedfellows, the glue that
holds things together is no longer “telling” but “conversing.”

The term “dialogue” comes from Greek and signi es a “ ow of

meaning.” The essence of dialogue is an inquiry that surfaces ideas,
perceptions, and understanding that people do not already have.
This is not the norm: We typically try to come to important
conversations well prepared. A hallmark for many of us is that there
are “no surprises” in our meetings. Yet this is the antithesis of
dialogue. You have a dialogue when you explore the uncertainties
and questions that no one has answers to. In this way you begin to
think together – not simply report out old thoughts. In dialogue
people learn to use the energy of their di erences to enhance their
collective wisdom.

Dialogue can be contrasted with “discussion,” a word whose roots

mean “to break apart.” Discussions are conversations where people
hold onto and defend their di erences. The hope is that the clash of
opinion will illuminate productive pathways for action and insight.
Yet in practice, discussion often devolves into rigid debate, where
people view one another as positions to agree with or refute, not as
partners in a vital, living relationship. Such exchanges represent a
series of one-way streets, and the end results are often not what
people wish for: polarized arguments where people withhold vital
information and shut down creative options.

Although it may make logical sense to have dialogue in our

repertoire, it can seem illusive and even a little quaint. Yet the fact
remains that every signi cant strategic and organizational endeavor
requires people at some stage to sit and talk together. In the end,
nothing can substitute for this interpersonal contact.
Unfortunately, much of our talk merely reinforces the problems we
seek to resolve. What is needed is a new approach to conversation,
one that can enable leaders to bring out people’s untapped wisdom
and collective insights.

“Dialogic
leadership” is Human beings create, re ne, and
the term I share knowledge through
have given to
conversation.
a way of
leading that
consistently uncovers, through conversation, the hidden creative
potential in any situation. Four distinct qualities support this
process: the abilities (1) to evoke people’s genuine voices, (2) to
listen deeply, (3) to hold space for and respect as legitimate other
people’s views, and (4) to broaden awareness and perspective. Put
di erently, a dialogic leader is balanced, and evokes balance,
because he can embody all four of these qualities and can activate
them in others.

An old story about Gandhi illustrates this concept well. A man came
to Gandhi with his young son, complaining that he was eating too
much sugar. The man asked for advice. Gandhi thought for a
moment and then said, “Go away, and come back in three days.”
The man did as he was asked and returned three days later. Now
Gandhi said to the boy, “You must stop eating so much sugar.” The
boy’s father, mysti ed, inquired, “Why did you need three days to
say that?” Gandhi replied, “First, I had to stop eating sugar.”
Similarly, dialogic leadership implies being a living example of what
you speak about – that is, demonstrating these qualities in your
daily life.
Four Action Capabilities for Dialogic
Leaders
The four qualities for a dialogic leader mentioned above are
mirrored in four distinct kinds of actions that a person may take in
any conversation. These actions were identi ed by David Kantor, a
well-known family systems therapist (see “Four-Player Model”).
Kantor suggests that some people move – they initiate ideas and
o er direction. Other people follow- they complete what is said,
help others clarify their thoughts, and support what is happening.
Still others oppose – they challenge what is being said and question
its validity. And others bystand – they actively notice what is going
on and provide perspective on what is happening.

F O U R P L AY E R M O D E L

Watching the actions people take can give you enormous

information about the quality of their interactions and can indicate
if they are moving in the direction of dialogue or discussion. For
instance, in a dialogic system, any person may take any of the four
actions at any time. Although people may have a preferred position,
each individual is able to move and initiate, to follow and complete
things, to oppose, and to observe and provide perspective. None of
these roles is better or worse than the others. They are all necessary
for the system to function properly. As people recognize these
di erent roles and can act on this recognition, they begin to create
a sequence of interactions that keeps the conversation moving
toward balance.

In a system that is moving away from dialogue, people generally get

stuck in one of the four positions. For instance, some people are
“stuck movers”: They express one idea, and before that idea is
established or acted upon, they give another, and another, making it
di cult to know what to focus on. But perhaps most revealing of
non-dialogic interactions are the ritualized and repetitive
interactions that people fall into that systematically exclude one or
more of the positions.

In the Monsanto merger process, for instance, the two CEOs

became locked in a dynamic where one would initiate an action, and
the other would oppose and neutralize it, leading the other to push
back even harder. The con ict eventually escalated to the point
where it sabotaged the deal.

An intense move-oppose cycle between two high-powered players

like this one often prevents others from ful lling their roles as
“bystanders” and “followers.” The bystanders, who can see the
ine ective exchange, often become “disabled,” imagining that no
one wants them to identify what is happening. So the knowledge
they carry is lost. At the same time, people who might otherwise be
inclined to follow one side or the other to help complete what is
being said tend to stay on the sidelines, for fear of getting caught in
the cross- re. The result is that the interaction remains
unbalanced.

The quality and nature of the speci c roles can often cause
di culties. For example, opposers are generally branded as
troublemakers because they question the prevailing wisdom when
people would prefer to have agreement. For this reason, others
often tune them out. This failure to acknowledge the value of the
opposer’s perspective leads them to raise their voices and
sometimes increase the critical tone of their comments. In such
cases, people hear the criticism, but not the underlying intent,
which is almost always to clarify, correct, or bring balance and
integrity to the situation.
A dialogic leader will often look for ways to restore balance in
people’s interactions. For instance, she might strengthen the
opposers if they are weak or reinforce the bystanders if they have
information but have withheld it. Genuinely making room for
someone who wants to challenge typically causes them to soften
the stridency of their tone and makes it more possible for others to
hear what they have to say. Reinforcing and standing with those
who have delicate but vital information can enable them to reveal it.
The simple rule here is: Pay attention to the actions that are
missing and provide them yourself, or encourage others to do so.

Balancing Advocacy and Inquiry

One central dimension in a dialogue is the emergence of a
particular balance between the positions people advocate and their
willingness to inquire into their own and other’s views. Professors
Chris Argyris and Don Schön rst proposed the concepts of
“advocacy” and “inquiry” to foster conversations that promote
learning (see their book Organizational Learning, Addison-Wesley,
1978 for a fuller explanation). In the vast majority of situations,
advocacy rules: People are trained to express their views as fast as
possible. As it is sometimes put, “People do not listen, they reload.”
They attribute meaning and impute motives, often without
inquiring into what others really meant or intended. This was
evidently the case in the merger situations described above.
Bellicose advocacy sti es inquiry and learning.

BALANCING ADVOCACY AND INQUIRY

The four-player model further reveals the relationship between
advocacy and inquiry (see “Balancing Advocacy and Inquiry”). To
advocate well, you must move and oppose well; to inquire, you
must bystand and follow. Yet again, the absence of any of the
elements hinders interaction. For instance, someone who opposes,
but fails to also say what he wants (i.e., moves) is likely to be less
e ective as an advocate. Similarly, someone who follows what
others say (“tell me more”) but never provides perspective may
draw out more information but never deepen the inquiry. Thus, the
gure “Balancing Advocacy and Inquiry” reveals another way to
track the action in a conversation and o er balance into it.

Four Practices for Dialogic Leadership

Balanced action, in the sense named here, is an essential and
necessary precondition for dialogue. But it is not su cient.
Dialogue is a qualitatively di erent kind of exchange. Dialogic
leaders have an ear for this di erence in quality and are constantly
seeking to produce it in themselves and others. I have found that
there are four distinct practices that can enhance the quality of
conversation. These four correspond well to the four positions
named above.
For instance, you can choose to move in di erent ways: by
expressing your true voice and encouraging others to do the same,
or by imposing your views on others. You can oppose with a belief
that you know better than everyone else, or from a stance of
respect, in which you acknowledge that your colleagues have
wisdom that you may not see. Similarly, you can follow by listening
selectively, imposing your interpretation of what the speaker is
presenting. Or you can listen as a compassionate participant,
grounding your understanding of what is said in directly observable
experience. Finally, you can bystand by taking the view that only
you can see things as they are, or you can suspend your certainties
and accept that others may see things that you miss. In order to
make conscious choices about our behavior, we need to become
aware of our own intentions and of the impact of our actions on
others.

There are four practices implied here — speaking your true voice,
and encouraging others to do the same; listening as a participant;
respecting the coherence of others’ views; and suspending your
certainties. Each requires deliberate cultivation and development
(see “Four Practices for Dialogic Leadership”).

FOUR PRACTICES FOR DIALOGIC LEADERSHIP

Listening. Recently, a manager in a program I was leading said,

“You know, I have always prepared myself to speak. But I have
never prepared myself to listen.” This is because we take listening
for granted, although it is actually very hard to do. Following well
requires us to cultivate the capacity to listen – rather than simply
impose meaning on what other people are saying. To follow deeply
is to blend with someone to the point where we begin to participate
fully in understanding how they understand. When we do not
listen, all we have is our own interpretation.

Equally important is the ability to listen together. To listen together

is to learn to be a part of a larger whole – the voice and meaning
emerging not only from me, but from all of us. Dialogues often have
a quality of shared emergence, where in speaking together, people
realize that they have been thinking about the same things. They
are struck when they begin to hear their own thoughts coming out
of the mouths of others. Often decisions do not need to be made;
the right next step simply becomes obvious to everyone. This kind
of ow, while rare, is made possible when we relax our grip on what
we think and listen for what others might be thinking. In this
situation, we begin to follow not only one another, but the
emerging ow of meaning itself.

Respecting. Respect is the practice that shifts the quality of our

opposing. To respect is to see people, as Humberto Maturana puts
it, as “legitimate others.” An atmosphere of respect encourages
people to look for the sense in what others are saying and thinking.
To respect is to listen for the coherence in their views, even when
we nd what they are saying unacceptable.

Peter Garrett, a colleague of mine, has run dialogues in maximum

security prisons in England for four years. He deals with the most
serious, violent o enders in that country on a weekly basis.
Together, they have produced some remarkable results. For
instance, prisoners who will not attend any other sessions come to
the dialogue. O enders who start o speaking incomprehensibly
and who carry deep emotional wounds gradually learn to speak
their voice and to listen. Peter carries an unusual ability to respect,
which reassures and strengthens the genuineness in others. This
stance enables him to challenge and oppose what they say, without
evoking reaction. I asked him to share the most important lesson
that he has learned in his work. He said, “Inquiry and violence
cannot coexist.” True respect enables genuine inquiry.

Suspending. When we listen to someone speak, we face a critical

choice. On the one hand, we can resist the speaker’s point of view.
We can try to get the other person to understand and accept the
“right” way to see things. We can look for evidence to support our
view that they are mistaken and discount evidence that may point
to aws in our own logic. This behavior produces what one New
York Times editorial writer called “serial monologues,” rather than
dialogue.

On the other hand, we can learn to suspend our opinion and the
certainty that lies behind it. Suspension means that we neither
suppress what we think nor advocate it with unilateral conviction.
Rather, we display our thinking in a way that lets us and others see
and understand it. We simply acknowledge and observe our
thoughts and feelings as they arise without feeling compelled to act
on them. This practice can release a tremendous amount of creative
energy. To suspend is to bystand with awareness, which makes it is
possible for us to see what is happening more objectively.

For instance, in one of our dialogues with steelworkers and

managers, a union leader said, “We need to suspend this word
union. When you hear it you say ‘Ugh.’ When we hear it we say ‘Ah.’
Why is that?” This statement prompted an unprecedented level of
re ection between managers and union people. Our research
suggests that suspension is one of several practices essential to
bringing about genuine dialogue.

Voicing. Finally, to speak our voice is perhaps one of the most

challenging aspects of dialogic leadership. “Courageous speech,”
says poet David Whyte in his book The Heart Aroused, “has always
held us in awe.” It does so, he suggests, because it is so revealing of
our inner lives. Speaking our voice has to do with revealing what is
true for each of us, regardless of all the other in uences that might
be brought to bear on us.

In December 1997, around a crowded table in the Presidential

Palace in Tatarstan, Russia, a group of senior Russian and Chechen
o cials and their guests were in the middle of dinner. Things had
been tense earlier in the day. Chechnya had recently asserted its
independence through guerrilla warfare and attacks on the
Russians. They had shocked the world by forcing the Russian
military to withdraw and accede to their demands for recognition as
an independent state. The Chechens were deeply suspicious of the
academics and Western politicians who had gathered everyone in
that room; the Chechens feared that they were Russian pawns
intent on derailing Chechen independence. The Russians, for their
part, were fearful of adding further legitimacy to what they
considered a deeply troubling situation.
And yet, despite all this suspicion, after a few hours people began to
relax. At the rst toast of the evening, the negotiator/facilitator of
the session stood up and said, “Up until a few days ago, I had been
with my mother in New Mexico in the States. She is dying of cancer.
I debated whether to come here at all to participate in this
gathering. But when I told her that I was coming to help facilitate a
dialogue among all of you, in this important place on the earth, she
ordered me to come. There was no debate. So here I am. I raise my
glass to mothers.” There followed a long moment of silence in the
room.

It is in
courageous Dialogic leaders cultivate
moments like listening, suspending, respecting,
these that
and voicing
one’s genuine
voice is
heard. Displays of such profound directness can lift us out of
ourselves. They show us a broader horizon and put things in
perspective. Such moments also remind us of our resilience and
invite us to look harder for a way through whatever di culties we
are facing. When we “move” by speaking our authentic voice, we set
up a new order of things, open new possibilities, and create.

Changing the Quality of Action

Dialogic leaders cultivate these four dimensions – listening,
suspending, respecting, and voicing — within themselves and in the
conversations they have with others. Doing so shifts the quality of
interaction in noticeable ways and, in turn, transforms the results
that people produce. Failing to do so narrows our view and blinds
us to alternatives that might serve everyone.

For instance, in the Monsanto merger story, the CEOs did not seem
to respect the coherence of each other’s views. Each one found the
other more and more unacceptable. Although we do not know for
sure, it seems likely that they did not re ect on perspectives
di erent from their own in such a way that enabled them to see
new possibilities. The paradox here is that suspending one’s views
and making room for the possibility that the other person’s
perspectives may have some validity could open a door that would
be otherwise shut. By becoming locked into a rigid set of actions,
these leaders ruled out a qualitatively di erent approach — one
that they could have made if they had applied the four dialogic
practices described above.

Dialogic leadership focuses attention on two levels at once: the

nature of the actions people take during an interaction and the
quality of those interactions. Kantor’s model is a potent aid in
helping diagnose the lack of balance in actions in any conversation.
By noticing which perspective is missing, you can begin to re ect on
why this is so and quickly gain valuable information about the
situation as a whole.

Dialogic leadership can appear anywhere, at any level of an

organization. As people apply the principles outlined above, they
are learning to think together, and so greatly increase the odds that
they will build the expansive relationships required to build success
in the new economy.

William N. Isaacs is the president of Dialogos, a Cambridge,

Massachusetts-based consulting rm, and is a lecturer at MIT’s Sloan
School of Management. This article is drawn from his new book,
Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together, to be published in May 1999
by Doubleday.

 advocacy, communication, dialogue, inquiry, isaacs, leadership,

listen, respect, suspend, voice, volume 10

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