The power of collective conversations

A utilities company asked me to help roll out a set of organisational Golden Rules. Ten rules, intended to capture what mattered most for keeping people safe.The ask was to build understanding, reduce resistance, create internal champions. It felt like the expectation was to persuade people to buy into the rules. However, I find the persuasion pathway tedious and rarely successful. 

Looking at the rules, and considering the task at hand, I sensed it was an opportunity for a collective conversation. So instead of presenting the why and how of the rules, I designed an activity that involved people talking to each other. Across offices and sites, small mixed groups gathered around tables covered in laminated cards and large sheets of paper. Each card carried one of the ten rules. The task for each group was to sort the rules along three continuums: Clarity (ease of understanding),  ease of application, and effectiveness at reducing harm? 

At first, the talk was polite. Someone stepped in to take the lead in sorting the cards. People were sussing each other and the task out. But then the differences began to surface.

"That one's super clear," said a site manager. "Not for me" an office employee replied. "I don't even know what a Confined Space is." The honesty triggered laughter and gave people permission to speak more freely. More people leaned in, explained their viewpoint and experience, shifted cards to where they thought they should sit on the continuum, even grabbing cards from each other. 

One conversation led to another. A discussion about remote driving revealed concerns that some participants had never considered. A rule about Temporary Works suddenly became relevant when someone connected it to a current construction project. Trenching and Excavation took on new meaning when field workers described situations they routinely encountered. An office manager who initially dismissed most of the rules as irrelevant realised that the Electrical safety rule applied directly to a task she had performed only weeks earlier. 

What happened in those rooms was something that one-one conversations, however well conducted, can't produce. A collective conversation is more than just a change in the numbers of ears and mouths. By bringing together people, new things become possible that individual exchanges just can’t get to, such as:

• Seeing together

• Making sense together

• Acting together

Seeing together

Different people see different parts of the same system. The site manager knows the field, the office worker knows the policy intent, and the technician knows what the rule actually asks of someone working remotely in difficult conditions. None of them holds the complete picture. But together, in the same room, working on the same task, they can assemble something closer to it.

This is why who is in the room matters. The task of assembling a good enough collective to talk together isn’t hinged on having the most senior people, or the most articulate, or the usual voices, but the people whose partial views, placed alongside each other, can approximate the whole. Go for the smallest group that can see the fullest picture.

A collective conversation can reveal a pattern or the shape of a system that no individual holds completely.

Making sense together

The same rule means something different to someone in a remote location than to someone in a workshop than to someone writing policy in an office. When those interpretations meet, they interrogate each other. Assumptions surface, and blind spots become visible.

The office manager didn't just learn a new fact about electrical safety. She reinterpreted her own recent experience in light of what she heard in the room. The connection she made (this applies to me; this happened to me just weeks ago) was formed through the exchange.

When perspectives that don't quite fit together are placed alongside one another, new things become visible and force people to reconcile things. As a consequence, people are likely to leave with their perspective and ideas stress-tested against different realities already.  

Acting together

When understanding is built collectively, something happens to people's relationship to possibilities and action. The site manager who now understands why the office worker was confused about confined spaces doesn't just know more. She feels some responsibility for closing that gap. The person who connected excavation rules to their own fieldwork for the first time now has motivation to apply it, because they arrived at it themselves rather than receiving it from a slide deck.

But it goes further than motivation and ownership. When a group builds understanding together, they also discover where their combined capabilities point. The person who knows the field and the person who knows the policy and the person who knows the remote context are better positioned to act on it together. Because they now know who knows what, who has what access, who has what influence. The collective conversation surfaces the distributed but pooled capability to do something about it.

Steps toward better collective conversations
If we want to have better, more impactful, collective conversations, we’d do well to consider the following:

• Who belongs in the room? The people whose partial views can together approximate the whole. Consider: whose voice is missing? The size of the conversation container also matters. More people means more perspectives (to a degree), but also more complexity and less airtime for each participant. 

• The threshold for participation. Start with something that invites genuine thinking and reduces the risk of being wrong, something that lowers the threshold of participation. This can be a simple quantitative assessment of the current state. One-word contributions. In the Golden Rules sessions, the card sorting task gave people something to argue about, and the arguing did the work.

• What you protect as facilitator. Groups often rush toward agreement before they have explored the differences that matter. As a facilitator, your job is to keep differences visible long enough for the three layers above to emerge: see more or further, think anew, and take action together. 

Some things can only be seen together. And once they are seen together, they become possible to address together. 

Daniel

PS Heather Beach, journalist and workplace well-being strategist, recently started a podcast called “Beyond Resilience". I had the opportunity to be her very first guest where we discussed the art of conversations to improve workplaces. You can listen to and watch the conversation on Spotify.