2012 Best Practices for Government Libraries

Conversational Patterns That Support Telling Truth to Power
By Nancy M. Dixon, Principal Researcher, Common Knowledge Associates
Originally published on January 27, 2012 in Conversation Matters
116
BEST PRACTICES 2012
The Defense Intelligence Agency’s (DIA) Knowledge Lab faced the challenge of how
to move accurate intelligence up the chain of command. Too frequently the
intelligence analysis, painstakingly generated by front line analysts, was delayed
and often severely modified by a chain of superiors before it reached policy makers
who could act upon it.
Zeke Wolfberg, the Director of the Knowledge Lab and I, as the knowledge
management consultant to the Knowledge Lab, recently published an article about
how we addressed that problem at DIA. The article appeared in Reflections, the
SOL Journal on Knowledge, Learning and Change (Vol. 10, 4). I provide a summary
of the article in this post. The full article can be downloaded under My Publications
on the left.
DIA provides military intelligence to prevent strategic surprise and deliver a
decision advantage to warfighters, defense planners, and policymakers. The
analysts who develop intelligence assessments are divided into teams of 30 plus
with each team focused on a different region (e.g. South East Asia) or a different
functional area (e.g. missiles), as well as task forces that are periodically assembled
to address crises (e.g. the Mumbai terrorist attack).
The intervention we undertook to enable telling truth to power, was called “Critical
Discourse.” The format was to bring together a team of analysts along with their
supervisor, to jointly analyze the actual conversations that occurred between
members of the team and between team members and their supervisor. The
conversation analysis was based on the work Chris Argyris, using his left and right
hand case format to create scripts of difficult past conversations. Each analyst and
supervisor selected and wrote out the dialogue that occurred in three difficult
conversations they had engaged in. Each team met over a period of three months
to analyze each other’s cases and to practice Argyris’ Model II skill set with the goal
of reducing the misunderstandings occurring in their conversations. Each team
member also received individual coaching between group meetings.
Model II is a way of interacting that results in knowledge and learning for everyone
who is engaged in the conversation. The goal of Model II interaction is not to win an
argument, but to create a space for joint learning. A person using the Model II skill
set holds in their mind the underlying assumption that, “I have part of the
information and others have other parts that I may not be aware of.” The skills are
used to get all the information that is available and pertinent into the conversation.