cameron and green making-sense-of-change-management

Complex changethese ideas and practices into organizational settings. This way oftalking pays particular attention to the meaning that unfolds whenpeople communicate collectively.Isaacs sees dialogue as not merely about talking, but about takingaction, and at its very best it includes meaning making and the expressionof feelings and leads towards powerful action. Dialogue is about thinkingtogether rather than thinking alone, and demands that we both let go ofour own positional views and begin to face and hear about other people’sexperiences and realities.Isaacs talks about ‘choice points’ in a conversation. A key choice pointin a conversation which involves some deliberation is whether to eitherdefend your own view or position, or suspend it and therefore listenwithout resistance. Defending usually leads to either productive analyticaldialectic or unproductive verbal brawling. Suspending is more likelyto lead to an exploration of the deeper questions, a new framing of keyissues and the possibility of reaching collective, refreshing new insights.Whole system workIncreasingly, organizations and public bodies are seeing the need to bringwhole systems together to tackle complex and messy issues with multiplestakeholders. Patricia Shaw (2002) talks about these sorts of events:Carefully designed and facilitator-led large group events are an increasinglypopular example of ‘intervention’ into the ongoing processes of organizing.These are intensive interactive conferences intended to stimulate new formsof action to address ambitious change in complex situations. Participants areinvited to identify issues and create self-managing small groups to generateproposals for future work. The result is a public plan of action.Open space technologyHarrison Owen, the originator of open space technology, says that hisideas are probably as old as homo sapiens, it is just that modern-daywisdom has obscured our instincts and intuition about how gatherings ofpeople can self-organize to find what is exciting and energizing, and thenmakes things happen. Owen’s ideas emerged when he began to noticethat at a regular international symposium that he used to attend, whichused the traditional formal presentation of papers plus orchestrated panel323