Opening Creative Channels in the Competitive Workplace Through Dialogue: An Interview with Glenna Gerard
by Kali Saposnick

Copyright © 2002 Pegasus Communications, Inc. (www.pegasuscom.com). All rights reserved. No part of this article may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, without written permission from Pegasus Communications, Inc. If you wish to distribute copies of this article, please contact our Permissions Department at 781-398-9700 or permissions@pegasuscom.com.

Most organizational leaders place a high premium on cultivating creativity. Yet the competitive nature of many work environments often stifles employees' willingness to share their ideas. Glenna Gerard, coauthor of Dialogue at Work: Skills for Leveraging Collective Understanding (Pegasus Communications, 2001), points to a strong need for dialogue skills to close this gap. "If I think you're going to take my idea and not give me credit, or my idea is not going to be popular, or sharing my idea might get me in trouble with my superiors sitting in the room, I'm probably going to edit what I say and who I am," she says.

In order to open up avenues of communication in competitive situations, we need to establish an atmosphere where people feel they can put any idea out there and look together at whatever ends up on the table. This does not mean identifying our similarities or becoming homogenous; rather, it's about cultivating relationships that honor and appreciate our differences and capitalize on those differences in creative ways. For example, imagine a conversation where some people want to evaluate, make choices, and move quickly to action, while others want time to reflect on and play with different possibilities. When both conversational styles are encouraged, a group can generate enormous creativity and make effective decisions. Typically, however, we choose evaluation because reflection takes time that we don't feel we have. But decision-making that's partial to speed generally produces replication of old ideas, not innovation.

"The key to fostering dialogue is to consider what you're doing as an experiment," suggests Glenna. "And if the experiment yields valuable results, you can use what you've learned to add value in the future." Create a space where you suspend the need to prove your idea is right and instead focus on understanding different perspectives and how they can catalyze emergent ideas. Most of us have participated in conversations where everybody spoke freely and felt heard, so we know how to contribute to peak creative experiences. But in corporate settings we rarely implement these behaviors because we forget, we have no time, or we feel threatened in some way.

How can we nurture an open, collaborative environment to sustain effective dialogue? In Dialogue at Work,Glenna lists what she considers the top five behaviors: listening (seeking to understand, looking for the big picture, and not interrupting), suspending our judgments (noticing but not expressing our judging thoughts and continuing to listen), identifying assumptions (surfacing and challenging our underlying beliefs about others' views), inquiring (being curious and asking questions to clarify what others are saying), and reflecting (building in the time and setting the pace to think deliberately and not feel pressured to come to a quick decision).

Glenna suggests that we begin by personally practicing the different skills and developing our own capacity to converse differently. By learning how to remain present, handle our own discomfort with diverse opinions, and manage our responses in any situation, we model a new way of talking and being together. We don't have to do anything special, nor must we teach people how to do it. All we need to do is, as Gandhi put it, "be the change we wish to see in the world."

Another thing we can do during a conversation is to draw attention to things without judging. For example, we might observe that people seem to be uncomfortable with an aspect of the discussion or that many different ideas seem to be circling without resolution. So we could say, "How about if we take a couple of moments to reflect on what we've heard so far? Then we'll check around the table to see where we are." Just taking a moment to reflect silently can change the course of the dialogue. A third thing we can do is to be curious, which often requires a willingness to call into question our own assumptions and beliefs. Especially when we disagree or don't understand something, we can inquire into another person's ideas and help reveal more of their thinking.

Although most of us tend to feel more comfortable around like-minded people, conversing with someone who suggests we look at an idea differently opens up whole new arenas for creativity and expands our worldview. When an organization uses the principles of dialogue to allow diverse perspectives and interests within a system to freely interrelate with one another, it develops a fresh new approach to day-to-day-operations and emerging challenges.