Creating Energized Commitment to the Dialogic Approach: The Change Team's Journey of Discovery

If you want to know how to bring Dialogic OD into an organization that needs it but doesn’t know what it is, this is the book you want to read. Sarah Lewis brings her considerable experience and intellect to overcoming many of the barriers you will likely encounter when you are the first to use a dialogic, emergent, generative approach.
In Dialogic OD change teams (also known as planning groups, design teams or steering committees, among other terms) are much, much more than just a group of people planning a project. They are the beginning of the change and key to success. Your expertise in developing a dialogic mindset in team members will greatly determine the success of the entire change effort.
In organizations that are used to top-down management, the change team plays many roles, including:
• Acting as a microcosm of the larger system that can bring the perspectives, issues, and concerns of the variety of stakeholders to the table
• Creating a testing ground to understand the important norms, narratives, history, and present-day strengths and challenges that must be taken into account to design an effective change process
• Bringing together the initial group with whom you learn how to develop enthusiasm for a Dialogic OD approach in the larger organization
• Emboldening the people who are crucial in convincing senior managers and inviting the rest of the organization into a process of generative conversations that may be very counter-cultural
In this short, lively book, you follow the unfolding interactions with the change sponsor, internal change agent(s), and planning team as the OD practitioner lays the essential groundwork for successful organizational transformation. Sarah provides detailed descriptions of the many issues and group dynamics you are likely to face and appropriate responses to each of them. Supporting you as you enter the organization, gain the support of a key sponsor, set up a change team, and then help that team let go of traditional, problem-solving approaches to planned change and instead embrace a generative change approach.
We follow a case of an experienced Dialogic OD practitioner beginning a new assignment for a leader who says he wants to create an empowering, engaging approach to dealing with people issues identified in a staff survey but doesn’t really understand what it takes. We watch her work with an internal change-agent partner who has trouble letting go of mechanistic, bureaucratic processes, and a design team who initially assume their job is to provide solutions for managers to implement. Over a few weeks, a developmental process takes place as they test, challenge, learn and eventually become the core from which the entire organization gets ready to engage in generative change.
The presentation draws on more than 40 years of experience consulting with organizations where the author developed the ideas and methods described in the book. Conceptual frameworks, how to’s, and extensive cases are presented throughout to illustrate the ideas and methods in practice.