Learning Conversations

"Some friends and I started talking"(Wheatley, 2002, p. 25). In the world of complex plans and processes, most successful change starts with a simple conversation between people with shared interests. Societies are transformed and communities created through the simple act of friends talking together. Talking together in conversation is far more than people expressing opposing points of view as in a discussion; it is truly a dance in which people turn around together in a heart felt sharing of ideas, feelings, and emotions.

See the full story at:

To Dance Together

It seems that the most difficult chalenge that many leaders have is to engage in conversations with others while balancing relationship and performance improvement. Leading is an act of conversation. Being fully engaged with others. Not as a discussion where ideas are torn apart and disected, but in a dance where sharing and learning are happening in real time. Regardless of whether a leader is task oriented and focuses on performance improvement or if a leader is relationship oriented and focuses on the human in front of them, to be fully effective that leader must come to the middle and balance relationship and performance improvement to be effective.

This section is about my work in conversational leadership and an invitation to come into circle with me to explore how conversational leadership can transform the culture of an organization and the effectiveness of the team members that play such an important part in creating a sustainable community.

See my conversational leadership model at:

Conversational Leadership

Through conversation, I created an opportunity to volunteer in Madurai in Tamilnadu in April of 2004. I worked in a learning institute introducing conversational collaborative models to help improve learning.

Please see my pictures of the trip at:

India Trip

Please read my paper on the trip at:

My India Trip Story

This community is founded on the principles of self-organization, living systems, conversational learning, and learning organizaitons.

This community is designed to help each of us to think big and act small helping build connections with our customers, employees, partners, and build a more profitable and sustainable future for our enterprises.

This community for people worldwide and hopefully will provide an opportunity for us to share ideas and resources, build partnerships and friendships, spread knowledge, hope, and action, and help us work locally and internationally to build a more sustainable future. If we take what we learn in this community and carry out into our communities, we can and will make a difference locally and internationally and be part of helping build a responsive and sustainable future.

I would like to recommend several initial resource for every member of this community. First Greenopolis.com is soon going to be an international resource for people across the world interested in creating a sustainable future. Second I highly recommend the new book by Peter Senge, The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals And Organizations Are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World. Please read my review below that I posted on Amazon to gain a quick picture of what this resource can do for us.

Conversations and collaboration are the way forward

This long awaited book fulfills all of my expectations for a manual to help us create the conversations and collaboration necessary to reclaim our world's health. Over the years there have been quite a few high impact books helping us understand the extent of the challenges we face as we look forward to create a sustainable world. "The Necessary Revolution" steps forward and outlines how to create the partnerships that are needed to unleash the pent up creativity that millions of team members across the world and in all enterprises have been holding back. Peter Senge and team from his organization Society for Organizational Learning come at the subject as world leaders in the austere world of business. It is going to be very difficult for business leaders across the world to read this work and write it off as rantings of an extremist. Peter is one of the top business minds in the world and I do not believe this work can be easily ignored.

For those of us who are disbursed across enterprises and feel like we have little impact on moving our enterprises towards a more sustainable future, this book provides outstanding case studies of work being done across the world by enterprises large and small. Some of the work and the visions of the leaders chronicled in this text are not only enlightening but surprising. After many chapters a "toolbox" is provided to help set the stage for the conversations and collaboration needed to move change forward. And of course, all of this work is set in a framework of systems thinking which is so necessary to be able to see beyond the silos so many are bound by.

"The Necessary Revolution" should be required reading for community leaders of all types, NGO, religious, Government, and corporate alike. As we start to create these critical partnerships and conversations focused on sustainability, I believe that we can quickly change the course that we are on. A must for every person who wants to see a change in our direction. Thank you Peter, Bryan, Nina, Joe, and Sara for this extraordinary work.