12 Useful Things

Over 12 years of work, enabling thousands of dialogues on highly complex and challenging issues, we’ve learned a thing or two. Or twelve, actually.

Here are 12 useful things you can do that will make for fundamentally more useful conversations. They aren’t easy…but then again, if it were easy, you wouldn’t be here poking around for ideas, now would you? 😉

1. Ask the fundamental question.

2.?Engage any and all stakeholders who care.

3.?Include the people who will make the conversation awkward.

4.?Trust in the intelligence of the human system.

5.?Chaos is fundamental to change structure reinforces status quo.

6. Diverge, diverge, diverge THEN converge. Be gracefully persistent throughout.

7. Conversations that matter take time to emerge; they follow on the heels of trust.

8.?People can only be polite for so long. Outlast them.

9. Change. Is. Uncomfortable. But opening space helps.

10.?Hold hope. You’ve been there before; you know there’s another side. They may not. Hold hope.

11. Always start from a clear outcome and design backward. Always.

12.?Promises are irrelevant. Sincerity is the act of following through.