How might we make Work conversations WORK?
As organisations push to grow faster and bigger in shorter periods of time, the number of issues that need to be dealt with on a day-to-day level escalates.
As the level of uncertainty and disagreements rise in the organisation, so does the level of complexity of its conversations. Issues long kept “under-the-table” can mushroom suddenly and unpredictably to become “on-the-table” conversations.
If these conversations are not skill-fully facilitated, the level of team engagement and team effectiveness can be undermined.
How can we help ordinary people working in organisations - internal facilitators - navigate complex conversations with each other?
Under the Good Design Research (GDR) initiative by DesignSingapore Council, we mapped out a network of respected and influential external as well as internal facilitators from Singapore’s people and organisational development (OD) sector as well as organisational leaders working in HR and OD.
Then, we interviewed them to get their take on:
What makes organisational conversations so difficult these days?
What were the most useful core practices and theories they operated from to navigate those conversations?
Based on what we have found, we created a field-guide aimed at helping internal facilitators learn how to:
diagnose the level of difficulty of their conversation
design a constructive conversational approach for better outcomes
Our Journey
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