How to Build Better Dialogue Practices with your team

Are you getting stuck in unstructured conversations at training or in meetings?

Using participatory and collaborative learning can be a risky decision. You don’t want messy discussions with no clear outcomes or action points.

Furthermore, having quality dialogue is not a solo superpower – it’s a team skill that everyone needs to master.

To level up the dialogue skills in your company, leaders of today and tomorrow need to master group facilitation online and face to face. This is a collection of skills, tools and techniques that get people working together effectively.

The leader as a facilitator needs to know how to:

1. Create safe and hospitable (physical and virtual) spaces
2. Formulate powerful questions
3. Design engaging learning flows
4. Stick to planned timings
5. Utilise tools and techniques designed for participation

Like building fitness at a gym, it is good to create a clear process or plan how to build learning and participation in your team.

Our Insights Cards have been used to spark dialogue in trainings and meetings in various settings. Here’s a simple “Learning and Leadership Gym” program, based on the Insight Cards as the tool.

Learning and Leadership Gym with Insight Cards

Preparation:

You will need the Insights on Personal Development and the Insights on Leadership, preferably one deck per max. 10 people. (eg if you have 30 people participating, get a minimum of 3 decks each).

Set 2-3 workshop sessions of 45-60min, approx one week apart.

Invite people to the sessions with a warm welcome. Set the intention of why you are doing this and what you aim to achieve clearly.

Step 1

Dialogue on Personal Development

1. Form small groups of 3-5 participants and hand them a deck of cards (facing down)
2. Set the intention of the activity to encourage ideas about learning and personal development.
3. One at a time, people pick up a card containing a powerful question on personal development. They read the question aloud and answer with their best insights.
4. Set a time to about 20min. When time is up, invite everyone to share their key insight on their own learning and to come up with a concrete action point: “What personal development idea will you try before our next Insights Dialogue?”

Step 2

Ideas into Action

Send a reminder to the participants in between the sessions about their action points and getting ready

Step 3

Dialogue on Leadership

1. Follow the instructions from Step 1.
2. If you would like to make a variation on the dynamic, try introducing a dice. When someone picks a card from the deck, they also throw a dice. If the person gets 1-3, they answer the question themselves. If they get 4, they have to draw their answer. If they get 5, they can ask it from someone else and if they get 6, everyone will have to answer.
3. Finish with the key insights and next actions.

Step 4

Follow-up
Check with the participants in 1-2 weeks if they have followed up with their planned actions or come up with new insights. You can also do this by setting up a meeting or mini workshop to reflect on outcomes and ideas.

Variations: This is a guideline for giving an idea of a possible process. Feel free to adjust the plan to suite the size and specific needs of your audience.

You can get a little more ideas for using the Insight Cards here.

Collection of tools and methods to create participative learning.

Resources mentioned in the video: World Cafe Method, Kahoot, Hyper Island