Thought Experiment #41: Why every organisation needs a ‘Head of Conversations’

For the past few years, I’ve been releasing ‘thought-experiments’ on new roles organisations need but don’t have. It is - hopefully - a coherent ‘thought’ which summarises and builds on countless ‘dots’: discussions, observations, and thoughts. It is an ‘experiment’ because it is the very first step in putting an article out into the world and inviting others to build on it or knock it down, with the intent to rebuild it stronger. 

Some of these thought-experiments have already inspired organisations to create new roles (e.g. thought-experiment #25); while other roles may be ahead of their time.

1. Thought Experiment 25: Head of Experimentation
2. Thought Experiment 28: Head of Customer Learning
3. Thought Experiment 29: Head of Role Design
4. Thought Experiment 30: Head of Stories
5. Thought Experiment 34: Head of Failure
6. Thought Experiment 35: Head of Mindshifts
7. Thought Experiment 36: Head of Problems
8. Thought Experiment 37: Head of Platforms

Please connect with me if you’d like to build on these thought-experiments.

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TL;DR - When you see organisational cultures struggling, multi-million product failures, or strategy not being executed properly, the root cause is probably the wrong people having the wrong conversations at the wrong time - for all the wrong reasons. In this post, I put forward a case why every (large) organisation needs a Head of Conversations. 

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The greatest innovation tool we have is the power of conversation. 

Yet most employees spend tens of hours on tools such as emails, documents, and presentations every week. These are the most expensive, least effective, but conversely the easiest tools we have. On the other hand, a conversation is the cheapest, most effective, but the hardest tool to deploy.  

I see conversation as a tool because it’s the most effective way to get things done in organisations. How many times have you experienced the endless backward and forward by email, only to have the issue resolved by a simple five-minute conversation? 

According to Adam Kahane and Otto Scharmer, there are four types of conversations - “explaining that people relate to each other at different levels of conversational complexity. This diagram shows how individuals and collectives move counter-clockwise along different kind of conversations; from polite discussion (i.e., talking nice) through the field of debate (i.e. talking tough) towards more open, reflective dialogue and finally forms of collective intelligence (i.e., generative dialogue).”

I would argue, based on having worked in large and small organisations, that there are far too many conversations that stay in the ‘talking nice’ stage, and never move to the generative dialogue, where co-creation moves the conversations into actions. 

Before exploring the rationale, the business case, what this role is and what it isn’t, let’s explore three dots that became the inspiration for this role. 

Dot One: Wrong conversations - Too many of our organisations are permission-centric. With most employees defaulting to endless time on tools like email (an average knowledge worker sends/receives 126 emails a day), Powerpoint, workshops, and surveys - all of which power internal, permission-driven conversations - this comes at the expense of external, insight-driven conversations. Furthermore, the sudden shift to online, virtual calls during this pandemic has led to many remote teams shifting to very action-centered conversations for expediency’s sake, at the expense of having genuinely beneficial conversations. The informal ‘watercooler, ‘over lunch’, and spontaneous conversations, which are essential for information flow and relationship building, are simply not happening. 

Dot Two: Too-late conversations - I recently spoke to an ex-colleague friend of mine, who, after working for over 15 years for the same organisation, recently left. His biggest pet peeve was that he was never given a chance to even show he was capable of being a partner. He is only now having this conversation as a part of his exit interview - when it’s too late for both parties. There need to be dedicated pathways to turn hidden thoughts and reactions into productive conversations earlier. And these conversations need to be facilitated, supported, encouraged, outside of HR departments. HR, it seems, is where you go when things become serious and formal and just a little too late. 

Dot Three: Siloed conversations - In any organisation, most departments are speaking in siloed conversations. In a recent HBR post, it was concluded that to drive growth, you need to get finance and sales in sync. “The CFO and sales leader should focus on and prioritize their own relationship first before the relationship between the finance and sales functions. Businesses are designed and driven by well-defined organization charts and processes, but when they stumble, it’s usually because of people.” 

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The first reaction any person would naturally have to this role is with its title. The immediate association is one of a fuzzy, quirky something that hip design agencies or the Tesla CEO would use. In reality, it’s the exact opposite.

There is immeasurable value in facilitating the right conversations, at the right time, with the right people, with the right intentions. 

The job of Head of Conversations is not just to facilitate but provide a platform, launch interventions, and track metrics for many different types of growth-conversations to happen easier, faster, and better. 

Project-growth conversations: Many millions of dollars’ worth of projects inside organisations fail for one simple reason: poor communication. Conversations that needed to be had were dismissed or never even took place. There need to be conversations that allow for creative friction to surface, to allow skeptics to raise their concerns, and for project leaders to test their assumptions and hypotheses before prematurely scaling their ideas. Example Metrics: # of new experiments tested, # $ value of ‘ghost’ projects stopped

Customer-growth conversations: The success of any organisation is determined by how customer-centric it is. Right now, this relationship (conversations and associated insights) is often owned by the customer sales or marketing teams. The Head of Conversations’ job is to democratise access to customer conversations for all employees across the organisation, to help drive better insights. Example Metrics: # diversity of conversations across departments (using org network analysis), # of insights developed outside of product/marketing teams, # net promoter score

Individual-growth conversations. In a previous post, I argue the need for organisations to replace performance-reviews with growth-conversations. The Head of Conversations’ job is to support executives and managers to embed a habit of effective 1:1 conversations with their line employees. For employees who are coasting, managers need to have the knowledge, skills and mindsets to facilitate the right conversations to raise their aspirations and goals. For struggling employees, who are not “performing” in their roles, managers need to have the courage and sensitivity to have difficult conversations that help their employees address these issues head-on or transition to alternative roles. Example Metrics: # employee retention, # employee promoter score # no of peers (mentors/mentees) matched

Team-growth conversations: Google found, in a multi-year study that grew from its quest to build the perfect team, that the number one ingredient in successful teams is psychological safety: ''a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up'. In short, the Head of Conversations’ job is to create the right tools and training to support employees to have more, better, and effective conversations on a daily basis. Just as organisations deploy agile-coaches, why not a conversation-coach? Furthermore, the most productive teams are those that bring together people with a wide array of specialties. Bell Labs was a classic example, where Walter Brattain, an experimentalist, and John Bardeen, a theorist, shared a workspace so they could perform a call-and-response all day about how to manipulate silicon to make what became the first transistor. Google X often recruited a seamstress for their Project Loon. The Head of Conversations job must inspire greater diversity in team formation for new projects, which is a precursor to diverse conversations. Example Metrics: # no of actions (from training) deployed by managers # manager reviews

Culture-growth conversations: Be they conversations around equality, accessibility, diversity, inclusivity, and flexibility, there are many hard conversations about organisation culture that need to be had. The format of these conversations can of course be through informal mechanisms, but formal mechanisms like mentoring platforms (e.g Guider) make these conversations scalable. Example Metrics: # workforce composition by gender, race, and age # average tenure for employees from monitored groups # promotions awarded to individuals from monitored groups

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Now, here are 6 practical actions that this Head of Conversations can own in the first 90 days of his/her role:

1. Re-imagine meetings. Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, says the ‘smartest thing we ever did’ was change the meeting structure by banning Powerpoints, encouraging staff to write narratives, and allow thoughtful conversations to happen inside the meeting. The Head of Conversations can bring about a similar change - but why stop there? What if the organisation changed the vernacular of ‘meeting invites’? A meeting is a dry invitation of let me update you, let me sell to you, or let me convince you. Instead, encourage employees to invite employees to send ‘conversation invites’. A conversation requires coming with not just answers but questions (where you’re stuck, where you need value added, etc).
2. 10% of all employee time needs to be with external conversations. There are no ‘answers’ inside the building. Whether that’s your IT department, your HR department, managers, or sales - everyone can benefit with having more conversations outside of their existing networks within the organisation. To do this currently requires probably ten steps of permissions and justifications, so it’s no wonder these conversations never end up happening. Instead, the Head of Conversations can track the amount of external conversations, build the right internal policies and practical pathways to create greater access to end customers to help drive new insights that could give birth to innovations.
3. Facilitate the right customer questions. For example, I’ve often wondered: instead of marketing departments sending out surveys, or an automated telephone asking customers to rate an experience, why don’t organisations (in this case Head of Conversations) embed this one question into every customer engagement process - “What’s the one thing (no matter how small or big) we could have done better?” Then the Head of Conversations’ job is to dig deeper, and in collaboration with marketing and product teams, to prioritise those that need turning into wider organisation-level conversations for actions.  
4. Replace ideation tools with conversational tools. We’ve all worked in organisations where there is an incessant desire for the next new idea - where the organisation's ideation platforms collect hundreds of ideas that just sit there, or are rejected by the reviewers who may lack understanding of their true potential. What if, instead of using ideation platforms, organisations used conversational-platforms to spend less energy on requesting new ideas and more energy on creating, facilitating, connecting and empowering conversations that leads to the mixing of multiple ideas; conversations about how to turn ideas into experiments; conversations on why an idea could work, not just reviews of why it won’t work.
5. Physical spaces and habits. When Steve Jobs designed a new headquarters for Pixar, he obsessed over ways to structure the atrium, and even where to locate the bathrooms, so that more personal conversations would occur. The Head of Conversations job is to redesign spaces for more serendipitous conversations to occur. Research has proven time and again that having the smartphone nearby in meetings can take a toll on people’s thinking - so Head of Conversations job is to create organisational norms that encourage quality conversations. 
6. Conversational-training. Good questions are the heart of good conversations. The Head of Conversations can create micro-training programs that upskill employee capabilities, mindsets, and courage to frame and ask hard, silly, simple, confusing, relevant, questions of themselves and their colleagues. Furthermore, every employee can do with training on the subjects of listening, empathy, and storytelling.

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Every organisation has the need to shift from quantity conversations (emails, Powerpoints, Slack messages) to quality conversations. In Cal Newport’s latest book, a world without email, he explores how the future of work demands new tools of collaboration. Perhaps we need to prioritise the old-tools (conversations), and deploy them at scale.

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Before you go, please engage (like/share/comment) if you feel there is value here for you, so that your network can come across it. Thank you, sincerely.