Stephen Billing’s Blog

 What you are comfortable to discuss legitimates topics for your people. Those things you are uncomfortable with quickly go into the "undiscussable" pile.

As regular readers will be aware, I have been advocating that conversations are the means by which change takes place in organisations. This is because organisations can be seen as themes of consistency and novelty that emerge from the myriad conversations that take place amongst many people over periods of time. So, organisations remain the same (and sometimes stay stuck), due to recurrent themes that predominate in the conversations that take place over the course of many interactions. Each of these interactions individually holds the potential for novelty. Think of regular team meetings, project meetings, coffee conversations, board meetings, informal meetings to explore certain topics, progress meetings, and presentation of proposals. Each has the potential for something new, but also has potential to reinforce existing patterns. "It depends."

During the conversations that take place during these meetings, participants make choices about what to bring into the public domain and what to leave unspoken. Thus, organisational participants are always negotiating a balance between what to reveal and what to conceal in their organisational conversations. Such matters as the status of your love life, your living conditions or issues in your family are obvious matters for judicious revealing and concealing.

But so are matters such as what you really think of the CEO’s presentation on customer service,  whether you think this change initiative will blow over and be superceded by something else, or whether you are thinking of looking for a new job.

What you think of your colleague’s idea for your current project is no less the subject for judicious revealing and concealing. After all, your relationships are subject to power relationships that both enable you and constrain you at the same time. So frustrating!

All conversations are subject to power relations that enable and constrain at the same time. Hence, your people are always determining what it is safe to reveal and what to conceal – perhaps not consciously. You are subject to the same dynamics. By which I mean that you as a senior manager are also negotiating what to reveal and what to conceal in each of your myriad interactions during the course of a day.

I contend that choices not to bring issues into the public domain tend to foster consistency and support the status quo (i.e. "no change"), while choices to bring issues up for discussion, which can be risky, perhaps even career-destroying, create the opportunity for new patterns of interaction to arise.

In other words, as a leader, your choices about what is acceptable for discussion – what you proactively raise as a legitimate subject for discussion, has a direct impact on the potential for change to occur in your organisation.

Your mundane day to day conversations with others have a big impact on the change potential of your organisation. If you’re thinking about the change you want in your organisation (and who isn’t?), ask yourself, "What topics am I legitimating," and "What topics are undiscussable?" Your intuition may tell you the answer.

Check out your intuition with someone you trust.Or else get someone from outside to help.