Importance Of Dialogue Essay

In the last fifteen years or so, dialogue has become an important topic of discussion in the offices, workplaces and even in our neighbourhood. As a result we ask ourselves what we really mean by organisational dialogue. According to William Isaaacs

During the dialogue process, people learn how to think together – not just in

The sense of analysing a shared problem or creating new pieces of shared

Knowledge, but in the sense of occupying a collective sensibility, in which

The thoughts, emotions, and resulting actions belong not to one individual,

But to all of them together. (William Isaacs, past director, MIT’s Dialogue Project)

The work dialogue stems from the Greek roots ‘dia’ and

Adding further, practise of dialogue is practise of community building. Hence this sense of community have the power to transform the organisational culture.

There has been lot of studies recently regarding the effect of dialogue on organisational culture. The 'success stories ' of major culture change programmes at British Airways, ICL and British Telecom (Armstrong 1990; Price & Murphy 1987) and Nissan (Kotter & Heskett 1992) are frequently cited as chief examples of effective culture change through change in dialogue in the companies . Two major approaches were identified which were responsible for changing organisational culture named the top down and the bottom up according to Thorhill.a in his book managing change; a human resources strategy approach. “Culture engineering approach” (see palmer and handy 2000) is also the name given to the top down in which it as presumed that the top management of the company or an organisation has thorough knowledge of ideal values, behaviour and standards which