Practical Example

Management dialogue processes at top management level.

When your colleagues throw you off the thinking track ...

Requirements of the client:

Disruptive developments force a company to undertake major radical changes, courageously set new courses and transform its organisation, which requires a great deal of joint mental and coordination efforts. With regard to strategic considerations and issues regarding orientation, management members are required to think together and against each other, which means that many issues are put forward and different opinions, ways of thinking as well as understandings collide. So it may happen that your colleagues throw you off the thinking track.

The employees of this specific company are accustomed to working through large data volumes as well as preparing efficient reports and chains of arguments for management presentations, but they are not that experienced with deriving different interpretations. In this case, their lack of experience in dealing with methodically organised processes and targeted management dialogues represents a challenging task, since it is part of core management skills in strategy building processes to dialogically generate interpretations across businesses.

Our approach:

Understanding is an art and a science in itself. An important factor of understanding efforts is to use dialogues to generate interpretations and to adopt a hermeneutic* attitude. This is exactly the point where our management dialogue process comes into action: dialogue processes are intended to jointly look for interpretative variations und ranges of interpretations as well as to reflect adequacy and directionality. Management dialogue processes are time-consuming and people-intensive, but produce important insights and accelerate decision-making.

Dialogue processes also include reflection on one’s own communication and management culture as well as the analysis of one’s individual way of thinking, which is expected to enable an employee to adopt the perspective of his dialogue partner. During management processes, anticipations are experienced and learnt as a group. This approach enables to solve social and political blockades more easily and makes them manageable within the dialogue context.

The result:

Throughout the management dialogue process, plausibility checks and interpretation findings were considered as well new issues exploited and individual aspects deepened. In addition, processes required for orientation and focusing were chosen and the new strategy topics defined. By jointly developing a strategy, combined with mental and understanding efforts, it was possible to create a new form of cooperation at management level and within corporate culture.

On this basis, future corporate developments can now be specifically aligned. When implementing the elaborated corporate development strategy, management has achieved a joint “interpretation” by means of dialogue, and found and trained new forms, classifications and processes of dialogue work. Courage and consistency will ensure lasting success.

* Hermeneutics as a theory and practical method of interpretation provides important insights into understanding processes. According to hermeneutics, there are different aspects of understanding that can explain why proper understanding is so difficult:

• Each understanding is based on prior understandings • The relationship between the sign and the signified is not clear • Understanding is always subject to the subjective point of view of the understanding person • Understanding is influenced by history, society and one’s own life story • Understanding is selective and interest-based