I talked briefly about this idea yesterday (at the tele-seminar), but I think it warrants a bit more attention.

It’s about a stream.

What if cool ideas were discovered through dialogue rather than through leader driven monologues that are full of convincing, selling, spinning and enlisting? Instead, what if vision was the result of inclusion, discovery, innovation, and mutual stewardship. 

Look again at the second list of words.

The common denominator in all of the words is relationship. Leadership is as much about the cultivation of relationship as it is about anything else. For too long leaders have viewed relationship as a way to get things done rather than as a way to discover what should be done. If leadership is a relationship of discovery, then dialogue becomes an important portal through which that discovery can occur.   

It’s about a stream.

But  how we might ask?

Just how do you, Dave, propose that we include more people in the discovery process of vision and still accomplish something more than endless chatting?

It’s about a stream.

    Hierarchy has been the dominant way we’ve viewed relationships of leadership and followership (top-down). In this system people related to each other based on their positions in the hierarchy. This structure has not naturally fostered dialogue. It fostered monologues, commands, directives, and corrective types of communication, but not dialogue. What we need now is a new side-to-side way of thinking about relationships that allows dialogue to become a part of the texture of everyday work.

I call it the stream.

Part two is coming soon…