Many organizations have an idea of what they want to deliver; but organizational muscle memory and old mindsets can get in the way of new approaches and undermine progress. Transformational results require transformational processes.
Dialogos has developed an approach for creating transformation that include three core elements:
Design Creativity. The ability to both envision new outcomes and an underlying set of processes to deliver it. We listen for the underlying story people are telling themselves, and invite them to shift it. And we look for ways to incubate and access unforeseen potential and imagination.
Social and Cultural Transformation. We have built an understanding of how to navigate and shift social and cultural constraints—which includes the ability to create transparency, dialogue, and honesty about the realities facing organizations.
Unlocking Innate Wisdom. Our approach takes seriously the notion that the wisdom to handle complex problems is present in the human beings who comprise the system. They may need to learn more, change attitudes, or let go of habitual ways of thinking and acting; but they are also in best position to do something different, if the conditions could be created to unlock what they know. We ask the question “what would it take,” not, what is in the way?
Conscious Implementation. We focus on implementation of dynamic designs that continuously seek to raise the game and sustain energy for new possibility. There is a false distinction between strategic thinking and “implementation”—thinking and doing. Implementation is always effective when it emerges from a sense of deep commitment and focus; and rarely is when it is merely compliant with managerial dictates.
Dialogos’ transformative design experience ranges from building team coherence to deliver a major corporate infrastructure project; to creating the process by which leaders from radically different cultural backgrounds are collaborating and designing a multinational, billion-dollar set of initiatives to bring hydropower to South Asia; to overcoming tradition and resistance in order to change the approach to managing risk in a century-old US federal agency; to implementing an innovative and effective regional business development strategy for an international development organization.