Hi, I’m Ian McClean, founder of Flow Group and GreenLine Conversations. This podcast has grown out of the chaos that’s been thrust upon us. And in it, I share the best of 25 years of helping leaders in business organisations deal and cope with change. So, as you’re out there, busy making sense of it all, trying to cope, and repurposing your organisations, I’m hoping that some of this will provide some help, some of the time.
I’ll keep it deliberately short, because I know you’re busy. Let’s dive in.
We live in a world where change is faster, uncertainty is greater, and also in a world which is becoming more digital, which means people are becoming more virtual and more remote, where people’s attention spans are becoming less, particularly, but not only amongst the younger generations and where our dialogue and our opinions are increasingly polarized.
Black or white, red or blue. Against this backdrop. Our general ability to have meaningful conversations that move through difficulty and diversity and even polarity is becoming less and is diminishing. So at a time when we most need to be connected and we most need to come together to solve the problems that are affecting all of us and our futures.
It appears that the means to hold and host these conversations, which are critical, are in decline.
So this is the reason that I’m putting a pause on the serious confessions of a guru to introduce instead, a special edition, which brings attention to the most basic element that is most critical to our overall effectiveness, that of having the right conversations.
We started the Green Line Conversations Project over 15 years ago, and we built up an awful lot of data, and it informs our professional approach.
When we work with our clients, as well as how we conduct ourselves individually, internally, and also outside of work in our general day-to-day conversations, the very definition of what we do as a business is we hold the space in a way where divergent viewpoints can be held together to come up with a better mutual outcome.
So, in codifying that and using that as a vehicle for many, many different things and applications. In our work and in our businesses, everything from simply solving a problem together to how we conduct our meetings, to creating a strategy that we can all stand over to agreeing our priorities, making decisions, resolving conflict, managing our teams and our performance Coaching one another, giving and receiving feedback.
The list is endless. So before the art of having conversations disappears down the plug hole entirely. And whether it’s in a work context, whether it’s in a family or in a relational context. The genesis of the Green Line Project began about 15 years ago. As I said, when a bank who had been a challenger in the marketplace to the pillar banks discovered that the wind had changed, and having grown very aggressively against the backdrop of benign winds, all of a sudden found itself in a situation where it needed to reduce its headcount by 50% and turn itself into a collections agency. Having been a lending agency for the years previously, this occurred all of a sudden during the financial crash.
And left us with a proposition where we needed to work with the leadership of this new entity to establish a brand new culture with half of the individuals who’d been there in the previous culture on the central cultural premise of having and holding honest conversations. The happy ending to the story is that with this laboratory experiment.
They managed to build a business over the next three years, which founded on having honest conversations and the skill to hold and host them. Productivity and connectivity went up within the organisation and within five years they got bought out by a larger entity. Thus proving that you can transform whole cultures through the central spine of having honest and open and skillful conversations.
So let me begin at the beginning and just talk about the nature of conversations, because conversations, more than we know, really do matter, and the reason that we don’t particularly think about them or prioritise them is because they’re a little bit like the wallpaper of life. If you think about it from the moment, a baby discovers language for the first time and utter its first word.
We are involved in and surrounded by conversations and like wallpaper. We’re so surrounded by them and immersed with them all the time that we don’t even notice them after a point. We might even think that they’re inconsequential, but there is one thing that I do know. There is nothing that I know in the world that can either connect people or divide people quite like a conversation.
And consequently in the times we find ourselves living in now, it’s even more critical and more important that we pay attention to the nature and how we have our conversations.
