Wealth of Wisdom

CHAPTER 46Achieving New Insights and Possibilities through Generative Dialogue

Michelle Osry

The day before I was due to facilitate a retreat with a business family which had self-declared themselves to be “stuck,” I was given Kate's Sutherland's treasure-trove of a book We Can Do This! 10 Tools to Unleash Our Collective Genius. The family had tried numerous times, over the span of a decade, to launch a family governance process but had failed to make any meaningful progress. Knowing that the family was discouraged and fatigued, I had planned a series of activities that I hoped might encourage a fresh start.

By our first morning break, it became clear to me that the family desperately wanted a deeper, more honest conversation that would allow each member of the family to be seen and heard without triggering their familiar and unproductive communication patterns. Rather than return to the planned agenda, I sketched on a flipchart what I recalled of the Generative Dialogue framework I'd seen while skimming We Can Do This! the day before:

It produced a breakthrough! The framework helped the family to see that their conversational process was predictable—and fixable. The framework provided a roadmap for taking their conversational process deeper: from where they were and how they got stuck, to how they could get unstuck and where they could go. Over the span of a weekend, the family learned to talk and listen in new ways. At the close, each family member took time to express their ...