Conversational Learning and Performance: Interpreting Great Strategic Conversations

Smith, Ann Kowal

2008-12
2015-03-09

We interviewed seventeen successful leaders to explore their experience of effective strategic conversations yielding innovative outcomes. Although these organizational leaders uniformly espoused emergent conversation, whereby they prefer to collaborate with their teams in an experiential learning process, their conversations were primarily leader-driven directed discussions with specific outcomes in mind. Moreover, they described not single events, but multiple strategic conversations distributed over time, with varied participants and purposes. Successful strategic conversations appear to develop, over time, in a dialectic space formed by the leader's desire for authentic contributions by participants and the experience of organizational and cultural forces that inhibit emergent innovation. Keywords: conversational learning, strategic conversation, organizational discourse, time, collaborative innovation

Experiential learning
Conversation

Kelvin Smith Library, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, provides the information contained in Digital Case, including reproductions of items from its collections, for non-commercial, personal, or research use only. All other use, including but not limited to commercial or scholarly reproductions, redistribution, publication or transmission, whether by electronic means or otherwise, without prior written permission is strictly prohibited. For more information contact Digital Case at digitalcase@case.edu.

http://hdl.handle.net/2186/ksl:weaedm110

52 p

Doctorate of Management Programs