Change the Conversation (Foundations) Course
Change the Conversation (Foundations) is an engaging 2.5-hour self-paced learning course, usually coupled with one or more workshops. It’s designed to enable in-house cohorts of managers and professionals to grow their skills in getting ready for, and having, deeper conversations, dialogue, on uncomfortable topics – and to do so with reduced risk and greater safety for better outcomes. The course also comes in different versions.
Choose the Version that best suits you!
As well as a General Business version, the Foundations course comes in versions for Healthcare and Lawyers.
Change the Conversation is also available in a 1-hour Introductory form, with an optional workshop and again with versions for General Business, Healthcare and Lawyers.
A more-in-depth Change Enabler course version is also offered, which builds upon and extends the Foundations course.
All managers and professionals need the skills taught in the Change the Conversation course!
TAPPING POTENTIAL THROUGH DIALOGUE
Empowerment, innovation, psychological safety, collaboration…these aspects of successful, emotionally healthy teams and organisations are elusive but attainable. The same is true with challenges such as handling conflict, improving teamwork, and dealing with performance or behavioural issues.
Such issues have in common that ‘underneath’ each is a need for conversation – deep-reaching, exploratory conversation, dialogue – to talk openly and accurately about what’s going on now, what needs to happen, and how to move from ‘here’ to ‘there’.
Yet this is not a kind of workplace conversation we typically have. Usually, we get caught up in patterns of reacting, judging others negatively and ‘dancing around’ difficult topics. As a result, important issues can be ‘off the table’ or treated only superficially. We need to change the conversation.
COMMONWEATLH BANK STAFF TESTIMONIALS
Here’s what five participants from a recent demo course for Commonwealth Bank (Australia’s largest) have said (more info. can be provided on request):
THE EMPHASIS IN THE FOUNDATIONS COURSE
‘Change the Conversation’ is designed to build the skills and confidence of your managers and professionals in preparing for, and stepping into, virtually any conversation which they find uncomfortable. They learn to work jointly with others in cutting through to the underlying issues, examining different perspectives, and building more genuinely shared understandings to propel change.
This is different from the one-way communication orientation of many ‘challenging conversations’ courses.
Utilising the OBREAU conversation model (observation, reasonableness, authenticity), participants learn how to engage with others and deal with change and other challenges in ways that are emotionally safer as well as more mindful, attentive, empathic, and authentic. In this way, the course helps develop the inner capabilities of participants as well as being practical and action oriented.
One potential benefit is the prospect of tapping individual and group intelligence that is otherwise hidden, out of reach – the kinds of things that people think, feel and know yet ordinarily find too risky to express.
There are no magic bullets of course, and the skills taught need practice. What the course does is give participants a framework and tools that they can try out and apply in all manner of situations over time, progressively sharpening their skills.
Your participants will learn how to:
The approach they learn is simple to grasp, powerful and deep-reaching in its impacts, and generalisable to virtually any change-related or uncomfortable interpersonal situation. The power in the approach is that it helps make discussable topics that might otherwise be seen as off-limits or too threatening.
Format
The Foundations course involves 2.5 hours of punchy and engaging self-paced learning modules, with average run time under 10 minutes. Reflection and practice activities are included.
The course can be run either as a standalone experience or accompanied by discussion sessions or workshops.
As a standalone experience, Change the Conversation is an ideal accompaniment to leadership development or team building activities.
Another approach is to have learners complete the three course sections separately (45 – 60 mins per section) and follow each with an internally facilitated discussion. We provide you with a set of questions to help you guide the conversation. Or we can facilitate such discussion sessions for you.
Make It Your Own
Alternatively, we can conduct more in-depth workshops to help participants embed and apply their learning. Talk to us about how we can best tailor workshops to meet your needs.
