Talk and Action - Team Mates Not Rivals! (2/2)

• Talk helps to build the coalitions and new mindsets that are the key to effective organisational change: "If you . . . want to change the way people think, you do it by changing the way they talk. . . [giving them] new stories and myths to tell and retell to each other." (Paul Bate, Strategies for Cultural Change, Butterworth-Heinemann, 1995).
• Talk about purpose, values and overarching goals enables people to anticipate and respond to actual events, rather than those that might have occurred if the 'real world' had been kind enough to comply with the assumptions made in formal plans and budgets.

Talk is not simply a ritual precursor to action, even where action taking is its intended outcome. Organisations that fail to follow through on workshop-generated action lists do not lapse into some form of suspended animation. They continue to act - and to talk! But they do so in ways which sustain the status quo, rather than carrying out the supposedly 'agreed' actions.

Organisations unavoidably comprise networks of ongoing, self-organising conversations, through which managers' actions are interpreted, inferences drawn and cultures embedded. What is required, therefore, is more talk not less. But it needs to be talk that emerges from the shadows and into the open; talk that exposes and explores the "undiscussable" issues that block action; and talk which shares the new stories and myths that encapsulate the desired future.