THE TALK–ACTION SPECTRUM

What if talk is the first step in action?

Talk is the process of transforming thinking and inducing action through collective learning and inquiry. Conversations are the social glue which ties team members together. In fact, teams are described as complex, overlaid, communication networks.

There is a chain reaction from talk through action as has been seen in many research and theories. The talk–action spectrum develops constructs taken from many such communication theories, most notably Herbert Clark’s theory of conversational grounding, Austin’s speech act theory, Grice’s theory of conversational implicature, Obasi H. Akan’s concrescent conversations, Bohmian Dialogue and the Dialogue theory of William Isaacs.

Talk catalyses collective insights which build trust. Trust connects people, leading to cohesive engagement. Engaged teams can then collaborate well to harvest energized action.

1. Collective insights: Talk opens up thematic portals of collective knowledge sharing, relationships and possibilities. Ideas in our minds suddenly become real and take wings when we start to share and talk about it. Abdolvahab Baghbanian and Ian Hugheshave extensively researched that in unfamiliar situations, executives who made decisions collectively would make a significantly more efficient and effective decision than counterparts who made decisions individually. This is because in new and uncertain situations, collective intelligence creates better decision-making. As people share their insights, the magic in the middle unfolds, and the sense of wholeness emerges. The theory of conversational implicatures is attributed to Herbert Paul Grice, who observed that in conversations, what is meant often goes beyond what is said and that this additional meaning is inferred and predictable. Grice proposed that participants in a communicative exchange are guided by a principle which determines the way in which language is used with maximum efficiency and effect to achieve rational communication. He called it the cooperative principle.

The cooperative principle: Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged. This cooperative principle is an umbrella term for nine com- ponents which guide how we communicate. These nine components are grouped together into four categories, called the maxims of conversation: the maxim of quality (truthfulness), the maxim of quantity (informativeness), the maxim of relation (relevance) and the maxim of manner (perspicuity). This life-affirming concept of conversations creating collective insights is also part of Bohmian Dialogue, the world café, appreciative inquiry, positive coaching and many other historical and cultural conversation perspectives. The collective insights add credibility to the ideas and individuals, and slowly this credibility builds trust in the team.

2. Cohesive engagement: The talk that builds trust relationships is the key driver to promote synergy and connect among the members of the team. Thomas, Zolin and Hartman5 in their research prove that communication improves trust between employees and supervisors, and that trust in turn leads to greater employee engagement.

One study by Iyer and Israel ?showed that organizations which communicate effectively are four times as likely to report high levels of employee engagement than organizations which communicate less effectively. Quirke argues that the key to creating engagement lies with a company’s leaders. He further discusses that it is their job to communicate in ways that connect the dots for their employees to see how their individual success contributes to the organization’s success, as this is argued to win commitment. This creates a space for authentic conversations to be nurtured for ideas, expectations and goals to be set and processed. Now the team just loves being in this space to learn and contribute. Maylett and Warner ?have found that employees will not engage until they have capacity, reason, freedom and know-how to do so.

This increased responsibility is an excellent example of the participative problem-solving process, which is argued to increase engagement. This space in their minds is the cohesive engagement. Engagement is the means to action.

3. Harvest energized action: How high-performing teams contribute to task completion is a highly relevant issue in complex organizations. Organizations recognize that a highly engaged workforce can increase innovation, productivity and bottom-line performance while reducing costs related to hiring and retention in highly competitive talent markets. Akan, Jack and Mehta have extensively studied the relation- ship among concrescent conversation, psychological safety and team effectiveness. They argue that a concrescent con- versation ignites a climate of psychological safety, resulting in ‘joint action’ necessary for positive team outcomes. Engaged teams use the space to perform their best. Their conversations are open, future-looking and filled with possibilities. Searle ?challenged Western civilization’s most sacred paradigms, the belief that talk is not action. In developing his philosophy of language, Searle coined the term ‘speech acts’, hypothesizing that ‘Speaking a language is engaging in a (highly complex) rule governed form of behavior.’ He contends that speech acts bring into existence a social reality which did not exist before their utterance and that the hearer must now act/react to this new reality.

Herbert Clark ?takes this idea one step further by emphasizing the joint nature of such actions. A joint action is an action that cannot be accomplished by a single individual. It requires two or more individuals to cooperate and coordinate to complete a joint action. To succeed, the two of them have to coordinate both the content and process of what they are doing. This is called grounding, according to Clark.

The Harvard Business Review Analytic Services ?study found that two metrics most utilized to measure the outcome of employee engagement initiatives are employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction. ?Rob Markey, ?head of Bain & Company’s Global Customer Strategy and Marketing Practice and co-author of The Ultimate Question 2.0 believes that ‘the only way to have consistently really high levels of customer loyalty is to have a workforce that is so enthusiastic, creative, and energetic that you outperform competitors in service delivery, execution, and product design.’

According to Markey, companies which are strongest in fostering high levels of employee engagement do the following three things:

1. They put employees in positions where they have the ability to exercise judgement in doing their jobs and learn over time through feedback from customers (internal or external) to do that job better.
2. They continually link employee performance back to the broader goals of the organization to make customer goals better.
3. Culturally, their missions are heavily staked in offering employees autonomy, mastery, purpose and a strong sense of affiliation. Structurally, this means that top managers need to open up the decision-making authority, allowing power and responsibility to be decentralized from headquarters out into individual teams.

The talk now becomes the action, as ideas are thrashed, steps are taken and strategies are put in place. This energy-filled action is how every conversation should conclude. The talk–action spectrum identifies the associated factors which together form the basis for establishing the role of conversations in team engagement and performance. These factors or factor range locate a relation along a continuum.

(The Talk – Action Spectrum is a research based model I developed and is part of my book – Talk Action)

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