In next weeks podcast, I discussed, Dialogue MappingTM with KC Burgess Yakemovic of Cognexus Group. KC has over 25 years of experience capturing and using decision making rationale within both the corporate and small business environments. She worked with Jeff Conklin a (author of Dialogue Mapping: Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems) during his early research on the technology needed to support the IBIS methodology in the “real world.” Since January 2011, KC has been the Director of Training at CogNexus.
This excerpt is from part of the conversation that took place after the podcast about applying Dialogue Mapping to meetings:
Note: This is a transcription of a podcast. It has not gone through a professional editing process and may contain grammatical errors or incorrect formatting.
Joe Dager: I am very intrigued, and I think Dialogue Mapping is an interesting process. I create mind maps, flowcharts and that type of stuff, from conversations all the time. That’s just part of the conversation, is drawing a picture or something. You can see my attraction to Dialogue Mapping because that’s just how I think. When I started in Lean and Six Sigma, I came from the roots of Systems Thinking and The Fifth Discipline back in the 80’s, so not that I’m overly proficient in diagramming archetypes and laying them out and doing them, but I have a tendency to think more iteratively than I do linear. I force myself to be linear because that’s how you process map basically.
I mean Dialogue Mapping is interesting. It’s great way to capture conversation and in meetings, and I’d like to become proficient at it to be able to capture. It seems like every time, you get to a tactical or a strategic meeting to strategic meeting, but the difficulty in a lot of tactical meetings is they turn into strategic. I think Dialogue Mapping might help keep everyone on track.
KC Yakemovic: Yes, that probably means that that part hasn’t actually been worked. Well, what you get often is an assumed agreement instead of the actual agreement. And I like to tell stories about meetings that I’ve been to. This happened frequently in the software world where you get the marketing people and the software in the same room. And then the marketing people would say, “We have to have feature X. It’s absolutely mandatory; we must have feature X.” And so the software people would go, “Okay, we can give you feature X but it’s going to cost you $5 million and take 5 years.” So the marketing people repeat again, “We must have feature X…” and the software people repeat again, “This is going to take 5 years and $5 million.” And then they walk out of the room, and the marketing people believe that they’re going to get feature X and the software people believe that it’s obvious that feature X can’t be done in the 18 months before product delivery, so it’s not going to happen.
Joe: That’s a great explanation.
KC: The recognition that you haven’t actually agreed on anything and that’s one of the things that as you get into a more advanced form of doing the Dialogue Mapping, you actually get to the point of having people decide on something and not just explore. At that point, it becomes clearer when there’s non-agreement. It isn’t actually a decision made. And that’s I think one of the things that gets us in the regular way of doing business is that there isn’t a clear agreement indication. A lot of times there’s an assumption and people walk out on assumptions, and it makes things bad.
Joe: I think you think the nail on the head because I mean I’m in this one meeting very often that we walk out of there and I know people walk away with this assumption and other people are walking away with this assumption, and I’m sitting there kind of in the middle. Because we’ve got the software and the business development people, we have the software people on one side and we have the sales people, and then I’m kind of the outside quasi-marketing person that kind of floats between both sides. I leave the meeting, and I’m sitting there saying or I’ll have a conversation with both side afterwards, and there’s totally a disconnect of what’s happening.
KC: Yes, what they thought the meeting was about, what they thought was agreed to during the meeting.