Conversational Capability
Building Conversational CapabilityConversations are how organisations think.
When a manager asks a employee what makes the job difficult, and listens to the answer, things can change. The worker feels heard. The manager learns something no report would have surfaced. A small piece of the gap between how work is designed and how work is done can start to connect.
Multiply that across an organisation and it becomes something larger. A culture where concerns travel before they become incidents. Where improvements don't stay trapped with the team that found them. Where people at every level feel their experience of the work is worth saying out loud.
That is what conversational capability makes possible, through the gradual development of everyday practices that help people make sense of work together, surface what matters, and act on what they find.
Why it mattersMost organisations already have more information than they use well. The gap is rarely in the data. It is in whether the right conversation happened at the right time between the right people.
A safety concern that stays unspoken because nobody asked. An improvement idea that never left the site where it was found. A near miss that got filed rather than discussed. Each one is a signal the organisation needed and never received.
Conversational capability is the infrastructure that changes that. When leaders know how to start the conversations that matter, when teams have the practices to think together regularly, when the organisation has developed the habit of learning from its own work, signals start to travel. Understanding accumulates. The organisation gets better at being itself.
Most organisations already have more information than they use well. The gap is rarely in the data. It is in whether the right conversation happened at the right time between the right people.
A safety concern that stays unspoken because nobody asked. An improvement idea that never left the site where it was found. A near miss that got filed rather than discussed. Each one is a signal the organisation needed and never received.
Conversational capability is the infrastructure that changes that. When leaders know how to start the conversations that matter, when teams have the practices to think together regularly, when the organisation has developed the habit of learning from its own work, signals start to travel. Understanding accumulates. The organisation gets better at being itself.
What the training coversContact Open Change for more information
Training and coaching optionsAn Invitation to Safety Conversations: one-day program
A full day for safety professionals and operational leaders who want to develop their conversational practice. Participants experience the conversation types directly, identify their own strengths and development areas, and leave with the book as a practical reference.
In-house leadership workshops
Half-day and full-day sessions designed for leadership teams working on conversational capability together. Built around the organisation's own context and challenges. Can be run as a standalone session or as part of a broader development program.
Individual and group coaching
One-to-one coaching for safety professionals and operational leaders building their conversational practice. Sessions are grounded in real situations from the leader's own work. Group coaching is also available for teams working through similar challenges at the same time. AUD $400 per hour.
Train-the-trainer
For organisations that want to build internal facilitation capability at scale. Combines the one-day program with design support for rolling out conversational practices across teams, sites or functions.
Specific conversation methods
Open Change also provides facilitation and training around specific conversational practices, including
Pre-start gauge - A collective conversational readiness assessment method
Collaborative sense-making - 20min structured capturing of insights and ideas for what matters
Collective improvements - Using stories to understand and improve how work happens