In the Digital Fray, Don’t Just Converse. Collaborate.

March 30, 2020

We’re just over two weeks into our “work from home” status for most of the knowledge workers in the United States. We’ve taken the crash course on Microsoft Teams or Zoom, put on our selfie makeup, and rebooted our WiFi. But, we’ve got ten meetings and two deliverables on the calendar this week, and it’s putting a strain on our backs, butts, and relationships. We reason, “It’s O.K. Everyone will be rational, and we’ll just go back to business-as-usual soon.”

Should we?

With the move online, we can either gain or lose traction with our teams, networks and organizations. The choice is ours. We could just begrudgingly endure the meetings and emails. Or, we could build trust, inspire team cohesion, and drive astonishing impact. When we move from in-person work to virtual (or hybrid) work, our communication frequency, structure, participation, and even content change.

Structure matters for collaboration.

Communications researchers point out that we get four times the amount of communication from non-verbal information than from verbal information alone. For example, we take in information from gestures, facial expression, pitch, tone, and speaking cadence. When we are online, communicating with the team throughout the week, information is more scarce. Beyond basic words and syntax, what matters is the structure of conversation. That is, who’s communicating, with what frequency, and with what moves that accumulate relationships and meaning.

Over the last thirty years collaboration researchers have been increasingly demonstrating the value in the non-content elements of our interactions:

• In the 1990s, the Dialogue Project, a Harvard-MIT collaboration, led by William Isaacs, demonstrated that dialogue could improve a group’s rapport, idea-expansion, and productivity. Isaacs found that teams who used the dialogue practices of Voice, Respect, Listening, and Suspension were more likely to share their ideas about project risks, thus avoiding rework that results when issue-identification is too late. For example, in a well-documented case at Ford Motor Company, engineering, manufacturing and marketing teams used regular dialogue to break down their language and trust barriers. They collaborated, and launched a luxury car model months ahead of time, and $6 million under budget.[1]
• In 2010 Carnegie Mellon’s Anita Woolley and MIT colleague Tom Malone found that teams with members using “social sensitivity” were higher performing than similar teams with equal or even higher collective IQs. [2] 
• In 2012 Sandy Pentland, of MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence, expanded this work, and found that eye-contact, turn-taking and out-of-hierarchy interactions significantly improved both project teams’ performance against KPIs (scope, budget, timeliness), and their team cohesion.[3]
• Similarly, in 2016, MIT’s Catherine Turco described the value of a firm’s executives inviting employees to see critical performance data, to discuss on company social platforms, and to weigh in on critical business decisions without incrimination. These and other psychologically safe ingredients were part of what Turco called the “Conversational Firm.” [4]

What is striking is the researchers’ foci – dialogue, personality, participation equity, and psychological safety. The researchers implicitly separated relationship-building structures from meaning-making structures.

Enter: The Four Discussion Disciplines

In 2012, at Columbia University, my faculty colleagues and I set out to explore the impact of using relationship-building structures and meaning-making structures together. We had observed some worrisome patterns among our students in their weekly digital conversations. Students would pop in and make vague statements (without contextualizing their points based on what had been written). Others were writing tomes. Others were trying to “fix” problems shared by their classmates, before any collective idea development had really taken place. Still others were using esoteric references. And few were perceiving digital conversation as a “collaboration.”

We wondered if, when students used both relationship-building and meaning-making structures at the same time, would productivity, rapport and innovation improve?

As an experiment, we decided to pull in the practices of dialogue. After all, weren’t students supposed to listen and respect each other? Wasn’t there merit to suspending before jumping to conclusion? Yet, even in 2012, at that early stage in the science of social, we knew that digital conversation was unique. Digital conversation is not limited to who’s sitting in the circle. Nor does it evaporate when people log off. More importantly, for modern executives looking to “productize” knowledge, the fruit of the digital conversation is not just expanded consciousness, but actionable knowledge.

We set out to redefine the dialogue practices for modern digital conversations. First, we would need to address the idea of co-creating these knowledge “products.” Second, we would need to embrace the unique features of digital, such as memory and the potential for participation-expansion outside “the room.”

Thus were born the Four Discussion Disciplines: Integrity, Courtesy, Inclusion and Translation:

1. Integrity (Asking clean questions, making deliberate, data-driven statements. Integrity incorporated the Voice and Listening dialogue practices.)
2. Courtesy (Respecting each other, showing gratitude, respecting the forum. Courtesy incorporated the Respect and Suspension dialogue practices, and the “social sensitivity” participant traits that Woolley et al described.)
3. Inclusion (Avoiding alienating participants through code or acronyms. Drawing others in, at times, literally with “@” signs. This practice expanded beyond the traditional dialogue practices, and recalled the turn-taking that Pentland observed in effective project teams.)
4. Translation (Synthesizing, seeing connections or meta-themes, making statements that propel the ideas into a product or action. This practice went outside the dialogue practitioners’ philosophy of “generate collectively, and interpret individually.” Translation would be about working toward collective understanding “out loud.” This later was observed in Turco’s Conversational Firm.)

With the Four Discussion Disciplines, or 4DDs, the goal was to propel the participants’ ideas forward, building one on the other, and extracting (or up-leveling) those ideas into new insight -- all while building on each other's learning. Insight, thus, incorporated shared data, experience, context, and purpose. [5]

To give the students practice we made the 4DDs part of each week’s digital conversation. We introduced three types of roles into our groups of five or six. Each week’s Lead would broach the topic, and would cycle back in at the end and synthesize or abstract the meaning (“translate”). That week’s Social Reporter would hold a mirror to fellow discussants, posting recognition of their use of the 4DDs (“Hey, that was a good example of Inclusion!”) Meanwhile, all participants, regardless of role, were responsible for all disciplines -- Integrity, Courtesy, Inclusion, and Translation.

During their first semester, students did a self-assessment of their use of the 4DDs by reading their group's posts and finding examples of each discipline they wanted to emulate. We found that, while Integrity and Courtesy came fairly naturally, Inclusion and Translation developed later. By the end of their Master’s many used the 4DDs in most of their collaborations on- and offline. They came to appreciate how the 4DD structure positively influenced meaning and relationships. One student remarked in front of 60 new recruits, “If you only learn one thing, the four discussion disciplines, you got your money’s worth.”

Quantifying the Four Discussion Disciplines

In 2013, in collaboration with Motorola Solutions, a group of five students set out to test the four discussion disciplines empirically. They coded 405 anonymized posts from discussions in the Motorola Solutions social network. They coded both positive and negative examples (e.g., adding to the original four, “Anti-Courtesy” or “Anti-Inclusion.”)

The team found that, controlling for the content of the discussion and the specific team members, there was a positive, significant relationship between the presence of the 4DDs, and the target outcomes Motorola Solutions sought when they set up the social network: idea development, question resolution, and actionable insights. [6]

Though the data points were limited, we saw the way the 4DDs contributed to both meaning-making and relation-making. Studying the anonymized posts, we found that Integrity and Courtesy seemed to be correlated with team cohesion and community, while Inclusion and Translation seemed to be correlated with content breadth and relevance. We reasoned that Integrity was about setting the tone and topic explicitly, and Courtesy was about respecting people’s agency and humanness. Inclusion was about reaching out and seeking diversity, or getting other voices into the discussion. Translation was about pulling ideas together and constructing a coherent thesis.

I've introduced the four discussion disciplines to nonprofits, Fortune 500 companies, associations and universities. Many organizations have embraced the 4DDs as essential to digital survival.

The shadows

The Coronavirus pandemic is expanding the volume of digital conversation today. We have digital conversations going on in Email, Slack, Yammer, Microsoft Teams, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Twitter and a host of other areas -- even in document comments, customer service calls, grocery orders, and texts to our kids. Each interchange is an opportunity to propel ideas forward, or arrest them in their tracks.

We assume we are civil in our day to day virtual conversations. But, in a subtle way, we can do violence to each other when we fail to acknowledge, read, expand, or incorporate others. William Isaacs wrote in Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together that the “opposites” of the dialogue practices -- either by intention or by omission -- can be destructive of relationships, programs, products, and diplomacy. In Isaacs’ words, these opposites, or “shadows” are stark. Voice’s opposite is idolatry, Respect’s, violence, Listening’s, abstraction, and Suspension’s, certainty. [7]

Similarly, in a digital environment, we could see digital conversations “going south” when the 4DDs are absent or present in their opposites.

●     Integrity’s opposite is disingenuousness

●     Courtesy’s opposite is disrespect

●     Inclusion’s opposite is bias

●     Translation’s opposite is indifference

Get collaborating, not just conversing!

Use digital conversation to grow the capacity to think, care and create together. 

You can practice the 4DDs everywhere, not just online in your email or posts. The 4DDs can contribute to relationship-building and meaning-making in high-stakes diplomacy, doctor-patient encounters, team interactions, and even family gatherings. During this time of Coronavirus self-quarantines -- with digital clutter masquerading as collaboration -- we can use digital conversation to grow our groups collaboration skills: the capacity to think, care and create together. Practicing the 4DDs contributes to:

1. A greater openness to different styles of thinking and self expression,
2. New ways to transform idea-glut into coherent lessons and actions,
3. A capacity to work through conflict and find shared purpose, and
4. Digital interaction as co-creation, not just transaction.

Take the time with your meeting or team this week to look at your own evidence. Did the posts or emails inform? Propel? Include? Obstruct? Did you create a “whole bigger than the sum of its parts”? Did a member of the team who normally dominates give way to a less vocal member? Were you conscious of your tone and language?

The Four Discussion Disciplines may very well be your means to improve meaning-making and relationship-building right now. At the same time, you will make progress toward becoming a more welcoming, more productive workplace where digital conversation is collaboration.

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Katrina Pugh is a faculty member and former Academic Director of Columbia University’s Information and Knowledge Strategy Master of Science Program, and president of AlignConsulting. She is the director of a project using AI to benchmark and improve conversation for more productivity and more innovative outcomes. She is also the author of Sharing Hidden Know-How and Smarter Innovation.

References

1. Senge, Roberts et al (1999). The Dance of Change. New York: Doubleday.
2. Woolley, Anita, Chabris, Christopher et al (2010), “Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups,” Science, Vol. 330, 29 October, 2010. 
3. Pentland, Alex (2012). “The New Science of Building Great Teams”. Boston: Harvard Business Review, 90(4).
4. Turco, Catherine (2016) The Conversational Firm: Rethinking Bureaucracy in the Age of Social Media. New York: Columbia University Press.
5. Pugh, Katrina (2016). “Four Disciplines Drive Effective Online Collaboration.” Columbia School of Professional Studies News, February 1, 2016. https://sps.columbia.edu/news/four-discussion-disciplines-drive-effective-online-collaboration
6. Pugh, Katrina et al (2014). Smarter Innovation. London: Ark Group.
7. Isaacs, William (1999). Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together. New York: Doubleday.