Core Principles

Dialogos works with client organizations to transform their capabilities and move beyond the limits that everyone has taken for granted in the past. We specialize in transforming the systems and structures already in place: leadership teams (at senior levels and throughout organizations), large-scale system-wide initiatives, and “boundary dilemmas”: where groups in opposition need to find ways to work together.

Our focus is on producing deep and shared systemic insight, and collective ownership of the implementation of solutions.

Our experience in assembling and working in a global network, and our senior staff, each of whom have decades of experience in producing transformation change in complex national, community, and organizational settings, provide us with a powerful foundation from which to work.

Dialogos’ social technology combines dialogue, social systems analysis, and transformational change. Our approach is based on the following core principles:

1. Utilize the transformative power of context: The context out of which people operate determines the behavior they display. Context has two critical dimensions: internal perception and external structure. Our social technology involves shifting existing internal context, e.g. the internally held routines, mental models, and deep assumptions people carry to create a fresh response to external context.
2. Map the system: Based on MIT’s system dynamics mapping method, we enable people to create a whole picture drawn from usually highly fragmented and disputed perspectives. This process is highly inclusive and has proven to be a powerful catalyst for action, particularly in large and complex systems.
3. Whole systems design: Dialogos applies a collective design methodology that invites organizations to set the tone and pattern they want to see throughout, a system of activities that will embody that tone, and a process of continuous improvement and learning, as well as identifying aspirational results they want to create.
4. Build capability for dialogue: Dialogue is the art of thinking together. Applied well, it opens new potential and produces a powerful, shared field for new thinking. Sometimes mistaken for a merely relational or communications process, dialogue represents the essence of the scientific method, a process of deep inquiry shared and developed among a community in which assumptions are revealed, and from which new levels of coordinated action can emerge.
5. Create centers of alignment: The seed of change always lies at the core – the way a core group of individuals operates. This “core” need not correspond merely to hierarchical structural authority. True core groups are often made up of networks that set a pattern for others. Our method involve creating these “centers” or coalitions at all levels of a system, to transform governance processes, stimulate innovation, and enable grounded social change.
6. Follow the cycle of creative change: Dialogos has developed a three-phased methodology for creative change that places emphasis on front-end loading -- investing in core building and design, followed by a phase of experimentation, prototyping, and collective capability building, and resulting finally in scaling, implementation, and replication. We help people avoid the common pitfalls in navigating change, such as initial under-investment, disregard for small experiments, or premature scaling efforts.