William Isaacs

William Isaacs is the founder and president of Dialogos, a consulting and leadership education firm based in Cambridge, MA, and Chairman of the Board of the Dialogos Institute, a not-for-profit action research organization. He is a leading authority on collective leadership, the design and development of organizational learning, and the practice and theory of dialogue. He is also a Senior Lecturer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management.

His 1999 book, Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together (Doubleday), has been translated into seven languages, including Swedish, Chinese, Hebrew and Farsi. It was featured in Fast Company as a guide to “the secret of good informal conversation,” and has been acclaimed by a variety of reviewers as the definitive guide to profound change through speaking and listening. His articles have appeared in The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook by Peter Senge et al. (1994, Doubleday), in The Dance of Change by Peter Senge et al. (1999, Doubleday), and numerous articles and journals.

In 1990 Dr. Isaacs co-founded (with Peter Senge) the Center for Organizational Learning at MIT, a consortium of 25 leading companies dedicated to cross -organizational learning and change. He received a major grant from the Kellogg Foundation to found and run the MIT Dialogue Project, which initiated cross-boundary conversational experiments around the world over the past ten years.

For the past 20 years he has consulted to senior leaders of prominent organizations around the world assisting them in creating visionary transitions and maturing the collective leadership of their systems. His work focuses on producing generative change that can engage large numbers of people, leading to“learning at scale,” integration of functional organizations into business leadership, transforming management union relationships, and “organic growth” by creating cross-boundary and cross-functional transformation and action.

Some recent clients include British Petroleum, the International Finance Corporation (and the World Bank Group), Royal Bank of Scotland, NASA, Shell, Motorola, and Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Joint Strike Fighter Program.

He received an A.B. in policy studies from Dartmouth College, an M.Sc. in political philosophy from the London School of Economics, and an M.Phil. and D. Phil from Oxford University in organizational behavior, social theory, and applied social psychology. He lives with his family in the Boston area.