conversation is an engine

My friend is a corporate philosopher who lives out his work life in a tall glass tower thinking about, among other things, how to adapt his corporate culture to create more honest dialogue. My primary concern with dialogue in this blog has been how to engage customers honestly. But yesterday’s conversation with this friend I realized that honest dialogue (and if not honest, is it really dialogue?) requires truth-telling. And truth-telling starts inside corporations, even inside individuals. As Mrs. Kirkistan put it, “It seems sort of obvious, doesn’t it, that people should tell the truth?”

Indeed.

But what is obvious to us on a personal level gets twisted in a corporate setting, and processed and stuffed into an animal bladder and offered as a truth-sausage at the other end. Such manipulations are standard procedure  for any organization to present their product or service in the best light. That’s where the one-way messages have always come from, the ones that fall flat with potential clients because they stink of the processing plant and are exactly similar to all the other one-way message that land on their mental doorstep hundreds of times each day. My friend suggested I read the Cluetrain Manifesto, which I’ve ordered. The cluetrain website offers to dig much deeper into the notion of conversation between companies and customers, and also promises that customers will—and are already—finding the relevant information they need to make a decision. And they are finding it independently of (and likely contrary to) the one-way messages thrown at them. The website is dated at 1999, so these are not new thoughts, but seem to be gathering force in 2009.

Which brings me to another conversation with an FDA-regulated firm wanting to engage in dialogue but knowing the limits of what their regulators and lawyers would allow to be said in the corporate space. As we kicked around the idea of blogging and just how much truth-telling (in the raw, personal form the blogosphere rewards) could really happen, we stumbled on the peer-review model and wondered if more truth-telling must necessarily happen outside the corporate site, where dialogue could be engaged with experts offering unfiltered opinions. Naturally, such a web site must offer hearty benefits to any dialoguer. I hereby declare these site “Manipulation-Free Zones,” though I recognize that manipulation is part of the human condition. It is the rare human who does not present himself/herself and his/her interests in the best light. But can we aim high?

More on this later.

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