I have been thinking for a long time about what it takes to create space for new kinds of conversations, ones that open doors that are normally closed or at least seem to be.

More than 30 years ago, along with my colleague and friend Amy Edmondson, I brought together a group of some of the most remarkable leaders in the organizational development and learning fields. Included were my dissertation advisors, Chris Argyris and Don Schön; the leaders of the systems thinking world, John Sterman and Peter Senge; the leading organizational psychologist Ed Schein; and David Kantor, a remarkable family systems interventionist. Robert Putnam, Alan Graham, and Diana Smith attended. William Ury showed up at one point. So did David Bohm.

We spoke about the personal origins of the theories each had built, and learned a great deal about how to think together, and how such thinking can break down. Convening a space for the dialogue meant reading the room: listening for the potential, not just the interpersonal dynamics that might need to be navigated, and more than this, calling for that potential to come. Which, in this case, it did in remarkable ways.

We are beginning to try to capture what it takes to do this kind of thing. This month’s article is a step in that process – some thoughts on what it means to move beyond reading a room to raising it.

The most important parts of conversations are the ones that no one could have imagined before they started. If you listen for what that might be, you will often find it. Reply to let me, Skip, and the rest of the Dialogos team know your thoughts.

Bill Isaacs
Principal, Dialogos

A few years ago, I worked with a board that had quietly stopped believing anything new could happen in its own room. Sixty people representing nearly two hundred countries gathered several times a week to do work that mattered to the global financial system and the geopolitical systems beyond it. Most of them understood, somewhere below the surface, that the form of their meetings had eaten the substance: there were monologues where there should have been dialogue; there was false unanimity where there should have been open inquiry; and the fragmentation was ritualized, frustratingly visible to the people inside it who could not find a way to change it.

A fragmented pattern can’t be directly confronted. It has to be coaxed from its protective crouch. To even begin to do this, you need to truly read what is in the room: what is in people’s minds and hearts, but more so the forces at work that are driving them to act as they do. Much of this remains unspoken, or as the inventor of the term organizational learning—my mentor and colleague Chris Argyris—once described it, “undiscussable.” Something that is hidden needs to come out.

I made clear to this room that there were more choices available than it seemed. My team and I talked to all sixty people, one by one. We promised confidentiality, invited genuineness, and overwhelmingly received it. We built enough mutual trust that when I put sixty flip charts on the wall and asked everyone to answer the same eight questions—things like, what's your real vision for this institution, what are the hard truths we all need to face, what three changes would transform everything, and what do you need to do differently—they did it. And they walked around reading what everybody else had written, some of them for the first time genuinely encountering what their colleagues actually thought. This mutual witnessing awakened them.

A real conversation had become so foreign that experiencing one felt like a revelation. It was a potential they had all openly wished for and privately stated deep skepticism about. “I am willing,” many had said to me. “But I doubt others are.”

Most of the time, we think of reading as looking for who is reacting to whom, or where the resistance lurks. You try to think about how to motivate, mitigate, or work around someone. Skillful reading of this kind can rearrange the visible dynamics of a room, sometimes usefully, but it usually does not open genuinely new possibility. Upstream of these patterns are the hidden assumptions people make about themselves and others. Even further upstream is the programming that keeps them from seeing their own fingerprints on the situation—how they have caused the very reactions they now observe. And behind all of this still is the not-yet-unfolded potential of the situation: what people long to have happen or sense is possible, but do not dare to state, or even let themselves recognize. When connection to this deeper signal is lost, no amount of downstream interpretation or manipulation restores it. The room stays stuck because the people in it are stuck—not in the dynamics they can see, but in their distance from their own deeper intention.

True reading, at its deepest, is listening past what is present toward what is trying to emerge, and toward whatever is holding it back. The conventional meaning of “reading a room” carries an extractive implication: scanning a situation to know what move will get you what you want. There is something detached and slightly predatory in that framing, the observer watching from outside. What I am describing here is its opposite. To genuinely read a room is to open yourself to it—to feel what is moving in the wider system, what is seeking to happen, and what is in the way. The first kind of reading can be done from outside. The second cannot. You can only hear what wants to come through if you are willing to be part of the field through which it might come.

Reading the room starts with inquiring into this larger context:

This last question is fundamental. In every creative process, timing matters. There are things one must do differently at the beginning, the middle, and the end. Each phase opens some doors and closes others. A “phase” can be brief—a conversation—or extended, flowing over months or years. Different things matter at different phases. What happens at the outset of any cycle almost always determines everything that follows. My mantra: how things start is how things go. But equally, once things are in motion, despite intentions to the contrary, old habits, limiting mindsets, and limiting beliefs will always resurface. You have to address these and find a way through them.

Most leaders believe they already know how to read a room. They are observant people and they notice things. What they tend to miss is that much of what they notice—the energies they pick up, the opportunities that appear, the threats they begin calculating against—is a reflection of their own state, not the room’s. You enter, you perceive, you respond. The perception happens inside a set of reactions you did not choose and are probably not tracking. Three layers of these reactions keep most leaders locked onto what is already manifest, with no bandwidth left for anything else.

People typically begin any professional and many personal exchanges with protective energies: parts of them that want to keep themselves and their interests safe. They are right to be concerned; it’s a dangerous world, after all, and most people have been conditioned by trauma of one kind or another. In the board I was working with, the trauma was global, national, institutional, and sometimes personal, all at once. What’s missing in these settings is room to breathe and find a place to notice and temporarily set these reactions aside. Small moves on this front open large opportunities.

Think of these as parts of you, each with their own read on what’s needed and their own preferred response. Richard Schwartz has outlined this idea in his Internal Family Systems (IFS) model: the part that wants to solve; the part that wants to be seen as useful; the part that is already running a risk assessment on what this room might cost you. These aren’t character flaws. Rather, they’re the accumulated structures of experience and personality that have served you well enough to get you into the room in the first place. The trouble is they are not you, even when they feel like it. The leader who believes their instinct to act is identical with clear perception is confusing the instrument with the measurement.

There's a structural version of this that goes deeper than individual habit. I owe this underlying framework to David Kantor, as expressed in his fittingly titled classic Reading the Room. Kantor identified three fundamental paradigms in which people operate:

Each is a coherent way of being in a room, with its own strengths and its own blind spots.

Cross these three paradigms with three distinct languages—the language of affect and relationship, the language of meaning and ideas, and the language of power and action—and you have nine different ways a person might experience what’s happening and what should happen next. The open-affect leader in the room sees the closed-power leader as controlling or withholding insensitive to the inclusion of what’s most: individual feeling. The closed-power leader wants to take action, and sees the other as naive and over-focused on feelings, not results. The random-meaning person wonders why everyone is so invested in having a consistent way to operate, rather than sensing what is present now without predetermined structure. All of them are reading aspects of the situation accurately from their angle. But none of them is seeing the whole room. They’re reading their own pattern projected onto the situation.

We are all capable of stepping beyond our preferred repertoire. The master practitioner can facilitate this movement, and speak to any of those nine patterns without being identified with any of them. The question the practitioner must always be asking: What pattern is in front of me, and what does it need right now? How do I join it accurately?

WATCH

Recorded in Concord, Massachusetts and at MIT, where Bill led the Dialogue Project for over a decade, this conversation gets at the root of what dialogue actually is — and why most of what passes for it in organizations isn't. Watch it if you want to understand what we mean when we say the work starts before anyone's in the room.