Over the past eighteen years, the Collaborative Action toolset has been designed and tested to allow users to effectively:

• Access-in an ethical manner-the hidden issues and knowledge beneath surface discussions and critical business issues;
• Distinguish facts and real data from untested-and often damaging-assumptions;
• Diminish the mechanisms of rumor, political infighting, and the distribution of false and misleading information;
• Begin to illustrate the cost in time, wasted energy, and dollars of continuing to conduct "business as usual," while being able to implement change quickly;
• Identify and leverage hidden opportunities for implementing lasting change and practical innovation; and
• Integrate highly effective quality assurance checks and balances into existing and newly created solutions.

By sharing a description of these tools with viewers of our site, our intent is to minimize the potential inaccurate inferences about what it is that we are referencing throughout the site and to provide the viewer substantial value for the time spent browsing our site.

Collaborative Action Tools:

View of Conversation: This tool, which is the foundation for all the Collaborative Action methods, is a conceptual framework that allows individuals to become aware of the their Internal Dialogues and to safely and productively express them in conversation with the objective of testing their accuracy.

An "Internal Dialogue" is what an individual is thinking and feeling, but not saying in relationship to the topic being discussed. One may think of this as the uncommunicated conversation individuals have with themselves while listening and speaking to others. The issues in people's Internal Dialogues can be some of the most important concerns to address in order to accelerate performance, organizationally.

Action Inquiry: Action Inquiry is a tool used to understand the thought processes and observations which inform another person's assumptions, as well as the emotions associated with those conclusions. By asking people to describe what others said or did that led them to a particular conclusion, the tool creates substantial value and an unusual kind of precision. This is important, because most people remember their impressions (conclusion about others) but quickly forget the words, gestures, and thought processes upon which they were based.

Collaborative Design: This is a method by which all relevant multi-level organizational stakeholders, including external customers, work together as equals to invent new solutions to business issues and their root causes. The objective of Collaborative Design is to continuously maximize the organization's and the customers' business value and human dignity.

Collaborative Design is based on two principles:

• All participants' issues and concerns can add substantial value to the final outcome. This means that even negative concerns or fears from people's inner thoughts, such as "it'll never work here" or "management will never do it" are valuable and should be acknowledged as important contributions to the Collaborative Design process.
  
  
• The second principle is mutual value: An important ingredient to assuring that Collaborative Design works is to identify the mutual value that all participants can receive from genuinely engaging in the process.

Declaring a Bind: A bind is an unresolved predicament that comes from two or more conflicting options for action, which the individual initially experiences as unacceptable to self, the other person, or the organization as a whole. Declaring a Bind is a tool that safely and productively allows individuals to make the dilemma public and inviting others to jointly design a way to deal with the bind effectively. This often builds a bond between the individuals involved to allow them and you to deal with the issue(s) together.

Different Dictionaries: This is a tool that allows people to check on the precise definition of a word or words being employed where the intended meaning of a verbal or written communication may be in doubt or unclear. These variations in meaning may be extreme or slight and may be produced by cultural, gender, social and/or personalized nuances in meaning that have evolved tacitly over time in our individual vocabularies. Frequently, individuals believe that the meaning of their words is intuitively obvious to others.

Error Case: Our research and consulting consistently demonstrate that individuals throughout organizations - at all levels of hierarchy and experience - tend to experience error as a common barrier to effective change. The error case is a business tool that assists individuals in understanding their current inner, often hidden reactions to error, to reflect more openly on the learning and design more effective strategies, individually and organizationally to reduce error.

First Party Checking: First Party Checking is a tool which enables people to begin testing the accuracy of their inferences. The principle behind this tool is to do the testing directly with the person who did or said something that resulted in your assumption. It provides a way to state and test their internal dialogues or points of view in a more productive and safer manner. This is done in three ways: during a meeting or conversation; after the fact; or over time.

Invitation: This tool provides individuals with informed choice about the likely business value in discussing a particular issue and their "absolute right to decline" its discussion with as few negative consequences as possible. Invitation assures that people do not feel manipulated into inappropriately expressing their innermost thoughts and emotions, thus increasing safety, trust, and effectiveness.

Ladder of Inference*: This is a conceptual tool which allows individuals to become aware of how they make meaning in their interactions with others and how they experience the world. More specifically, it allows them to recognize how they make inferences about others' actions and behaviors, and recognize the business value of being able to test inferences openly with others. In addition, the Ladder provides a conceptual foundation for two important tools, First Party Checking and Action Inquiry.

*The Ladder of Inference has been adapted from Chris Argyris' work and used with his permission. We have simplified Argyris' ladder as much as possible, yet retained all of its functionality.

Private Reasoning: This is a systems map showing a core pattern of learning virtually all human beings experience to be effective (win), create safety for self and others, be in control, and/or reduce negative feelings for self and then others. The tool describes the decisions that most people, with good intentions, make to accomplish these objectives, the rationale for their typically private and unilateral nature, and their consequences to the individual, others, and the organization.

Stating an Internal Dialogue: This tool allows individuals to begin to express difficult to discuss issues in a more productive manner, while reducing the negative reactions others may have to openly looking at these issues.

Systems Mapping - Recurring Patterns: These are pictorial and linguistic representations of recurring internal dialogue patterns that typically take place unknowingly in organizations. Derived from internal dialogue research, these maps focus largely on the negative, undetected, and costly consequences resulting from a pattern of action or a set of inferences and provide high leverage points for long-term systemic change. Examples of these maps include "Different Dictionaries" and "To Speak or Withhold."

Quality Assurance Cycle: This is an internal dialogue process in which users can credibly identify previously undetected bottlenecks and success factors to their current practice, measure the business value generated, and jointly create and test new solutions with customers to maximize learning and its bottom-line impact.