4.5.4 Dialogic design for the intelligent enterprise: Collaborative strategy, process, and action

Dialogic design provides efficient, reliable approaches for organizations to envision and implement cohesive, comprehensive, and compelling roadmaps for enterprise evolution. Using structured dialogue to integrate the collective intelligence of stakeholders, we produce a shared representation of the intelligent enterprise, enabling “organizing around intellect.” Dialogic design is progressive in focus, scaling from strategic vision to business process design to system requirements, mapping each level's priorities to successive requirements. Each focus inquiry iterates from deep problem understanding, to generative solution design, through consensus action planning. We applied Structured Dialogic Design to the transformation of a small consultancy, with findings applicable to any enterprise. The process efficiently enables a democratic, collaborative approach to redesign of socio-organizational systems and practices, using a software-supported collaborative process. It efficiently achieves true consensus on organizational and business strategy, resolves multiple conflicts of values and resource decisions, and determines the most effective priorities while preventing groupthink errors.