A Service Program of

The International Institute for Sustained Dialogue

444 North Capitol St., NW,

Suite 434

Washington, D.C. 20001

 

 

Our Method: 

 

Relationships begin to change when the people involved learn to be open about their own concerns, expectations, and uncertainties, and when they become ready and able to listen to the concerns, expectations, and uncertainties of others with intent to understand. 

 

This process requires development of an atmosphere of trust, mutual respect, openness, and honesty. While our methods work well, significant change in relationships takes time and commitment from those involved, and from the leadership of the organization.

 

We can help create the conditions for relationship-altering dialogue, and we can moderate the dialogue so as to encourage change, but only the participants can change relationships. How long this process requires depends largely upon the participants, but also upon the depth of blockages to effective relationships.

 

Our Process: 

The process begins with a meeting with management where the following steps take place:

 

 

Stage One: Dialogue moderators conduct in-depth interviews with each proposed participant. The interviews, each of which may require an hour or so, have these purposes:

 

 

Stage Two normally consists of an initial one or two day retreat. The objectives of this retreat are:

 

 Stage Three consists of two-hour dialogue sessions, roughly every 14 days, often around dinner. An alternative is one full Saturday per month. The purposes of these continuing sessions are to:

Stage Four continues the pattern of meetings established in Stage Three. The tasks now are to:

 

 

 

Stage Five completes the process as participants carry their new relationships into the daily workplace, equipped with new understandings and with specific strategies to address the issues identified in the first stage.

 

At this point, participants and management may consider whether and how to keep the Results-Oriented Dialogue group in being as a safe space for:

 

 

 

  

 

Work with Organizations: Phil Stewart’s most recent experience applying the methods of Results-Oriented Dialogue in an organizational setting addressed the challenge of helping to create a High Performance Organization within a major Foundation. Within six months, from an organization which defined itself as almost at the point of complete breakdown, using these methods the organization Stewart was able to help move it to a condition where effective collaboration became the norm, where the performance of the organization reached unprecedented levels. Phil regularly consults on a wide variety of Results-Oriented dialogues in such places as community hospitals, churches, and other organizations, corporations and institutions.

 

Senior Management Experience: Phil Stewart spent twelve years, from 1990 through 2001 in senior management positions with Kellogg (Deutschland) GmbH, a division of Kellogg Company. The positions held include Director, Eastern Europe, and General Manager, Kellogg Latvia, Inc. In each of these positions, his responsibility was to open and develop all of the markets of newly independent Eastern Europe, from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary to the Balkans, and from the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, to all of Russia, the Ukraine and Kazakhstan. 

 

In addition, as General Manager, Kellogg Latvia, Phil Stewart managed the construction, staffing, staff development, and operation of a factory in Riga, Latvia, and built, trained and managed direct sales and merchandising forces in Latvia, Moscow, and St. Petersburg, as well as opened and developed relationships with distributors in all of the above named states.  

 

In the core markets, Phil Stewart and his teams achieved record-setting growth rates, growing these new markets more rapidly than in any of Kellogg’s other 130 markets during the same early years.

 

During 11 years with Kellogg, Phil Stewart was an intimate observer of the profoundly negative consequences for an organization when management seeks to impose its visions, rather than build support for change through developing relationships based upon openness, honesty, and trust that make possible genuine inclusiveness in the decision process and by doing so create the buy-in that assures success.

As Executive Director of the U.S. – Soviet Dartmouth Conference from 1972 through 1990, Phil Stewart participated in the changing of relationships among the business, scientific, and political leaders involved from both sides in this US-Soviet high-level dialogue, relationships which eventually opened the Soviet Union to democratic ideas. 

 

 

Over 4 years as a co-moderator of the Armenia-Azerbaijani Dialogue, Phil Stewart gained in-depth, practical, hands-on experience in the application of Results-Oriented Dialogue, contributing not only to a framework for a peace process for the area, but also to the further development of the process of Results-Oriented Dialogue.

 

IISD Experience in the Development of Results-Oriented Dialogue: The approach, methods and models we employ in Results-Oriented dialogue have their roots primarily in experiences dealing with deeply-rooted conflicts, conflicts in which relationships essential to effective collaboration either had never been developed or had broken down. 

 

The experiences through which Results-Oriented Dialogue emerged, was developed, tested, and confirmed include:

 

 

 

 

 For further information, contact us at any of the following:

 

 4 Goldenrod Lane

 Falmouth, Maine 04105

 E-mail: pstewar2@maine.rr.com

 Phone: 207-878-0339

 Cell: 207-450-3783

 

 Harold Saunders, President

 444 N. Capitol St., NW.   Suite 434

 Washington, D.C. 20001-1512

 E-mail: hsaunders@kettering.org

 Phone: 202-393-4478

 www.sustaineddialogue.org