"One of the most important shifts required in [a] new way of viewing conversation is to re-evaluate our traditional view that talk and action are separate activities. We... [suggest] that we consider revising our traditional views of talk and action, seeing them as a single integrated whole rather than as separate activities. What if, when conversations are highly energized and relevant, you are already in the action phase? What if it's not talking and discovery followed by action planning and implementation in the linear way we in the West think about it?"
....
"Perhaps the whole process is part of a single action cycle - reflection/insight/harvesting/action planning/implementation/feedback - in which conversation is a lively core process every step of the way. We're discovering that when people care about the questions they are working on and when their conversations are truly alive, participants naturally want to organize themselves to do whatever has to done, discovering who cares about what and who will take accountability for next steps. Perhaps my eighty-four-year-old mom said it best when she shared a fundamental insight from her lifetime of organizational work... "You see," she mused, "conversation is action. You can think things and you can feel things but it doesn't become 'real' until you express it. Then it begins to germinate. Other people hear it, other people begin to feel it, you share ideas together - and if it's important enough, relevant action becomes just a natural thing that happens.'"
- Juanita Brown w/ David Isaacs,
from World Cafe: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations that Matter, pg 37, 38
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