When managers are looking to reinvigorate a company, often their first thought is to reshuffle the organizational structure. But this puts the cart before the horse. Conversation trumps structure. A company having meaningful strategic conversations can thrive even when the org chart isn’t quite right; the best organigram won’t save a company with poor conversational health. Conversation may be a soft topic but it is about hard truths. At the end of the day, not having honest dialog is as serious as running out of cash. All the elements essential for good strategizing – from understanding customers to engaging employees to developing leaders to sparking innovation – depend on it.

At the most basic level, leadership needs to convince employees to participate, to join the energized circle of innovators from which many feel excluded as they talk about the leadership as ‘them.’ At a large financial firm for which we’ve done work, information technology employees we surveyed didn’t believe it was their job to innovate the business model and couldn’t name any innovations that had come from their group. But in fact the group was actively involved in profoundly changing the organization’s business model. By using advanced algorithms, they were automating trading in several asset classes, radically reducing transaction costs and creating new hedging opportunities for customers. By explaining what innovation was, and by illustrating areas in which the group had already made a contribution, we helped convince these employees to be more engaged in the strategizing process.