The Team Discovered: Dialogic Team Coaching (BMI Series in Dialogic Organization Development)

Review\n"The Team Discovered breathes fresh energy into the field of Organization Development. It makes the case for the integration of analyzing the world and experiencing the world--both of which are needed to act on the world. I love this book's focus on language as the basis for transformation; the artist's belief that every team and moment is unique; attention as a casualty of the modern world; the work of leadership development as creation every step of the way. It is a welcome antidote to the longing for structured, predictable, and measurable interventions. It is a pleasure to recommend that you read this book."Peter Block, Citizen of Cincinnati and Author of Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used and Community: The Structure of Belonging\n"This book is a fresh reminder of what every worker, manager, and leader knows but often forgets: Teams are in themselves social ecosystems, capable of being wonderfully and smartly connected, adaptive, and effective. These stories illustrate the value of well-crafted Dialogic theory, co-creating meaning with teams, rather than leaping too quickly to diagnose, categorize, and apply normative prescriptions. Leaders, workers, and particularly professionals in HR and Organization Effectiveness will find this to offer a path to help teams own and improve their common experiences."
John Boudreau, Senior Research Scientist and Professor Emeritus at The University of Southern California - Marshall School of Business\n"I feasted upon this book. The story is threaded with clients' and coaches' challenges, dilemmas, and aspirations, and it resonates so deeply. This short book will help coaches understand what they do so well, while also pointing clear direction to where they could learn and grow. What an exciting window into the complex and impactful world of Dialogic team coaching."
Geoff Bellman, Advisor, Extraordinary Teams Partnership; Author of Extraordinary Groups: How Ordinary Teams Achieve Amazing Results and The Consultant's Calling: Bringing Who You Are to What You Do\n"If you've grown weary of quick-fix team effectiveness approaches that ultimately don't stick, The Team Discovered is the antidote. Bennett Bratt makes a strong case for meeting people and teams where they are and cocreating a path forward. He starts with the premise that the team has the answers and paints a compelling story with all-too-familiar characters that help bring to life an approach that is refreshing and liberating."
Kristy Feldkamp, Global Head of HR, Personal Systems, HP Inc.\n"The business world is awash with team diagnostic instruments, most of them of dubious validity. Here we have a much-needed antidote to the atomistic approach of diagnostics. The aim of team coaching is to enable teams to have the conversations they need to have with themselves, and this book is a route map to successful teaming."
David Clutterbuck, EMCC Special Ambassador and Visiting Professor, Henley Business School. Author of Coaching the Team at Work and editor of The Practitioner's Handbook of Team Coaching\nThis hopeful, poignant, and deeply insightful book brings the wisdom of Dialogic OD and the heritage of Diagnostic OD into an expansive view of how to best support teams in a world of immense diversity and attention poverty. Bennett Bratt offers a new approach to team development that meets today’s teams where they live: in a complex world with intense demands and precious little time. This book challenges widely used approaches to team development that utilize data showing a gap between current and desirable team performance. Most methods presume some kind of evaluative comparison is helpful: comparison to other groups, comparison to large data sets, comparison to best practices, comparison to a theoretical ideal. Instead, Ben explains why a dialogic approach to the use of questionnaire data is better at helping teams author their own narrative of effectiveness, one they will own