Insights.

We all operate inside a living system of thought, emotion, and relationship—a shared code that shapes how we sense and act together. Drawing from decades of fieldwork, Bill Isaacs and Skip Griffin show how attention moves through four layers—Reaction, Nous, Field, and Identity—and how learning to work with these layers allows transformation to unfold as a natural process rather than an engineered event.

Skip Griffin reflects on how the quiet, relational work of change underpins even the most visible transformations. He draws lines between the civil-rights movement and modern organizational change: the build-up of trust, the gestation of intent, the long-haul readiness before the moment of action.

In this article for Strategy+Business, Bill Isaacs writes from inside the practice of large-scale dialogue—moments when conversation itself becomes the turning point. Using the story of our work on the South Asia Champions for Development Program, he shows how the movement from politeness to truth-telling, from breakdown to shared inquiry, can release new intelligence in a system. Lasting change begins not with control or consensus, but with creating the conditions for people to think and see together.

In the Harvard Business Review, Dialogos Senior Associate Kate Isaacs and her MIT co-authors examine how the organizations W.L. Gore and PARC sustain innovation through distributed leadership. They show that when authority, awareness, and accountability are shared across entrepreneurial, enabling, and architecting roles, organizations can stay both free and focused—creative without collapsing into chaos.