This is a companion paper expanding the consideration begun by Harold Clarke and Whitney Barton in their paper, Putting Dialogue to Work in the Virginia Department of Corrections, that was considered at our 2019 conference. That paper described the value of the Working Dialogue as a business practice for the management of organisational change, and gives specific case studies to substantiate this. In this paper I want to explain the thinking that led to the original design of the Working Dialogue by me and Jane Ball with a small team from Virginia. The pattern involves a sequence of Dialogues with a fixed group of people in one room together, and results in a collective view about a plan of action. So it requires in-the-room Dialogue skills. Each Working Dialogue is also intended to be an intervention in the way things are currently working, so this requires further skills along with the careful placing of the Working Dialogue at the point of intervention in order to yield the most value with the right grouping of people. It is intended for use in every business unit across a large state agency, and is therefore intended to be systemic. This third level requires architectural thinking in the design process, as outlined in this paper.
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