Drama-Free Culture with Caitlin Walker
Drama in the workplace is a major drain on productivity, creativity, and collaboration. It manifests as emotional outbursts, unresolved disagreements, resistance to change, or misalignment with strategic priorities.
It’s not just unpleasant – it can cost billions in lost engagement and productivity, exacerbating mental health issues.
Fortunately, we can learn how to minimize or even eliminate drama in the workplace, and that’s exactly what we talk about in this episode of the CultureLab podcast with my guest, Caitlin Walker.
Caitlin has devoted much of her career to studying effective ways of bridging seemingly irreconcilable differences between people that lead to drama. After discovering David Grove’s Clean Language approach, she developed Systemic Modelling™, an application for groups and organisations that helps teams collaborate more effectively.
In this episode, Caitlin and I talk about the applications of her methodology at work – and we even do a couple of demos where she leads me through a series of “clean questions” so that you can get a better sense of how to use them in a conversation.
Episode highlights
- The ways drama manifests itself in the workplace.
- The four clean questions and how to use them.
- Asking clean questions as a way to create space for your people to think and explore their own ideas and enhance a sense of belonging.
- Setting boundaries at work.
- Examples of activities that can help you cultivate a drama-free culture within your team.
“Clean questions help reveal fresh information, they allow as to work with more than what we already know.”
Listen to the interview in the player below or on iTunes. If you like what you hear, please leave a review, and it may be featured on a future episode.
More about Caitlin
Caitlin Walker is the author of From Contempt to Curiosity. She has won a PhD for her thesis on “Using Clean Language” and has over 25 years of experience working with diverse teams.
Caitlin is a director of Clean Learning and the developer of Systemic Modelling™. She is the author of From Contempt to Curiosity, which details many of the innovative and transformational projects she’s led across our community from the most dispossessed to leading think tanks, and has recently been awarded a PhD from Liverpool John Moores University for her thesis on “Using Clean Language Interviewing to model Curriculum Design in Higher Education: Curriculum Design is Like What?”
Caitlin has a long-standing passion for creating the conditions for groups and individuals to flourish – She took the Clean Language work of David Grove and developed a group and organisational application known as Systemic Modelling™.
Over the last 25 years, Caitlin has worked with individual systems as well as systems of individuals supporting diverse parts/facets/areas of any system to pay exquisite attention to themselves and to one another to create deep, sustainable systemic changes. All of her work is invitation-led and is an excellent mindset for Agile thinking and shared governance. She has systematically tested and developed her ideas in challenging arenas and her robust products have become sought-after learning aids.
Books mentioned in this episode
From Contempt to Curiosity by Caitlin Walker.
The Dance of Life by Edward T. Hall
Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
Additional resources
CultureBrained® Community – a one-of-a-kind virtual community for Heads of Culture, founders, and leaders who want to up their culture game.
Clean Questions and Metaphor Models a Tedx talk with Caitlin Walker
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