This list focuses specifically on books where conversation, dialogue, and collective sense-making sit at the centre. These works explore how people think together, listen, inquire, and engage across difference, all of which are foundational to Conversational Leadership as a lived practice.
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Recommended Books
02 December, 2022★ Recommended Creating Conversational Leadership by John Hovell
In this book, Creating Conversational Leadership, John Hovell makes the case that our global society needs the new fields of Knowledge Management/Knowledge Services, Organization Development, Diversity & Inclusion, and Conversational Leadership.
These are remarkable tools, management methodologies, and personally rewarding techniques for working professionals, managers, and all levels of ... Continue reading
22 December, 2021★ Recommended The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization by Ron Davison (2011)
The premise of this book, The Fourth Economy by Ron Davison, is that a fourth entrepreneurial economy is emerging. This will be as different from the information economy as the industrial economy before it.
Last century we popularized knowledge work, transforming from an industrial economy dependent on child labor to an information economy dependent on adult education.
This century we will ... Continue reading
22 August, 2019★ Recommended Closing the Mind Gap: Making Smarter Decisions in a Hypercomplex World by Ted Cadsby (2014)
We have always struggled as human beings. But our struggle today is exacerbated by a gap between the increasingly complicated world we have created and the default ways we think about it. Twenty-first-century challenges are qualitatively different from those that generations of our ancestors faced, yet our thinking has not evolved to keep pace. We need to catch up. To make smarter decisions — ... Continue reading
01 October, 2023★ Recommended Future Minds: the Rise of Intelligence From the Big Bang to the End of the Universe by Richard Yonck
In this book, Future Minds, challenges our assumptions about intelligence — what it is, how it came to exist, and its place in the development of life on Earth and possibly throughout the cosmos.
Taking a Big History perspective — over the 14 billion years from the Big Bang to the present and beyond — he draws on recent developments in physics and complexity theory to explore the ... Continue reading
31 October, 2022★ Recommended Conversation: A History of a Declining Art Stephen Miller (2007)
In the book Conversation: A History of a Declining Art, Stephen Miller pursues a lifelong interest in conversation by taking a historical and philosophical view of the subject.
He chronicles the art of conversation in Western civilization from its beginnings in ancient Greece to its apex in eighteenth-century Britain to its current endangered state in America.
As Harry G. Frankfurt ... Continue reading
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Recommended
Conversation: How Talk Can Change Our Lives by Theodore Zeldin (2000)In this book, Conversation: How talk can change our lives, Theodore Zeldin explains what kind of talk charmed and excited people in the past, and why we talk differently today.
It explores the art and the history of conversation and how it can be the key to a happier, more interesting future.
It shows how women have changed the ways lovers speak, how families avoid silence or boredom, how ... Continue reading
10 January, 2022★ Recommended Beyond Knowledge: How Technology Is Driving an Age of Consciousness by William E. Halal (2021)
The Knowledge Age of the past two decades is passing today as the digital revolution and artificial intelligence replace knowledge work.
William Halal’s study of social evolution explains how this marks the passage to a new frontier beyond poorly understood knowledge — an “Age of Consciousness” is here.
But more pandemics, climate change, gross inequality, gridlock, and other ... Continue reading
14 July, 2020★ Recommended How to Have Impossible Conversations: A Very Practical Guide by Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay (2019)
In our current political climate, it seems impossible to have a civil conversation with someone who has a different opinion. Dialogue is shut down when perspectives clash. Heated debates on Facebook and Twitter often lead to shaming, hindering any possibility of productive discourse.
In this book, How to Have Impossible Conversations, Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay describe the process of ... Continue reading
06 May, 2021★ Recommended The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding by Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier (2018)
In the book, The Enigma of Reason, Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber argue that reason is not geared to solitary use, to arriving at better beliefs and decisions on our own.
Reason, we are told, is what makes us human, the source of our knowledge and wisdom. If reason is so valuable, why didn't it also evolve in other animals? If reason is that reliable, why do we produce so much thoroughly ... Continue reading
03 February, 2021★ Recommended Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust That Society Needs to Thrive by Bruce Schneier (2012)
In the book, Liars and Outliers, Bruce Schneier examines the role of trust in enabling healthy, functioning societies. Schneier argues that some level of trust is essential for large-scale social coordination and cooperation. Without trust, societies cannot thrive, and individuals are forced to avoid interactions or spend heavily on protection from abuse and cheating.
The book explores how ... Continue reading
25 March, 2023★ Recommended The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt (2013)
In this book, The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt shows how moral judgments arise not from reason but from gut feelings. He shows why liberals, conservatives, and libertarians have such different intuitions about right and wrong, and he shows why each side is actually right about many of its central concerns.
Credit: Amazon
The Righteous Mind animated
The Righteous Mind | Jonathan ... Continue reading
26 September, 2021★ Recommended The Extended Mind: the Power of Thinking Outside the Brain by Annie Murphy Paul (2021)
Over many years of elementary school, high school, and even college and graduate school, we’re never explicitly taught to think outside the brain; we’re not shown how to employ our bodies and spaces and relationships in the service of intelligent thought. Yet this instruction is available if we know where to look; our teachers are the artists and scientists and authors who have figured out ... Continue reading
15 September, 2015★ Recommended Community: the Structure of Belonging by Peter Block (2018)
As a response to the increasing violence in our culture, the widening ideological divides, and the growing gap in economic well-being, there is greater awareness that a deeper sense of community is desperately needed. But even as we acknowledge the need to build community, the dominant on-the-ground practices about how to engage people, civically and organizationally, remain essentially ... Continue reading
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Recommended
On Dialogue by David Bohm (2004)Never before has there been a greater need for deeper listening and more open communication to cope with the complex problems facing our organizations, businesses, and societies.
In this book, On Dialogue, scientist David Bohm believed there was a better way for humanity to discover meaning and achieve harmony.
He identified creative dialogue, a sharing of assumptions and understanding, as ... Continue reading
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Recommended
Humble Leadership: the Power of Relationships, Openness and Trust by Edgar H. Schein, Peter A. Schein (2018)The more traditional forms of leadership based on static hierarchies and professional distance between leaders and followers are growing increasingly outdated and ineffective. As organizations face more complex interdependent tasks, leadership must become more personal to guarantee open, trusting communication that will make collaborative problem solving and innovation possible.
... Continue reading
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Recommended
Strategic Conversations: Creating and Directing the Entrepreneurial Workforce by J.-C. Spender, Bruce A. Strong (2014) ... Continue reading
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Recommended
Talk, Inc.: How Trusted Leaders Use Conversation to Power Their Organizations by Boris Groysberg, Michael Slind (2012)How can leaders make their big or growing companies feel small again? How can they recapture the “magic” — the tight strategic alignment, the high level of employee engagement—that drove and animated their organization when it was a start-up? As more and more executives have discovered in recent years, the answer to this conundrum lies in the power of conversation.
In the book, Talk, ... Continue reading
01 May, 2018★ Recommended Dialogic Organization Development: the Theory and Practice of Transformational Change by Gervase R. Bushe, Robert J. Marshak (2015)
First Int'l Conference on Dialogic Organization Development | Gervase Bushe & Robert Marshak ... Continue reading
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This page is part of a blook on Conversational Leadership. Parts of this book have restricted access. You can learn more about the book and how to obtain full access on the home page.
Conversational Leadership Workshop
In-person, 7–11 September 2026, Warbrook House, Hampshire, UK
In-person, 7–11 September 2026, Warbrook House, Hampshire, UK
We are living and working in conditions of uncertainty, complexity, and rapid change. Many leadership approaches still rely on control, expertise, and tools that no longer fit the realities people face.
This week-long immersive workshop brings people together to practise Conversational Leadership as a shared, lived experience. It is not a training course but a space to slow down, think together, and explore how leadership emerges through dialogue, responsibility, and real engagement.