Topaasia is a dialogue tool for situations where you want to get people thinking, talking and forming a shared understanding.
It is not needed for every conversation. If there is a clear right answer to the matter, or the purpose is simply to pass on information, holding a conversation at all is pointless.
Topaasia is at its most useful when:
- the answer is not yet fully known
- different perspectives are needed
- people should be brought into the conversation on an equal footing
- the organisation has an important topic where talk needs to turn into shared understanding and action.
So what is it used for in practice?
1. Engaging people in strategy
Strategy can be defined by leadership, but it cannot simply be handed to the personnel to execute. The team needs to be able to reflect for itself on what the strategy means in its own work, in other words: What should we do more of? What should we let go of? What changes in our everyday work? What does making the strategy happen require from us specifically?
With Topaasia, an organisation can turn its strategy into conversation content that teams use to work through the same theme from their own starting points.
The goal is not just to tell people about the strategy but to help them form their own understanding of it.
Hoivatie: A great tool for strategy work
Granlund: Rolling out strategy digitally to a 1000+ person organisation
2. Values conversations
Organisational values are a prime example of themes dictated from the top that rarely show up in practice, though they certainly show up on office walls.
Topaasia can be used both for defining values and for embedding them. Both are about conversations. With Topaasia, teams can reflect, for example, on where the values are already visible and where there is a conflict between them and everyday reality.
Values conversations produce valuable information for the organisation. If an organisation says it is one kind of place but a completely different experience keeps coming up in the conversations, that is an important finding.
Vastuu Group: Gamification in support of values conversations
3. Debriefing personnel surveys
Running a personnel survey does not yet develop the organisation. What matters is what happens to the results afterwards.
With Topaasia, the survey results can be turned into a conversation for teams, where people get to interpret the findings, bring up their own experiences and choose the things they want to influence.
That way the personnel survey does not remain a report; the results generate conversation and action.
Jollas Institute: a gamified debrief of a workplace community survey
WSOY: From personnel surveys to concrete action with Topaasia
4. Development discussions
The traditional development discussion is often built around a form: the employee fills in the questions in advance, the manager reads the answers and the form is gone through in the meeting.
At its best this works well. At its worst, the same answers are copied year after year and the whole exercise produces nothing but stress and cynicism.
The idea behind Topaasia is to turn the situation around: instead of going through a form, the focus is on the conversation itself. Ready-made prompts help both the employee and the manager raise things that might not come up in an ordinary conversation.
At the same time, the success of the conversation is less dependent on an individual manager's facilitation skills.
"There is no going back to the form": Entteri renewed its development discussions
Quanscient renewed its 1:1 development discussions with Topaasia
5. Team development
Topaasia's original purpose was team development. Teams often have issues that everyone recognises in some way but that are never properly put on the table. Topaasia gives the conversation a structure.
Participants get prompts for their thinking, bring the things they consider important into the conversation and together form a view of what should be tackled next.
The tool can be used, for example, in retrospectives, in developing the team's ways of working or in assessing collaboration.
Elis Textile Service: More effective team development and people management with Topaasia
6. Improving collaboration and communication between teams
Two teams can work excellently on their own but poorly together.
In a situation like this, an instruction to "sit down and sort it out" does not necessarily help. The conversation easily drifts into defending one's own needs. People dig into their trenches.
Structured dialogue makes difficult things easier to put on the table. The subject of the conversation is not an individual person or a culprit, but a shared issue examined from different perspectives.
Entteri resolved communication knots between teams with Topaasia
7. Handling difficult and sensitive themes
Topaasia has also been used, for example, to address diversity in the workplace community, young people's working-life readiness and other personal themes.
In situations like these, the structure of the conversation can lower the threshold for taking part. A participant does not always have to start by saying: "I have this problem."
Instead, a topic can be put on the table for the group to examine together, and that alone can open up a conversation that would not otherwise have happened.
How does Humana promote inclusive dialogue and tackle challenging topics with Topaasia?
Elomatic: Diversity in working life
8. Audits and assessing the state of organisational culture
Audits often look at hard data: are certain criteria met, what do the metrics look like and where do things stand against the targets. Not everything essential can be found in the numbers, however.
The personnel has knowledge about their own work, their skills, their operating environment and problems that the metrics do not necessarily reveal.
With Topaasia, this qualitative knowledge can be gathered systematically as part of a broader assessment.
Improving conversation culture at Aava&Bang
Could your organisation use a conversation?
Did one of the examples make you think "we could try this too"?
Great! You can easily try Topaasia with a low threshold:
1. Start a free trial and try it with your team