The Virginia Department of Corrections (VADOC) strives to hire trustworthy, dedicated staff and retain their employment for 20 to 30 years of professional service. While this employment strategy contrasts with the five-years-of-service trends in private industry, in corrections the employer and the employee greatly benefit from a long career history. Recently, the VADOC has struggled to hire and retain professional corrections employees. This challenge is widespread across th

My route into dialogue has followed a path from psychology to union representation, and from consulting to my current work. I started in 1971 as a mental health worker at a major psychiatric hospital in Uppsala, Sweden. This led me to becoming a member of the Swedish Municipal Workers’ Union – known as Kommunal, Sweden’s largest union – where I soon became the trade representative and then president of the local union in 1976. In 1980, I was offered the position of ombudsman

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