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Videos & Talks

Using SWOT and Working Dialogue to Improve and Strengthen Our Work Unit - Alfreda Shinns, Jillian Mackling and Caitlin Sweeney

A probation office with very little turnover and a seasoned team discovered that stability itself had become the problem. At Alexandria Probation and Parole, complacency was the threat hiding in plain sight.

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Alexandria Probation and Parole serves probationers, parolees, and their families through a staff of 15 across Virginia's Alexandria District. When the management team met for a dialogue in 2019, a shared concern emerged: a stable, experienced workforce risked settling into routines that no longer served the District's mission. Leadership responded by combining a SWOT analysis with Working Dialogue, inviting every staff member to offer their authentic voice on strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats within their unit. The process surfaced what individual conversations might have left unspoken, giving the team collective ownership of both the diagnosis and the changes required. Published in The World Needs Dialogue! Four: Putting Dialogue to Work (2022), the paper by Alfreda Shinns, Jillian Mackling, and Caitlin Sweeney demonstrates how dialogue methods can turn a routine management tool into a vehicle for organisational renewal in a justice setting.

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Videos & Talks

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Dialogue in prisons and justice settings

Offender resettlement

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