The Simple Power of Pathway Conversations™
From "Engaged Curiosity" (2025 Jack Ricchiuto, Nuance Works)
We regularly encounter organizations that genuinely want to convene engagement in their planning. They know from experience that not engaging stakeholders is a missed opportunity to co-create larger impacts.
Their intention is to empower people to do together what no one can do alone. Their intuition is that they could have a
wider and deeper impact if they engaged the people who care about these impacts. They believe in the advantages of engaged stakeholders, the wisdom of crowds, or the power of alignment.
What moves them forward is having a simple, viable framework—a productive how for their worthy why.
We teach the Pathway Conversations™ framework that gives conveners a way to engage the gifts in the room. Everyone comes to the table with four gifts—the ability to learn, assume, question, and take action. As we engage these gifts, people become more reflective, aligned, curious, and productive together.
People don't need to be "held accountable" or "motivated" to share their gifts because, according to neuroscience, doing so is intrinsically rewarding. People want to be engaged co-authors rather than dependent consumers, outsourcing responsibility to others for the building of their futures.
The four Pathway conversations engage people's gifts as they learn how to co-create new choices only possible in their working together on what they care about. Whether they're working on something relatively simple or complex, it takes them less than 90 minutes to gain fluency in the framework.
The framework works every time because it frees people from their self-limiting assumptions by turning them into questions they answer through actions rather than unproductive discussions or divisive voting. People don't even know they are limiting themselves with their assumptions until they discover the power of turning these into questions.