'Are we a fertility or an infertility company?' A Learning expedition inviting dialogic reframing

Abstract

In this article, I present, illustrate and analyze a learning expedition (LX) of pharmaceutical company managers, uncovering processes fostering generative dialogue to develop new collective understanding. Applying a dialogic lens to a sequence of exchanges with partner organizations and internal dialogic circle settings, managers’ unquestioned assumptions in describing their own business become clear and can then evolve. Enabled by different facilitation elements, the LX suspends organizational routines and triggers generative dialogues that encourage organizational change. The study contributes by showing: first, how context and practices used in establishing the LX aid in suspending organizational routines and second, how the context of multiple interorganizational events and exchanges (understood as a cycling between different dialogues) enables dialogue and reflexivity fostering organizational development (OD) and third, how the LX enables double loop learning that invites reflexivity, altering managers’ assumptions.