The Share Our Organization Toolkit – 92NY's Belfer Center for Innovation & Social Impact and Essential Partners

​The Share Our Organization Toolkit provides a five-step framework for organizational leaders to use structured dialogue as a catalyst for workplace change and culture improvement. Designed by 92NY's Belfer Center for Innovation & Social Impact and Essential Partners, this toolkit helps organizations address tensions, conflicts, low morale, and communication breakdowns by creating dialogue sessions where team members practice reflection, listening, and perspective-sharing in ways that build trust and understanding. The model centers on Reflective Structured Dialogue, a research-based framework developed in 1989 from therapeutic strategies, mediation, conflict resolution, and organizational development practices that creates conditions for productive exchanges even during difficult or divisive conversations.

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Information about the Issue
Organizations frequently encounter dynamics that undermine collaboration, morale, and effectiveness. These include relational strain across teams, cultures of appeasement, high turnover, burnout, difficulty collaborating across different perspectives and identities, and employees feeling disengaged or lacking affinity with their organization. When organizations face crossroads moments requiring strategic pivots, policy disputes creating entrenched conflict, or the need for meaningful professional development beyond core job skills, traditional approaches often fall short of addressing the underlying communication patterns and trust deficits that perpetuate dysfunction.

The Share Our Organization model addresses these challenges through structured dialogue sessions that serve as either standalone interventions or starting points for broader organizational change initiatives. Organizations can launch initiatives as one-time projects focused on specific challenges or as ongoing commitments to creating cultures where diverse perspectives are regularly heard and respected. The approach is particularly suited for organizations experiencing tension between team members, facing intractable issues that impede work, navigating tense moments or policy conflicts, embarking on major projects requiring diverse input, or seeking to build more connected and inclusive workplaces.

The toolkit walks organizational leaders through five steps for designing and implementing their own initiatives. First, they define their purpose by establishing clear goals and intentions, such as supporting high-stakes processes like strategic planning, interrupting cycles of conflict around specific issues, or developing cultures where people feel included and able to collaborate. Second, they determine who should be involved by identifying organizers to manage the initiative, facilitators to design and lead dialogue sessions, participants who have stakes in the purpose, and other stakeholders whose perspectives matter for success.

Third, organizations design their initiatives and dialogue sessions using core structures from Reflective Structured Dialogue. These include communication agreements that ensure safe enough space by addressing observable behaviors like interrupting, timed speaking that gives each person equal response time to promote equity and listening, and reflect-write-respond sequences that allow participants to process complex prompts before sharing. The toolkit provides sample question prompts designed to form arcs that lead participants toward fuller understandings of one another, customizable to different organizational contexts and purposes.
Fourth, organizations plan how dialogue moves to action by closing sessions with reflective ideation exercises where participants generate ideas for next steps, debriefing with organizing teams to review feedback and determine priorities, and taking action on the most impactful ideas elevated during sessions. Fifth, they create launch plans addressing logistics, internal communications, participant recruitment, and context-specific considerations that ensure successful implementation.

The model recognizes that dialogue creates openings for organizational leaders by building trust and understanding even across significant differences. For some organizations, improved working relationships may be the primary outcome. For others, dialogue sessions surface member-informed directions for policy changes, new programs, cultural shifts, or strategic priorities that leaders can advance through deliberate action steps unique to their contexts.

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Why It Matters
The Share Our Organization Toolkit matters because it provides organizational leaders with accessible, research-based tools to address workplace dysfunction at its roots rather than treating symptoms. By changing how team members communicate with each other, organizations create conditions for effective collaboration, problem-solving, and inclusion that ripple through all aspects of organizational life. The structured dialogue approach interrupts toxic communication patterns, prevents defensive reactions, and creates space for perspectives that might otherwise go unheard, directly addressing the trust deficits and relational strains that undermine organizational effectiveness.

The framework is significant because it democratizes access to powerful dialogue facilitation methods. Rather than requiring external consultants or extensive training, the toolkit equips internal leaders to design and implement their own initiatives using proven structures. This ownership model ensures initiatives align closely with organizational contexts and purposes while building internal capacity for ongoing culture work. Organizations can start with pilot sessions, learn from experience, and scale based on what works in their unique environments.

The approach matters practically because it converts employee perspectives into actionable organizational intelligence. Through reflective ideation exercises, dialogue sessions surface concrete ideas for policy changes, program launches, process improvements, and cultural shifts directly from the people most affected by organizational decisions. This member-informed direction strengthens buy-in, addresses real rather than assumed needs, and positions organizations to make changes that genuinely improve working conditions and effectiveness. By elevating voices that may not typically be heard in organizational decision-making, the model supports more equitable and inclusive workplaces where diverse perspectives become sources of strength rather than sources of conflict.

About the Organization
Essential Partners is a nonprofit organization founded in 1989 that helps people build relationships across differences to address their most pressing challenges. Grounded in behavioral health research and drawing innovations from mediation, systems theory, conflict resolution, appreciative inquiry, organizational development, psychology, and neurobiology, Essential Partners developed Reflective Structured Dialogue as a framework proven effective across diverse issues, settings, and challenges. The organization equips people to build cultures of connection, deeper belonging, and mutual understanding and trust across differences of values, beliefs, and identities. 92NY's Belfer Center for Innovation & Social Impact builds and scales initiatives that enable change leaders to activate ripples of impact globally, including GivingTuesday, The Social Good Summit, Women inPower, and Ben Franklin Circles. Share Our America, an initiative from the Belfer Center, helps communities embrace their differences as sources of strength and unlock their potential to create change. Together, Essential Partners and 92NY's Belfer Center created the Share Our Organization Toolkit to extend dialogue-based change models into organizational contexts, providing leaders with practical resources to foster inclusive communication, strengthen relationships, and catalyze meaningful workplace transformation.

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