"If you talk to a man in a language he understands, it goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language it goes to his heart."

Nelson Mandela

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us."

Marianne Williamson, as cited by Nelson Mandela

"We must become better at asking and do less telling in a culture that overvalues telling."

Edgar H. Schein

If fear is driving us apart, dialogue will bring us back together. If we've really lost each other, there is no other alternative. Yes, we often hope practical solutions will enable us to solve the problem without really connecting. But we know deep down it is stronger to listen and speak from the heart. Not as a soft way out, but actually right through the middle, openly addressing the confrontation. Flying Elephants was founded to drive the dialogue in the most challenging situations, making it the center of the change proces.

Within various systems, in public and private organizations, and on different continents. We drive advanced and unconventional change projects that span days, months or years. We bring teams, groups of hundreds or even thousands together in meaningful dialogues, addressing the most painful issues and co-creating to build new futures. Always with the aim to respond to the question: how can we build on our differences to create new realities?

Apply Driven by Dialogue in your organization

Dialogue in Action

Floor de Ruiter designs, organizes, and facilitates processes that help move people, teams and organizations forward together on their most important and intractable issues. He is founder and partner of Flying Elephants, an international social enterprise specialized in guiding advanced change processes in critical situations, like crisis or conflict. Flying Elephants helps businesses, governments, and civil society stakeholders to work together and address their collective and individual challenges. With a strong focus on connecting people with different and even extreme perspectives and interests, they guide people towards innovative and practical solutions for systems or organizational change. Especially in times when a company, system or individual wants to reinvent itself Flying Elephants is asked to step in and support this process.

Useful Tools

CONNECTING

A step by step approach to connect with your audience.
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VALUE PERSPECTIVES

Elaboration on the different value perspectives.
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GUIDELINES

Guidelines for communication based on ValueFraming. Download PDF

VALUE JUDGMENTS

How does each value judge the other(s).
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LEADERSHIP COMMUNICATION

Seven roles of communicating in leadership positions. Download PDF

SITUATIONAL LEADERSHIP

Four maturity levels of a team ask for a different value system approach. Download PDF

LEARNING STYLES

Which style of learning fits best to which value system?Download PDF

WORKING TOGETHER

Discover the strengths, weaknesses and different perspectives of each value system. Download PDF

LOCAL GOVERNANCE

Four optional roles of (local) administration and its benefits. Download PDF

Workshops

Team Development & Collaboration

To heighten team effectivity we use the power of the difference. Teams are strengthened by exploring defaults and mismatches in the interaction with their surrounding environment. This way, they will develop a greater understanding of others' perspectives and the trust within teams or among departments increases. This often leads to improved communication in teams or between company departments.

Organizational Change

Traditional top-down processes do not produce results for a fundamental transformation. Co-creating with hundreds or even thousands of people about one issue, is that possible? Can you even have a meaningful dialogue on that scale? We learned how to engage effective large scale dialogues and successfully run radical bottom up change in large organizations. Our interference will help you to improve organizational flexibility to make sure big change projects are achieved faster with less resistance.

Leadership

Communication is at the heart of everything. Are you as a leader able to inspire others and engage them to be guided by you? Real communication is as much about telling, as it is about asking and listening. It starts with understanding the other: it should always be a dialogue, even when you are the only one talking.

Client Communication

We create a variety of workshops specific to your needs and wishes: varying from one afternoon to a multiple day program. At the end of the client communication program you will have:
- Improved customer focus and customer communication.
- Heightened commercial efficacy: employees are better to express themselves and match products and services with the customer (building client relations).
- You are able to match your goals with your clients needs with effective client communication.

Government Communication

We have extensive experience working in the field of government communication. Different contexts ask for a different role of the government. This workshop gives you insight into which different options there are, how to apply them and which way to engage with citizens is most effective in a given situation.

Personal Change

We help you develop a deeper understanding and awareness of your personal compass, to overcome your personal barriers, doubts or internal critics. To increase personal impact and enable you to create your next step.

Want to know more about what's currently happening at Flying Elephants