What's the secret of good conversations? Bill Isaacs, the author of "Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together" and director of the Dialogue Project at MIT's Organizational Learning Center, says that people need to build specific skills and to appreciate the separate stages of a good conversation. This Fast Company article outlines a few key skills, followed by a description of those stages that a conversation moves through as it evolves from the cursory to the creative: polite talk, breakdown, inquiry, and flow.
