Yalas work best where:

• People who need to work together are scattered or isolated
• Aims are confused or even conflicting
• Management are supportive

The Yala does not have to be an all or nothing proposition. Begin by listing a few of the obvious and most important interfaces, and don't worry about completeness. Instead, concentrate on fertile ground where you are most likely to find people who will help you.

This may take some salesmanship. Pitch your company on the process. Show them a demo. Explain that creating a Yala is a low-risk, low-cost way to develop and test new ideas.

Or “go stealth”. Fly under the political radar until you can demonstrate some real results. Seek a boss who will provide air cover. Try a Yala at a few key interfaces and respond to feedback.

The Yala encourages dialogue, or "thinking together".

Debate is the standard form of discourse in politics and the law. Most of us have seen how adversarial and destructive political debates on TV or radio can become. Successful dialogue is rare and far harder to stage than debate.

Dialogue is the constructive process that leads to the emergence of collective intelligence.  In dialogue, we encourage people to listen and be listened to, speak and be spoken to, develop and deepen mutual understanding, uncover common concerns, and learn about others' perspectives while reflecting on their own.

Yala administrators must therefore be ready should contributors at dysfunctional interfaces resort to hostile and insulting remarks. Occasionally, these will be deliberately intended to upset and offend. More often they'll just be angry comments made by people who feel passionately about a subject. Electronic communication is prone to this kind of misunderstanding because it does not transmit facial expressions or voice intonations that might soften a message.

Moderating electronic communication is a key skill in cultivating a Yala. We must be nice but not weak:

• Provide guidelines
• Respect others
• Support those who contribute
• Exclude bullies, censors, and casual observers
• Explain  our actions
• And not meddle

The objective is not to censor what is said but the opposite: to restrain those who want to suppress what others say.

However cultivating a Yala is usually far more fun than this. Tending a Yala is a relatively open-ended process. Discussions are dynamic, living, creative creatures. They are unpredictable and, when they work, take paths no one could have planned driven by the interests and responses of their contributors.

Efforts to direct the outcome run in the face of a spirit of collaboration. Instead, good moderators are prepared for surprise, and do not expect conversation to follow any formal pattern. Be aware of this and ready to follow in whatever direction participants want to go. As one person puts it, “I must be ready to zig when the discussion zags.”

Having planted our trees in fertile ground and weeded out hostility and censorship, we are ready to harvest insight. Insight is found at three levels: at the level of the interface, when we drill down to challenge the known, and when we step up to embrace the unknown.

Reach out to exchange ideas

First, insight occurs at the level of the interface. Those whose networks span structural holes have early access to diverse, often contradictory information.  This gives them a competitive advantage in delivering great ideas. It is not creativity born of deep intellectual ability. It is creativity as an import-export business. An idea that is mundane to one group may be a valuable insight to another.

Drill down to challenge the known

Second, insight occurs whenever we drill down. SuperTable and Pattern reports use information about contributors to cut the feedback from different perspectives, to "walk around in other people's shoes". These reports invite us to connect with those whose views may be very different from ours, to accept that no one owns the truth and that everyone has the right to be understood.

Participants in the Biennial Roundtable on Education, for example, might have found the unorthodox views of Malcolm Gladwell (expressed in his book Outliers) very stimulating. He argues that the “the way in which education has been discussed in the United States is backwards... [it] assumes that there is something wrong with the job schools are doing. The only problem with school, for kids who aren’t achieving, is that there isn’t enough of it.”

Thus drilling down encourages us to challenge what we think we know by exploring the deeper roots (unquestioned beliefs) that may perpetuate past and present dysfunctions.

Step up to embrace the unknown

Finally, insight will always be found whenever we step up to raise the level at which a problem is addressed. To embrace the unknown,we need to expand the scope from a departmental perspective to the perspective of the whole firm, from tactical to strategic, from short term to long term, from inside the company to the market and the industry, from static to evolutionary, and, not least, from interface to complex relationship as a whole.

We each add our smarts to the processes through which complex relationships learn, change, adapt and grow... but we usually can't see how. Our lives unfold on the wrong scale. But the trees of a Yala help us observe how our local dialogue contributes to the global discourse, and so gain a better sense of proportion. They provide a framework for more balanced and holistic conversations.

In the Biennial of the Americas, a Yala’s elevated vantage point would reveal how closely the topics are woven together. As women increasingly drive national prosperity, there are consequences for poverty, health and education with subsequent implications for trade, energy and climate change.

When people - whose differences have polarized - develop better relationships through participation in effective dialogue, they find previously unthinkable opportunities for respectful disagreement and for collaboration. Thus a Yala can help us solve very complex, very challenging problems with almost no leadership, no strategic plan, and no Congress!