William Isaacs

Founder and CEO Dialogos

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

William Isaacs is the founder and chief executive of Dialogos, a strategic dialogue and leadership development consultancy, and one of the people who turned dialogue from a philosophical idea into a practical organisational discipline. He co-founded MIT’s Center for Organizational Learning in 1990, directed the Institute’s Dialogue Project, and taught at the MIT Sloan School of Management as a senior lecturer for more than two decades. His 1999 book on dialogue and the art of thinking together, drawn from roughly fifteen years of research with corporations, managers and community leaders, remains the standard text on the subject and has been translated into many languages. The central claim of that work — that groups are constrained by habits of thought that are felt but never discussed, and that only a particular quality of conversation can surface them — has since shaped how large organisations approach collective decision-making, and it is what Dialogos sells.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded MIT’s Center for Organizational Learning in 1990, working in the intellectual tradition shared with Peter Senge, Edgar Schein and David Bohm.
• Directed MIT’s Dialogue Project.
• Taught at the MIT Sloan School of Management as a senior lecturer for more than twenty years.
• Wrote the defining 1999 book on dialogue as a discipline for collective thinking, published by Doubleday/Currency and based on about fifteen years of field research.
• Founded Dialogos and has led it as chief executive, advising Fortune 100 companies, national governments, prime ministers, fund managers and multilateral institutions across five continents.
• Worked on organisational dialogue with companies including Ford, Motorola, Shell and Hewlett-Packard.
• Serves as a leadership advisor to Clean Energy Ventures.

Professional Journey

Isaacs came to organisational work from political philosophy rather than from management. He took an A.B. in policy studies and political philosophy at Dartmouth College from 1976 to 1980, an M.Sc. in political philosophy at the London School of Economics the following year, and later returned to academia at Oxford, completing M.Phil. and D.Phil. work between 1985 and 1991. That grounding matters to the substance of what he went on to do: his account of dialogue is not a communication technique but an argument about how collective thought is constrained and how those constraints can be made visible.

In 1990 he co-founded the Center for Organizational Learning at MIT’s Sloan School, part of the cluster of work around Peter Senge, Edgar Schein and the physicist David Bohm that produced the organisational learning field. Isaacs became director of MIT’s Dialogue Project and began roughly fifteen years of research with corporations, managers and community leaders, testing what happens when groups are given the conditions for genuine inquiry, confrontation and clarification rather than debate or negotiation. He worked through this period with companies including Ford, Motorola, Shell and Hewlett-Packard.

That research became his 1999 book, published by Doubleday’s Currency imprint, which set out the idea of an ecology of thought and argued that conversation can enable groups to think past the limitations of their individual members. The book has been translated into many languages and remains widely cited in both academic and practitioner literature.

He founded Dialogos to carry the practice into the field as a consultancy, and has led it since as chief executive while continuing to teach at MIT Sloan for more than twenty years. Over roughly three decades of advisory work he has served as a leadership advisor, educator and architect of systems transformation for chief executives of both startups and global corporations, fund managers, development professionals, national policy leaders and prime ministers, working across five continents. He also serves as a leadership advisor to Clean Energy Ventures.

Education

Dartmouth College

A.B., Policy Studies and Political Philosophy, 1976-1980

London School of Economics and Political Science

M.Sc., Political Philosophy, 1980-1981

University of Oxford

M.Phil. and D.Phil., completed between 1985 and 1991