Episode #3

A conversation with Deb Roy.

(Interview with Deb Roy, Director of the MIT Center for Constructive Communication and co-Founder/CEO of Cortico)

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In the final episode of our Cortico trilogy, we talked one-on-one with the company's co-founder and CEO, Deb Roy. For those of you have not listened to the previous two episodes, you can do so by clicking on Episode #1 and Episode #2.

It was (and is) amazing to me how much time some very smart people at MIT have devoted to better understanding small-group conversations; their structure, what makes them work, what they might tell us and how they might (or can) be included in policy-making, decision-making, story-telling, etc.

Cortico in partnership with the MIT Center for Constructive Communication has been working on “understanding” conversations for eight years. Deb and his team have built a platform that enables “deeper” conversations, amplifies under-heard voices and tamps down the loudest (and/or most strident) voices “in the room”.

The result, in most cases, is a shared “sense of things.” Or as one Cortico conversation participant put it: “You can be in a room full of people and still feel alone.” Within a Cortico group conversation, she said, “you don’t feel that way.”

Where the Cortico platform might lead is an open question. Like countless start-ups before it, it could fail. Ninety percent (90%) of start-ups do fail. But it seems more likely that Cortico won’t fail; that it will succeed in ways that it intended to and in ways that it did not.

It’s fairly easy to see how it can be used to better inform “town hall” meetings, or better understand different points of view within institutions, and/or see what shared values emerge in conversations about contentious “issues.” Governments, NGOs, corporations, civic groups, religious organizations and others need these types of insights. Those are “markets” that Cortico can successfully address and serve.

What’s intriguing (to me at least) is how Cortico might be of use in a “post-legacy-news-media”….news ecosystem.