ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an optic for examining leadership created relationally in the practice of moment-by-moment interplay. It focuses on conversation, and treats it primarily as an invitational, ontological practice. The chapter argues that conversations "travel" as participants improvise on the contributions of others, moving conversations in emergent trajectories, along topic lines towards conclusions, and via a variety of modes, for example argument, questioning, or affirmation. It provides a resume of relational approaches to leadership that have emerged strongly in the last ten to fifteen years. In contrast, a relational approach theorizes leadership as emerging amidst relational processes, rather than through an individual's actions within relationships. The chapter discusses how people can build vocabularies for discussing moment-by-moment talk and leadership in organizations and can identify moments of leadership. It introduces some extracts of talk from a meeting by way of an illustration of how conversational travel can be used and the insights that can be gained through such an optic.
