WHAT IS DIALOGUE?

Dialogue is a group process, which may be used when there is a diverse group with many points of view.

 When thinking is going in many directions, dialogue can help group members to discover what they have in common, so that there is a framework for working together. After being in dialogue, people are more willing to discuss areas of conflict. When there is no shared meaning, there is no reason to create together to find solutions for problems that affect everyone. Conflict without dialogue often includes blaming, judging, and finger pointing, which doesn't serve any purpose besides making people feel resentful and angry.

Dialogue can also bring out assumptions that keep a group apart because there has been no satisfactory and safe way to share them. When a group is hindered by unexpressed emotions and unknown and unshared assumptions, a lot of energy is used to keep the lid on by not sharing. The reason that dialogue is so powerful is that all of the energy of the group moves towards new meaning, rather than defending ideas.

When we realize that we do not have to become defensive or judgmental in order to speak our own truth, we speak it more simply and clearly, without the typical butterflies in the stomach or tightening of shoulders. The energy flows freely into the group, and does not create physical tension in group members. Dialogue provides a container for new ideas and new feelings within the group.

• Dialogue is time bounded. It is done for a specific, decided upon time.
• People sit in a circle, where no one person holds a position of power.
• People agree to suspend judgment of what others say.
• People agree to give up advice giving and problem solving, and concentrate only upon truth and meaning in the present without blame or excuse.
• There is one person who acts as a facilitator, (from the Latin, facile, to do or make easy) who keeps the group within the guidelines.
• People temporarily agree to give up their "titles", and to act as colleagues during the dialogue process.
• People practice generative listening, rather than listening to answer questions or make judgement. (Generative listening considers ideas, and then builds upon them)

These practices are the foundation for discussion towards decision making, choosing solutions, and eliminating ideas that might not be helpful. This is why dialogue is time bounded. We can practice many things if we know that there is a time limit!

In the long run, the value of dialogue is for the individual, helping broaden expectations and education by discovering and removing hidden assumptions. Groups become more creative and exciting by practicing dialogue, and individuals grow personally.

It is very important to have a diverse group within dialogue because the thinking of any one individual will be different from any other, thereby bringing more material into the circle.

Finally, dialogue enables people to be more themselves without their usual defenses. Building trust is a foundation for true community.

People of different personal styles have different approaches and challenges to dialogue. Those who are action oriented and decisive may prefer a more direct approach, and may find the apparent slowness of the process difficult to handle. They will need to practice patience and listening skills. Those who prefer to think quietly without speaking very much, who think of people first, may need to challenge themselves to speak out. They may also need to resist the temptation to give advice or solve problems for others. Those who usually have a big picture approach and love variety and creativity may find it necessary to practice patience, though later, they will be delighted by the reward of an entire system of thought emerging from a dialogue. People who need reasons and explanations for things before acting, may also have to practice patience by allowing questions to go unanswered or statements unchallenged.

We Learn Fast, Slowly

By slowing down to practice dialogue, groups save a great deal of time. This time saved is the time necessary to rework solutions or to weather discord. Dialogue is not the answer to all the world's problems, but it is a very powerful technique which may enable us to think our way out of some very serious world problems that are contributing to the downward spiral of earth health, and to war and discord world wide.

Beginning the Practice of Dialogue

Angeles Arrien, cultural anthropologist and author of The Fourfold Way, gathered together the deep cultural beliefs held in common from over 150 of the world's indigenous peoples. These beliefs seem to be a wonderful foundation for the understanding and practice of dialogue.

1. Show up and choose to be present.

2. Pay attention to what has heart and meaning.

3. Tell the truth without blame or judgment

4. Be open to outcome, not attached to outcome.

By showing up and being fully present, Arrien refers to the Way of the Warrior. This is about power, personal power. This is not the power used to overcome another, but the power to make a difference by one's presence in a group. This the way of showing honor and respect for self and others; careful and judicious communication, saying the right thing at the right time, and in the right way, having personal responsibility and self-discipline, and using one's power in the right way. In dialogue, people give up their personal power of communication and position to become equal to others in the group. They retain the power of being fully themselves and fully present.

By paying attention, Arrien refers to the Way of the Healer. The healer is about love and caring. Healers pay attention to what has heart and meaning by acknowledging others' skills and opinions, acknowledging others' character qualities, acknowledging others' appearance in life, and acknowledging others' impact upon themselves. They understand the importance of self-esteem, love, and healing for the Self as well as for others.

Telling the truth is the Way of the Visionary. The guiding principle of the Visionary is telling the truth without blame or judgment. The visionary maintains an awareness of creative purpose and personal vision. Action comes from the authentic Self, not only in response to another.

Being open to outcome, but not attached to outcome is the Way of the Teacher. This principle is highly relevant to the practice of dialogue. When we are expecting a certain outcome, we automatically rule out something that hasn't been invented yet. This principle is critical to creativity, and in the process of dialogue, what is created is a new mind, a new learning, which is owned by the group, and not by any member of the group.

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On Dialogue, Culture, and Organizational Learning by Edgar H. Shein.

We need ways to improve our thought processes, especially in groups where the solution depends upon people reaching a common formulation of the problem. At the root of any volatile issue we are likely to find communication issues that prevent the parties from framing the problem in a common way, and thus making it impossible to deal with the problem constructively.

In this article Shein shows that dialogue has considerable promise as a problem-formulation and problem-solving philosophy and technology. Dialogue is a vehicle for understanding cultures and subcultures and becomes a central element of any model of organizational transformation.

The benefits of dialogue:

Because of the increasing rate of change in the environment, and because of the growth of technological complexity in all functions,

• Organizations face an increasing need for rapid learning
• Organizational structures are moving toward knowledge-based, distributed information forms.
• Organizations will break down into sub units developing their own subcultures
• Organizational communications are increasingly dependen t upon valid communicqation across subcultures needing an overarching common language and mental model.
• Any organizational learning will require the evoloution of shared mental models that cut across the subcultures of the organization.
• Cultural rules about interaction and communication inhibit the evoloution of shared mental models.

"The ultimate reason for learning about the theory and practice of dialogue is

that it facilitates and creates new possibilities for valid communication."

"If we did not need to communicate in groups, then we would not need to work on dialogue. But if problem solving and conflict resolution in groups is increasingly important in our complex world, then the skill of dialogue becomes one of the most fundamental of human skills."

Shein asks the question "Why do we have so many problems understanding each other?" He continues, "…we are culturally overtrained not only to think in terms of certain consensually validated categories but also to withold information that would in any way threaten the current 'social order'."

We are taught to save face, our status. Lack of acknowledgement is devastating to most human beings. We are taught to respond in ways that enhance the self worth of others, to be polite. To one culture a rude remark may be a serious insult to another, an affront which would lead to an immediate breakdown in relationship.

Time pressures create another dilemma for groups: voicing the truth might lead to quicker solutions but may undermine the relationship building process. We may formalize the debate around Roberts Rules of Order, sacrificing understanding and communication to the preservation of "face."

"All problem-solving groups should begin in a dialogue format to facilitate the building of sufficient common ground and mutual trust, and to make it possible to tell what is really on one's mind"

"Only with a period of dialogue is it possible to tell if the communication is valid." By valid, Shein means sharing mental models that are different, using words that are different will markedly reduce the effectiveness of all group action.

Groups differentiate themselves in terms of communities of practice in which they create their own genuine subcultures, common frames of reference, common languages, frames of references. The problem in an organization then is to coordinate and integrate the subcultures. We will need technologies and mechanisms that make it possible for people to discover that they use language differently, that they operate from different mental models, and that the categories that we employ are learned social constructions of reality and are thus arbitrary. Dialogue is one such technology.

How is dialogue different from good face-to-face communication that we learn in group process training? The difference is only clear in the actual experience of dialogue. Then the difference is obvious.

"Dialogue is focused more on the thinking process and how our perceptions and cognitions are pre-formed by our past experiences. If we become more conscious of how our thought process works, we will think better collectively, and communicate better."

"An important goal of dialogue is to enable the group to reach a higher level of consciousness and creativity through the gradual creation of shared meanings and a "common" thinking process."

Dialogue is more about thinking and languaging than about the emotional content of what is being said. In dialogue, active listening is employed in reflecting on what my own assumptions are, in self analysis, while in the usual group process, we are taught to listen to others. We become more aware about the imperfections or bias in our own cognitive processes. In group process we are interested in perfecting our interpersonal skills while in dialogue we are building a group that can think generatively, creatively, and together.