Dialogue

Background

Dialogue is a conversational process that is especially effective in dealing with (polarised) groups of people with different, divergent and/or opposing views AND for addressing complex situations with multiple stakeholders, issues and perspectives.

It gives a creative response to two questions:

“How can we enhance our capacity to talk and think more deeply together about the critical issues we are facing?”
“How can we access the mutual intelligence and wisdom we need to create innovative paths forward?”

“It is a way of taking the energy out of our differences [...] It lifts us out of a polarization and into a greater common sense,and is thereby a means for accessing the intelligence and coordinated power of groups of people.”1

The concept of Dialogue has been developed into different directions and has been experimented with in many different contexts and formats –within the corporate world, in community projects, in politics, in government, and in not-for-profit organisations.

Dialogue can be done with groups ranging from two people to many hundreds.

There is now an accumulated 30+ years of experience with Dialogue including a surprising number of impressive success stories.

In a business context Dialogue turned out to be one of the most powerful catalysts for team learning.2 Dialogue processes have been applied in many businesses including Ford, Intel, GS Industries, Shell Oil, Motorola, Hewlett-Packard , Amoco, AT&T, IKEA, VOLVO France, en KPMG, usually with impressive results.

“Dialogue is not merely a set of techniques for improving organizations, enhancing communication, building consensus, or solving problems. [...] During the Dialogue process, people learn how to think together […] People can begin to move into coordinated patterns of action without the artificial, tedious process of decision making.”3;

Applications

Dialogue is a very powerful path for:

knowledge harvesting and the enhancement of knowledge networks in organisations
strategic design and alignment
innovation
sense-making in complex (rather than complicated4) domains and with ‘intractable’ problems
Dialogue is also highly effective in negotiation.

Normally with negotiations the starting point is finding a balance between ‘win’ and ‘lose’. Even when we try to create a ‘win/win’ situation the risk of ‘lose/lose’ or ‘lose/win’ (or the sense of such a risk) plays a role. In Dialogue there is no risk of losing and the possible gains are enourmous.

Outcomes

Dialogue usually results in:

creative and innovative ways of thinking and solutions for significant issues, very complex challenges and ‘intractable problems’
group alignment and the emerging of collective intelligence
a very strong sense of ‘being in it together’ and of the wholeness in which diversity is not just allowed but actually has value (e.g. in ‘stovepipe’ organisations dialogue can be used to create cross-boundary teams with a strong communal identity that is achieved through the dialogue process. This will result in the dissipation of the polarisation derived from the need to create a sense of identity and strength through defending and promoting one’s own turf against ‘others’ in the organisation)
personal involvement and responsibility: even when the process involves hundreds of people and irrespective of rank, social status, organisational position, etc. …
momentum and motivation with people involved

One direction Dialogue developed into is the World Café format.
This format “[…]has been used in corporate, non-profit, educational and community settings. In each setting people consistently report outcomes that include:

satisfying relationships among participants
a high degree of trust established quickly among people who have had no previous contact
access to breakthrough thinking, and
the coalescing of a common sense of purpose” […]5

Also typical, following World Cafés, is the occurrence of self-organising action: people that have Dialogued together will often organise themselves to take the process, the conversation, the emerging ideas and actions further, in a manner that requires very little coordination effort – if at all.

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1 Dialogue and the art of thinking together; William Isaacs, Doubleday, New York, 1999 [ISBN: 0-385-47999-9].

1 Dialogue and the art of thinking together; William Isaacs, Doubleday, New York, 1999 [ISBN: 0-385-47999-9].

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2 The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook; Peter Senge, et.al., Doubleday, New York, 1994 [ISBN 0-385-47256-0]. For a full citation see the notes below.

2 The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook; Peter Senge, et.al., Doubleday, New York, 1994 [ISBN 0-385-47256-0] says the following about ‘team learning’: “Because of the long-standing experience which many organisations have with group dynamics and team building, many teams believe that they have been practicing a version of this discipline for years. However, unlike team building, team learning is not a discipline of improving team members’ skills, not even communication skills. For many years we have used the concept of alignment as distinct from agreement, to capture the essence of team learning. Alignment means “functioning as a whole.” Building alignment (you never “get there”) is about enhancing a team’s capacity to think and act in new synergistic ways, with full coordination and a sense of unity […] As alignment develops, people don’t have to overlook or hide their disagreements; indeed they develop the capacity to use their disagreements to make their collective understanding richer.”
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3 From The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook; Peter Senge, et.al.

3 From The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook; Peter Senge, et.al.

4 See: The New Dynamics of Strategy: sense-making in a complex and complicated world: C.F. Kurtz & D.J. Snowden; IBM Systems Journal, Vol. 42 – No. 3 – 2003; and Complex Acts of Knowing – paradox and descriptive self-awareness: Dave Snowden; IBM Global Services, Special Issue of the Journal of Knowledge Management, July 2002.

5 From the World Café website - with gratitude.