Observations about
Why Dialogue Works
Sharing knowledge leads to knowledge growth which leads to new perspectives, new ideas and innovation. Creating innovative solutions is critical to creating business and social value. Dialogue improves people's collective capacity to share knowledge and shape their future together.
Just knowledge is not enough to create the capacity for collaboratively shaping realities - present or future; nor are ordinary conversations. With modern communications knowledge is widely accessible and millions of discussions take place continuously, yet polarisation is widespread.
The polarisation reflects into our ‘normal’ mode of conversation. We live in a debate culture where most conversations (discussions) are aimed to bring points across, score points, advocate opinions, convince, persuade, and negotiate — whether in private, politics, business, or community context.
An illustrative story is set in a village of dwarfs: ‘Something’ huge enters the village. The dwarfs gather around it in a circle, each describing what they see (which is obviously just a small fraction of that whole big thing): one sees a tree trunk, one sees a waving fan, one sees a huge hose coming from the sky spraying water, etc.
Their descriptions do not match, and the dwarfs get into heated arguments about each other's ‘mistaken, stupid, short-sighted’ observations.
What they don't see is that they are describing different parts and aspects of one single large elephant.
The arguments they get into illustrate how invested we are in our perceptions and in their ‘rightness’ or ‘wrongness’.
Dialogue treats all these descriptions, perceptions and ‘bits of knowledge’ as pieces of a puzzle and brings them together into a ‘whole picture’. This leads to new perspectives that enable new ideas (= innovation) and a shared pool of meaning (in this case ‘elephant’).
This shared pool of meaning goes beyond the polarisation and even beyond diversity, and finds the underlying unifying field.
It gives a systemic view of the complexity and the trends in it and is a very strong tool for collaborative sense-making. Sense making is the very basics of knowledge management, forming the framework based on which knowledge can be used and applied.
A strong systemic view is vital to any successful architecture, be it of enterprises, systems, large scale projects or cities.
The shared pool of meaning uses diversity in a way that turns each perspective into an essential piece of the total puzzle (rather than a source of polarisation).
Dialogue is unifying in a way that respects diversity. Each one of the ‘bits of knowledge’ (perceptions, perspectives, ideas, thoughts, beliefs ...) becomes part of a bigger picture which is larger than the mechanistic sum of its parts (if we put all the bits of the puzzle in a straight row with the idea of summing them up we will get something that is totally meaningless).
Dialogue is not only ideal for engaging complexity and multiple (“conflicting”) perspectives, it creates a level of intelligence that goes beyond the sum of the intelligences of the people participating in it. In other words, Dialogue often leads to the emergence of collective intelligence.
Collective intelligence is the phenomenon of synchronised brainwave oscillations in a group. The mechanism for this is not yet known, but the conditions necessary for such occurrences are. Teams have been and can be trained in creating these circumstances.
When the collective intelligence phenomenon occurs, a group as a whole rises above itself, but also each one of the individuals in that group functions on a level of inspiration and creativity that goes way beyond their ‘normal’ performance, without losing their very individual way of thinking, beliefs, points of view.
This is experienced by everyone involved as highly engaging and energising.
Experience shows that the ‘unifying field’, the ‘shared pool of meaning’ and the level of engagement experienced lead to self-organising action. Action then hardly needs to be planned (in the traditional sense), coordinated or supervised.
From an effectiveness and time-allocation point of view, Dialogue might seem like a waste of time, with the idea of ‘let's stop talking and get to work’.
Practical experience (in the corporate world) teaches that taking the time to discover ‘the unifying field’ in early stages of an endeavour saves incredible amounts of time and logistic hassles during implementation.
