Section II: What Is Dialogue?
Meditation or warm up exercise
Stages in the evolution of dialogue as plan (Resources B1 and B2)
William Isaacs (1999) claims to be building directly on Bohm's work. He goes into
a many possible techniques and skill sets that can be used to view and enhance
dialogue in a group. He focuses on a four-stage evolutionary-model of a dialogue
(p.242-290):
Stage one is “Shared Monologues” where group members get used to
talking to each other.
Stage two is “Skillful Discussion” where people are learning the skills of
dialogue.
Stage three is “Generative Dialogue,” a special ‘creative’ dialogue Isaacs
seeks for his groups.
Stage four is “Strategic dialogue.” When a generative dialogue is followed
by a strategic dialogue focusing on systems, strategies, functions and tasks to
make the vision come to reality, lasting results can be created. The new
design can create better systems that are capable of remaining viable even
when the outside environments continue to change.
Background
In advocating for mental health transformation, we often focus on a set of
principles of recovery such as self-determination, empowerment, and respect.
These lists have mainly been generated by c/s/x’s who have found them to be vital
to their own recovery. There is a new challenge which arises, however, when we
move outward to the larger world beyond our own individual recovery. There are
new demands in the arena of systems advocacy which we have not encountered in
finding an individual voice in our own lives.
The first important element in expanding from individual to collective advocacy is
how to have a group of us come together and advocate as a unified whole for
particular changes in the system. The second is how our unified group can carry
out the advocacy with a decision making body in the system such as a Department
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of Mental Health or Medicaid. Learning to engage in genuine dialogue may be the
most important next step in this process. The process of dialogue is also vital to the
process of education we want to carry out here and in your own trainings.
Therefore, it is valuable to outline the background of the concept of dialogue.
Whereas Martin Buber and Paolo Freire have contributed to the idea of dialogue, I
will focus on the meaning of the term developed by physicist David Bohm. (I refer
you all to resource paper B2), Bohm states. “No firm rules can be laid down for
conducting a Dialogue because its essence is learning - not as the result of
consuming a body of information or doctrine imparted by an authority, nor as a
means of examining or criticizing a particular theory or program, but rather as part
of an unfolding process of creative participation between peers.” He states that
the crises confronting humans arise from defects in our thought processes. By
thoughts he includes feelings, desires and intentions.
“What is needed is a means by which we can slow down the process of thought in
order to be able to observe it while it is actually occurring.” Bohm states that we
cannot observe the process of thought formation the way we can observe the
movement of our arm through proprioceptive receptors (feedback sensations about
where our arm is in space). “Dialogue is concerned with providing a space within
which such attention [to thought] can be given. It allows a display of thought and
meaning that makes possible a kind of collective proprioception or immediate
mirroring back of both the content of thought and the less apparent, dynamic
structures that govern it. … It [dialogue] creates the opportunity for each
participant to examine the preconceptions, prejudices and the characteristic
patterns that lie behind his or her thoughts, opinions, beliefs and feelings, along
with the roles he or she tends habitually to play. And it offers an opportunity to
share these insights.
“The word ‘dialogue’ derives from two roots: ‘dia’ which means ‘through’ and
‘logos’ which means ‘the word’ or more particularly, ‘the meaning of the word.’
The image it gives is of a river of meaning flowing around and through the
participants. Any number of people can engage in Dialogue - one can even have a
Dialogue with oneself - but the sort of Dialogue that we are suggesting involves a
group of between twenty and forty people seated in a circle talking together. In
other words, what might be called a coherent culture of shared meaning emerged
within the group.
“In an assembly of between twenty and forty people, extremes of frustration,
anger, conflict or other difficulties may occur, but in a group of this size such
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problems can be contained with relative ease. In fact, they can become the central
focus of the exploration in what might be understood as a kind of ‘meta-dialogue,’
aimed at clarifying the process of Dialogue itself.
“Participants find that they are involved in an ever changing and developing pool
of common meaning. A shared content of consciousness emerges which allows a
level of creativity and insight that is not generally available to individuals or to
groups that interact in more familiar ways. This reveals an aspect of Dialogue that
Patrick de Mare has called ‘koinonia,’ a word meaning ‘impersonal fellowship,’
which was originally used to describe the early form of Athenian democracy in
which all the free men of the city gathered to govern themselves.”
Compare Dialogue and Discussion: (see resource B1)
Dialogue
Discussion
Starts with listening
Is about speaking with
Focuses on insights
Is collaborative
Generates ideas
Encourages reflection
Encourages emergence
Starts with speaking
Is about speaking to
Focuses on differences
Is adversarial
Generates conflicts
Encourages quick thinking
Encourages lock-in
Six main ground rules for dialogue:
1. Listen together
“Listening is usually considered a singular activity. But in dialogue, one discovers
a further dimension of listening: the ability not only to listen, but to listen together
as part of a larger whole.”
“The challenge is to become aware of the fact that especially when we try hard to
listen, we will often still have a part of us actively failing to do so. The key is to
simply become aware of this, to make conscious just what we are doing.
Awareness is curative.
2. Respect the person as a whole being
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a. Respect the other. “To be able to see a person as a whole being, we must
learn another central element in the practice of dialogue: respect. Respect is not a
passive act. To respect someone is to look for the springs that feed the pool of their
experience. The word comes from the Latin respecere, which means ‘to look
again.’ Its most ancient roots mean ‘to observe.’ It involves a sense of honoring or
deferring to someone. Where once we saw one aspect of a person, we look again
and realize how much of them we had missed. This second look can let us take in
more fully the fact that here before me is a living, breathing being. When we
respect someone, we accept that they have things to teach us.”
b: Respect differences. “To enable a dialogue, a group of people must [also]
learn to do something different: to respect the polarizations that arise without
making any effort to ‘fix’ them.” In dialogue, one learns that agreement on a
mission or action rarely requires total agreement of perspectives, values and
worldviews.
3. Suspend certainty about our view
“When we listen to someone speak, we face a critical choice. If we begin to form
an opinion we can do one of two things: we can choose to defend our view and
resist theirs. First we can try to get the other person to understand and accept the
“right” way to see things (ours!). We can look for evidence to support our view
that they are mistaken, and discount evidence that may point to flaws in our own
logic.
“Or, we can learn to suspend our opinion and the certainty that lies behind it.
Suspension means that we neither suppress what we think nor advocate it with
unilateral conviction. Rather, we display our thinking in a way that lets us and
others see and understand it. We simply acknowledge and observe our thoughts
and feelings as they arise without being compelled to act on them. This can release
a tremendous amount of creative energy.”
4. Authentic Voicing
“To speak your voice is perhaps one of the most challenging aspects of genuine
dialogue […] Finding your voice in dialogue means learning to ask a simple
question: What needs to be expressed now? For many of us this is no small feat.
We have been inundated with numerous messages about how we ought to behave,
what we ought to say, in all the different circumstances of our lives. To discover
what we think and feel, independent of these things, requires courage. This is true
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in part because our authentic voice is not a rehash of others’ words. So we are
unlikely to find someone else speaking what we ourselves need to say.
5. Heart-to-heart connecting: when connecting either one-on-one or in a group,
am I connecting at my heart as well as my head level. Try to listen with your heart
to what a person may be feeling as well as to their words. This is listening with
your heart.
6. Leave your hat at the door: try to connect with others on their most equally
human level through not identifying with your role or their role. We are all just
passengers on the bus of life. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all
[people] are created equal..."
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