Dialogue: The Art Of Thinking Together

411 Pages·2010·1.72 MB·English

by  Peter M. Senge, William Isaacs

Contents

Foreword
Introduction: The Fire of Conversation

PART I: WHAT IS DIALOGUE?

1. A Conversation with a Center, Not Sides
2. Why We Think Alone and What We Can Do About It
3. The Timeless Way of Conversation

PART II: BUILDING CAPACITY FOR NEW BEHAVIOR

4. Listening
5. Respecting
6. Suspending
7. Voicing

PART III: PREDICTIVE INTUITION

8. Patterns of Action
9. Overcoming Structural Traps

PART IV: ARCHITECTURE OF THE INVISIBLE

10. Setting the Container
11. Fields of Conversation

12. Convening Dialogue
13. The Ecology of Thought

PART V: WIDENING THE CIRCLE

14. Dialogue and the New Economy
15. Cultivating Organizational and System Dialogue
16. Dialogue and Democracy
17. Taking Wholeness Seriously
Notes
Appendix: Diagrams

For

Jody
and
Sam

Acknowledgments

No serious book simply arrives fully born. It is forged, some would say

squeezed, out of the very marrow of one's psyche. This book has been no
exception. I have been blessed to have had the assistance of many people
over the years in this process, and in fact would have been unable to
succeed without them. Acknowledging them is both a great pleasure and
something of a risk, since one is inevitably unaware of all the contributions
that have actually shaped one's life and work.

The most important statement I think I could make here is to

acknowledge that there is a growing community of people around the world
who have both a commitment to and real capacity for living the ideas
represented in this book. Their contributions where they are will in the end
be far more significant than any words in any book. As we cross the
threshold to a new millennium, I am encouraged to know of many who are
endeavoring both to reshape the institutions of the industrial age, and to
bring new music into the world, and who have an increasingly conscious
perspective on the changes required of all of us.

First, David Bohm's ideas, and perhaps even more important, his

extraordinary and often breathtaking capacity for genuine inquiry, have
shaped all aspects of this book. Sarah Bohm unwaveringly fostered the
spirit of dialogue for me and many others. Martin Exeter set a standard of
spiritual character that made undeniably visible the wholeness many only
speak about. David Kantor has been a colleague, mentor, and friend for a
decade. He has contributed in numerous ways to my thinking process and
theory development. In my work I have tried to incorporate something of
what remains most impressive in this man: his extraordinary capacity as an
interventionist to help human beings to untie their own knots and liberate
themselves. His compassionate ability on this score remains unparalleled,
and is I believe an essential feature for enabling genuine dialogue.

Chris Argyris and Donald Schön taught me a great deal about the

pervasive and self-defeating habits of action in human beings. Their work
on conversation remains the gold standard of rigor in this domain. Peter
Senge has been a friend and colleague for many years now too. He is a
remarkable learner, and has a powerful ability to generate insights and
communicate them in a way that allows many others to prosper. I want to
thank him for his Foreword, and for his steady support and encouragement
of both my work and this field. Ed Schein has also been a close friend and
ally for many years now. Ed's comments and reading of the manuscript
were of great value. In many ways my work stands on the shoulders of such
giants as him, one whose clarity of thought and insight about what is
valuable for human beings gave dialogue a needed boost at a critical
moment.

Several colleagues have provided enormous help in the development of

many of the ideas here. Peter Garrett has been a friend and colleague for
some twenty years now. His partnership and originality of thought greatly
helped David Bohm, and greatly helped me. He has made a significant
contribution to the formulation of the principles of dialogue. And his
inspired hand and lucid mind can be felt in virtually every other idea here.

Michael Jones brought a fierce and gende determination to keep the

awareness of beauty before us all. Mitch Saunders' friendship and creative
wisdom provided an enormously potent field within which this work could
form. Barbara Coflman facilitated some of the first dialogue sessions we
held in the United States, and provides exemplary leadership in this field.
Otto Scharmer has developed a fine theory of communication and field
development that dovetails with my own work and greatly enriched it.

Diana Smith has been a steady inspiration to me, encouraging me to be

true to my own voice. David Skaggs contributed much perspective for the
section on dialogue and democracy. Mark Gerzon's reading of the
manuscript pointed me in the right direction and greatly assisted in helping
this book come to clarity. Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps offered
helpful and genuine encouragement. Bruce Allyn offered helpful advice and
assistance in the section on the Hague Initiative, as well as being a friend
and support for the overall journey. Chris Thorsen and Richard Moon have
pioneered in the realm of physical analogues for dialogue, bringing aikido
and dialogue together. They offered many helpful insights. Glennifer
Gillespie and Beth Jandernoa have nurtured both me and this book. Danah
Zohar inspired me to keep going, and provided genuine intellectual
companionship. Diana and Jon Guilbert's dear friendship, vision, and

straightforward feedback are a lifeline and source of real strength. Daniel
Kim of Pegasus Communications has been a colleague and voice of
encouragement for some years too, always encouraging me to take the next
risk.

Cliff Barry and Mary Ellen Blandford have been immensely helpful to

me over the years as both friends and advisors. Their thinking about
intrapersonal structures and their skill in releasing the inner circuitry that
keeps people stuck are both stunning and extraordinary; they have
transformed my life and energized the thinking in this book.

Many people participated in The Dialogue Project at MIT, where this

book got its start. I want to thank all of those who played their parts in this.
Larraine Matusak championed the work at the Kellogg Foundation. Many
people have been blessed by her vision, and I feel especially fortunate on
this score. The Organizational Learning Center at MIT provided a safe
haven for the project. Many people within the Center actively helped with
the project, especially Jeff Clanon, Vicki Tweiten, Jean MacDonald,
Angela Lipinski, Jane Punchard, and George Roth. Their support and
interest continue within the Society for Organizational Learning. Mary
Fewel Tulin and Uli Dettling played important roles in shaping the dialogue
research. Mary Ellen Hynes, Michelle Martin, and Nina Kruschwitz all ably
administered the project and acted as the glue that held it all together.

The Dialogue Facilitator Group was the seedbed for many of these ideas.

These people are exemplars of this work in the world, and include: Juanita
Brown, Sarita Chawla, Barbara Coffman, Freeman Dhority, John Gray,
Robert Hanig, Sue Miller Hurst, Ron and Susan Kertzner, Nomatemba
Luhabe, Harold Massey, Ken Murphy, Marilyn Paul, Agota Rusza, and
Mitch Saunders.

The team at DIAlogos has had enormous patience and been deeply

committed to sustaining our business and keeping the spirit of it alive, even
though I was often absent from it. Sabra Dalby's large heart and meticulous
spirit nurtured and sustained us all. Joan Wickizer ran our office in ways
that I still marvel at. B. C. Huselton was one of the early pioneers in the
dialogue work while he was with Armco. He has been a constant and dear
friend for many years, a determined strategist and an able representative of
this work. I also want to thank Janet Gould, Carmen Barmakian, Eric
DeLuca, Kate Pugh, Tiffany Roach, and Kristin Collins for their generosity
and commitment.

The graduates of DIA ·logos's educational and leadership development

programs have been enormously influential. They provided the living

laboratory from which many others will benefit. Pam Paquin and Wendy
MacPhedran both provided fine logistical support and authentic
encompassment of the people who came through our doors.

Many more people than I can name, in many organizations around the

world, have provided strong encouragement, access, resources, and time,
enabling the dialogue work to proceed. Especially helpful have been Fred
Simon and Nick Zeniuk, formerly of Ford Motor Company, David Marsing
of Intel, Rob Cushman of GS Industries, Linda Pierce, Tom Ryan, Bill
McQuillan, Jim Tebbe, and Beth Macy of Shell Oil (Company, Rick
Canada of Motorola, Steven Olthof and all my friends at KPMG
Netherlands, Rolf Lindholm, Sven Atterhed, Emily Bliss, Roger Martin,
Mark Fuller of Monitor Company, and Lisa Cheraskin and Bob Kelly from
Eli Lilly.

John Cottrell, then president of the United Steelworkers of America

Local #13, is a true leader and good friend, who sustained genuine support
and modeled authentic inquiry throughout the process. I want also to thank
the whole Executive Board of Local #13, who provided such genuine,
powerful, and committed participation to this work. Many people have
learned from and have been blessed by what they achieved.

Sister Lynn Casey and Barbara Sowada had the courage and vision to

bring dialogue to Grand Junction, inspired by the vision of a truly
compassionate healthcare system. Barbara Coffinan, Mitch Saunders, and
John Gray, with the assistance of Elna Stockton and Uli Dettling, were the
facilitators and researchers of the project, and provided able leadership for
it. Diane Weston wrote a wonderful reflection on the project which proved
quite helpful here. Many people in Grand Junction worked hard to sustain
and deepen this project, far more than I can name here, including Denny
Stahl, Roger Zumwalt, Mike Weber, Paul Curly, Bruce Ward, Greg Omura,
Denny Hartshorn, Bernadette Prinster, Tish Wells, and Sally Schaefer.

All the participants in the Boston Urban Dialogue gave us many insights

into the nature of dialogue and the challenges of bringing it into social
contexts. Freeman Dhority and Ron and Susan Kertzner provided powerful
leadership for this process.

Harriet Rubin in many ways started this process by suggesting I write

something about dialogue. She awakened my voice, steered me away from
the rocks, and continued to speak the rude truth about my work, in a way
which was enormously helpful. Roger Scholl at Doubleday took over from
Harriet, and has brought an honesty and clarity to this work that has made it
far stronger and more valuable. I am grateful for his tutelage. Stephanie

Rosenfeld has capably managed many of the details of this project. Arthur
Klebanoff, my agent, kept my perspective wide about the process and its
potentials.

Tom Ehrenfeld provided valuable encouragement and help along the

way. Cliff Penwell gave a careful reading of the manuscript, improving it at
many points. Marietta Whittlesey read the manuscript and offered valuable
input. Others who read drafts and offered vital support include Jim Cutter,
Amy Edmondson, B. C. and Kaaren Huselton, Bill McQuillan.

Art Kleiner deserves very special mention. Art is a combination wizard,

immensely talented writer, honest critic, brilliant editor, and genuine friend.
He has helped me at every stage of this process, and been a remarkable
support. One simply could not ask for or receive more.

My parents Jed and Susan Isaacs have been indefatigable fans and

loving, ever present supporters, as have my brother John Isaacs and sister
Jane Isaacs Schoenholtz and their families.

My wife, Jody Isaacs, has provided the kind of tender and insightful help

and understanding that are truly rare commodities. She has endured much
and offered a liveliness and joy into the field in which I have worked that
the reader will surely feel. Without her this book, quite simply, would not
exist. Finally I want to thank Sam, whose first three years of life coincided
with the creation of this book. He has brought more perspective than
anyone. His tender curiosity constantly inspired me to get down to cases,
overcome the obscurity, and say what I meant. This book is for his
generation and for the leadership that is so evidently emerging from it.

Cambridge, May 1999

Foreword

Several years ago, after a speech to a large group in Silicon Valley, I

was asked to meet with a group of about twenty-five executives, mostly
CEOs and executive VPs. Rather than present more, or have a question and
answer session, I suggested that we put our chairs in a circle and do a
“check-in.” This is one of the simplest practices of dialogue, going around
the circle and saying a few words about whatever thoughts and feelings are
moving in me at the moment. The first several people made more or less
perfunctory statements, expressing questions or commenting on the oddity
of not sitting in the familiar “classroom” seating arrangement. Then one
man said, “I think I know what this is about,” and told a story.

He spoke of a camping trip he had taken the prior summer with his two

teenage sons in the Sierra Nevada mountains. He said that, while they were
there, he wasn't entirely sure how much his sons were enjoying the trip. It
seemed like they complained a lot, about not being able to listen to their
music, or use their computers, or call their friends. Then, several months
after they returned, his sixteen-year old asked, “Dad, do you remember the
camping trip we took last summer?” “Yes, I do,” he responded. “You know
the part I liked best,” the son continued. “What was that?” he asked.
“Well,” the son continued, “it was in the evenings—when we would sit and
talk with one another.“

From that point onward, the “check-in” among the group of executives

became quite different. One after another told stories of heart and meaning.
It seemed that everyone understood what was happening and what was
expected. Some of the stories were simple, some more involved. Some
people posed deep questions, questions which reflected core struggles in
their lives. Others talked about issues that confronted them in their work
and in their organizations—or in their families. It didn't really seem to
matter what the specifics were. Everyone seemed to understand the

opportunity present, the opportunity to reflect and to be heard, and to reflect
further on what it meant to be heard. We spent the rest of the meeting
simply going around the circle. Nothing else seemed quite so important.

It was only a few generations ago that, as people grew older, they did so

with the idea that personal maturation had a lot to do with developing one's
abilities in “the art of conversation.” Although this was a fairly recent time,
it seems very distant to us today. It was a time when the pace of life was
different. It was a time when, with the day's work done, people sat and
talked. It was a time when oral tradition was still alive, and the telling of
old stories had not yet passed from day-to-day living. It was also a time
when life and relationships still revolved around making meaningful and
simple connections with one another.

Of course, these simple practices go back for a very long time. Few

practices seem to lie more at the heart of human communities than talking
and telling the old stories. As far as I know, no indigenous culture has yet
been found that does not have the practice of sitting in a circle and talking.
Whether it be council circles, or women's circles, or circles of elders, it
seems to be one of the truly universal practices among humankind. As
commonly expressed in Native American Indian cultures, “You talk and
talk until the talk starts/'

The very word dialogue and its etymology invites us to contemplate this

ancient knowing. The ancient Greeks were perhaps the last western culture
to have preserved this idea in the advent of the agricultural revolution,
emergence of city states, and modern ways of organizing society. For the
Greeks, dia · logos, flow of meaning, was seen as a cornerstone of civic
practice, inseparable from self-governing. The polis or gathering place for
governing, the root of our modern politics, was nothing but a physical space
that designated and enabled the conversational space required for true self-
governing. The capacity for talking together constituted the foundation for
democracy, far more fundamental than voting. As one ancient Greek
philosopher noted, “When voting started, democracy ended.“

In a sense we are running an historic social experiment today. We are

experimenting with whether or not a society can hold itself together without
the core process that has always bound societies, the process of
conversation.

Since 1990, when the community of organizations, consultants, and

researchers that has become the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL)
first formed, we have had ample opportunity to experiment with
reestablishing dialogue as a core process in self-governing within large

institutions. Bill Isaacs has directed this research, working with many
colleagues to establish experiments within both businesses, nonprofit
organizations, and diverse community groups. Some of these experiments
have failed in the sense of establishing dialogue as an ongoing process.
Some have succeeded, often beyond our highest expectations. And of
course, it was exactly this variety of outcomes that forced Bill and his
colleagues to ask, “What seems to differentiate among these situations?”
“What do we not yet see that is at play when people attempt to truly talk
together?“ Gradually, a body of knowledge began to take shape, the gist of
which is contained within the following pages.

Bill invites us to think about dialogue on many levels, starting with

observable behaviors, the basics of listening and respecting one another, of
suspending one's views and voicing. But what makes these new behaviors
possible is not simply trying to act differently. New behaviors that last
come from new ways of seeing, from new awarenesses and sensibilities.
Here something quite unexpected can happen, a deep movement within us
that eventually opens up vistas of subtle dynamics to which most of us most
of the time are blind.

For example, Bill introduces the “four-player model,” a system for

understanding the structures that lie behind group behavior, first developed
by family systems therapist David Kantor. The dynamics of “movers,
opposers, followers, and bystanders” not only characterizes a field of
interdependent actions, they point to interdependent roles we tacitly assume
—traditionally known as sovereign, warrior, lover, and magician. The
interplay of these archetypal roles have inspired great stories, like the tales
of King Arthur's Round Table, for a very long time. Viewed from the
perspective of dialogue, an interesting finding emerged: a healthy “ecology
of thought” is characterized by the presence of all four roles. In other
words, there need to be followers—“I support this idea;”—just as much as
there need to be movers; but there also need to be opposers—“I do not
agree, and let me explain why;”— just as there need to be bystanders
—“Here is how I am hearing where we seem to be going.” Moreover, in a
genuine dialogue, these are not static roles. Rather, people more or less
naturally take on new roles as needed when they sense the need for a shift
of energy in the conversation. By contrast most of our workplace
conversations are characterized by rigid roles: by all movers, pushing past
one another to champion their views; by disabled bystanders, paralyzed at
not being able to bring their voice; or by cowed followers, fearful of
offering anything but the meekest agreement to the voices of authority.

Gradually, Bill takes us still deeper, to consider the “architecture of the

invisible,” a subtle world of forces born of intention and awareness. Here,
we begin to see conversation as a kind of “aperture” through which social
realities unfold. The physicist David Bohm used to say that the tree does
not grow from the seed. It is ludicrous to say the tiny seed produces the
immense oak tree. Rather, Bohm suggested, the seed is a kind of aperture
through which the tree gradually emerges. In a sense, it organizes the
processes of growth which eventually create the tree. Just so, our
conversations organize the processes and structures which shape our
collective futures. The nature of the aperture rests in the spirit that shapes
the undertaking.

These are unusual subjects for a “management book,” but this is an

unusual management book. For a very long time, our work within the SoL
community has been guided by a simple premise that breakthroughs in
human functioning will be required to build organizations that can thrive in
the world of growing turbulence and interdependence the twenty-first
century is bringing. Moreover, we have found again and again that these
breakthroughs are both deeply personal and deeply systemic. I can think of
no other book that lays bare this seeming paradox more elegantly and more
usefully.

And I am no longer concerned, as I once was, that readers will find this

material impractical. When the in-depth dialogue research began, I was a
bit worried. The people with whom these projects were carried out were
practical people, line managers, executives, and staff mostly coming from
Fortune 100 companies. Dialogue seemed esoteric by contrast to the
demands of their jobs. It was hard to imagine engineers sitting in tribal
circles. Plus, there was so much to learn about how to develop dialogue and
the individual and collective capabilities it demanded.

While I was right to anticipate the challenges, what I did not expea was

the impact. In almost every setting where practices of dialogue have
become embedded and part of everyday routines, the ensuing changes have
become irreversible, as near as I can tell. People do not go back. They may
practice “check-ins” or they may not. They may sit in circles without tables
or they may not. They may use “talking stones” or other objects passed
person to person in order to slow the pace of conversation or they may not.
All these are artifacts, and the artifacts shift as circumstances shift. But
once people rediscover the art of talking together, they do not go back. This
rediscovery seems to awaken something deep within us, some recognition
of what we have lost as our societies have drifted away from the core