DIALOGUE: A DIFFERENT MODE OF COMMUNICATING AND RELATING
What is dialogue? Hear the voices of those who have been prominent in addressing that question.
William Isaacs, lecturer at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and president of DIAlogos, a consulting and leadership education firm, says in his book Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together - an “approach to communicating in business and in life”:
Writing a book about dialogue is in some respects a contradiction in terms.
Dialogue, as I define it here, is about a shared inquiry, a way of thinking and reflecting together. It is not something you do to another person. It is something you do with people. Indeed, a large part of learning this has to do with learning to shift your attitudes about relationships with others, so that we gradually give up the effort to make them understand us, and come to a greater understanding of ourselves and each other (Isaacs, 1999: 9).Daniel Yankelovich, one of the leading analysts of how citizens come to public judgment in the United States, says in The Magic ofDialogue:
In philosopher Martin Buber's classic work I and Thou, Buber suggests that in authentic dialogue something far deeper than ordinary conversation goes on. The I-Thou interaction implies a genuine openness of each to the concerns of the other. In such dialogue, "I" do not, while talking with you, selectively tune out views with which I disagree, nor do I busy myself marshaling arguments to rebut you while only half attending to what you have to say, nor do I seek to reinforce my own prejudices. Instead, I fully 'take in' your viewpoint, engaging with it in the deepest sense of the term. You do likewise. Each of us internalizes the views of the other to enhance our mutual understanding.
To Buber we owe the stunning insight that, apart from its obvious practical value (most problem solving demands mutual understanding), dialogue expresses an essential aspect of the human spirit.
Buber knew that dialogue is a way of being.... In dialogue, we penetrate behind the polite superficialities and defenses in which we habitually armor ourselves. We listen and respond to one another with an authenticity that forges a bond between us.In this sense, dialogue is a process of successful relationship building (Yankelovich, 1999: 14-15).
David Bohm, a British physicist and philosopher, who late in life turned his attention to the role of dialogue in human relationships, defines dialogue by contrasting it with other ways of talking:
Contrast dialogue with the word 'discussion' which has the same root as 'percussion' and 'concussion.' It really means to break things up. It emphasizes the idea of analysis, where there may be many points of view, and where everybody is presenting a different one—analyzing and breaking up. Discussion is almost like a ping-pong game, where people are batting the ideas back and forth and the object of the game is to win or to get points for yourself (Bohm, 1996: 6-7).
In dialogue, by contrast, minds open to take in new ideas and perspectives, modify earlier assumptions, and rethink judgments. Again, David Bohm says:
. consider a dialogue.when one person says something, the other person does not in general respond with exactly the same meaning as that seen by the first person. Rather, the meanings are only similar and not identical. Thus, when the second person replies, the first person sees a difference between what he meant to say and what the other person understood. On considering this difference, he may then be able to see something new, which is relevant both to his own views and to those of the other person. And so it can go back and forth, with the continual emergence of a new content that is common to both participants. Thus in a dialogue, each person does not attempt to make common certain ideas or items of information that are already known to him. Rather, it may be said that the two people are making something in common, i.e.
creating something new together (Bohm, 1996: 2).Harold Saunders in A Public Peace Process: Sustained Dialogue to Transform Racial and Ethnic Conflicts writes:
Dialogue is a process of genuine interaction through which human beings listen to each other deeply enough to be changed by what they learn. Each makes a serious effort to take others' concerns into her or his own picture even when disagreement persists. No participant gives up her or his identity, but each recognizes enough of the other's valid human claims that he or she will act differently toward the other (Saunders, 1999: 82).
In debate, one’s purpose is to make one’s viewpoint prevail, so one listens to other positions only to identify shortcomings in the argument so as to attack them. In dialogue, one’s purpose is quite different - to listen to others’ views while suspending judgment, recognizing that others’ views may deepen one’s own thinking and that two sides together may move more deeply toward common ground. Debate entrenches narrow views while dialogue opens minds to new and better approaches.
The aim of negotiation and mediation is a formal, written agreement. The objective of dialogue is a changed relationship. “The currency of negotiation is defining and satisfying material interests through specific jointly agreed arrangements. The outcome of dialogue is to create new human and political capacities to solve problems. Negotiation requires parties who are ready to reach agreement. Dialogue can be made fruitful by involving parties who are not yet ready for negotiation but do not want a destructive relationship to continue. Negotiation deals with goods that can be divided, shared, or defined in tangible ways. Dialogue may change relationships in ways that create new grounds for mutual respect and collaboration” (Saunders, 1999: 85).
Useful handbooks are written and training workshops conducted to convey the philosophy, the art, and the practice of dialogue in communities. One such is The Little Book of Dialogue for Difficult Subjects by David Campt and Lisa Schirch, one of a series of short books on various aspects of conflict transformation published by the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding at Eastern Mennonite University (Schirch and Campt, 2007).
They address the role of dialogue organizer, dialogue designer, and dialogue facilitator. They treat the importance of presenting the purpose of a dialogue in a way that makes it relevant to the community; the need to recruit diverse participants so that all significant facets of a problem will be introduced into the dialogue; and the value of thinking through in advance how to create not just a physical space but a relational space in which participants will feel safe in opening up their deeper feelings. They stress the need to establish ground rules to govern interactions in the dialogue; to design opening questions that will decrease anxiety among participants as they introduce themselves and enhance the sense that this is a space where all will be fairly heard - both majority and minority or both sides of a conflict; to design follow-up questions to encourage sharing of experiences and perceptions and to explore differences and commonalities; and eventually perhaps to explore possible action once relationships have begun to change through the dialogue. “Building relationships across lines of division and increasing understanding of a situation can help people see what needs to be done to address the issue and find ways to work together” (Schirch and Campt, 2007: 55). They also devote a chapter to key tasks of the facilitator in pressing participants to deeper and deeper levels of probing the meaning of interactions. They outline the phases through which a dialogue process might evolve.
The differences between uses and users of dialogue reflect how deeply they need or choose to go in dealing with the problem or conflict they face. They reflect the nature of the conflict faced. One user may need to go no further than to help a group faced with a divisive issue to step back, get angry thoughts off their chests, recover mutual respect, and gain some perspective and composure so they can talk through the issue in a calmer and more constructive way. Another user may be faced with groups who harbor decades if not centuries of anger, pain, and grievance toward each other, have been killing each other, have occupied the other's land, have desecrated historic and personal shrines or monuments.
Still another may face people who do not act violently toward each other but who are nevertheless so deeply alienated from one another that, though they may work together in mutual civility within formal structures, deeply rooted resentment, even anger or hatred, blocks willing collaboration outside formal social or economic structures that require it.While distinctions between the two users will inevitably blur, it seems fair to say that somewhere along the path, some users cross a vague line. On the near side of the line, the user is primarily working among people who can talk reasonably together to improve communication in ways that will reduce tension and enable the parties to perform necessary tasks together. This might or might not be called conflict resolution. On the farther side of the line, the user will find people in such deeply conflictual relationships that they are barely able to look at each other, much less talk together constructively or at least people who viscerally resent and mistrust each other. They will be able to do so only when they clear their minds of anger and learn to listen to each other with some empathy - a capacity that may take a long time, patience, and work to develop.
In the first case, the challenge is to improve the quality of communication. In the second, the challenge is to begin transforming relationships that are the cause of destructively suppressed or openly deadly conflict. More subtly in the second case, a conflict may not be so obvious on the surface, but it is intense and deep-rooted enough to block genuine collaboration even though a civil veneer may hide seething feelings underneath.
The latter case may be exemplified by race relations in many communities in the United States where citizens of different racial and ethnic backgrounds work together each day, but each night they go home to their own neighborhoods, social groups, and cultures and rarely interact. They may be exemplified by racial, ethnic, or religious differences that separate people in regions all over the world.
As the leader of a US organization formed in the 1970s said in the early 1990s: “Our organization was formed in the 1970s to improve race relations in this [southern] city. We have worked together and have done a lot of good work to improve interactions in this community. But underneath, I’m not sure how much fundamental relations have changed. I guess we have pursued a strategy of, ‘Do it but don’t talk about it’.”What distinguishes dialogue as a process for conflict resolution is the space and encouragement it provides to talk deeply over time about dangerously divisive elements in a relationship. These elements may be carefully hidden in order to permit civil relations without removing deeply embedded grievance that blocks willing collaboration, or they may lead to open violence.
However deeply the user may feel the need to go in probing the roots of conflict, whether subterranean or violent, it is important to recognize the profound philosophical bond between dialogue and relationship.
Asystematic, intentional effort to transform relationship is a significant factor in defining a dialogue process as an instrument in conflict resolution. Dialogue itself is at the heart of relationship. As Martin Buber has told us, dialogue is the medium through which relationship is experienced. Dialogue creates a common body of knowledge - not only knowledge of what the other thinks but of why the other thinks that way. To quote Bohm again:
[We] realize what is on each other's minds without coming to any conclusions or judgments.... We...weigh...the question a little, ponder it a little, feel it out.. If we can see what all of our opinions mean, then we are sharing a common content, even if we don't agree entirely.. Accordingly, a different kind of consciousness is possible among us, a participatory consciousness.. We would be taking part and communicating and creating a common meaning.. Society is based on shared meanings, which constitute the culture (1996: 20-21, 26, 28).
In dialogue, thought and communication are often at the tacit level; fundamental change will come at that level.