Dialogue and Social Change

The Process and Potential of Dialogue in Social Change

William Isaacs

Full citation: Isaacs, W.N. (1996, January-February). The process and potential of dialogue in social change. Educational Technology, 20-30.

Dialogue

Dialogue is a unique form of conversation with potential to improve collective inquiry processes, to produce coordinated action among collectives, and to bring about genuine social change. Dialogue involves the free flow of meaning. Isaacs directs the Dialogue Project at MIT. It focuses on developing an approach to enable groups of people to disidentify with polarized positions and engage in critical, collective inquiry into their underlying assumptions and tacitly held views. This critical step is called "creating a container" for dialogue.

Definition by David Bohm: "dialogue is a sustained, mindful inquiry into the processes, certainties and structures underlying human thought and action.

Isaacs thinks of dialogue as the creation of tangible, self-organizing, charged "fields" of new meaning in which profound collective insight and reorientation appear, and out of which people can take aligned and effective action. In studying dialogue, they find that the process of dialogue seems to involve shifts in the very ground on which people stand, transforming and expanding their sense of self, and deepening their capacity to hear and inquire into perspectives vastly different from their own.

Emergent themes

Dialogue is a cornerstone for "organizational learning", a field that managers and leaders throughout the world are actively pursuing in efforts to redesign their organizations.
Dialogue appears to be a powerful way of harnessing the inherent self-organizing collective intelligence of groups of people and of both broadening and deepening the collective inquiry process.
Dialogue may be an important breakthrough in the way human beings might govern themselves, whether in private or public domains.
Dialogue may be an innovative alternative approach to producing coordinated action among collections of people.

Tacit knowledge and fragmentation in thought

The knowledge people use to think collectively is tacit. These ways of thinking govern how we formulate our views, deal with differences, pay attention, and make causal connections. These tacit influences govern the ways people perceive the world and take action in it. Mostly, it leads us to perceive the world as fragmented. Like Wheatley and Bohm, Isaacs looks at the world from a "quantum wholeness" perspective, in which what you see is a function of the way in which you try to perceive reality. Dialogue uses difference and conflict that arises out of the differences in people's perceptions to create opportunities for learning and the rediscovery of inherent wholeness.

Fragmentation of tacit thought

Tacit thought is fragmented in five ways. It is the habit of thought that reduces the world into parts (reductionist approach).

Objectification: applying labels or categories leads to a general tendency for people to conceptualize interpretations and then project them as objects outside of themselves.
Independence: this is the inability of thought to connect its movement to consequences. It blurs the connection between the conscious acknowledgement of external objects and the thought prcesses that take unrepresented sensation and convert this into the perception of external objects. (cf. Allen & Otto, who feel that this connection takes place at the boundary between the individual mind and the environment)
Literalness: this is the notion that thought presents experience as literally what is there. NO! The mind has a foggy filter that colors the incoming perceptions.
Rigidity: people adopt rigid interpretations of various facets of their own experience, demonstrating mechanistic, predictable, habitual interactions and an inability to improvise (rigid mindsets).
Violence. By seeking to impose our own logical order, instead of attending to the nature of the order or lack thereof tht is already present, we commit a subtle form of violence in thought. Our thought seeks to alter something that it is itself part of, rather than creating sensitive and intelligent inquiry.

Fragmented face-to-face patterns

These tacit dimensions of thought interact with the manner in which people interact with each other face to face.

"Hot inquiry": this is like a discussion, in which people try to break things apart to study them. It is in contrast to an inquiry ("cool inquiry") where there is a flow of meaning or a dialogue.
Polarization: this is generally unwished for conflict between opposing points of view, with little or now means of inquiring into the extremes. It leads to factionization. Such thought creates "necessity" (to be right), and then acts to defend itself against evidence that it may be wrong. It is the exact opposite of progressive discourse.
Immunity to changes in self-image: this is systematic resistance to self-reflection and lack of skepticism about the viewpoints that people bring to their experience.

Containers and fields of dialogue

The field of dialogue is the environment of collective attention, identity image, and dynamic movement of tacit thought in which these are contained. This field contains and mediates the other levels of observable action in the system. It is related to culture, but is more similar to an electromagnetic field.
The container is a setting where the quality of collective attention can be focused, so that habits of projection and reaction can be systematicaly observed and inquired into.

Attention

There are two kinds of attention people may use to support inquiry:

Reflection--or reflection-in-action--is based in memory, in processing images and information that occured in the past.
Proprioception--or self-perception--implies a kind of on-line awareness that is not memory-based.

In dialogue, we seek to cultivate both levels of awareness, i.e., to be aware of what one is doing as one is doing it.

The field model

Isaacs sees the dynamics of the field of dialogue as a feedback loop between face-to-face interactions and steering mechanisms.

The face-to-face level of interaction concerns the processes of live engagement around difficult issues--the moves people make, levels of abstraction with which they think, the reasoning they use, the quality of inquiry they impart.
Steering mechanisms are the routines by which a system seeks to govern itself--the policies, procedures, and behaviors that it uses to navigate the substantive concerns it faces. They are not located in any one person, place, or thing, but are total patterns of operation.

These face-to-face structures and the steering mechanisms interact. Often, they lock people into a rigid form of behavior that is self-defeating.

Transforming the field over time

There are four phases that describe the development of the field over time:

Instability of the container: members are in an "initiatory crisis" with no decisions, no purpose, no leader, and no agenda. They are concerned with safety and trust.
Instability in the container: members strruggle with polarization and conflict springing from fragmentation, a clash of personally held beliefs and assumptions. A crisis of suspension results, and gradually menbers attempt to suspend personal assumptions publicly, to keep the dialogue going.
Inquiry in the container: member are able to inquire into polarization and foreign ideas without taking divisive action on them. They concentrate on the disconnections within the group.
Creativity in the container: members begin to think generatively, and new understandings based on collective perception emerge.

Praxis

The authors have initiated three long-term research sites in which they developed their theory in different settings and with different facilitators. They identified several critical elements, crises, and emotions that characterize each of these stages in the dialogue process:

x	instability of the container	instability in the container	inquiry in the container	creativity in the container
core elements	incoherence, paradigm clash	search for new rules and new language	flow of meaning and insight	conscious emergence of collective mind
crises	individual suspension of viewpoint	collective suspension of viewpoint	facing consequences of fragmentation	none
emotion	grief	anger	fear	joy

Conclusions

There is enormous transformative power in dialogue as its nature and impact begin to be understood. New levels of dialogue can produce new levels of coordinated action.

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Lorraine Sherry
lsherry@carbon.cudenver.edu
Created Octover 20, 1996