Dialogue: The Emergence of Shared Meaning
By Michael Jones
To appear in New Leaders, July/August 1996. Copyright 1996 by Michael Jones. Reprinted with permission.
"We can sing and dance together, but we cannot think together."
--David Bohm
"There are only two or three human stories," American novelist, Willa Cather, once wrote. "And they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before."
I believe that dialogue - the practice of coming into the circle to listen and think together - is one of those stories. Where discussion is derived from the words dis quatere, meaning to scatter, examine or shake apart, and its companion word, debate is derived from battuere (the same root as dueling), which means to beat down or to do battle with words, dialogue is derived from the ancient root leg which means to collect or speak, as well as from the Germanic word lekjaz - the one who speaks magic words - and most recently from the Greek dia-logos which translates into the flowing through of the word or meaning or relationship.
The story of dialogue originated with small groups of hunter gatherers who formed in circles of conversation around the fires at night to share their stories and dances and songs. The word conversation itself means "to turn together." It involves a forgetting, or a surrendering, of oneself and a reciprocity with the other in order to create a collectively-held space through which another dimension of reality can emerge. A part of what is surrendered is our relationship to memory and conditioned knowledge. In its place, we begin to cultivate a more subtle intelligence that is focused on refining and inquiring into our moment-to-moment perceptions and experiences of what is.
With the exception of the arts, certain spiritual traditions, like the Quakers and cultures who have maintained close connections to their oral tradition, the practice of dialogue became too time consuming and it gradually dropped away. But, as author David Abram reminds us, "Humans are tuned for relationship." Dialogue is a fundamental aspect of who we are. In giving it up, we became separated from an essential aspect of ourselves.
We can awaken it again by slowing down our thinking and allowing ourselves to be more inclusive, fluid and tentative in our thoughts. This, in itself, creates the kind of peripheral vision that allows for the more improvisational and creative dimension of our thinking to emerge.
The practicality of this is implied by Gary Hamel when he says, "The critical lack in businesses today are not resources or strategies, but imagination." The imagination is revitalized by acknowledging the truth of what is real. The new leaders will be those who are able to create spaces and processes for skillful conversation. Through surfacing the underlying images and structures of our thinking, and making the implicit explicit, we create the possibility of re-imagining ourselves, our organizations, and the quality of our work.
Through such practices as listening openly to one another without resistance, of framing questions which lead us in the direction to the mystery rather than to the answers, of following the subtle impulse of our thinking and inquiry, by suspending, examining, and reconsidering the validity of our own assumptions and beliefs and examining many different points of view, and reclaiming our capacity for an immediate and first-hand experience through touch, taste, hearing and sight, we begin to establish a dialogic relationship with our world.
While we belong to organizations, we also belong to a story. The capacity for thinking together is one of those stories. It is both new and also very old. We need to connect again to the underlying narrative that gives form and vitality to our organizations. The stability we seek is not only in our technologies, structures and products, but in the quality of thinking and feeling that is beneath the stories, the images and the values and visions and the thoughts that form us. The story of dialogue has been going on for more than ten thousand years. Its re-emergence may be a signal that the capacity for collective intelligence is the next step in our evolution - and an essential step for the story of our journey together to continue to unfold .
Michael Jones is a Senior Associate with DIA-logos in Cambridge, Massachusetts He is the author of Creating an Imaginative Lifeand is a pianist and founding artist with Narada Productions where he has produced many popular recordings, including Pianoscapes and After the Rain.