The Dialogue Project Annual Report 1993-94
William N. Isaacs
The MIT Center for Organizational Learning
The MIT Center for Organizational Learning
Table of Contents:
II. Progress Towards Goals 1993-94
This report summarizes the principle findings and activities in
the first two years of work at The Dialogue Project at MIT. It
also marks the completion of our initial funding cycle from the
W.K. Kellogg Foundation. The Dialogue Project was brought into
existence as a result of this generous grant and produced some
significant results in its first two years. Among other things,
we see ourselves participating in and contributing to the emergence
of a potent new field of endeavor. We have also been sobered by
our realizations concerning how little we yet understand about
this process, and about the unpredictable effects and dilemmas
that dialogic inquiry can bring to social systems, as people engage
in inquiry into their fundamental assumptions. For instance on
the one hand, we have found that dialogue brings people more closely
together and enables them to learn to reason and think together;
on the another hand, we have seen that the dissolution of boundaries
and the reframing of old problems can be deeply threatening and
destabilizing.
The overall intent of this project was to explore the validity
of dialogue, and to contribute to the development of practical
knowledge about it. In this regard. the two year grant cycle has
been a genuine success; our project is increasingly viewed as
one of the world's leading authorities on dialogue and on its
application in practical settings.
We can characterize the impact of the work by describing four
central themes that have emerged as dominant as we reflect on
dialogue and its role in the world: (l) dialogue is being reported
and seems to be emerging as a cornerstone for "organizational
learning," a field that managers and leaders throughout the
world are actively pursuing in efforts to redesign their organizations;
(2) 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;
(3) dialogue shows possibilities for being an important breakthrough
in the way human beings might govern themselves, whether in public
or private domains; and (4) dialogue shows promise as an innovative
alternative approach to producing coordinated action among collectives.
Together these themes suggest a broad landscape of potential research
and practical action. They also suggest some powerful and potentially
radical possibilities for leaders, managers, and change agents,
in the public and private spheres, as they consider strategies
for change and transformation.
Underscored in our awareness is the realization that dialogue
is not "mere talk". Dialogue must be distinguished from
ordinary forms of conversation. While the term "dialogue"
is ubiquitous, what we have come to mean by it is practiced relatively
rarely. and often more by chance than by design. Much of what
is called dialogue at the UN. for example, or across negotiating
tables, is rarely or never dialogue according to our definition.
Such exchanges involve a trading off of views and positions, a
discussion where the effort is to win and avoid losing. The experience
is little different when groups of people in almost any setting
seek to talk together seriously. People fear being judged inadequate
by their "tribe". tend to hold and defend non-negotiable
positions, play habitual roles, act in a polarized fashion, press
for conformity and seek to avoid losing face. All of this prevents
dialogue -- the free flow of meaning. One reason for this is that
people bring a wide and diverse range of assumptions and tacit
ways of understanding the world to any conversation. More critically,
they tend to identify themselves with these tacit assumptions,
and so defend them if challenged, even if there is evidence to
suggest they need not or that the effect of doing so is counterproductive.
Our work has focused 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.
Several definitions of dialogue have emerged in our work. We still
find merit in each of them. Initially drawing on the work by physicist
David Bohm, we defined dialogue as "a sustained, mindful
inquiry into the processes, certainties and structures underlying
human thought and action." We also held that dialogue, as
Martin Buber did, consisted of a genuine meeting between people
"who express themselves without reserve and are free of the
desire for semblance." Under these conditions, said Buber,
More recently we have come to think 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. We have begun to operationalize this notion of a "field"
by assessing observable changes in the nature of collective attention,
shared inquiry, collectively held assumptions, and individual
and collective reasoning processes and behaviors. Our initial
findings suggest that the process of dialogue seems to enable
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. And finally now we are also seeing dialogue as a discipline
of collective inquiry, distinct from the valuable yet individually
focused learning processes that populate the fields of conflict
resolution, mediation, organizational development, therapy, and
even "team building."
This work seems to have particular relevance in organizational
settings, where efforts are being made around the world to create
new levels of reflection and learning in order to manage the transition
to the 21st century. We see dialogue as providing a potentially
critical foundational process for creating new "infrastructures
for learning" within modern organizations -- ones that can
reacquaint us with the impacts of our collective actions, and
enable us to reason together about possible new directions. Navigating
the challenges of the next few decades, we propose, will also
require entirely new levels of collaborative function. Multiple
constituencies with conflicting agendas require not only the resolution
of conflict. but the capacity ultimately to think together in
an ongoing fashion. Dialogue may well provide one rigorous approach
for this work.
In 1992, The Dialogue Project team set out to accomplish the following:
After two years of activity we have produced important results
in each area:
(1) Practical Settings. In 1992, we initiated three long term
research sites:
These sites have continued in 1993-4. In this period we have also
held numerous shorter dialogue sessions in a diverse range of
settings. including: the Parliament of World Religions, with a
group of religious leaders; a group of senior women change agents
from around the world; a group of German speaking educators in
Germany; a group of French speaking professionals and educators
in Quebec; with senior executives from the State of Massachusetts,
and with many managers in corporate settings throughout the US.
At the Center for Organizational Learning at MIT, dialogue is
becoming a central component in the creation of a learning organization.
Many of the projects now being launched through the Center feature
dialogue as a key component.
(2) Theory building. In 1993-94 we have learned a great deal about
how dialogue emerges in different settings and with different
facilitators, and about the kinds of individual, group, and systemic
changes that dialogue tends to spark. We are creating an action
theory, with principles and insights into how dialogue works over
time. We have also only begun to discover the impact of dialogue
on large systems, to develop a "dialogic" approach to
large systems transformation. A book on dialogue is well under
way at this stage as well.
(3) Facilitator development. To develop our knowledge about facilitation
of dialogue, we assembled a group of highly skilled educators,
trainers, consultants, and psychologists and worked with them
during the last few years. In the process, we refined essential
requirements for brief and long-term training programs for dialogue,
and developed a body of facilitators who are capable of bringing
the transformative power of dialogue into a wide variety of settings.
(4) Educational Material. We have created. over a two year period,
the initial outlines of an approach to facilitation and training
in dialogue. The scope and nature of this training have proven
to be far more complex far reaching than we had initially expected.
We have developed key design principles for brief (1-3 day) initiations
into dialogue and collective inquiry, and developed a wide range
of supporting materials for introducing dialogue into a variety
of settings. Among these is an introductory video, video interviews
with key thinkers on dialogue, a wide array of experiential, "isometric"
exercises for dialogue, and much supporting material. Our central
educational contribution has been the development of a three and
one half day initiation into dialogue that is designed to be accessible
to a very wide range of people. The "Foundations for Dialogue"
seminar has been offered to over 400 people in the past two years,
and will increasingly be available as a vehicle for initiating
dialogue in practical settings around the world.
(5) Symposium. In April of 1994 we held an international dialogue
symposium. Participants came from South Africa, England, Mexico,
the US and Canada. We had representatives from every research
site, as well as a group of distinguished thinkers and practitioners.
In this gathering a sense of the larger possibilities of this
work in the world began to take shape. and new clarification about
the nature of dialogue as a truly collective endeavor emerged.
We have begun to outline an action theory of dialogue that translates
a hundred years of theorizing about dialogue by Martin Buber,
Patrick De Mare, David Bohm and others into a series of discoveries
about how to actually produce dialogue in practical settings,
what its impact is on people, and how it can be a powerful vehicle
for social and organizational learning and change. This theory
is based on our clinical observations and is in a preliminary
testing phase; we are now consolidating data from three sustained
sites and are beginning to identify themes common to all and particular
to each. Our view is that no real progress can be made in any
field without the development of new theory. We follow the maxim
of Kurt Lewin, who said there is "nothing so practical as
a good theory." Theory to us is not abstract and disconnected
from the practical world. but highly unable.
Our theory of dialogue is based on the premise that the tacit
forces that guide the ways people think and act is fragmented
and incoherent, and that this ground and its influence are largely
invisible to human beings. Dialogue creates special environments
in which people can begin to perceive, inquire into, and shift
these underlying patterns of influence, and create entirely new
kinds of individual and collective mind.
Tacit Knowledge and Fragmentation in Thought
Just as the know-how people use to ride a bicycle cannot be stated.
the knowledge people use to think. particularly to think collectively,
is tacit. Our tacit ways of thinking govern how we formulate
our views, deal with differences, pay attention, make causal connections:
in short these tacit influences are like the operating software
that govern the ways human beings perceive the world and take
action in it. Incoherence in these tacit springs of experience
leads people to create unintended effects when they act, and to
remain unaware of the fact that they are actively participating
in ways of thinking and acting that continue to produce these
effects. People are in effect out of contact with the sources
and impacts of their thinking and acting. As physicist David Bohm
put it, "thought creates the world and then says. I didn't
do it" (Bohm, 1980). One purpose of dialogue is to reestablish
contact so that this tacit ground can be accessed, its impacts
perceived, and its effects altered.
As Bohm has pointed out, one of the most fundamental and pervasive
dimensions of this tacit ground is that it leads us to perceive
the world as fragmented. Fragmentation of thought is like a virus
that has infected every field of human endeavor. Drawing in part
upon a worldview inherited from the 16th century which saw the
cosmos as a giant machine, we have divided our experience into
numerous isolated bits that seem to have no connection to one
another. As a result, specialists in most fields cannot talk across
specialties: marketing sees production as the problem; we say
some managers "think" and workers "act"; Brazilians
create more grazing land but destroy a critical global supply
of oxygen. Nowhere does this fragmentation become more apparent
than when human beings seek to communicate and think together
about difficult issues. Rather than reason together. people defend
their "part," seeking to win over others. This results
in people trying to trade off their views, force serious differences
underground, collude in false uniformity of thought, or descend
into unproductive and at times armed conflict.
Recent developments in both quantum theory and cognitive science
indicate that perceiving the world in terms of separate fragments
is a fictitious way of thinking. The discovery of what Niels Bohr
called the "quantum wholeness" suggests that there is
an irreducibility of observer and observed when it comes to looking
at small particles of matter. According to quantum theory, light
can behave like a particle or a wave depending on how you set
up the experiment. What you perceive. in other words, is not determined
by independent external properties of "parts" of reality,
but is a function of the ways in which you try to perceive that
reality. And cognitive science is warning us increasingly not
to take the content of our thought as an independent factual description
of the world as it is, but as a medium actively coloring it. As
David Bohm put it, "the notion that all these fragments are
separately existent is evidently an illusion, and this illusion
cannot do other than lead to endless conflict and confusion."
Dialogue, as we have been developing it, is a way of experiencing
this "postmodern" experience of reality, and discovering
an actionable dimension through it. It uses difference and conflict
that arises out of these differences to create opportunities for
learning and the rediscovery of inherent wholeness. It also produces
settings in which a sense of shared direction may emerge out of
common experience, not only out of rational analysis. It seeks
to encourage a balance between the analytic understanding of different
positions, and a more intuitive sense of common direction.
A Conceptual Framework for Dialogue
Several writers have held that the thinking that created our social
and organizational problems cannot be used to correct them. As
Argyris and Schon (1990) have argued, people hold implicit "theories
of action" that they unwittingly use to resolve the problems
they face -- these include seeking to protect oneself and others
from embarrassment and threat in face to face inquiry. Argyris
shows that these very efforts are counterproductive, limit learning,
and insure the persistence of "defensive routines" (Argyris,
1990). Our emergent theory of dialogue seeks to take the next
step, and to begin to explain the nature and persistence of these
"entrained errors" within social systems. It argues
that there are "core processes" at work in social systems.
The dominant dimension of these core processes is "fragmentation."
These manifest as a set of tacit strategies of thought that limit
and constrain consciousness, and a set of systemic patterns of
behavior that reinforce these limits.
Building on work by Bohm (1988, 1989, 1990), we have proposed
that at the tacit level people hold specific strategies in thought
of which they are unaware, and which create fictitious ways of
thinking and counterproductive actions. A model for these is shown
as follows:
Fragmentation of Tacit Thought -- is the habit of thought
that reduces the world into parts. It is the method of deconstruction
unconsciously adopted as part of the perceptual background or
frame in which people operate. We propose that unconsciously held,
this frame is highly problematic in that it predisposes actors
to operate without appreciation of their impact.
Some critical variables defining fragmentation:
Inquiry into "independence" thus calls into question
the fundamental nature of the social constructions of reality
in which people live. In our emerging theory of dialogue, I propose
that inquiry into these processes, the background perception and
experience of life, can be undertaken, and need not be seen as
either too remote for inquiry or too inaccessible for it.
"Cool" inquiry, in contrast, requires a shift in mode
of attention. It focuses on the whole and inquires into the way
the whole organizes the parts. "Cool inquiry" invites
attention to "field dynamics" -- that is -- to the nature
of different face-to-face moves and their impact on the overall
climate, level of safety among the people concerned, their depth
of listening, and quality of attention. Cool inquiry also involves
people modeling self-reflexive or "proprioceptive" listening
techniques --e.g., ones that cause the listener to reflect on
the physical/somatic impacts a particular move has had on him
or her, that call attention to their relative level of mindfulness,
and that invite others to do the same.
These interacting forces of thought and face-to-face interactions
create an unstable "field" of social dynamics that produces
and sustains phenomenon like "organizational defensive routines"
(Argyris, 1990). In this sense our work is an attempt to understand
the forces that sustain such dynamics, despite serious efforts
to intervene in them.
One important element of this, work has been to develop a model
which shows how dialogue can be integrated into large systems
change processes. The following conceptualization builds on but
seeks to depart from work by D. M. Smith (1994), who proposes
a model where face-to-face interactions are the mediating variable
for producing integrated action in systems. As has already been
stated. we have been working with the premise that the "field"
is the most fundamental level which requires our attention. We
define the field as the environment of collective attention. identity
images, and dynamic movement of tacit thought in which these are
contained. The field. we propose, contains and mediates the other
levels of observable action in the system.
The "field" domain is the ultimate intervention focus
of the dialogue work. It is related to, but should be distinguished
from terms like "culture." Schein's (1992) suggests
that "tacit assumptions" are what governs the appearance
of culture at an espoused or artifact level. The field concept
builds on Schein's notion, but should be understood as a dynamic
flowing movement. The field consists not only of the tacit norms
of the culture, but also the dynamic movement of thought within
it.
The "field" level in practice is concerned with the
aesthetic and timing of face-to-face interactions -- the quality
and nature of the collective attention and listening brought to
bear on a subject. the tone and texture of the interactions, the
patterns of the shared reasoning. and centrally. the ways in which
people tend to unwittingly reproduce and embody the content of
their conversation within the process of the conversation. The
focus here is on experiencing directly the nature of the tacit
patterns of thought and action that appear in collective settings.
We draw a distinction between two kinds of attention people may
use to support inquiry in any setting, and so influence awareness
of the field: reflective attention and proprioceptive attention.
Reflection. even if it is "reflection-in-action" is
based in memory -- in processing images and information that occurred
in the far or recent past. Proprioception (whose roots mean simply
self-perception) implies a kind of "on-line" awareness
that is not memory based. We have physical 'proprioception' --
we can close our eyes and still know where our aim is, without
having to think about it. We have direct conscious awareness that
extends into the physical levels of ourselves. We seem however
to lack this ability when it comes to our thought. We cannot "feel"
the direction of our thought -- consciousness simply appears to
us as literal and real. We do not connect our perceptions with
the nature of our thoughts. If we had this ability, we would be
able to see self-destructive thoughts. For example, and have some
ability to control them. Typically we simply see our thoughts
as emerging "from nowhere" and do not detect our own
fingerprints on them.
In dialogue we seek to cultivate both levels of awareness -- reflective
awareness and proprioceptive awareness -- which could also be
stated as awareness of what one is doing as one is doing it. Typically
our thinking processes move too quickly, or we do not have the
luxury of time, to perceive these forces at work. We have argued
that organizations and institutions have a genuine need now to
expand their repertoires -- make room for inquiry of this sort,
not simply to replace it for analytic approaches.
Our aim has been to operationalize the field notion and so make
it actionable and usable, as well as to develop new theory about
it. We have done this in part by proposing several principles,
including the notion that we must suspend assumptions in order
to make possible exploration of underlying thinking, and provide
a "container" in which dialogue may take place. To suspend
assumptions means to display attributions and the data that leads
to them, but also to reflect on the underlying process of thought
that gave rise to a particular conclusion.
To provide the container implies that one finds ways to lower
transaction costs of interactions, shift the ground from one where
the parties are seeking to make decisions or "fix" the
system to explore new options about what is creating the current
system, reduce the risk of all parties to interact, and legitimate
inquiry into underlying images, norms and perceptions. Above all
providing the container implies creating a setting where the quality
of collective attention is focused and can be made increasingly
vivid, so that habits of projection and reaction can be systematically
observed and inquired into. The purpose of the container is to
enable participants to, in effect, see the water in which they
have been swimming, so that they may influence it consciously.
The field in which people operate, as was indicated above, is
generally level and unstable at the outset of interactions, and
some process is required to stabilize the field so that work can
be done. At the outset of interactions there is often a paradigm
clash. People coming together bring different norms and patterns
of interaction that are unconsciously held and that tend to go
unrecognized. It is important to note that this does not at all
imply an attempt to limit difference or to seek consensus or conformity.
The willingness to listen does not mean the obligation to agree,
accept or act upon. Stability in this sense means willingness
to participate.
The practice of dialogue seeks to manage this in part by producing
competencies in groups at both the "face-to-face" level
of inquiry and at the "field" level, stressing the interaction
between both. 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. It seeks
to enable people to safely inquire into defenses and self-limiting
reasoning patterns in themselves and others. It also seeks to
utilize knowledge of the ways in which the field environment unfolds
over time.
Yet an integrated approach to learning must also take into account
the routines by which any system seeks to govern itself -- the
policies, procedures and behaviors that it uses to navigate the
substantive concerns it faces. We propose the term "steering
mechanisms" to describe these phenomena. Steering mechanisms
refer to the dynamic patterns that govern the operations of any
system. Originally developed by David Kantor (1976) as a term
for the way family systems orient themselves and achieve their
goals. it can be applied to organizational systems as well. For
example, the reward structures, resource allocation systems, information
systems, and production systems all "steer" the larger
organization towards its goals. These steering mechanisms are
not located in any one place or in any one person, but are total
patterns of operation. They may operate unproductively or productively;
they may as Argyris (1990) puts it, become defensive routines
they increase malaise and ineffectiveness and the inability to
prevent error, or they may also be productive or creative routines
that continuously improve not only today's problem but increase
the likelihood of solving tomorrow's.
These face-to-face structures and the steering mechanisms interact,
and this interaction must be taken seriously. For example, the
way people deal with pay-for-performance systems is greatly impacted
by their ability to deal face-to-face with difficult evaluation
problems. Argyris (1990) has shown that there is often continuous
drift upwards in pay scale in these systems, despite elaborate
technical measures to create meritocracy. He argues that people
find it hard to downgrade others and so they cover up or repress
negative judgments. A technical evaluation system is thereby undermined
by face-to-face behavior.
Linking these two elements provides significant new options for
action. At Ford, for example, in a project led by Daniel Kim,
managers realized that the presence of late parts on a new product
development project was part of a reinforcing cycle of face-to-face
behavior and steering mechanisms. Late parts led senior managers
to intervene and to create "punitive measures" that
attempted to control the system, which further discouraged the
engineers to report late parts, which led to more parts being
late. People in this system realized that this pattern of interaction
led to the opposite of what was desired, and took action to change
it.
Our c]aim is that changes of this sort are significant, but that
for them to be sustained, and the rigidity that produced this
kind of pattern in the first place to be loosened. attention must
be paid to the "field" in which these interactions occur.
In pact, these managers have begun to report changes in their
"field" along some important dimensions: relationships
between senior managers and engineers shifted in ways that go
beyond mere "rule-following." People actually started
to like and trust one another, and they have indicated that while
subtle, this fact has had important leverage in the situation.
This model, building on work by D. M. Smith (1994) can be represented
in the following fashion:
The core of this theory of intervention builds on the premise
that one must create special environments for inquiry in which
these shifts in collective attention may take place, while one
is also focusing on the substantive interactions with which people
are concerned.
Transforming the Field Over Time
We propose below the outlines of a theory that describes the development
of the "field" over time. Our theory of intervention
suggests that there are a variety of stages to the evolution of
the dialogue field or container, and that the emergence of each
phase involves skillful choices and the navigation of crises for
both individuals and the collective. The phases we have found
are:
Each of the stages of the dialogue process seems to contain certain
critical elements and forces. It is important to state that there
is a similarity of this model to other group development models,
and some important differences. Primary among these is that the
emphasis in group models is typically on the nature of the interpersonal
interactions among the people in the group. In dialogue the emphasis
is on the nature of the thought processes that underlie what is
appearing in the group, the quality of the individual and collective
reasoning, and the quality of their collective attention. One
does not in dialogue, for instance, seek to "give feedback"
to others; instead one is asked to reflect on one's own impulses
and projections -- to listen to oneself in essence. Inquiry into
the nature of the collective pattern is encouraged, from a stance
grounded in one's own experience.
Shown below is a more detailed map of some of the critical elements
that appear within the dialogue process. At (I) the instability
of the container appears; a model for this is articulated above.
We have also found that any group of people gathering together
carries a latent wish or hope for a new possibility -- whether
or not there is any possibility that this wish could become reality.
At (II), we have found that groups engage in the search for new
"rules," and soon discover in dialogue that there are
few rules that accurately convey or constrain the experience.
People develop new language and new cognitive perceptions at this
stage as well, as they begin to "go meta," or reflect
on the process as it occurs. People also typically engage in what
we call "model clash," entertaining the question "whose
meaning has more power here?" Reflecting on these polarizations
and the thinking that underlies them, the impacts they have, and
the order between them, are all key elements at this stage. At
(m). we have found groups to emerge into a deeper level of exchange
with one another, and have also found regressive tendencies appearing.
People create "idols" in thought out of their experiences,
including their experience of dialogue. and then seek to live
from that ideal. Dialogue is iconoclastic however, in its continuous
invitation to people to live from present experience, not from
memory. We have found that groups struggle with this stage, and
are likely to founder here. Finally at (IV) we have found that
there is a possibility of a new kind of mind emerging among people,
and have some evidence that this can appear among people.
By becoming conscious of these phases, and the elements that are
present within them, facilitators of dialogue can begin to develop
understanding of the process, and provide a "holding environment"
for them. Much of the facilitation of dialogue involves modeling
the behaviors oneself; the premise we hold here is that the nature
of the transformation that might occur through dialogue is based
on processes that are internal to people. We are changing structures
of perception and experience in the dialogue process; hence a
facilitator must understand this and operate in this fashion relative
to his or her own structures of perception.
I. PROJECT SUMMARY
there is brought into being a memorable common fruitfulness which
is to be found nowhere else. At such times, at each such time,
the word arises in a substantial way between men who have been
seized in their depths and opened out by the dynamic of an elemental
togetherness.
II. PROGRESS TOWARD GOALS 1993-94
Fragmented Face-to-Face Patterns -- These tacit dimensions
of thought interact with a set of phenomena at the face-to-face
level:
| I. Instability of the Container | II. Instability in the Container | III. Inquiry in the Container | IV. Creativity in the Container | |
| Core Elements |
|
|
|
| |
| Crises | individual suspention: "I am not my point of view" | collective suspention "We are not our point of view" | fear of collective pain: "facing consequences of having created a world of fragmentation" | . |
| Dominant Emotional Content | Grief | Anger | Fear | Joy |
Research Team Implementation Activities
The work of the research team has proven quite challenging over the year, as we sought to carry out our stated agenda of grounded theory building and close analysis of site data. Yet our search for level of analysis proved enriching: we became familiar with the "territory" of large group talk, and found that dialogue exists not so much in the exchange of words and ideas, but in fundamental shifts in the direction of the conversation. Similarly. shifts in the site interventions themselves, when viewed in parallel, corroborated and grounded our initial conceptual model. We ultimately designed our method as we went, according to our growing understanding of the phenomena we were viewing.
Satellites and ants. Our dilemma is described by a helpful analogy given by fractal researchers: that of "measuring the coastline of Great Britain." One could, if one wished. send a satellite up to measure it, or fly in a plane. If one walked all the way around, including the shape of the landscape in one's measure, one would get a far larger measurement; if one were an ant crawling over grains of sand, the length would be still more unwieldy. One question is-- is length a valid measure? And if so, which level of analysis (measurement) does one choose, according to one's research need?
As we closely analyzed and coded session transcripts called for by grounded theory, we began to feel like ants crawling over grains of sand. Where were the powerful experiences we had noted during and after the sessions? Where was the sense of shift. of resonance? Certainly not in the transcribed text, viewed word by word and line by line. Unlike most "constant comparative" efforts, we were not after content-- we were after the process we recognized as dialogue.
Episodes. The first insight we gained from this apparent cul-de-sac on our journey was that key moments and exchanges in sessions might be a more fruitful place to find dialogue. Certain persons, alone and together, appeared to catalyze the group toward insight. Certain facilitator moves assisted the group in seeing its own shared situation and reflecting together. In short, we rethought the wisdom of looking too closely at the talk, and shifted to cataloguing and analyzing what we called key "episodes" in dialogue.
Sites viewed together. As we began collecting and cataloguing episodes, we began to see the need for an integrative way of understanding them. Again. no episode by itself reflected the depth of experience reported by participants. We began to view the three core sites together: the Boston Urban Dialogue, GS Technologies, and the Grand Junction health care site. As we created a working chart of key events and shifts in the three sites. we began to see resonances between what appeared to be developmental stages in each.
Methodological bias. Our approach has remained consistent in its combination of clinical and action research perspectives (Schein, 1987). The act of helping has brought us into intimate relationship with the systems in which we intervene, while we have allowed our methods to shift according to the problems we address, as the dialogues unfold over time.
Tools, methods, and alternate sources of data.
Data gathering. For those sites whose first phases are complete (GST and BUD), we have transcribed nearly all sessions, debriefs, field commentaries, and interviews. Given our methodological shift, the qualitative database was no longer of primary importance (though it will be completed for the GST site as a part of a doctoral dissertation research project within the next year.) In the GST site alone, total audio time is over 150 hours, with approximately 75 hours of interviews.
Data analysis. We continue to "mine" the data for all three sites for episodes and key shifts. Episode catalogs are being developed, expanded, and refined for each site. These episodes are then linked to the overall chronology of the three sites, and used to refine the phase model of dialogue, as well as facilitation theory. (The GST materials will be separately analyzed via a conversation analytic/clinical interpretive approach in the dissertation mentioned above.)
Ongoing reflection
Our research team continues to be led by Bill Isaacs and David Kantor, who assists in theory development on all fronts, conceptual modeling, facilitator theory, and methods. We followed through on our reflections in this area in this past year by
- including an additional researcher for the BUD and Grand Junction sites; hiring an assistant for data management, notetaking, and word processing.
- increasing the number of research team meetings to adequately reflect on the wealth of data, catalogues, and field notes we were accumulating, as well as to put more time into theory development.
- finding ways to engage "communities of inquiry"--inviting additional researchers to visit our meetings, engaging in dialogue as an activity and topic at various conferences discussed elsewhere, and holding the symposium.
Reflection on Theory Building Outcomes
Our original expectations of the theory building dimensions of this work were that they would be central to the project -- which was intended to contribute to the intellectual foundations of leadership. This has in fact turned out to be the most challenging and in our view most significant part of the work. The territory we have outlined here has been acknowledged by a number of authorities and by participants in our sites as representing an important contribution to our understanding of leadership. We have proposed that leaders be made aware of and trained to create "fields of shared meaning" and have begun to outline a way of thinking and acting in this regard.
B. RESULTS, ACTIVITIES, CHALLENGES: PROJECT SITES 1993-1994
The following is a brief review of the three central sites in which we have been working over the past three years. As stated above, we worked to develop three distinct cases -- one in a topical domain, one in a social setting, and one in an organization.
Extended Sites
- Healthcare Domain -- Grand Junction, Colorado
In the summer of 1992, the CEO and the Health Education Director of St. Mary's Hospital in Grand Junction, Colorado attended a conference in New Hampshire on creating learning organizations. There the two administrators learned about dialogue and became convinced that this approach would enhance their efforts to shift the culture of their hospital. They proposed that St. Mary's become one of the research sites for MIT Dialogue Project.
Following a series of conversations, the St. Mary's Hospital Administrators decided to expand the focus of this effort. We formed with them a six-month pilot project that would include the broader community, with St. Mary's Hospital as the convenor and sponsor. In November of 1992, a group of forty leaders who influence health care delivery in Grand Junction, Colorado, including representatives from St. Mary's and Community Hospitals, Hilltop Rehabilitation Hospital, Rocky Mountain HMO, City Market--the region's largest employer, and the majority leadership in the state legislature, came together to learn about and to engage in dialogue. From November 1992 through May 1993, 25-30 community representatives participated in monthly dialogues.
In parallel, a sub-group of 12 selected by their organizations became a "Learning Team." The community dialogues were to create a forum for sustained collective inquiry into the processes, assumptions, and certainties that governed their shared world. The purpose of the Learning Team was to build capacity in a cadre of local leaders for dialogue facilitation and other capabilities related to creating learning organizations. A third track of facilitated meetings for hospital CEOs was also added to apply the skills and tools of dialogue to immediate inter-organizational conflicts.
After six months, community participants requested extension of the project. We took this invitation as an opportunity to engage in the next level of intervention in this community -- we agreed to renew the project if the other major institutions related to healthcare would join St. Mary's Hospital as full sponsors. Four months later, a new consortium of healthcare institutions accepted and agreed to fund another twelve months of partnership with the Dialogue Project. This consortium of six CEOs formed an historic new collaborative designed to address common interests, which has since taken on a life of its own.
Phase II began in October of 1993, to run through the Fall of 1994, including monthly dialogue and Learning Team sessions (two days each month). Participants included an even broader range of actors in the healthcare system, such as the Independent Physician's Association, Veteran's Administration, alternative healthcare providers, and community representatives. Thirty-five people attended these dialogues to confront, inquire into, and begin to shift the underlying sources of fragmentation and incoherence in their region's healthcare systems. The job of the Learning Team (which has been expanded to 16 members) was to create a bridge from the insights and themes emerging from the dialogue sessions, to action.
Over the past year we have seen some important developments in this transorganizational setting. One entails the fact that the hospitals in this area provide leadership for a region far beyond their geographical range, and so the influence of this project has already begun to be felt in wider domains than the ones we envisioned.
We have also found strong evidence for what we have termed the "chrysalis effect" for social change: after a sustained period of intensive inquiry and the development of new levels of collective insight within the community, a "sea change" of new actions have appeared on the scene: Dialogue is being taught to a variety of people throughout the region. The leaders of this healthcare system community are now actively engaged in redesigning their system, and have developed a series of proposals that would have been unthinkable two years ago. What is perhaps most significant from a knowledge building standpoint is that we have seen the emergence in this community of a new form of collective governance. People have begun to learn to "think and act together." to reason together about the possibilities that face them, and have begun a mature, reasoned, and impassioned exercise to provide solutions to the enormous dilemmas and challenges facing their healthcare system. To summarize. in this past year concrete developments have included:
- The ongoing transformation of a conflict ridden, highly competitive
inter organizational system into one that is actively designing
a "seamless system" of healthcare for the entire community.
- The formation of new governance and inquiry processes in the
healthcare community -- leaders now actively and openly inquire
into radical redesigns for their system. This has evolved into
active redesign efforts of healthcare systems in the community.
Proposals include, for example,
- creation of a non-exclusive healthcare "pavilion"
by St. Mary's (dominant provider in community) that would open
access and fee opportunities to all providers -- this is a significant
transformation in that St. Mary's is giving up access to exclusive
control over a large revenue source.
- CEO of one hospital proposed dissolving the governance structure of his hospital to make more services more accessible to the community.
- creation of a non-exclusive healthcare "pavilion"
by St. Mary's (dominant provider in community) that would open
access and fee opportunities to all providers -- this is a significant
transformation in that St. Mary's is giving up access to exclusive
control over a large revenue source.
- Active extension of learnings from this setting into wider
local and US healthcare community by project staff and community
leaders
- influence on Governor's Council for Healthcare reform. The
CEO of the largest hospital in Grand Junction sits on the chairmen's
panel for healthcare reform -- this is a nationally organized
council made up of the governors of the fifty states that is designed
to consider the impact of healthcare reforms in the US
- conference presentations (Healthcare Forum, Institute for
Healthcare Improvement, Quality Management Network)
- local training efforts on dialogue and related themes in service
agencies and medical teaching settings.
- facilitator training within subgroup of community composed
of cross-organizational representation.
- influence on Governor's Council for Healthcare reform. The
CEO of the largest hospital in Grand Junction sits on the chairmen's
panel for healthcare reform -- this is a nationally organized
council made up of the governors of the fifty states that is designed
to consider the impact of healthcare reforms in the US
[Back to Table of Contents] Sample Critical Events in the ProjectPhase I (1992-3)
- In the introductory session, two prominent community leaders
were publicly interviewed by one of the facilitators in order
to produce visual maps of the leaders' theories-in-use for responding
to real life professional dilemmas. This public modeling accomplished
three things: First, it established a norm of deep and candid
exploration into the generative power of thought. Second, those
observing learned in a meaningful way about how untested assumptions
figure in people's failure to achieve intended results. Third,
this exercise demonstrated the value of trust in the facilitator(s)
as guides in this domain.
- A safe forum emerged for CEOs of the three competing hospitals.
This "off-line" container became a place for them to
explore long-standing, unexpressed and untested attributions about
one another and their hospitals' competitive strategies. As they
explored the roots of one conflict after another, they realized
the inadequacies of their well-worn stories concerning the status
quo. Each began to realize that his or her interpretations of
others' behavior was insufficient grounds for judgment. They shared
such discoveries with the larger community, speaking powerfully
for the value of inquiry.
- One doctor, recently returned from a difficult shift in the
Emergency Room, asked another when he had cried last, leading
to exploration of deep pain felt throughout the community: the
healthcare systems' inability to focus on healing as opposed to
"sick care," and also its inability to avert pain and
untimely death. Providers' long-hidden sense of failure, and unmet
aspirations for healing suddenly became discussible. Inquiry then
turned to medicine's seemingly insatiable quest for technological
fixes.
- The group of CEO's formed to share sponsorship of Phase II
answered a recurring theme throughout the first phase--the domination
of the healthcare community by St. Mary's. Since St. Mary's had
sponsored the first phase, some participants believed there was
a hidden agenda. When the leadership from multiple institutions
gathered to make an agreement with the Dialogue Project, they
created the community's first community-based leadership structure.
They also discovered that other matters could benefit from similar
coordination and cooperation. Without much fanfare, this innovation
in infrastructure began to influence the thinking and learning
of the community.
Phase II (1993-4)
- In the Learning Team, the facilitators introduced dynamic
movement and three dimensional visual modeling as a way to inquire
into proposals for system reforms. This methodology helped participants
move beyond abstract conversations about change and explore the
implications of one another's ideas from multiple perspectives.
Doing this in a public forum enabled cross functional and inter-organizational
learning. Before long, it became clear that no one could anticipate
all unforeseen consequences of his or her strategies. Soon participants
began to request these opportunities to test their proposals,
to gain access to others' insights. Examples to date include:
the establishment of an integrated service delivery pilot system;
the reconstitution of one hospital from independent institution
to community resource jointly owned and operated by the other
providers; and the establishment of a leadership group to coordinate
such things as physician recruitment and major technology purchases.
- After four months of talking about "it" -an anticipated
breakthrough, new program, or new structure--one of the most vocal
proponents of concrete output declared that nothing could rival
the power or importance of the field the group had already created
together. While it was essential to pursue dramatic changes in
the healthcare system, he sensed that radical change was already
occurring because individual and organizational identities were
shifting to appreciate the community's interests. This insight
reframed and contextualized efforts to create a new regional "architecture"
for the system. People were still working hard on tangible change,
but they valued the invisible, shared aspirations that fueled
their efforts. Soon the CEO of Community Hospital--a man viewed
by most as "resistant" to change-- declared that he
could see his hospital moving to an emphasis on pediatrics--thus
abandoning its historic and costly strategy of direct competition
with St. Mary's-- in favor of focusing on its core strengths and
the community's greatest needs.
- The ongoing transformation of a conflict ridden, highly competitive
inter organizational system into one that is actively designing
a "seamless system" of healthcare for the entire community.
- Organizational Domain -- GS Technologies
In mid 1992, a small mid-west steel producer in the US initiated a series of pilot experiments involving a new form of conversation, to be held among all the members, both management and union. This division, the WorldWide Grinding Systems (WWGS) component of Armco, a major US steel manufacturer, had experienced the painful decline of most American steel businesses -- ten years of decreasing production, the loss of over 4000 employees, reduction of product lines from 42 to 2, and especially intense management-union strife with a history of tensions going back more than 40 years.
Both sides turned to dialogue to explore intractable differences they had maintained over a 40 year period, to see what sort of mutual learning they could create, and to discover whether that learning might lead to performance differences in the mill. B. C. Huselton, VP of Human Resources, initiated contact with us and proposed that we conduct a dialogue that might eventually include customers, union, and management. When the group started. some of the representatives from either side could barely speak without shouting or walking away. Less than one year later, the two sides had grown so accustomed to talking together that they regularly made joint presentations. Relationships and thinking began to be transformed in dramatic and poignant ways. Union people were led to say that it might be time to "suspend" the word union, in other words, to explore its meaning and the intense investment that all parties seemed to have in it. Managers acknowledged their blindnesses and spoke about how much they had to learn. One union man noted, "they hired me from the neck down;" and then, "I have started to think for the first time in twenty-five years, and I am listening to my wife."
Within two years, the changes initiated through dialogue at Amoco WWGS had rippled out to affect the division's financial infrastructure. The President of the division had been directed, in essence, to try to sell the division to provide cash for the parent. If they sold the division, and the new buyers were willing, the current management and workers could stay; if the division were unsaleable, then Armco would close it down.
Immediately, the division managers made several commitments -- to seek a buyer who would let them stay in place and maintain their values, to keep their union, and to make a commitment that the new organization would be infused with learning and genuine dialogue. Equally quickly, several potential investors exited the scene. Nearly all the investors demanded that the union be removed--which the managers of Armco WWGS refused to consider. Finally one set of investors came forward who saw the significant potential of this business in its market, and also saw that the managers' adamant stance towards their values, protecting the union, represented an unfamiliar but authentic commitment to the company's future.
Negotiations with the new investors and partners went on for over a year. Meanwhile, a separate but parallel process of dialogue sessions continued between union and management - providing a setting where senior managers could clarify their thinking and their capacity to work together, and where the despair and skepticism about the past forty years of history between union and management could surface and be explored. Gradually union and management began to create a new kind of community of learning that remains vivid in the minds of those participants. Managers explored, quite openly, their own doubts; union people led inquiries into the gaps they perceived. Later, managers would attribute this process to enabling them to have the clarity and strength to navigate the intellectually complex and emotionally demanding work of negotiating an LBO.
By November of 1994, the WWGS managers were simultaneously experiencing their highest success and the deepest crisis of their existence. The forced sale had thrust the company into the midst of a leveraged buyout, one that few in the industry thought they could pull off successfully. At the same time, the company faced a challenging contract renewal with its union. This time the union was voting as a stand alone plant, and not as part of several plants controlled by Armco. For the first time, the votes in this plant counted: the banks funding the LBO had made it clear that without a union contract. they would pull out of the deal. In the past, the union had had almost no impact on the direction of contract renewal, the future of the company, and the future direction of their lives. Now, the union held virtually all the cards. To make the situation even more nerve-wracking for the managers, the union had turned down the first contract vote on the grounds that management was asking for too much of a wage concession.
In the midst of all this, a small group of senior union officials and senior managers gathered together. outside of the formal contract negotiation, in a dialogue group that they had set up and participated in for over a year. Many were skeptical that anyone would even come to the session. given that tensions were running high on all sides. There was talk of a boycott of this dialogue session, yet 35 of the 40 people involved attended. Coming together in this way was unprecedented and challenged some deeply held assumptions about the way "adversaries" in a contract renewal process ought to interact.
What was even more unusual was the nature of the conversation in this dialogue session. There was no accusation exchanged between managers and labor leaders. People tried to understand what was happening without resorting to blame. They asked themselves questions: Where had the unexpected dissatisfaction come from? Why were people in the plant angry and reactive? What stopped many people from seeing that there was a bigger picture here where the promise of a new plant and new future hung in the balance? What had we done that had kept us from seeing our mutual interdependence before? While some union people outside of the dialogue process were very angry, seeing managers as the "problem", those within the dialogue would say things like "it is more complicated than that. No one is to blame here." Later we would begin to think about paradoxes: the power one small group of people can have, and the limits to their effectiveness -- especially when there is a forty year living memory of betrayal and abuse in the minds and hearts of many of the people.
Together, the managers and labor leaders began to explore some of the most challenging assumptions they were making about one another (such as, that some actually wanted the plant to close and the deal to fail). They acknowledged the vast range of differences and emotional intensity they felt. Managers revealed their despair and fear of losing the opportunity to purchase a future -- not just for themselves but for a plant and division that the parent company had threatened to break up and sell in pieces. People actively examined areas of self-deception and blindness that had persisted within their collective frame of mind -- including such myths as the idea that some people actually wished the plant to be closed down as retribution for all the years of abuse.
This was an example of a dialogic inquiry in action, one that was able to hold, even under the enormous pressures of external politics and internal emotional turmoil. After a year of sustained practice, this group of people, who had begun a pilot experiment to explore the value and impact of dialogue, found themselves applying it very directly to their lives and their future.
The union eventually voted to approve the contract, and the company, renamed GS Technologies, became independent. Dialogue is not at all an instant success story; even now tensions remain between the managers and parts of the union. We are now working actively with front line supervisors to instill the next level of dialogue competence on the shop floor. And in a challenging development, recently many of the union executives, including the president, were voted out of office by their union brothers. Other union members perceived them as being "too close" to the management. Yet the dialogue participants, from both management and labor, have been quick to say that one must not judge such developments too swiftly. Many have realized that those people in the union who were not exposed to dialogue and to the wave of new thinking in the organization (we had only worked with 45 out of 900 people) would now have to grapple with the same issues that had been present all along.
Perhaps most telling are comments from some of the union officers themselves. For example, members of another union executive group recently visited GS Technologies to learn about dialogue and its impact. When asked if they would have changed what they did, now that they were out of office, some surprising (and what others later called courageous) answers emerged: "I'm convinced...we wouldn't be here without dialogue," said one of the GS Technology union people. Another union man observed that they have jobs, and a good contract, and likely would not be there without dialogue. Another reinforced this view, "I think we had a choice -- do the right thing or do what the membership wanted and get reelected. I would always choose the right thing." Finally the GS Technologies Union President summed it up this way: "the only way for American labor to survive is through cooperation and dialogue."
After listening to this newly outvoted union group, the president of the visiting union then said, "We came here on the benchmarking trip because we have to do something. It seems to me that dialogue is the right thing to do. We'll go back and discuss it..." The work that the GST union officials did has changed their lives, and we believe initiated a process of change within this union that contains the seeds of a more generative, more far-seeing, and more human way of operating.
Sample Critical Events in the Project
- In the early, harmonious hours of the first management-union
offsite, the men were reflecting during the "qualities of
dialogue" exercise, on extraordinary experiences of communication
in their lives. George, a 4-year employee related the story of
the last week of his father's life, in which he and his father,
after a lifetime of distance, finally listened to each other.
George spoke of "lost dialogues." and expressed his
wish that the present group would not miss any more opportunities.
Others were deeply moved at the story, and appreciated the analogy
to the moment. They were glad to make the effort to get past old
adversarialism.
- Later that same day... conflictual issues began to surface
in the open dialogue, leading one union man with a reputation
for "going ballistic" to do so. "I think there
are two containers in this room!" he exclaimed, and angrily
denounced controversial plans mentioned earlier by managers.
The atmosphere was highly charged, the challenge to transmute an historical tendency for somebody to storm out of the room. The tension lasted through the next morning. Responses ranged from managers' questioning the man's use of profanity in front of a lady (woman research person from our project), to his own likening of the situation to a "breakout" or spillage of molten steel--he was afraid that conflicts would "chip a hole" in the vessel of dialogue being built. Another union man reminded him of how they handled such catastrophes in the mill: "Everybody in the area just converges ... I mean, nobody even has to say anything to anybody.... I hope this group can do that." Again, a vision of what could be. in the form of a powerful first experience of containment and transformation. By the end of the day, members were quite pleased and impressed with themselves for persevering, and for relating in a new way to old antipathy.
- One day we arrived to find many of the participants dressed
in suits--a funeral was to be held later that day for a workman
killed in an accident on site. Grief and somber reflection permeated
the early part of the session, which many recall as a sense of
closeness and shared mortality. Interestingly, after the group
had moved through remembrances of the man and the meaning of his
death for others, discussion turned to the future. and prospects
for the business and the physical plant. By session's end the
topic was "sizzle" in marketing the new business, with
union men and managers together imagining a very alive. savvy
business, housed in a clean, modern facility. Long after, the
session stood out for members as an occasion of both feeling and
thinking together.
- In the early, harmonious hours of the first management-union
offsite, the men were reflecting during the "qualities of
dialogue" exercise, on extraordinary experiences of communication
in their lives. George, a 4-year employee related the story of
the last week of his father's life, in which he and his father,
after a lifetime of distance, finally listened to each other.
George spoke of "lost dialogues." and expressed his
wish that the present group would not miss any more opportunities.
Others were deeply moved at the story, and appreciated the analogy
to the moment. They were glad to make the effort to get past old
adversarialism.
- Boston Urban Dialogue
Of the various on-going dialogue settings we have worked in over the past two years (corporate, educational. series of intensives), the Boston Urban Dialogue (BUD) continued to be one of the most challenging. Nowhere has dialogue's potential been more keenly sensed than by such individuals as these community leaders, coming as they do from conflict-ridden. often dysfunctional and violent urban contexts. The desire for cross-cultural, cross-group, cross-individual understanding and deep communication bums in most of these people. How to keep that flame of motivation alive as people are confronted with the challenge of dialogue as a discipline requiring time and steady perseverance remains challenging. For some, an early taste of the fruits of dialogue is strong enough to sustain them through the initial period of group incoherence and fragmentation, and they report their lives being transformed and nourished by dialogue practice.
The Boston Urban Leaders Dialogue Group was first launched in September, 1992. as one of the three sites for the Kellogg Foundation funded Dialogue Project. Potential participants for the BUD group received an invitational letter which described the purpose of the projects as "an opportunity for persons of diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds to come together to explore the possibilities of deep, generative communication which transcends the individual limits each of us inevitably brings with us."
In selecting participants, the project team consulted with leaders in a broad range of settings, i.e. social service agencies, business, education, health care, and consulting groups. Selection criteria used were: l) leadership representing diverse constituencies; 2) interest in the process; and, 3) willingness to enter the process in a spirit of openness and mutual respect. We held two year long cycles for this group. Both started with an initial pool of approximately 30 participants. In practice, about I5-20 people attend any one session .
Since this group was not located in an organizational system, and had no mission except the dialogue itself, most of the "results" are in terms of learnings:
- Appreciation of the challenge of dialogue in a process-sophisticated
group, e.g., with psychotherapists, social change agents, etc.
- Sense of social fragmentation, and the time involved in surfacing
and engaging submerged conflict
- Learning about the dynamics of a facilitation team, and the
"parallel process" between the team and the dialogue
group, e.g., fragmentation and conflict between facilitators often
reflects the dynamics lodged in the group.
- Similar dynamic can be lodged in participant-observers, such
as researchers and even technicians (video crews, sound techs).
Sample Critical Events ( as related by one of the facilitators of this group. Professor Lynn Dhority)
- We were meeting in a room in the Harvard School of Government,
and a black woman objected to the portraits of the early, (white,
male) US presidents, most of whom were slave owners. There followed
some sympathetic support for her objection as well as other attempts
to reframe and recontextualize the situation. Then a black man
turned to the black woman who was objecting and said approximately:
"I am jealous of those men, because they have you focused
on them, and I want you to see me. I am here with an open heart,
ready to share in love, and I want connect with you, no matter
who is portrayed on the walls of this room." This comment
shifted the atmosphere in the room much as a thunderbolt might
have, and the theme of racism was replaced by love for that evening.
- I expected the topic of black/white racism to be a central
one for this group, yet it never again made a similar appearance.
Anti-Semitism, on the other hand, was the focus of a series of
sessions. It was triggered by the admission of a participant that
she had caught herself making anti-Semitic attributions during
a phone call during that particular week. She used the incident
to inquire into her underlying beliefs and assumptions. A Jewish
man in the group responded to her story with an emotional challenge
to those present to look at their anti-Semitism. He said he felt
mistrustful of those present, whom he believed to be non-Jewish,
and certainly would not expect anyone present to support him in
a Nazi-like situation in this country. He quoted his grandmother:
"Scratch a goy (a gentile), and you'll find an anti-Semite."
This challenge provided the group with an opportunity to test
and engage its budding dialogue skills of listening, suspension
of assumptions and inquiry.
Interestingly, the Jewish male challenger, after several sessions, noted that the process had helped him shift his mistrust to the point that he could actually imagine the woman who had triggered his initial reaction being a support for him in a Nazi-like society. Her willingness to disclose her prejudice and work on understanding her underlying thinking and beliefs had helped him see her as other than one of the goys his grandmother had spoken of. For me, this was a beautiful example of how dialogue can produce shared meaning which can heal.
- In our penultimate session the theme of old age in different
cultures was explored for awhile before the topic of Bosnia came
up. For the next 20 minutes a variety of perspectives were exchanged
on the "legitimate" use of violence, contrasting mass
murders in Nazi Germany with Hiroshima with Dresden until the
notion of "our cultural story" came up. Then someone
observed that the entire exchange involved only men, an observation
all the more striking since women outnumbered men 2 to 1. The
men in the room had been talking energetically about war, intervention
and violence. When a woman finally spoke, it was to ask: "Isn't
all this talk about war what men do? And now they are fighting
verbally with each other. There could be another story....a woman's
story." My interpretation of that pregnant moment was that
of insight, a group "aha." We had an instantaneous realization
that we were caught up together enacting a cultural story, and
the group mind seemed to shift to a search for a new "story."
- Appreciation of the challenge of dialogue in a process-sophisticated
group, e.g., with psychotherapists, social change agents, etc.
C. EDUCATIONAL MATERIALS
Our reflections on this work are that there are two primary dimensions to the educational work surrounding dialogue: the development of a testable theory of dialogue as it might be applied in various settings, and the creation of specialized learning environments that allow individuals to recover greater quality of attention around the nature of their shared field of meaning and experience. We have developed materials and processes to serve both ends.Our specific intention for the past year was to produce experiential educational materials that would aid in introducing dialogue. We have now developed a 3.5 day program, called "Foundations for Dialogue" which is a formal initiation into the process of dialogue. In addition, we have developed video teaching material on dialogue that consists of 5-10 minute interviews with a wide range of people who have been actively involved in our core sites. These include footage of the author of The Quantum Society, Danah Zohar; Dr. Peter Senge, the Director of the Organizational Learning Center at MIT, and Curtis Davis, the chief architect of the largest public works project in the US.
We proposed to produce a guidebook of our material. A version of this has been published in The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook (and included in the appendix of this report). Some of the material we have developed includes a series of experiential exercises that we have called dialogue "isometrics " intended to strengthen the cognitive muscles required in dialogue; guidelines for setting up dialogues; preliminary instructions for facilitators; and reflections on the impact and value of dialogue for different settings.
We have also begun the outline of an extensive facilitator development training process. We have now begun to identify the critical elements for such a program, and intend to begin offering it sometime early in 1995.
D. FACILITATOR DEVELOPMENT
The facilitator development process initiated through this grant cycle was intended to develop a group of competent practitioners of dialogue. We were faced with the initial challenge of not knowing precisely what would be required of a facilitator. and found ourselves throughout the two year period developing practitioners while we were also developing our model of excellence for practitioners. This proved to be one of the most challenging dimensions of the project.After much intensive work, which included meeting every month for a year, and then every several months for a second year, we have developed a powerful cadre of practitioners. Today we have a core team for The Dialogue Project of eight individuals from diverse fields who are highly competent. They include Mitch Saunders, a family systems therapist and co-founder of a leading not-for-profit organization in California; Barbara Coffman, an educator who has worked extensively in Central and Eastern Europe, and with top filmmakers in the US and former Soviet Union; Robert Hanig, a senior training and development expert; Susan Royal, a master facilitator and consultant; and Ron Kertzner, a master facilitator, lawyer, and conflict resolution specialist.
Our central reflections about this work suggest that dialogue facilitation should be thought of as a fairly advanced form of group process and systems work. It seems to require and build upon more traditional modes of intervention, including process consultation, leadership development technologies, and group facilitation competence. For intervention in large systems, practitioners also need the ability to intervene in difficult settings and create the level of openness and attention that is necessary for dialogue to work. One key learning has been that this is difficult and challenging training for many people. We conclude that some form of process consultation expertise. as outlined by Schein (1988), will be essential for any practitioner of dialogue.
E. SYMPOSIUM
In April of 1994 we brought together a group of twenty-five individuals representing all the different activities and sites present within the project. We had representation from South Africa, Mexico, Canada, England, and the US; participants from all our core sites, and a group of professionals that we felt would be able to help us reflect on dialogue and on its potential contributions to the world. This gathering was an important milestone and turning point for our work.Several conclusions were clearly voiced by the participants: that the project had clearly achieved recognition as a leader in this field; that the field of dialogue required a much wider constituency than simply that present at MIT for its full impact to be explored; that there were many important domains of exploration awaiting work and research; that there was a need to develop a serious and much more extensive training and research program; and that this work clearly had shown that it had a place in developing learning organizations.
The Symposium surfaced many important questions about dialogue, including an exploration of the relationship between dialogue and democracy, request for more diverse representation and involvement in this field, an inquiry into what were dialogue's cultural roots and should they be forgotten; and exploration of the role of dialogue in large systems learning processes.
We discussed the likelihood that the Symposium should be an annual event. We have planned another. similar gathering in December of 1994, in cooperation with the Birkana Institute, to invite the most senior practitioners of dialogue from around the world together to reflect on the field.
III. FUTURE DIRECTIONS
The Dialogue Project is establishing a range of directions for its continuing efforts:Organizational Learning. Dialogue is emerging as a central component in the creation of learning in organizations. Our work at the Center for Organizational Learning at MIT is introducing dialogue in a variety of new projects, all intended to build new knowledge about the interface between dialogue and organizational learning. Projects at Intel Corporation, and potentially at Ford, National Semiconductor, AT&T and Motorola are all being considered in this light. As we move ahead, we will intensify our focus on the relationship between dialogue and organizational learning, concentrating on increasing the capacities of organizations to create dialogue and learning.
Moving Beyond Negotiation. Under exploration is the extension of dialogue into key substantive debates regarding boundaries of race, gender, ethnic identity, social class, organizational function, or professional specialty. Under particular consideration is the field of ethnic conflict, as well as the debate between economists and environmentalists.
Governance. Several projects at both the state and national levels are being explored where dialogue might be introduced as a transformative element in the practice of government. The State of Massachusetts executive branch, and the Federal Quality Institute in Washington have both expressed interest in exploring these possibilities.
Community Development. Dialogue has a vast potential for assisting in the creation of more genuine community experiences. We have seen some significant results, and are considering ways to extend this work. We are engaged in projects at Intel corporation. with a group of educators in Michigan, with community leaders in Kansas City and in the planning of a new university in California are four examples.
Leadership Dialogues. Many senior leadership groups around the world are trying to think together in new ways. We believe that our work could be an important catalyst in creating the settings and the "fields" in which this work could take place. For example, we received a request from the World Economic Forum Foundation in Davos, Switzerland, which brings together business and political leaders, to help in creating a global "meeting of minds" by presenting our material at Davos. We have also been considering the creation of a senior level CEO group that might begin to catalyze global change.
Learning Societies. In the Center for Organizational Learning, we have begun exploring the possibility of assisting in the development of "learning countries", using dialogue as one of the core generative practices. There is serious interest in this notion in the senior level leadership of both Singapore and South Africa.
Theory Development. Clearly, the field of dialogue is in the very early stages of theoretical development. We would like to encourage a great deal more intellectual activity in this field by supporting research in other settings, by bringing together scholars and practitioners of this and related fields, and by deepening our own theoretical work. In particular, we are keen to advance work in measuring the concrete impacts of dialogue, creating quantitative instruments, articulation of the multiple types and approaches to dialogue (especially a dialogic theory and practice of large system transformation), and further refining the theoretical placement of dialogue in related scholarship.
Apprenticeships and Training. The need to train and educate people in the theory and practice of dialogue is ongoing. This past year we have developed a training model, and have articulated core elements for proficiency in this art. We also recognize that others will develop different approaches to dialogue, and see the need for some kind of compilation and critical review of approaches.
Institutional Developments. An outgrowth from this work is DIA˙logos, a not-for-profit institute whose mission is to enhance the quality of dialogue in the world. DIA˙Iogos is a meeting place for the community of core dialogue practitioners, and a locus where new ideas can be refined and developed. DIA&dotlogos maintains close partnership with the Center for Organizational Learning at MIT, providing dialogue practitioners for many projects as well encouraging active reflection and research. DIA˙Iogos is primarily concerned with building the capacity for dialogue and its related disciplines in key settings around the world. While dialogue as a field of endeavor has extended beyond the scope of the MIT Center's mission and activities, the two organizations will remain closely linked.
IV. DISSEMINATION
Our primary intention for dissemination for this project was the writing of a book about dialogue, to be written by the project director. This book is underway at this point, and is expected to be published in 1995. Several important articles have been written and published at this time that have contained reports of the results of this work. These include, the editing, writing, and designing of major sections of The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, by Peter Senge et al., several articles in the journal Organizational Dynamics, one by William Isaacs and one by Professor Edgar Schein (see Appendix); an article for the Health Care Forum on the work at Grand Junction, and an article for the newsletter The Systems Thinker.In addition we have presented our material at a number of public and professional conferences over the past year, including The Parliament of World Religions, where we were asked to help facilitate and present to the plenary gathering of 5000 people, invited presentations at the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland, presentations at the International Healthcare Improvement's National Forum on Quality, and at the Pegasus Systems Thinker Conference.
V. CRITICAL LEARNINGS AND REFLECTIONS
Project ActivitiesSeveral activities that we anticipated engaging in did not occur in the ways we had anticipated. We found, for instance, that it was wiser for us to concentrate on fewer sites that to initiate many new ones. We also found that the continued pressure of interest in this work produced ongoing management challenges: which groups to say no to became a matter of nearly daily consideration by our project team. Perhaps most important, we found that introducing a powerful new approach to collective learning brought with it both unanticipated successes and results, and unexpected challenges. Human systems act as if they have an immune system that causes them to be resistant to fundamental changes in their operating norms and patterns of behavior. These are subtle and pervasive and faster than ordinary "thought." As we have stated above. we think of these tacit patterns as structural limits in the fields of meaning in which human beings operate. We believe that the challenge of extending dialogue and dialogic inquiry in large systems contains many enormous benefits, but that it also requires a great deal more exploration.
In these two years we have begun a journey and exploration. Our most significant unanticipated outcome is the extent to which the momentum of this work outpaced the resources that we initially dedicated to it. We believe that a far more extensive effort is required to actually bring this work to bear on critical matters facing organizational, social and global problems. Our resolve is to find the means to enable this to occur in the next five to ten years.
The Field of Dialogue
As we reflect on the field of dialogue itself, a number of important conclusions appear. We have sought to summarize these in the remaining paragraphs of this report.
Dialogue is emerging as a discipline with the capacity to transform many fields of human endeavor. This emergence challenges many taken-for-granted assumptions about human identity, the power of shared speech, the nature of coordinated action, and the leverage points for genuine social change.
Experience of dialogue can bring people to the realization that their traditional self-concepts can be limiting. Participants are compelled to confront the paradoxical possibility that the center of their identity is 'no-thing', yet also a unique expression within the whole. People are also challenged to recognize the hypnotic effect that the collective has on their sense of identity, and the power of collective thought around this theme.
Dialogue compels the realization that most of what is significant to human beings is in one way or another created through shared talk, and that there is enormous transformative power in this activity as its nature and impact are understood. Deeply connected to this is the recognition that new levels of dialogue can produce new levels of coordinated action. Margaret Mead's apt comment -- that "a small group of people can change the world; indeed it is the only thing that ever has" -- has new meaning within our emerging understanding of the power of dialogue.
- Key Learning Discoveries
- Habitually maintained boundaries between traditional adversaries
can be dramatically transformed, and yet be quite precarious within
a larger system.
In our steel mill site, the dialogue process produced profound shifts in the ways management and union interacted over the first year of our work together. These changes were widely acknowledged as remarkable, both within and beyond the setting. Yet introducing deep changes in one part of a system became quite threatening to other parts. Large system pressures have intervened in this setting. and to some extent have threatened to unravel some of the cent, al advances. We are now exploring "dialogic" ways to handle these commonly acknowledged forces, with agreement from participants that this is a necessary and critical next step in our work together.
- Human beings interact within "fields" of shared
meaning.
Our findings strongly suggest that human beings live within fields of shared meaning of varying richness, depth and coherence that deeply influences the quality of their reasoning, the nature of their inquiry, the depth of their insights, and the coherence of their actions. We are finding that these fields seem to follow orderly, though not clearly predictable patterns of individual and collective development. We are also finding particular design principles and modes of facilitation that greatly enhance or greatly limit the likely emergence of these fields and hence of dialogue.
- Development of a theory of the way dialogue unfolds in
time.
Our developmental theory of dialogue contains important new insights about the process by which "fields" of meaning unfold in time. From this we postulate the presence of forces within these fields that either further dialogue, or further the fragmentation of human experience. These "anti-dialogue" forces we are finding are particularly evident at one stage of the process, and present very particular requirements to groups and facilitators.
- Discoveries about the "chrysalis effect" and
the shared, coordinated action that dialogue can produce.
Our health care dialogue has begun to foster direct community action, following many years of discord and lack of cooperation. Members are teaching various groups about dialogue, redesigning their entire healthcare delivery system, and reflecting together in a remarkably changed manner. All of this emerged not as a single change but as a "sea of change" in the entire fabric and quality of the interactions in the overall community. These changes apparently required a "dormant" period, in which dramatic inquiry and rethinking among the community took place.
- Articulation of a new level of learning that enables and
sometimes transcends advanced notions of organizational learning
now extant.
We have begun to articulate the ways in which dialogue l) broadens traditional approaches to "second order" learning, or learning about learning, by extending the process to the entire community in which people operate, and 2) deepens the learning by requiring individuals to reflect on the ways community artifacts exist and are reproduced within themselves.
- Discovery of the power of dialogue to produce new insight
and intelligence in groups.
A great deal of our data now confirms that dialogue does indeed carry enormous transformative power for groups of people--our founding insight. Dialogue is not always easily accepted, in that it challenges numerous assumptions about how groups of people ought to think, make decisions and choices, and learn together.
- The articulation of several important "species"
of dialogue and important differences in models of how dialogue
ought to be practiced.
We are refining out conceptual map of the terrain of dialogue. A first-pass typology of forms of group conversation has been developed. Critical dimensions of this typology include the nature of the focus of the group, which may be: a question, a strategic challenge, or an open inquiry into the operative assumptions in the 'here and now'. This typology also includes dimensions of the different uses of dialogue, and the different types of "fields" or containers that dialogue settings require and create.
References
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Bohm, D., Wholeness and the Implicate Order. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980.
Bohm, D., Unfolding Meaning. Mickleton: Foundation House, 1985, epilogue.
Bohm, D., On Dialogue. Ojai, CA, 41 pages, 1989.
Bohm, D. and D. Peat, Science, Order and Creativity. Toronto: Bantam, 1987.
Isaacs, "Dialogue" and "team learning" material, in The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook. Doubleday/Currency, 1994.
Isaacs, "Taking Flight: Dialogue, Collective Thinking, and Organizational Learning", Organizational Dynamics, Autumn, 1993, p. 24-39.
Isaacs, "Dialogue: The Power of Collective Thinking", The Systems Thinker Vol. 4, No. 2, April 1993, p. 1-4.
Isaacs and Peter Senge, "Overcoming Limits to Learning in Computer-Based learning Environments", European Journal of Operational Research 59 (1992) 183-196.
Isaacs, "The Perils of Shared Ideals", doctoral dissertation, Oxford University, 1991.
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Schein, E. H., The Clinical Perspective in Fieldwork. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1987.
Schein, E. H., Organizational Culture and Leadership. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1992.
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