Dialogue at the Heart of Change

DIALOGUE AT THE HEART OF CHANGE

Tom Atlee

I grew up in a family of intellectuals, where thinking, questioning, arguing, articulating and defending our thoughts and feelings was part of everyday life.  My home was noticeably more thoughtful, intense and freewheeling than the world outside, where cliché and conformity trivialized everything that was important to me.

But the thought-frying debates which sometimes took over my family’s dinner table were not much fun either.  Sometimes I felt frustrated by having to justify and explain myself so much.  I longed for conversations that were stimulating but also safe, open and exploratory.  I spent a good portion of my college years looking for and creating opportunities for that kind of conversation.

It was my work in the peace movement that led me to believe that hardly anyone knew how to talk together.  It was clear that the Americans and Soviets didn’t, nor the Arabs and Israelis, nor the Pakistanis and Indians, nor any of other warring peoples around the world.  We peace activists considered it our mission to fix up this pathetic situation.

The only problem was that we didn’t know much more about talking to each other than anyone else did.  Our movement was notoriously fratricidal.  (Monty Python lampooned this in their movie Life of Brian, which I thought was the funniest movie I’d ever seen.)  Too many of us knew the right way to do things, the politically correct way to think (which, unfortunately, was different from most other people’s) and we didn’t hesitate to argue, propagandize or backbite to express our views.  A very sad state of affairs, I thought.  I began to doubt that we were going to save the world, after all.

In most of the forums and meetings I attended, there were domineering leaders, asphyxiating group process, wild debates, cynicism, chaos and/or not much happening.  Quarrels brought people down; polite discussions seemed to go nowhere; and, if well-kept agendas made progress, it was usually uninspired progress.  We seemed faced with a choice of destructiveness, mediocrity or nothing.

While even in the 60s many of us were aware that something was wrong, we had no name for it and weren’t sure how to fix it.  In the seventies and eighties thousands of experiments were done – by activists, business consultants, new age gurus – to find or create missing positive dimensions of communication.  Those efforts have left us a rich and still-evolving legacy of useful approaches, processes, techniques, and understandings.  I’ve experienced a bit of this tremendous body of knowledge and it gives me lots of hope.

I’ve seen people who felt they had little connection with each other discover they share values and understandings at a core level.  I’ve seen them get a real EUREKA! feeling – Why are we fighting?  We should be on the same side.  We ARE on the same side!  And suddenly they are solving problems together, exploring things together, enjoying working together.

I now believe that we can actually learn how to be intelligent together – in our movements, in our communities, in the world.  I can see how we might release and actually use the enormous wisdom and power of our diversity instead of crushing it, isolating it, or smoothing it into a world of grey tolerance.  We just might think and feel our way, together, out of this global dead-end into which we’ve driven ourselves.

I wouldn’t necessarily be easy.  But I can see a path.  Quite a few of them, actually.

Dictionaries don’t help me talk about positive dimensions of communication.

They tell me that “communication” means the transmission (or exchange) of ideas, information, messages, etc.  This is fine as a general term.  But what do I call really positive two-way communication?

“Conversation” means talking together.  But some conversations are not very positive.

“Discussion” means exchanging opinions, talking about the pros and cons of something, trying to reach a conclusion.  That’s better than “argument” and “debate,” Which describe the battle of opposing positions.  But even “discussion” is too polarized, categorical and focused.  I need a word that has more exploratory, inclusive, co-operative connotations.

Lots of people have settled on “dialogue.”  In my dictionary it means the same as “conversation” – although sometimes it implies a formal conversation.  It also refers to the conversations of characters in books and performances.  Over the last two decades – during all this research and development on communication – dialogue has begun to mean something like “a conversation set up to generate understanding rather than conflict.”  I don’t think this definition has hit the dictionaries yet, but it comes close to what I’m looking for.

To make this word say exactly what I mean, I’m going to push the definition a little further in the direction it’s been growing.  See what you think of this:

Dialogue refers to people exploring meaning together.  My sense of this is that to the extent there’s both shared exploration and shared meaning, there is dialogue.

“Meaning” might refer to ideas, experience, or feelings – but in dialogue I’m concerned with their meaningfulness.  Things I talk about in dialogue are not trivial or irrelevant to me.  It’s no small talk.  In fact, the opinions, data, or emotions themselves are less important than what they mean to me, to others, and to the course of our collective inquiry.  Dialogue is meaningful exploration.  Not that dialogue is always serious.  Far from it.  But in dialogue I’m engaging with meaning, not just socializing.

My engagement involves following an unfolding inquiry.  I’m not nailing things down.  I’m not avoiding them or pushing people’s faces into them.  I let pools, rivers, oceans of meaning accumulate between me and others; I add to them and watch them flow and change.  I poke around in this evolving meaning, sail out on it, dive into it, look at it this way and that.  Whether or not I’m expecting to get anywhere (for dialogue can serve a goal or serendipity) I’m always open and looking.  The spirit of exploration constantly opens up new options and understandings: even while I’m speaking, I’m exploring, searching, following the shape of meaning as it flows among the group, riding the edge of the unknown – almost like a surfer riding the moving edge of the ocean. ¹

I experience my exploration as one facet of the group’s exploration – and the group’s exploration as a facet of my own:  it is a partnership.  We are practicing co-evolution, co-exploration, co-intelligence.  Instead of using our ideas to hit each other (as in a debate) or trying to stuff them into each other’s minds (as when we preach at each other), we offer out thoughts and feelings as new dimensions of the collective exploration.  David Bohm, the theoretical physicist and dialogue advocate, speaks of “suspending” our thoughts in the collective pool of meaning.  Sometimes it feels like the dialogue becomes a collective entity that’s thinking its thoughts through us – while at other times it is a meandering river with us as its banks.

I think that any kind of positive, collective engagement, flowing where the meaning takes it, is what I mean by dialogue.

Approaches to Dialogue:  Circles

There are many ways to explore meaning together.  And there are many aids to mastering dialogue as a skill.  More will probably evolve.  I’ll tell you about a few I’ve experienced or heard of.

When I was on the cross-country, nine-month Great Peace March in 1986 we did a number of experiments with talking stick circles.  This method of dialogue derives from an American Indian process usually referred to as Council, in which a special stick is passed from one person to another around a circle, and each person speaks only when they hold the “talking stick.”²

I’ve experienced a number of variations on this basic model:

Frequently circle initiators have instructed us to speak our truth from our hearts.  Sometimes they also suggest that we not comment on what someone else has said in the past but speak totally in the present moment.  (After doing this sort of thing a lot, and watching the results, I have come to wonder if perhaps, when I look inside, I am seeing not a personal reality but a collective reality viewed through my personal window.  Whether this is true or not seems to depend on my state of mind at the time.”

I’ve participated in circles that passed around staplers, crystals and ordinary sticks, as well as elaborate, symbolically decorated sticks inspired by traditional Councils.  I’ve noticed that if an object bears special meaning for a group, it seems to contribute to the group’s spirit of dialogue.  (I’ve also been in circles where we’ve gone around with no object, but I’ve noticed that using an object tended to ground the dialogue in one speaker at a time, making interruptions less likely.)

• Usually objects have been passed clockwise around the circle, but sometimes the direction was left up to the initiator or to the people sitting on either side.
• Sometimes the object has been passed across the circle (to whomever put out their hand for it or to someone selected by the last speaker) or was simply put in the middle, to be picked up by anyone. ³   In the best of such circles, the object usually sat in the middle for a while (and the group sat silent) before it was picked up.
• Sometimes whoever had the stick (or crystal or whatever we were passing around) sat silently holding it, creating a pregnant, still space for the group.  I’ve noticed people using this method to gently reorient a dialogue whose motion had become rushed, jagged, or uncentered.
• Sometimes – when the circle included new, potentially talkative participants unfamiliar with the spirit of dialogue – there has been a facilitator or some kind of procedure to prevent long monologues (e.g., participants raised their hands when they thought someone had talked long enough; even a few hands put pressure on the speaker to stop).⁴
• When a group wanted to ensure equal time, they would pass around a watch and the previous speaker would time the current speaker for the agreed-upon period (say, five minutes), alerting them a minute or two before their time was up.
• In very large groups, they usually split up into smaller groups.  Some groups used a method called “fishbowl”:  A group of 5-10 people would sit in a talking circle, surrounded and watched by the rest of the group.  Often a fishbowl circle participant would get up and be replaced by a member of the crowd, so the circle evolved and many people ended up participating.  On the peace march, though, we had a few evolving circles of 20-50 participants with people joining and dropping out all day long.
• Frequently the depth and insight of circle communication was directly proportional to the number of times we’d gone around.  Seldom was any profound level reached in one or two go-rounds.  I like circles of 4-10 people who spoke in 2-3 minute pithy statements.  We’d do many go-rounds in a couple of hours, generating insights and revelations that would leave us breathless.  There were, of course, exceptions to this keep-it-small rule.

The most dramatic example in my memory involved several hundred marchers jammed into a smelly fertilizer factory east of Denver with rain pounding down on a sheet-metal roof.  For weeks our march had been torn apart by disagreements about whether we should march all together or strung out in an undisciplined line.  People on both sides were ready to leave the march if this issue wasn’t resolved in their favor.  A portable PA system was set up in this cramped, steamy space and, with a generator roaring in the background, we took two-minute turns passionately sharing our thoughts and feelings.  Hours later, as the rain died down, we all know what we’d do:  In the cities most of us would march together, and in the country we’d march strung out.  What was incredible to me was that no group decision had been made.  Rather, a simple, sensible solution had emerged naturally, almost on its own.  That’s where the flow of meaning had taken us.⁵

It had never occurred to me that guidelines for behavior could consciously and effortlessly evolve without any decision being made.  The implications for group governance set my imagination spinning.

Silence

Experiences like this helped me better understand my Quaker traditions.  My family had attended a Quaker Meeting – a mostly silent worship service – and other Quaker activities for several years during my teens.  At the time I thought that sitting around in silence was at best an opportunity for thinking, daydreaming or meditating.  It is only in the last few years that I’ve begun to understand the spiritual dimension of silence as experienced by some Quakers and Native Americans – a respectful opening to a larger presence within whom they sit, who simultaneously resides in them, and with whose voice one of the may occasionally speak.⁶   In such meetings, a meaningful collective exploration unfolds out of the stillness.  A silent dialogue.

The relation of stillness to dialogue was further clarified for me when I realized that both groups (Quakers and many indigenous cultures) use consensus process – because it is the natural decision-making manifestation of their spirituality.  The spirit of both silent worship and consensus is one of collective openness.

Consensus

Consensus process provides a means of hearing everyone and considering all facets of a problem until the best obtainable truth or solution, agreeable to all present, emerges.  This usually involves a more sophisticated process than taking turns at a microphone in a fertilizer factory.  In community-building groups that I’m part of, for example, a facilitator periodically checks emerging understandings with the group, e.g., “I hear us saying we should provide child care so parents can attend meetings.”  If anyone has comments or concerns about the collective proposition, discussion continues.  When there are no further concerns or objections – and the facilitator will ask for them – the decision is formalized without a vote.

Although designed to arrive at a decision, consensus process allows a group to thoroughly explore a subject, using the viewpoints and creativity of those present as resources.  I have come to think of this less as a form of democracy and more as a mode of group intelligence.  I wonder how we came to be so satisfied with (even proud of) our practice of choosing-from-a-list-created-by-someone-else (voting) that we call democracy.  Dialogue challenges us to create different standards of democracy, ones that come closer to manifesting collective intelligence.

There are two pitfalls to consensus:  The first is that it requires a certain level of shared values, affinities and understandings.  If you picked a dozen people off the street, consensus wouldn’t work as well as with a dozen Quakers (although juries work and they seldom have Quakers).  Since one person can block a decision, consensus isn’t appropriate in groups with divisive value differences.  The second pitfall is that consensus takes a lot of time.  However, the time it takes to reach consensus is often offset by the time and other resources saved because there’s no defeated minority to handle:  Everyone owns the decision and tends to support its implementation.⁷

Mediation

Many advanced conflict-resolution techniques are, essentially, efforts to engage adversaries in collaborative exploration of their conflict and of possible solutions.  This is dialogue applied to conflict.

I believe this approach was first popularized as the essence of “principled negotiation” – a process developed at Harvard and publicized by Roger Fisher and William Ury in their 1981 bestseller Getting to Yes.  In earlier negotiation models, adversaries had to assertively maintain their positions, give in, or settle for often-unsatisfying compromises.  Fisher and Ury suggested that better results could be obtained for both sides if they let go of their positions and instead worked together to figure out how to best satisfy each side’s real, legitimate interests.

Another technique, which I’ve heard called “mediated dialogue” and “revolving discussion sequence,” gets both sides to satisfactorily re-state what the other has said before responding or saying something new.  Opponents are also given the mutual task of clarifying both their differences and their common ground.  They are coaxed to climb out of their positions and try on each other’s shoes.  They discover things about each other’s views they can honestly understand and agree with.  The goal is to enable each of them to incorporate useful truths from the other’s position, and thus make their own more valid and inclusive than it was before.  I heard about one instance where mediated dialogue was used in a debate on abortion.  The two sides ended up designing an adoption project to do together.

Mediation is, basically, helping people who are embroiled in a conflict to explore together the realities of their situation, and to find or create shared meaning and mutual benefit out of it.  Mediation is dialogue to resolve conflict.

Trust and Courage

In my experience, the quality of exploration in dialogue depends largely on how open people are willing to be with each other.  Openness includes honesty, vulnerability, forthrightness, curiosity, welcomingness, non-defensiveness, etc.  On a group level, openness depends largely on trust.  To the extent people feel confident that what they say will not be used to attack them, that their confidences will not be broken, that they will not be taken advantage of or abandoned in a difficult spot – then they will risk being open.  People need to trust themselves, each other, and the process they are engaged in.

Trust tends to grow over time and is facilitated by “a safe space.”  A person, group, process or setting can generate a safe space by being peaceful, supportive, welcoming, respectful, consistent and preventing interruptions or attacks.  Sometimes you can directly sense how safe a person or group is, but for cautious newcomers a reputation for safety may be necessary before they’ll enter into dialogue relationships.  A safe space can sometimes be created on “the spur of the moment.”

Recently I’ve been experimenting with getting dialogue going in non-dialogue situations.  I’ve had mixed success, and it’s always required some courage and a lot of on-my-toes awareness (which I’m not often up to).  It’s felt very risky to suddenly transform the nature of a conversation right in the middle.  But when it’s worked, it’s felt fantastic.  I’ve found that a display of highly conscious vulnerability can lift an adversarial or too-polite conversation into the realm of dialogue.  I’ve looked for ways to include the other person or people in my vulnerability and questions, rather than leaving them out or targeting them.  To create a safe space while challenging the status quo, I try to mix a generous helping of my shortcomings in with my sense of our shared situation.  “I hear us arguing with each other even though we both believe in peace.  It makes me feel very foolish.  I wonder what we can do to change?”  At the very least, such communications usually stop an empty, destructive conversation in its tracks.  That is, when I can muster the presence of mind to think of them and the courage to say them.

I believe that real community⁸ is the ideal environment for dialogue.  In real community, diversity is honored and people are willing to look at things as they really are.  It helps if people are familiar with each other – as long as the familiarity includes acceptance of each other’s uniqueness, both the bright and dark sides.  It is easier to be trusting and courageous when you are comfortable with the people around you.

In a trusting community of courageous people, all things can be said and heard and dialogue can flow unhindered.  In the absence of such community, I do what I can to help people (including myself) be more aware, trusting and/or courageous.  I find this requires much learning and practice.

Dialogue as a Practice

Dialogue can be considered an activity, a skill, or a kind of awareness.  It’s what we do when we explore meaning together.  It is also our ability to do that exploration.  And, lastly, it is a special sensitivity to the inner workings of our minds and how we organize our experience that both facilitates and arises out of dialogue.  This special awareness has even been referred to by some as “dialogue consciousness” or “a state of dialogue.”

I’ve found it useful to compare dialogue to archery which, as many people know, is used by some Zen students as a tool for disciplining their awareness.

Archery started out as an activity to hunt, attack and defend.  It was a survival skill.  Your skill was measured by how well you hit your targets, and developing it required practice.

When people practiced archery, some found that a special awareness grew in them, a clear alertness and presence of mind that was not only pleasant but useful in other activities and, at its best, intensely spiritual.  Somewhere along the line a well-trained, skilled, aware archer decided that this awareness had a value above and beyond archery, and that archery provided a path to its attainment.  I suspect that’s how the Zen art of archery began.

Archery demands a strength that can be trained to a point of effortlessness, a control that can be trained to a point of spontaneity, a relationship between archer and target that can be intensified until self and target vanish into simple oneness, and a built-in instant of release.  What more could a Zen student ask for?

But I can get engineered bows with sights that make archery easy.  And I can go after only slow or still targets.  But if I don’t develop my skills and awareness, I will be limited in what I can do and, in a tough spot, I’ll be helpless.

Likewise, I don’t need a lot of skill and awareness to explore most subjects in a talking circle.  But when I’m out in the world without the circle structure and process to support me, or when the subject is very delicate and highly charged, then it is good to have developed some dialogue awareness and skills to pull me through.  And dialogue consciousness, like Zen awareness, can be useful in other parts of life.

So some people practice dialogue as a discipline.  Some focus on developing communication skills and some on developing their awareness.  I have found such people less attracted to circle process for the very reason that it does support dialogue.  They prefer the challenge of open discussion in which the only thing that keeps it a dialogue is the consciousness and skill of the participants.  They learn the most that way.

Dialogue as a Communication Discipline

Here are some of the things I am learning to watch out for as I study dialogue as a communication discipline.⁹

• Efforts to nail down meaning:  making sure everything is thoroughly defined, clarified, understood.  This is a delicate point.  To a certain extent I need to understand what people are saying, and to make myself clear.  On the other hand, if I solidify meaning too much it stops flowing; exploration grinds to a halt.  Certainty ends exploration.  Certainty is great as a prelude to action but can be deadly to a dialogue.  Dialogue discipline may involve learning to prefer tantalizing questions to solid answers, learning to hold all conclusions lightly and letting minor confusions drift away unclarified.
• Undermining someone else’s meaning.  Arguing with, invalidating, or misrepresenting what someone said reverses the positive energy of dialogue.  Interestingly, neither disagreement nor agreement seem to contribute to dialogue.  Both tend to interrupt exploration.  Dialogue discipline may involve less passing judgment on things and more offering thoughts (or, better yet, tantalizing questions) as contributions to the evolving buffet of meanings before us.
• Running from meaningfulness.  It isn’t always easy to delve deeply into what is.  Glibness, smugness, cynicism, small talk and sometimes humor can be used to escape from meaningfulness.  Dialogue discipline may involve welcoming uncomfortable realizations (especially those that challenge unconscious assumptions I depend on) for the way they can expand my exploration of meaning.
• Identification with a position.  I can hold onto and protect a favorite piece of meaning, not giving it up to the fickle gods of open exploration.  I may identify with it; if something happened to it, what would happen to ME?!  I may become so heavily invested in or serious about a particular idea that it solidifies – or I do.  Once again, exploration stops, togetherness is shattered, meaning curdles into dogma.  Dialogue discipline may require me to hold my certainties lightly, let them go easily, float them into the group and trust the flow of collective exploration.
• Efforts to impose a personal meaning on the group.  Something can seem so real to me that it is incomprehensible that others don’t understand or agree with it, so I push it harder.  In a dialogue, this kind of effort stands out like a bull in a symphony.  Dialogue discipline may involve suspending rather than asserting my ideas into the group space.
• Sub-group conversations.  When the wholeness of the group is broken, dialogue is broken.  If only two or three of us have been pursuing a course of discussion for fifteen minutes, the others turn into spectators.  Sub-group conversations seem to get triggered by questions or comments which are targeted at specific individuals, or by the group stumbling upon a subject of passionate interest to only a few.  Dialogue discipline may involve noticing and mentioning such dynamics at work and learning to speak my truth in, to and for the whole group, not just one or two people.
• Linear restrictions on exploration.  I can call for focus, demanding that everything said be clearly and logically linked to preceding statements, dismissing other comments as off the subject.  I can ask questions that require answers or make statements that solicit responses.  I can demand that the dialogue produce results.  This glorification of sequence-sense can crowd out the spirit of open exploration.  Dialogue discipline may challenge me to expand my frame of reference to encompass whatever is said.  If my inquiry is open, everything fits.
• Personal withdrawal.  I can close down, isolating myself from the group.  I can become a disengaged spectator.  Or I can physically leave.  Dialogue discipline may mean I observe my own disengagement and admit it to the group, offering it simply as another observation – at which point it often dissolves because I have realigned with the collective exploration once again.  Dialogue discipline may mean staying tuned in, and noticing when I’m not.

Dialogue as an Awareness Discipline

Ultimately, dialogue is about wholeness – can we become whole and participate in non-fragmented ways in the wholeness of a group, the wholeness of collective consciousness?

Jeff Groethe introduced me to five modes of organizing experience¹⁰ which I’ve been using as a guide in expanding my awareness through dialogue practice.

• The first mode is identification, where I am not differentiating myself from whatever it is I’m looking at.  I don’t objectify my experience:  it just IS and I’m in it.  This is how we suppost babies experience things.  My communication at this level tends to be either spontaneous and expressive or socially-conditioned, but not analytical or objective.  This is the level of conformity, cliché, tears and impulsiveness.  I just AM angry; I can’t talk about it but I can express it.  This is where I “get things off my chest” and live life as it comes.
• The second mode is classification.  Here I differentiate myself (and everything else) from other things, I get things sorted out.  I know things by their categories:  idea, chair, planet, Yuppie.  When I’m in this mode I know what is and what ain’t, what’s right and what’s wrong – or at least try hard to know.  I communicate literally, dogmatically or adversarially, and fully believe in the solid objective reality of what’s “out there.”  I often assume others see and think as I do, and if they don’t, they’re wrong.  My arrogance loves here – as well as my objective clarity.
• The third mode is relationship, in which processes and the connections between people and between things are most real to me.  Reality is more contextual, less absolute than in the previous two modes.  I’m more concerned with fairness, balance, interactive processes.  My communication is open, concerned, emotional, heart-to-heart; it’s beginning to look like dialogue.  It is easy to explore things with other people – especially how we feel about things.
• The fourth mode is participation, in which reality and meaning come into being through my involvement.  Things can get pretty relative at this level since I view truth and solidity as arising from considerations, not from any absolute reality.  Mystics and quantum physicists feel comfortable here and ambitious dialoguers aspire to this mode of consciousness.  Here’s where “the map is not the territory” and things cease to have independent existence.  I no longer behave in ways that undermine dialogue, not because I’m being a good boy, but because those behaviors arise from the identification and fragmentation typical of the first and second modes, and I’m now looking at a larger picture of which I am an inseparable and creative part.  At this level, dialogue often happens from a place of collective consciousness, of engaged wholeness in which the individual and the group are experienced as facets of each other.
• The fifth mode is unity or oneness in which distinct entities (including me and all categories and relationships) cease to exist as entities – making this mode extremely hard to comprehend or talk about.  This is an ultimate mode, not a particularly functional one for me.  I leave it to God and his/her closest friends.

Now the point of all this is that I can practice dialogue disciplines as a way to improve my communication or (or rather and/or) as a path to arrive at expanded states of consciousness.  The difference is not so much in what I do as in how I do it.  When practicing communication I might think, “Oops, I’m arguing.  I’d better stop that.”  When practicing awareness, I might notice

• that I’m arguing,
• how fragmented I feel from the other person,
• that my attention, itself, seems fragmented and
• how I’m creating this battle – at which point I might decide to say something like, “I just noticed how my fighting comes out of mistaking my ideas for The Truth and that that derailed our dialogue.  I’ve tried saving the world (let’s say that’s what the subject was) for so long that if I agreed that it was impossible my whole life would seem wasted.  I identify my life with saving the world, so I assert its possibility because the alternative would wipe me out – literally.”  At which point the exploration of the end of the world would proceed.  This dialogue moment would have made me mindful of how I fragment my relationships and my consciousness in fights, and it probably would slip me into a very whole-view state of mind.

Dialogue Groups and Exercises

Physicist David Bohm’s research has led him to believe that dialogue can help access a higher order of intelligence unavailable to isolated individuals.  Some of his students, particularly psychologist Risa Kaparo, have developed elaborate methods for overcoming fragmentation of our awareness, allowing us to access this co-intelligence.  Bohmian dialogue groups are often arenas for dialogue practice (both communication and awareness varieties).  My experience with them has led me to see them as exercise studios where I go for a workout, whereas I view circles and consensus meetings as work camps where I go to actually produce something (although I have also gone to circles just for the fun of it).

I wouldn’t be surprised if, as I and others in the dialogue groups become more adept, these groups become more productive in the usual sense.  I imagine (and hope) that all this exercise of my communication aptitudes and awareness will enable me to generate the spirit of dialogue even among those unfamiliar with it, without having to depend on the process structures of talking circles, consensus, and so on.

I now attend a dialogue group facilitated by Jeff Groethe, who’s had two years of training in Kaparo’s procedures.  Whenever any of us seem to get too caught up with our own or someone else’s ideas – so that we’ve lost that fine exploratory edge on our consciousness – Jeff or someone else in the group will comment on that, and we all look at it.  For example, I often want to share ideas that I really love and, if it seems to me people aren’t getting it, I will start putting a lot of effort into explaining it.  Someone will comment on my efforting and I’ll suddenly see myself doing it.  It isn’t that it is wrong to put out an effort.  It’s that it is a sign that I am feeling myself and my ideas as separated from the group and its common pool of meaning.  I am no longer simply suspending my ideas out into the common pool for people to look at.  I’m sort of selling them.  Just noticing that may bring me back to the clear, open, watching state.

In another case the facilitator and another participant got into extensive back and forth discussion which the rest of us were watching.  I commented on it and we all looked at it.  Indeed, they had become a fragmented part of the group that was slowly but surely splitting apart the group.

Another time I commented that for the last half hour or so only the men (me included) had spoken.  A brief discussion of whether this was sexist ensued but we all knew that was secondary.  What really mattered was to make the phenomena conscious so that the dialogue would not be degraded by such an unconscious factor.  Dialogues in the Bohmian tradition stress bringing unexamined assumptions to light.

The facilitation is democratic.  Everyone is encouraged to “indicate” such apparent departures from dialogue consciousness.

We also experiment with exercises which increase our awareness of some facet of dialogue.  One of the most stimulating is E-Prime.

E-Prime

E-Prime is English without any “to be” verbs (be, was, is, has been, etc.).  When I try to communicate in E-Prime, I find I have to be constantly aware of my thinking and speaking.  Since I can’t just “talk normally,” I have to slow down and express myself freshly instead of using old thought patterns and habits of communication.  E-Prime makes it extremely difficult to identify things – to say that A is B.  So I have to soften and clarify my beliefs and positions.  Dogmatism becomes impossible.  An impulse to say “Dialogue is the best form of communication” is channeled into statements like:  “I see dialogue as a positive form of communication” or “Dialogue helps us to think together instead of against each other or in isolation.”  When my views are stated this way, people with other opinions seem less apt to disagree and more apt to offer their views as additional ways to look at the subject, thus adding to the body of shared information instead of cutting it down.

A Dialogue Movement?

I didn’t actually go out seeking dialogue and find all these things.  My frustrations with communication were, until recently, a persistent but relatively minor theme in my life.  My major concern was with the massive destruction being done to the earth and its people by war, violence and systems of domination – and the threat of total destruction that human technological brilliance made possible.  It is through seeking solutions to those problems that I found myself, repeatedly, face to face with the problem of communication and with this growing body of interesting alternatives that I’ve come to call dialogue.

Actually, these encounters with dialogue have gone beyond communication.  It has dawned on me that the real issue is intelligence – collective intelligence.  The global and social problems we face are complex and solution-resistant.  We can’t solve them one at a time.  They are all connected and, the worse each one gets, the more it seems that other things must be solved before the problem at hand.

Our systems of elected representation, government regulation, free markets, computer-aided expertise, etc., have all proved inadequate to the task.  We can all sense that there are still missing ingredients that, until we discover and deal with them, will keep us accelerating on this fast track to catastrophe.

One of the most important things we’re missing is the ability to be intelligent together, to collectively observe our circumstances and then evaluate that information in ways that enable us to respond – together – in appropriate, life-nurturing ways.  Intelligence is responsiveness.  And right now we are manifesting collective stupidity – responding to each other and our environment in inappropriate, life-destroying ways.  This dynamic is visible among friends, in groups and companies and, most dangerously, in whole cultures.

It occurred to me that it doesn’t matter, in a sense, if we see all sorts of solutions for the world and yet can’t communicate them in a society addicted to destructive communication.  Furthermore, that previous sentence assumes that we have discovered some ultimate solutions and that all that is necessary is to have others agree with us.  I can’t imagine that our solutions couldn’t be bettered.  We, ourselves, don’t even agree on them.  We, ourselves, need to learn.

All of this brings me back to dialogue, which offers many approaches to exploring meaning together, to finding common ground, to co-creating the vital insights we need to save the world.  I’ve come to believe that selling existing solutions is less important than joining together to co-create new ones.  I now doubt that we will survive as a civilization without engaging whole populations in creative participation, in co-creative, co-exploratory co-intelligence.  If we need anything else, our collective intelligence will create it.  Co-intelligence can provide the creative energy and wisdom for cultural transformation.

At least that’s where my own inquiry has brought me.  I realize that in this article I am trying to sell you on the idea of dialogue and collective intelligence.  It shows what a beginner I am at this.  I am learning, and I never want to stop.

Together with others inspired by a similar vision, I hope to start weaving all these approaches to dialogue (and there are many more than what I’ve described here) into a movement.  Maybe all those activists, organizational development consultants, human potential gurus, psychologists and others who have been doing this work will come to see that they are all manifesting the same human urge to seek meaning together – and start to come together themselves to more rapidly and coherently evolve this important trend in human affairs.  I would love to see a dialogue movement be born:  conferences, journals, computer networks and – ultimately – a weaving together of powerful methods which can then be consciously spread to citizen’s groups, businesses, schools, and governments to meet the adversity of the coming years with creative, appropriate behaviors and collective transformation.

But that’s just a vision.

In the meantime, there is the very real problem of that difficult meeting you have coming up this weekend.  Perhaps there is something here that you can use to make it more collegial.  Perhaps you will see it in a new light.  Perhaps, at least, a door of possibility has opened in your world and you can sense a soft, poignant gust of springtime swirling in on the musty atmosphere of committees, debates and stifled creativity.

That’s what I feel.

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Tom Atlee is founder and co-director of the non-profit Co-Intelligence Institute.  Recently his work has focused on developing our capacity to function as a wise democracy, so we can turn our social and environmental challenges into positive developments for our society. His social change vision is based on new understandings of wholeness which recognize the value of diversity, unity, relationship, context, uniqueness and the spirit inside each of us and the world.  Reprinted with permission.