Dialogue, Stages and Components of a Dialogue Session

Dialogue is not merely a set of techniques for improving organisations, enhancing communications, building consensus, or solving problems. It is based on the principles that conception and implementation are intimately linked, with a core common meaning. During the dialogue process, people learn how to think together - not just in the sense of analyzing a shared problem or creating new pieces of shared knowledge, but in the sense of occupying a collective sensibility, in which the thoughts, emotions and resulting actions belong not to one individual, but to all of them together.

Stages of Dialogue

PHASE 1 (instability of the container): Invitation -> Conversation -> Deliberation ->

PHASE 2 (instability in the container): Discussion (to shake apart) or Suspension (to hang in front)

PHASE 3 (Inquiry in the container): 

Discussion leading to Skillful discussion (the flow of speech, logical analysis) vs Debate (to beat down) 

Suspension leading to Dialogue (the flow of meaning), 

PHASE 4 (Creativity in the container)

Dialogue leading to Metalogue (meaning moving with/among)

Components of a Dialogue Session (taken from a blog of the Alliance of Christian Development Agencies - see link below)

William Isaacs in the book The Fifth Discipline Field Book enumerates the basic components of a dialogue session and these are:

Invitation: The process begins with an invitation. When being invited, people are given a choice whether to accept it or reject it. Extending the invitation to dialogue opens up the space to for people to express feelings of discomfort, resistance or fear. Unlike in a monologue, dialogue cannot be forced into anyone. There has to be an agreement to partake or participate in the process. The challenge for every facilitator is to create a space where potential participants will feel safe from traditional structures of authority and hierarchy or any element that will inhibit their engagement in a dialogue.

Generative listening: This is the “art of developing deeper silences in yourself, so you can slow your mind’s hearing to your ears’ natural speed, and hear beneath the words to their meaning.” This is also perhaps, what the Psalmist refers to as “applying my heart to what I have observed.”

Observing the observer: This has to do with the developing of an environment that is “quiet” enough for people to observe their own thoughts and the team’s thoughts. Once this is achieved, dialogue now becomes possible.

Suspending assumptions: Every individual possesses a lens or a framework by which he or she interprets the world around him. In any conversation or dialogue, it is inevitable for us to bring with us these assumptions. In suspending ones’ assumptions, he or she does not lay these aside but rather, these assumptions are brought forth into the collective for them to understand, consider and weigh. One must be aware of his or her assumptions and must be willing to invite others to see a new facet in this very thing that he or she is thinking or saying.

http://www.acda.org.ph/?p=264

Team Learning: a discipline that goes far beyond team building

Team learning is not team building and should not be taken on lightly... But you can focus immediatly on your organisation's chief concerns and issues....
Abstracts written by Charlotte Roberts, taken from The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, Team Learning

The discipline of team learning goes well beyond conventional "team building" skills such as creating courteous behaviors, improving communication, becoming better able to perform everyday work tasks together, or even building strong relationships. This discipline inspires more fundamental changes, with enduring application that will ripple out through the organisation.

Team learning is also the most challenging discipline - intellectually, emotionally, socially, and spiritually. The process of learning how to learn collectively is unfamiliar. It has nothing to do with the "school learning" of memorizing details to feed back in tests. It starts with self-mastery and self-knowledge, but involves looking outward to develop knowledge of, and alignment with, others on your team. Most of us have had no training in this. This discipline will lead you there. Do you have the necessary patience with yourself and others?

Members of the team should know that there will be times of frustration and perhaps embarrassment, as they develop their collective capabilities. Ideally, they should have the opportunity to chose the practice of team learning, with no penalty if they say "no" (although this may be unrealistics if the rest of the team says "yes").

CHARACTERISTICS OF A LEARNING TEAM

For a team which practices this discipline, it is helpful to have a reason to talk and learn - a situation that compels deliberation, a need to solve a problem, the collective desire to create something new, or a drive to foster new relationship with other parts of the organisation.

This first concern will become the preliminary "practice filed" for the team's development. As it gains confidence and ability, the team will move on to consider other matters.

THE TEAM FACILITATOR

The team can develop skills faster if it has an outside facilitator who is trained in techniques for building reflection and inquiry skills, as well as dialogue facilitation. Team members of unknowingly collude to misrepresent reality to each other, and cover up the ways in which they do so......

GROUND RULES FOR LEARNING

Teams need to set up their own ground rules for conversation. These may include agreements to tell the truth as each person knows it, bring relevant information immediatly to the team, or limit the time each person can speak. Teams may decide to clarify how decisions will be made and by whom, and to establish ways to safely check and challenge each other. Once the rules are set by consensus, it is important for the team to discuss how it will deal with violations. These rules are meants to help the team shape its conversations, not as an end in themselves; and they should never become so dominant that they override the team's purposes and learnings.

When results don't turn out as expected, you and the other team members will need to master the art of forgiveness. Looking for someone to blame may mean abandoning the team's learning. Forgiveness means standing with the persons who were leading the experiment at hand, and helping the team discern what forces at play contributed to the unexpected outcomes. Forgiveness also means not holding the mistake as a trump card to be used some time in the future when politics would encourage it.

Teams and capturing the significance of teams

Within and around teams - History has brought us to a moment where teams are recognised as a critical component of every enterprise - the predominent unit for decision making and getting things done. Nonetheless, most aspects of existing infrastructure - such as measurement and compensation systems, as well as rewards - have not yet "captured" the significance of teams. And many people who espouse the importance of teams still believe, when push comes to the shove, that the key unit of effectiveness is individual. This will inevitably change.

The prevailing definition of "team" will change as well.

From The Fifth Discipline Filedbook, Team Learning

Teams: the word "team" can be traced back to the Indo-European word deuk (to pull); it has always included a meaning of "pulling together". (The modern sense of team, "a group of people acting together" emerged in the sixteenth century.)
We define "teams" as any group of people who need each other to accomplish a result. This definition is derived from a statement made by former Royal Dutch / Shell Group Planning coordinator Arie de Geus: "The only relevant learning in a company is the learning done by those people who have the power to take action" - Art Kleiner, From The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, Team Learning
Photo of Arie de Geus

Team Learning: what does it take to act together?

Team learning. Such learning is viewed as ‘the process of aligning and developing the capacities of a team to create the results its members truly desire’ (Senge 1990: 236). It builds on personal mastery and shared vision – but these are not enough. People need to be able to act together. When teams learn together, Peter Senge suggests, not only can there be good results for the organization, members will grow more rapidly than could have occurred otherwise.

The discipline of team learning starts with ‘dialogue’, the capacity of members of a team to suspend assumptions and enter into a genuine ‘thinking together’. To the Greeks dia-logos meant a free-flowing if meaning through a group, allowing the group to discover insights not attainable individually…. [It] also involves learning how to recognize the patterns of interaction in teams that undermine learning. (Senge 1990: 10) 

The notion of dialogue that flows through The Fifth Discipline is very heavily dependent on the work of the physicist, David Bohm (where a group ‘becomes open to the flow of a larger intelligence’, and thought is approached largely as collective phenomenon). When dialogue is joined with systems thinking, Senge argues, there is the possibility of creating a language more suited for dealing with complexity, and of focusing on deep-seated structural issues and forces rather than being diverted by questions of personality and leadership style. Indeed, such is the emphasis on dialogue in his work that it could almost be put alongside systems thinking as a central feature of his approach.

What it is like being part of a great team - Peter Senge and the 5 main dimensions of Learning Organisations

 When you ask people about what it is like being part of a great team, what is most striking is the meaningfulness of the experience. People talk about being part of something larger than themselves, of being connected, of being generative. It become quite clear that, for many, their experiences as part of truly great teams stand out as singular periods of life lived to the fullest. Some spend the rest of their lives looking for ways to recapture that spirit. (Senge 1990: 13)

For Peter Senge, real learning gets to the heart of what it is to be human. We become able to re-create ourselves. This applies to both individuals and organizations. Thus, for a ‘learning organization it is not enough to survive. ‘”Survival learning” or what is more often termed “adaptive learning” is important – indeed it is necessary. But for a learning organization, “adaptive learning” must be joined by “generative learning”, learning that enhances our capacity to create’ (Senge 1990:14).

The dimension that distinguishes learning from more traditional organizations is the mastery of certain basic disciplines or ‘component technologies’. The five that Peter Senge identifies are said to be converging to innovate learning organizations. They are:

• Systems thinking
• Personal mastery
• Mental models
• Building shared vision
• Team learning

He adds to this recognition that people are agents, able to act upon the structures and systems of which they are a part. All the disciplines are, in this way, ‘concerned with a shift of mind from seeing parts to seeing wholes, from seeing people as helpless reactors to seeing them as active participants in shaping their reality, from reacting to the present to creating the future’ (Senge 1990: 69).

Taken from this good website: http://www.infed.org/thinkers/senge.htm#_Systems_thinking_%E2%80%93