Dialogue: What Makes It Unique?
A Guided Process
Effective dialogue between people of diverse experiences amd beliefs usually requires the guidance of a facilitator. The role of the facilitator in guiding the conversation makes dialogue different from other communication forms. Facilitators help create a safe space by setting ground rules or guidelines to keep dialogue participants focused on listening to and working with each other. Facilitators guide the dialogue process without deciding who is right or wrong, or declaring a “winner” as a moderator does in a debate. Chapter 6 describes the important dimensions of facilitating dialogue.
| DEBATE | DIALOGUE |
| The goal is to “win” the argument by affirming one’s own views and discrediting other views. | The goal is to understand different perspectives and learn about other views. |
| People listen to others to find flaws in their arguments. | People listen to others to understand how their experiences shape their beliefs. |
| People critique the experiences of others as distorted and invalid. | People accept the experiences of others as real and valid. |
| People appear to be determined not to change their own views on the issue. | People appear to be somewhat open to expanding their understanding of the issue. |
| People speak based on assumptions made about others’ positions and motivations. | People speak primarily from their own understanding and experience. |
| People oppose each other and attempt to prove each other wrong. | People work together toward common understanding. |
| Strong emotions like anger are often used to intimidate the other side. | Strong emotions like anger and sadness are appropriate when they convey the intensity of an experience or belief. |
An Intention to Learn and Change
The intention behind a dialogue is its most definitive characteristic. Dialogue works best when the people involved are open to learning and changing. The role of the dialogue facilitator is to encourage this kind of attitude.
| Dialogue requires a willingness to learn from those who believe differently. |
Most people either consciously or unconsciously believe that there is only one right way to believe or act. For this reason, some people discredit dialogue because it quires them to recognize that they may be able to learn from people who believe differently. When people believe that they alone hold the whole truth, there is no need to listen to others.
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Dialogue works best when participants bring curiosity and a sense of wonder about others, and a desire to learn more about people and their experiences. It requires humility to recognize that one person or group does not have the whole truth. In dialogue, people acknowledge that they can benefit from listening to and learning, talking, and working with others. Participants come to understand that what they believe about an issue is shaped, in part, by their life experiences and other factors such as age, class, religion, ethnicity, geography, or gender.
Openness to learning from and about others helps to create a space where people can be honest about their similarities and differences. In a dialogue process, participants are asked to respectfully listen, learn, and share their experiences with others.
A Dialogue Story
We began facilitating dialogues together in 1999 with Hope in the Cities, a nonprofit organization based in Richmond, Virginia, that works at creating just and inclusive communities. [2] As a city whose history is steeped in institutionalized slavery, Richmond was an ideal place to use dialogue to work on long-standing social divisions. We functioned as a biracial facilitator team—David, an African-American male, and Lisa, a white female—in an attempt to model cross-racial cooperation.
In 2001 we designed and guided the process for a series of weekend retreat dialogues for groups of 20 black, white, Latino, and Asian Richmonders. On one weekend a month for several years, various racially mixed groups had come together at a retreat center to share meals and lodging, relax in recreational rooms and gardens, enjoy magnificent scenery, and engage in formal and informal dialogue. During the Civil War, the mansion on the grounds had served as a hospital run by nuns that treated both Confederate and Union troops. It seemed a particularly appropriate place for honest dialogue about the city's racial, economic, and political divisions.
Those weekend dialogues used a unique format that differed from much of the work on racial reconciliation going on in the nation at the time, which involved only two- or three-hour sessions. The weekend retreat dialogue model allowed for a more intensive kind of relationship- building that fostered a greater degree of transformation. Informal rituals of eating, drinking, walking, and relaxing together—with times of ecumenical prayer as a supplement—helped to transform participants’ awareness of issues of race, class, and politics in a safe and nurturing environment that was built on relationships. Ultimately, these relationships between people of different economic and racial groups are what motivate people to bring about change in their communities.
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A retreat approach is just one model for facilitating dialogue. There are many others. In the following chapters, we explore how dialogue works; how to organize, design, and facilitate a dialogue process; and how to move from talk to action. We have woven short examples from our work into the chapters to demonstrate the diverse uses of dialogue.
This book identifies ways you can begin to use the process of dialogue in your family, workplace, community, and nation. With a few simple facilitation techniques, anyone can help a tense debate or conversation take on some qualities of a dialogue. Prompting people to talk about the life experiences that helped shaped their beliefs and opinions, rather than asking about the beliefs and opinions themselves, can help shift a conversation. Anyone can point out where there is common ground or similarities in opposing views. And anyone can encourage people to listen respectfully to others.
This Little Book, then, is useful for anyone who participates in conversation, not only for dialogue facilitators. In an age of globalization, with diverse people and societies growing increasingly interdependent, effective communication is critical. In our view, better communication leads to better understanding, which gives us the best chance of respectfully working and living together.
2. How Does Dialogue Work?
Dialogue offers individuals and communities a variety of benefits. One way to describe how dialogue works is to say that it affects three distinct but interrelated parts of our humanity: our intellect, emotions, and spirit. Dialogue is most effective when the process addresses each of those dimensions.
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Intellect
Dialogue exposes people to different ways of seeing the world. People have an opportunity to rethink their understanding and knowledge of an issue, event, or a group of people. Dialogue creates a safe space to listen and ask questions of people who have different experiences and worldviews. Recognizing the potential validity of alternative viewpoints expands people’s understanding beyond their own view. For example, when environmentalists and cattle ranchers take part in a dialogue about land usage, they discover new information about each side's interests and needs.
Emotions
Dialogue prompts greater emotional understanding of others and one’s own self, stirs passions, and motivates people to act. Sometimes dialogue helps people identify resentments they have unknowingly carried toward individuals or groups. When it works well, dialogue helps expand people’s sense of empathy for others and prompts them to act to change a situation.
For example, an intentional dialogue process between a married couple can help them learn about the historical context that shaped each spouse’s emotional needs. One spouse may have developed a need for emotional space and reflection following an argument. The other may prefer to work things out as soon as possible. Dialogue can help each spouse understand the background to these different emotional needs, and can motivate the couple to try new ways of interaction given this understanding of each other's needs.
Spirit
Dialogue facilitators foster, at a minimum, a basic level of human caring for all of its participants. Though this sense of caring is not unique to dialogue settings, it is not necessarily the norm in society, especially among strangers. This experience of deep caring can expand people’s sense of community connectedness.
People who are religious often characterize this sense of commonality in dialogue by saying that God is present. In a poignant description of how dialogue can touch the deeper levels of our humanity, one dialogue participant described the job of a facilitator as “doing surgery on people’s souls.”
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