What Is Dialogue?

Actively Listening

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Mindfulness Boosts Creativity

There can be no doubt that a confused, chaotic, distracted and an unsettled mind can lead to some spectacular states of creativity, but for most of us it’s a rare event. And when it comes to being creative and innovative in a business setting those states will more often get you fired than hailed as a creative genius. It’s better to leave the turbulent mind to writers of fiction and artists deeply involved in self expression. 

A top requirement to encouraging creativity and innovation within a business is the ability to communicate your ideas to a group of peers in your team. So being creative generally is not enough you also need to bring the rest of the explorers along with you on your journey to find the next big thing. If management is finding it hard to take ideas to fruition and to create an acceptable ROI you’ll you need a facilitator to help guide the process.

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Creating Positive Space Within Your Company

In the not too distant past the idea of employees and management existing in an environment of open communication would have been unthinkable. But times have thankfully changed and today more and more businesses are open to and actively moving forward with creating an atmosphere where open conversations can take place without fear of job loss or banishment.

Business leaders more and more recognize that a culture of trust and intimacy has the potential to constantly re-energize their core, and keep them nimble, creative and innovative much like if they were a start-up company.

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Expand Each Moment – Embracing Silence

Close your eyes for 3 or 4 seconds and listen to your surroundings, how many distinct sounds do you hear? I’ll bet you counted more then a handful. We are surrounded by noise, most of which we are barely conscious of and we’ve come to accept our life bereft of silence and forgotten how important embracing silence is.

The noise of passing cars, scraping snow shovels, clicking keys and muffled smart phones while important to our serenity is not the noise I want you to think about. No, I want you to think about the noise inside your head that’s shouting to get out. It’s our thoughts and internal conversations constantly taking place inside all of us that gets in the way of meaningful Dialogue.

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The Unknown

How do you strike a balance between managing the difficult business issues facing your firm right now and predicting the uncertainties of tomorrow?

A key challenge for organizations today is that the business environment has become more ambiguous, complex and uncertain. Companies are beginning to realize that short-term fixes don’t serve them well for the future and are instead placing more focus on contingency planning for the time ahead. Yet it’s important to strike a balance between putting out immediate fires and sensing into what is yet to come. To do this, you’re going to need to engage both your head and your heart along with one other body part.

I wish I could remember where; but I read a blog some years back that classified leaders into three categories: “Head-only”; “Heart-only” and “Gut-only” (by the way, that’s the other “body part”).

The author suggested that Head-only leaders focus on current results, relying on their rationale and diagnostic tools to make decisions. This presents a challenge of balancing paradoxes however. Heart-only leaders open themselves to a wide range of views – maybe too wide – as they tend to hinder their ability to identify future trends. And Gut-only leaders work on conviction and instinct which is a problem if their sense about the future is wrong.

The obvious solution is to draw from the strengths in all three categories – especially given the unknowns we experience in business today. But with the unknown comes some fear; with uncertainty comes apprehension. So how do we honor both the servant and the gift?

Learn to embrace the unknown by challenging your assumptions. Let go of old stories. The past does not necessarily inform the future. Accept that you do not know for certain and be okay with that. Don’t be so arrogant that you think you know the answer – have the winning solution – or are selling the right product.

Like the shifting wind, variables are constantly changing and if the wind has shifted, it’s likely you need an adjustment on the sail – or perhaps no sail at all. You need to be adaptive – moving in and out of the known and the unknowns, tacking accordingly as you release what you think you comprehend (head); remain open to what is possible (heart) and trust your sense about what is emerging (gut).

The bottom line is this: The only thing we truly have control over is our very next thought.

  • So learn to be present. Query apprehension.
  • Aspire to accept uncertainty and embrace the unknown. Trust.
  • Place your focus on both short and long term issues.
  • And be at peace with “I don’t know”.

Use your head, heart and gut to create the conditions to authentically understand current reality – all of the elements and factors internally, externally and multidimensional that are present to interact with now. Operating from that awareness – from that wholeness – will point you in the right direction.

 

Image: John Hain via Pixabay

Be Mindful Be Attentive

be mindful sunrise

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As facilitators of Generative Dialogue, we teach group participants to pause and silently ask three questions prior to speaking: 

  • Have I heard what’s been said? (Understand before being understood)
  • Is it truly my turn to speak? (Am I paying attention to my Ego?)
  • Is what I am going to say in service to the group? (Will my influence help the group to learn?)

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Challenge Your Assumptions

If someone came up to you on the street and said “challenge your assumptions” then walked away, what would you think? Maybe you wouldn’t think anything, but more than likely your thoughts would drift to thinking that person must be ill or you may even feel assaulted. Few of us would say “thank you” or “I probably should,” it wouldn’t occur to us to notice what was really said, no we would react from a place of assumptions.

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Participate in The Whole

moon and stars

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In the Introduction to Bohm’s book, On Dialogue, Peter Senge shares his view of the modern world – a world that “is full of increasingly stunning technological advances and an increasing inability to live together.” The fundamental problem here, according to Bohm, is that “the whole is too much. There is no way by which thought can hold the whole because thought only abstracts; it limits and defines.”

It was Bohm’s belief that in order to understand wholes, you have to participate rather than isolate. As a physicist, he had an understanding about the universe – a participatory universe where meaning continually unfolds. Because everything is interconnected, we (as human beings) are part of the universe. And if the universe is participatory; then we are too, making possible among us a different kind of consciousness – what Bohm called participatory consciousness.

When a group attains Generative Dialogue, “each person is participating – is partaking of the whole meaning of the group and also taking part in it.” Yet we tend to separate or isolate ourselves from whatever is within the whole and therefore cannot take part in it. And this is when we return to abstracting, judging and defending.

∞∞∞

Because we experience the world in polarity, for the most part we tend to separate ourselves from each another. There is pain and there is beauty. There is anger and there is love. There are good guys and there are bad guys. There are possibilities and there are challenges. And there is right and there is wrong.

We hold different beliefs. We have different identities. And because most of what we see in the world is a projection of our own fears, we make assumptions and judgments and feel a need to defend when others don’t share our world view.

But if the universe is indeed participatory; and if everything and everyone are truly connected, doesn’t that suggest that there are no “good guys” and “bad guys” separate from ourselves? Isn’t it instead that we “all participate in creating the forces that give rise to what exists – both what we value and what we abhor”?

David Bohm’s vision was a different more viable way of living together. As a physicist, he was dedicated to understanding how the universe works. As a human being, he wanted to “bring that same sort of understanding into the center of human affairs.”

The whole may be too much; but we have to try. Because It is through the invitation of Dialogue that we will “test the viability of traditional definitions of what it means to be human and collectively explore the prospect of an enhanced humanity.”

Image: Gerd Altmann Freiburg, Deutschland