Dialogue Can Bring Us Together

Words have power. Their invisible, weightless energy shapes and colors the world around us like an artist's brush. An endless supply of opinions flood us from corporate media, the Internet and other forms of mass and personal communication everyday.

Soundbite-driven mass media reduces complex issues into black and white fragments forcing viewers into an artificial us-versus-them mentality. Caught in this morass of information overload, we don't have time to think and sort through all the competing perspectives.

Certainly our education system holds some responsibility for weakening the "art of conversation," but no matter the source, our interpersonal, family and civic lives are in jeopardy.

With much of the media creating adrenalin-triggering content to keep viewers in a constant state of urgency and drama and our government inflicting "shock and awe" on the populace; what is lost is our sense of commonality, wholeness and shared understanding. Current political campaign coverage is a perfect example of how meaningful content has been sapped from the conversation, to be replaced by popularity contests, strategy analysis and gossip.

This is also reflected in our personal lives and our relationships with family and friends. We forget that at our core, we care about similar things. And, can work together to meet those goals. Most people sense that we live in an age of boundless potential, yet are faced with a variety of ongoing and impending crises with no clear solutions.

True dialogue gives us a method to cut through the chatter and restore us back to our core values, basic humanity and common connections. Rather then focus on divisiveness, dialogue can aid in seeing the world coherently.

I had the pleasure of hosting a World Cafe workshop at my loft. The process of "focusing on conversations that matter" is simple, yet can have profound outcomes.

Here is a short video about the World Cafe dialogue process:

William Isaacs, in Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together, writes:

Dialogue is not in the end merely about talking, it is about taking action. And at its best, dialogue includes powerful aesthetics such as: meaning, creativity, ethics and action. Dialogue fulfills deeper, more widespread needs then simply 'getting to yes.' The intention of dialogue is to reach new understanding and, in so doing, form a totally new basis from which to think and act.

Isaacs continues to say that dialogue is a "shared inquiry, a way of thinking and reflecting together. It is not something you do to another person. It is something you do with people. Dialogue is a living experience of inquiry within and between people."

The process of dialogue is nothing mysterious or complex. Through dialogue, we discover a base of shared meaning from an underlying "wholeness." By harnessing the collective intelligence of the community, dialogue becomes the cornerstone of civic practice. Being aware of the contradictions between what we say and what we do is key to opening true, meaningful and solution-based dialogue.

Together, we can find new directions and new opportunities more easily then we can on our own, and in the process unite people over what matters, not divide and destroy based on fear. With an increasingly connected world, we need to resurrect this innate skill more now then ever.