Nurturing a Culture of Dialogue

When dialogue breaks down

When a shared culture of dialogue breaks down or is not given a chance to grow, disagreements are no longer seen as opportunities to learn and collaborate but quickly degenerate into antagonistic opposites. Participants then no longer experience each other as fellow truth seekers, meaning makers, knowledge producers or power sharers. Instead, they tend to retreat into predictable echo chambers that reinforce the world view of their slogan-wielding tribe. They may even begin to believe that those who are not part of their tribe and do not adhere to what they hold to be true are ignorant, deluded, criminal, sick, mad, sinners or even evil. People are assigned an inescapable stereotyped position in some pre-established moral binary. Disagreements with them are perceived as existential threats to identity. The so-called enemy must then be silenced and excluded from opportunity. The possibility of working together with those who disagree with them, to solve problems they share in common, shuts down and the potential of collective intelligence is short-circuited.

We are experiencing a global crisis in our capacity for dialogue. The dynamics are the same whether the conversation is about race, gender, sexuality, migrants, climate, vaccines, land, etc. When dialogue breaks down the alternatives that everyone is left with are: physical violence, economic coercion or the dogmatic assertion of a single story. It is perhaps worth expanding on the third one. The dogma of a single story or narrative is the enemy of generative dialogue, whether it is traditional dogma, religious dogma, conservative dogma, liberal dogma, scientific dogma or postmodern dogma. Whenever a group of people believes its answers are final, total and complete, conflict escalates and possibilities shut down. At the very least a commitment to dialogue is an attempt to avoid the inevitable alternatives.

In a group consisting of diverse cultures, identities, knowledge systems and points of view, it can be very challenging to agree to what constitutes a shared culture of dialogue – even temporarily for the purpose of facing a specific challenge. What does it take to agree to give dialogue a chance? Here are five ideas to reflect on.

Co-creating the guidelines

A starting place could be involving all participants in the co-creation of the guidelines for that dialogue. This assumes everyone is committed to the ideal of working together to deepen their knowledge. What does everyone accept as criteria for assessing knowledge? What does everyone accept as protocols for ensuring inclusion? This is a dialogue about the nature of dialogue. Only what is agreed by everyone can be included in the guidelines. Then it can be decided whether the guidelines offer enough for productive dialogue to continue. If not, we know that physical violence, economic coercion or the dogmatic assertion of single stories are the available alternatives – motivating people through fear, financial anxiety or shame.

Maintaining the conversation until you have the best solution possible

We need to move beyond the idea of debates in which there are winners and losers. Instead we need to try and maintain the dialogue for as long as it takes to build onto each other’s ideas, giving and receiving feedback, co-creating the best explanations, solutions and transactions we can. This requires timeframes that are different from those experienced on social media or pressured corporate production meetings. How can we maintain the same conversation over time allowing it to deepen our understanding and ensuring insights are integrated into our collective knowledge. This is not a negotiation, but a sincere and shared exploration of the nature of reality. In this process, compromise should be the last resort not the organising principle.

Expecting to learn from each other

Creating the space for dialogue starts with being genuinely curious about the other person’s experience and being vulnerable enough to admit that you don’t know everything. Can you say, “I will enter the conversation from the perspective that others know something valuable I don’t and that their life experiences, different from my own, offer me something I can learn from.” The best way I can show my respect to others is by listening deeply, engaging with their disagreements fully, giving them my time, energy and attention. Even if I still disagree with them, I will have a deeper understanding and that will enrich the dialogue. listening deeply, engaging with their disagreements fully, giving them my time, energy and attention. Even if I still disagree with them, I will have a deeper understanding and that will enrich the dialogue.

Ensuring spaces are safe enough

Rather than “safe spaces,” we need spaces that are “safe enough” for people to share openly and be vulnerable to the difference they perceive in others. Learning together sometimes means sitting with discomfort and grappling with critical feedback. We need to be able to distinguish discomfort from real harm – engaging disagreement rather than allowing it to trigger automatic resistance. Questions and alternative points of view are not necessarily threats or intended as attacks on identity. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t deal with inequality and injustice when it occurs, but we should allow people the opportunity to acknowledge and reflect on their unconscious bias and to correct their speech and actions if necessary without excluding them.

Making assumptions explicit

A culture can be thought of as a shared set of assumptions about the way the world works. When those assumptions are made explicit and are free to be interrogated by everyone involved, the culture they are part of becomes more dynamic and open to new possibilities. The possibility of a shared culture of dialogue that produces a collective understanding assumes we can agree to a meta-perspective that transcends our individual and cultural differences. Can we agree on criteria for assessing knowledge? These could be things like: “Avoid jumping to conclusions before you have considered all the available evidence,” and “Criticise the idea – not the person who expressed it.” Can we agree on protocols for inclusion? These could be things like: “Ask questions that can deepen our understanding, rather than make statements that presume what others value, feel, think and believe,” and “Recognise that an absolute truth is almost always impossible to prove, and that instead of defending positions we should rather seek to share our own personal experiences with each other.”