What is Professionalism in Dialogue - William Isaacs

Dialogue has developed over a long intellectual and practical trajectory, reaching back to the ancient Greeks in Western society. Over this time, it has appeared in varying forms in many indigenous cultures around the world, where it is experienced not only as a means of communication but also as an intimate part of community and spiritual life.

Over the past three decades, the practice of dialogue has emerged as a distinct field based on the integration of experience, research, and theory-building from numerous initiatives and practitioner efforts around the world. The various threads of activity in this field include explorations of dialogue in groups and as a component of collective social intervention (Isaacs, 1999, Garrett, 2018); as a means of fostering deliberative democracy (Fishkin, 1991), as a supplement to negotiation (Susskind, 2003); as an approach to diplomacy (Saunders, 1999); and as a means of stimulating organizational development (Bushe & Marshak, 2016). There are multiple paradigms underlying these and other approaches, and a wide variety of methods that flow from them. While there is a surface similarity to all of these, there are important differences in intention, world view, and method among them.

What is striking, however, apart from the enthusiasm and engagement of the practi- tioners, is the lack of a shared set of standards for what constitutes excellence or ethical performance; there appears to be no unifying set of ideas about the knowledge that underlies these efforts. This context is driving the Academy of Professional Dialogue’s efforts to pro- fessionalize dialogue by establishing a more coherent approach to the field and its practices, with the intention of producing reliable outcomes and ethical standards.

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