What is Professional Dialogue™?
Dialogue is a skilful way of talking and thinking together that establishes a common meaning amongst a group of people.
The spirit of the engagement is to understand rather than to convince, and the process changes the ground out of which the various relationships arise. Professional Dialogue™ is a transparent way of learning together and humanizing an organisation or community.
Through Professional Dialogue™ organisations and communities are able to engage the collective intelligence of the participants to make better decisions, and to realise the creative opportunities inherent in any problem.
The ongoing practice of Professional Dialogue™ at a systemic level generates sustainable strategic and operational change. In a Dialogic Organisation or a Dialogic Community this is underwritten by the ongoing regeneration of its culture, including shifting historically stuck patterns of behaviour, for the constructive benefit of the whole.
Brief history of Dialogue
Dialogue emerged from a series of private gatherings on wholeness and fragmentation convened with David Bohm in the 1980s and announced through the paper Dialogue – A Proposal by David Bohm, Don Factor & Peter Garrett, 1991.
Other publications like ‘Dialogue with Scientists and Sages: The search for Unity’ (1986), ‘Science, Order and Creativity’ (1987), ‘Thought as a System’ (1990) and ‘On Dialogue’ (1996) developed different aspects of the theoretical need for Dialogue.
Since 1991, Dialogue has found extensive application in public and private organisations across all fields of human endeavour, from healthcare to government, manufacturing to criminal justice, third world agriculture to banking, and retail to philosophy. The exploration of Dialogue continued in many countries, addressing diverse social and organisational conflicts. A generic practice began to emerge that could effectively tackle the fragmentation of human thought, with skilful practitioners demonstrating significant progress.
By 2017, it became clear that a new profession had taken form. In March of that year, the Academy of Professional Dialogue was established as an international not-for-profit organisation by ten Founding Members from the UK, US, Sweden, Norway, and Germany.
Why Professional Dialogue™?
People in organisations find their roles require them to work within different departments, programs and initiatives. Although within the same organization and interdependent, they each have their own separate objectives, accountabilities, timelines and measures. Without the skills to talk and think together well, inevitably there is some level of confusion trying to meet the competing demands. What seems obvious and necessary to some, appears to be counter-productive to others.
The impact of bringing Professional Dialogue™ into an organisation is to overcome silo behaviour, unilateral action and other forms of fragmented activity by improving working relationships and effective communication. The dialogic skills enhance simple everyday decisions. They can also address the decision-making process in complex multi-stakeholder situations.
Professional Dialogue™ is tested and proven in public (governmental), private (commercial) and charitable non-profit organisations (NGOs) in a variety of sectors at local, state, national and international levels.
How to implement Professional Dialogue™
New ways of talking, thinking, and working together are introduced with simple yet radical communication skills, leadership structures, and decision-making processes. Leadership commitment to embed Professional Dialogue™ will achieve the huge benefits of this different way of working. We recommend the following sequence:
Those in Leadership Roles are encouraged to experience the value of Professional Dialogue™ for themselves first, and then to learn how to cascade this different way of working throughout the staff in every part of their organisation. This works because those in senior roles are seen leading by example and are themselves doing what they expect others to do. The starting point, therefore, is for leaders and supervisors to gain first-hand experience through a developmental course or longer program offered by the Academy.
Once Professional Dialogue™ has been tried and proven effective by some departmental, program or project leads - to enhance regular decision-making, and to address work challenges and opportunities that have proven difficult in the past - a confidence emerges. Not only is this effective, but the staff members find it enriching and enjoyable as they participate more fully, own the process and enjoy the successes. Momentum picks up with further educational training and participatory developmental learning, and perhaps the use of Accredited Professional Dialogue Practitioners to help to design and support larger changes processes.
Extending the dialogic approach to all staff will require some staff members to take on additional developmental learning to become internal Dialogue Practitioners. In time, a self-generating internal development program can enable a self-sustaining organisational capability.
Dialogic Organisations that use Professional Dialogue™ in their business practices are recognised and accredited by the Academy for the quality and effectiveness of their working environment
Scope and applicability of Professional Dialogue™
Professional Dialogue™ enables the development of individuals, teams, organisations, and communities in a multitude of situations around the world including:
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multi-national organisations, SMEs, and business supply chains
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government, the public sector, and non-governmental organisations
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education in schools, universities, and research
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communities, neighbourhoods, and civic settings
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healthcare, criminal justice and social services
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international development, migration and so on
Professional Dialogue™ is more than the ‘soft’ skills that are required for good communication. The Academy’s educational programme also covers the development and use of structural or ‘hard’ skills to address fragmented multi-stakeholder situations, where participants are challenged to engage with one another. In these circumstances there is no more effective way to proceed than using Professional Dialogue™