Jazzing up the art of conversation: Reconnecting through dialogue and conversation

 I want to emphasize that we need to reconnect humanity through different ways of interacting and engaging. Dialogue and conversation is a better form of reconnecting humanity than just using debate.I have always found Margaret Wheatley's writing on the topics of new ways of leading, new ways of interacting and new forms of organisation very interesting and I have drawn from her work often in my practice as a facilitator and organisational development consultant. As an independent practitioner  I still use this approach in my facilitation and I am very grateful for a wonderful community of practitioners where I learnt most of what I know today! We also need to reconnect to the concepts of Paulo Freire - giving voice and conscientising in mobilising communities and civil society to fight for their rights! 

 "Human conversation is the most ancient and easiest way to cultivate the conditions for change – personal change, community and organisational change, planetary change. If we can sit together and talk about what’s important to us, we begin to come alive. We share what we see, what we feel, and we listen to what others see and feel.” Margaret Wheatley (2002)

 In my work as organisation development practitioner I have been working with ‘dialogue’ and ‘conversation’  when bringing people together. 

Why the need to theorise about the art of conversation – surely it is the most natural thing – conversing? It is almost ironic that so many frameworks and books have emerged to teach us to converse. My sense is that the world has become so mechanistic that people have forgotten how to just be, we have meetings with protocol and formality, we have facilitation methodologies with complicated workshop plans and session layouts. To add to this the world has become a competitive place where people need to sound intelligent and fight to be heard – jargonised language is bandied about and half the time we are not really saying anything sensible. All of this has resulted in an environment where meetings are tedious, boring, and all the talking really gets us nowhere. Sometimes the facilitator or chairperson gets carried away with the very task of trying to get people talking and she or he talks too much! Workshops and meetings have become so predictable and staid, that there is a need for something different. Hence the need for us to return to the fundamentals of conversation, to find simpler ways of communicating and connecting.

 Sometimes we are so driven by finding resolution and getting something concrete out of every engagement, that the very act of dialogue becomes a senseless pushing each other about to eventually come up with a plan or outcome. Why is it so hard to just talk with each other, listen, respond, connect to what the other is saying and see what unfolds. We may be surprised if we just let go a bit of the technical aspects and jargon, and see if we can ‘get real’ and just be, not try to impress, interrupt, convince, argue or try to interpret. If we try to listen more and talk less maybe then we will hear where the other is coming from. These are old principles which many have written about, but which we find incredibly hard to put into practice unless we really make it conscious. I think that particularly in South Africa where we have a history of struggle, resistance and protest, we tend towards a conflictual culture of debate which does not always help us to listen to each other and come together coherently.  I am not saying we should not disagree or have conflict or debate. There are times when debate and discussion are necessary if a situation demands these kinds of interaction.

I attempt to work in an alternative way, a developmental way that is about getting people to listen to each other and to hear where the other is coming from, so we can begin to understand ourselves, each other and our organisation and build a developmental practice that is meaningful. Many of our processes are about helping to create a space where people can begin to find each other and communicate differently. Repeatedly we come into organisations and find that people are not talking honestly about things that matter, relationships are superficial, damaged or non-existent and meetings are all about business, projects and implementation plans. Often after one of our facilitated processes, people will say things like “You know, our meetings do not give us the space to talk this openly”.  This is where the concept of dialogue becomes useful.

Dialogue is not a new concept. I first came across the term through the writings of Paulo Freire, who referred to it as ‘giving voice…’ where people are able to express themselves and start to share with others in a learning situation. Freire (1972) says “To exist humanly is to name the world, to change and recreate it. Only by using true words will people transform the world.” Freire used it as part of a model for social action where dialogue is an integral part of getting the powerless to find their collective voice. For me this connects strongly to organisational culture, and what we as practitioners are trying to shift in organisations.

David Bohm has written extensively about dialogue. In his book “On Dialogue” (1996), he describes dialogue as “a stream of meaning flowing among and through us and between us”. He continues that “it’s something new, which may not have been in the starting point at all…something creative…this shared meaning is the glue or cement that holds people and societies together”.  He contrasts it with ‘discussion’ which he says means “to break things up…it emphasises the idea of analysis, where there may be many points of view, and where everybody is presenting a different one – analyzing and breaking up”. Bohm says that this has its value but does not get us very far beyond our various points of view. He equates discussion to a “ping-pong game where people are batting ideas back and forth and the object of the game is to win or get points for yourself”. Bohm also states that dialogue has to deal with assumptions – looking at what is behind the assumptions and not just the assumptions themselves. Bohm’s notion of dialogue is that people sit in a circle since it allows for direct communication and that dialogue should work without a leader and an agenda – he says that people work through the anxiety of this and eventually after an hour or two start to talk more freely. He further says a facilitator may be useful to get the group going, for timekeeping and explaining what is happening from time to time, but actually his function is to work himself out of a job.

  I have become more and more aware, both in my social life and work life, how amazing revelations, insights, clarity and new creative thoughts can emerge out of people through dialogue, where there is no agenda and we simply talk. ‘Open Space’ methodology conceptualised by Harrison Owen, is one way of using dialogue and conversation and allowing agendas to develop out of group interests. 

Conversation has been around for centuries, and may have evolved into discussion in a more formal organisational sense. Previously conversation was seen as the more frivolous or informal cousin to discussion, reserved for tea breaks and after work. Now conversation is being brought into more formal group processes.  What then is the difference between discussion and conversation and why is the term ‘discussion’ being used less and less? A book by Marjorie Spock (1978), entitled “The Art of Goethean Conversation” provides a wonderful description of conversation and discussion. She says that “discussions base themselves on intellect, and intellectual thinking tends naturally to separateness. But conversations are of an order of thought in which illumined hearts serve as the organs of intelligence, and the tendency of hearts is to union.” I think this is why a conversation is more useful than a discussion – it really gets us to the heart of a matter.

Margaret Wheatley’s book “Turning to one another” is an inspiring book, where she talks about bringing back simple conversations to get people talking and connecting about things that matter. When a colleague and I were facilitating a process that brought together various organisations in a learning forum, we became concerned that the quality of the conversation in the group was beginning to feel disconnected. We then presented the Margaret Wheatley principles as a framework and asked the participants to try it.

“The practice of conversation”

We acknowledge each other as equals.

We try to stay curious about each other.

We recognise the need to help each other become better listeners.

We slow down so we have time to think and reflect.

We remember that conversation is the natural way humans talk together.

We expect it to be messy at times

                                       from Margaret Wheatley’s book “Turning to one another”, 2002)

This got the conversation going for a while but the group needed to be reminded about the principles at various points throughout, otherwise it was threatening to degenerate into senseless debate which would not get us anywhere. One of the things we introduced to slow the group down was to ask them to wait for five or so seconds before responding and to think about how what they were going to say connected to what the previous person had said.  At first participants almost made fun of the approach, but later they started to get the idea and the quality of the conversation changed. People started to become more considered about what they were saying, to really connect to the previous speaker and to become more aware of what the other was saying. We then asked the group to reflect on their interactions as a group. Participants spoke about their struggle with having to wait the 5 seconds before responding and how difficult this was since they came with so many ideas, but they saw this as a good challenge. Others spoke about how the five second pause hindered the spontaneity in the group but that later things got easier and it started to work.

 Recently, Liz Goold, a consultant visiting  from the UK, shared a framework for dialogue from the work of William Isaacs where he explores the ‘art of dialogue’. We practiced it as a team in our meeting and my interest was sparked once more, so I went on a quest to read more, and found some new books on the topic and a wealth of information on the internet. I found a detailed explanation of the framework for dialogue.

Four qualities are significant in the design of dialogue:

(Dialogos International website www.dialogos-inc.com)

Voice – creating a place for all relevant perspectives and attitudes to be spoken so that they may be heard.

Listening – attention to the spoken and unspoken nature of the conversation and the “acoustics” of the space in the room .

Respect – the acknowledgement of the value of differences and participants’ identities.

Suspension – the willingness to raise and consider assumptions and perceptions without being bound by them.    

  Many consultants and development practitioners are realising that it may no longer be necessary to always design complicated processes and heavy workshops to get people talking. It is also becoming more effective to get whole groups to just talk to each other and listen to each other in more open processes and spaces. The facilitator needs to ‘hold’ the space very lightly but consciously in a manner that allows for conversations to happen. Patricia Shaw shares some wonderful case studies of how she has been practicing this way of working. In her book “Changing conversations in organisations” (2002), Shaw describes a mode of working to “join ongoing conversations as participant sense-makers, helping to develop the opportunities inherent in such conversations”. She continues that “it is the ordinary, everyday processes of organisational life that offer endless opportunity as we move from conversation to conversation”. 

I have begun to use this way of working more consciously and have been astounded by the results – what happens when you trust a process to yield the results needed by a particular group at a particular time. I believe that these basic principles and concepts need to be re-introduced to society to bring meaning and simplicity back to our lives and help us to really listen and not just talk over each other or throw in disconnected points that don’t have meaning or do not ‘weave a thread’ of conversation. Then we may end up with a richly woven cloth that has strength, instead of a broken cloth full of holes which will come apart.

This approach may take a bit of getting used to since people are more secure with having someone in front leading the way quite formally. It can become messy as Wheatley’s principles suggest, and demands facilitation that knows when to intervene at the right moments or how to ‘hold the group together’ as well as draw things to closure. I do not advocate this as an exclusive approach and I am not suggesting that facilitators throw out all other methodologies. It can be hugely effective when used in processes which demand a different approach, or when other methods are not proving useful to a group or organization.  

 “Jazz is the music conversation…it is a dialogue…with integrity.” (Wynton Marsalis, jazz trumpeter)

During a mentoring session with David Scott (who was a mentor to me for the first two years of my consulting career), we were speaking about ‘dialogue’ and ‘conversation’ and he compared it to a jazz band playing. When jazz bands improvise it is amazing to see how they do indeed talk to each other even though they themselves may not know what is going to come out. The listening that goes on throughout their playing helps them to build on each other’s contributions. I love listening to live local jazz bands and recently went to a concert where a Cape Town jazz band, “Loading Zone” provided an excellent model for me. It was incredible – the ‘talking’ that went on through the music as the musicians played together, giving each other the space, but at the same time finding different ways to connect to each other throughout with great respect for what each had to offer. This for me was true conversation. If we can take our lessons from these artists and relearn the art of conversation then we can make wonderful music and bring some life to group process and organisational life.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Liz Goold for sharing the methodology and reference to William Isaacs.

Thanks to David Scott for inspiring and stimulating my thoughts on conversations and jazz.

Thanks to Jonathan Kagoro for sharing an article by Michael Jones: Practices For Creating from www.pianoscapes.com where I found the ‘Wynton Marsalis jazz quote’.