Contents

Chairman’s Foreword

Editor’s Introduction

Section One

Organisations Need Dialogue!

Engaging Fragmentation, Subcultures and

Organisational Power

Peter Garrett

Dialogue as the Heart of Strategic Change

Mechtild Beucke-Galm

An Entry-Level Practice for New Professional

Dialogue Practitioners

Francis Briers

Conversations at the Mall:

Dialogue, Debate or Negotiation?

Thomas Köttner

Section Two

Criminal Justice Needs Dialogue!

Dialogue Through the

Offender Resettlement Journey

Jane Ball

Dialogue and a Healing Environment in the

Virginia Department of Corrections

Harold Clarke and Susan Williams

Fluxen Prison Dialogues in Norway

Trine-Line Biong and Christian Valentiner

The Legacy and Potential of Dialogue

in the Criminal Justice System

Mark Seneschall

Section Three

Healthcare Needs Dialogue!

Dialogue as a Whole-System

Healthcare Intervention

Beth Macy

Teaching and Using Dialogue in an

American Academic Health Center

James M Herman, Alan Adelman and John Neely

Dialogue and Communities of Practice in American Graduate Medical Education

Beth K Herman

Section Four

Society Needs Dialogue!

Dialogue, Politics and the Search

for Global Solutions

Claudia Apel

Economics and Time Management

as a Vehicle for Dialogue

Lars-Åke Almqvist

Indigenous Affairs, Border Services

and the Path of Dialogue in Canada

Peter Hill

Dialogue as a Working Model in

Degerfors Municipality

Per Hilding

Section Five

Acorn Dialogues

Dialogue Is a Spiritual Practice

Robert M Sarly

Learning Dialogue in a Higher Education

English Course

Mirja Hämäläinen and Eeva Kallio

Autism Dialogue

Jonathan Drury

Dialogue as Dynamic Energy in Living

Communities

Ove Jakobsen and Vivi ML Storsletten

The World Needs Dialogue!

2018 Inaugural Conference Participants

Chairman’s Foreword

This volume acknowledges and celebrates 25 Professional Dialogue Practitioners and the wide variety of good work they have delivered. Some have been actively developing their Professional Dialogue careers for decades, whilst others add the innovative energy of being relative newcomers. Their work has provided a unique service, addressing and resolving fragmented situations in a wide variety of organisations and communities in different sectors and countries around the world.

The publication is the first collection of such accounts and thereby provides the first benchmark for the field by recording the state of Professional Dialogue in late 2018. It sets a standard that others will emulate and no doubt surpass in the future. The authors had their work considered at the first international conference of the Academy of Professional Dialogue, The World Needs Dialogue! Their papers were written and circulated to participants before the Academy’s inaugural gathering. Extracts from the considerations with participants at the conference are included, along with their subsequently written postscripts.

The Academy of Professional Dialogue itself has taken a long time coming into form. Its origins lie in the gathering with David Bohm I convened in the English Cotswold Hills in 1984, that gave birth to a new kind of Dialogue. The essence of this endeavour was a deep concern for the well-being of society, humanity and the planet. It turned on the recognition of the damaging and pervasive fragmentation in human consciousness – and a developing awareness of the movement of thought and thinking that could move us beyond a state of fragmentation. During the early years, the primary endeavour was the practice of proprioceptive awareness, undertaken by privately convened groupings of keen individuals who shared this concern about fragmentation and wanted to experiment with what could be done about it.

Following David Bohm’s death in 1992, the focus moved into the use of Dialogue within organisations. Here fragmentation was just as blatantly evident as elsewhere in society, but there were significant differences. The participants shared the local history and state of their organisation, they were not necessarily participating on a voluntary basis, and systemic feedback was immediately available. The result was a commercialisation of Dialogue and often a greater focus on communication skill-building than on proprioceptive awareness. The field deepened, however, with the recognition that thought is collectively held in the memory of subcultural groups. This enabled conscious work with the lines of fragmentation along the interfaces between different subcultural groupings, and bore fruit in terms of improved understanding, better working relations and collaborative innovation. A further significant step was my developing an understanding of the inherent power structures of organisations, locating Dialogue in relation to decision-making and accountability. That enabled better alignment of purposeful activity, and self-sustaining cultural regeneration.

The key elements were now in place for whole-system change through Dialogue, and it was only at this point that I realised we had given birth to a profession. So in 2016 I registered the Academy of Professional Dialogue as a legal entity. I waited patiently, and a year later I gathered a small group of ten colleagues from the UK, US, Sweden, Germany and Austria to consider what, if anything, we might be able to offer to society through the Academy of Professional Dialogue. We met a few miles from where I had met originally with David Bohm a generation earlier in 1984. There was resolute agreement that as a professional body we could do some things that were not being provided by others. We could inspire people to use Dialogue, acknowledge those already doing good work, provide a programme of training and development for people who want to become practitioners, and we could further develop the whole field of Professional Dialogue. 

We raised the flag in 2018 with our first international conference, The World Needs Dialogue! The three days were attended by 80 participants from four different continents and the Academy of Professional Dialogue had finally taken form. The conference was led by the four Trustees, each of whom also hosted one the primary themes – namely Lars Åke-Almqvist (Society), Jane Ball (Criminal Justice), Jim Herman (Healthcare) and Peter Garrett (Organisations). I want to express my appreciation to my colleagues for their initiative, confidence and hard work. We issued a Founders Call and were remarkably fortunate to have a sufficiently generous response to clear the entire setting up costs of the Academy. The ten key sponsors were Lars Åke-Almqvist, Jane Ball, Flux Foundation, Gaiasoft, Peter Garrett, James Herman, William Isaacs, Robert Sarly, Henrik Tschudi and Renate van der Veen.

This book is the first publication of our new imprint Dialogue Publications, and I am proud of the fact that since the first conference we have established our own publishing company in order to make this conference material and other Professional Dialogue material widely available. This particular part of the overall initiative is the fruit of a long-standing friendship between me and Cliff Penwell, the editor, that goes back almost 40 years. We jointly resourced the formation of the company and between us we have spent hundreds of hours working on the papers and transcripts in our care. We are conscious of the contribution we are making by helping to create the language of Professional Dialogue, as well as disseminating the good work Dialogue Practitioners are doing.

My closing acknowledgement is for David Bohm, without whom we would not be walking this particular path with such a robust foundation and ontology. Were he alive today to witness what is happening, I know how interested, engaged and fulfilled he would be with the emergence of the Academy of Professional Dialogue.

Peter Garrett

Chairman, Board of Trustees,

Academy of Professional Dialogue

Editor’s Introduction

If this collection of reflections does its job well, it will not be remembered as a book about dialogue. Rather, much like the conference that made this volume possible, it will be held as something akin to a circle of practice, a place to pause with others and reflect for a little while. As in the conference, the words shared in these pages are closer to invitation than to exposition.

All told, the voices of 25 people are represented here – a little under a third of the number that participated in this first The World Needs Dialogue! conference. All of the contributors are practitioners, but a smaller number would consider themselves authors. A little under half speak English as their native tongue. Yet here we all are – no matter our language – setting aside both hesitancy (will others understand me?) and certainty (I’m sure they won’t!), in favor of showing up and letting others find their way alongside us.

The papers featured here were written in preparation for the conference but, as Peter mentioned, were not read at the event itself. They were distributed beforehand to allow us time to digest and then engage in dialogue rather than listen to presentations. While inevitably not everyone had read the papers, the authors offered their themes as points of departure for explorations in small groups. This served a couple of good purposes; besides expanding the topics, it allowed presenters to further refine the thinking that is now contained in this volume.

Like the conference, this book is organized into five categories: Organizations, Criminal Justice, Healthcare, Society and Acorn Papers. The first four areas we’ve called Working Papers, and I believe they are self-evident. Acorn Papers may need a little context. Where the Working Papers offer a place for consideration of established Dialogue practices, The Acorn Papers are reserved for experimental, or less-established fields of work – for example, Robert Sarly’s facilitation for troubled church congregations, or Jonathan Drury’s circles with those who are a part of the autism spectrum. These may, with interest and support, become well established in the Dialogue community in the time ahead. All of them have global-change implications in one way or another.

At the end of each paper you’ll find two additional sections: Conference Session Extracts, which are small excerpts of conversation from the smaller-group considerations on each of the themes. These are not intended as full transcripts or even as comprehensive accounts, but rather as a flavor of the conversations. Following this is a Postscript for each paper, the post-conference reflections of the authors after having time to digest their session and add whatever insights that may have emerged. Both of these sections are somewhat free-ranging, offering thinking-in-progress perspectives.

Some words of explanation about the use of shared language and terminology are probably needed, particularly for those of us who notice how words have impact. This applies here at three levels. First, you may notice a variety of editorial styles used over the course of the book. This is intentional; the idea (whether successful or not) was to honor – honour – the form of English used by each of the authors, so as to preserve a sense of voice in their writing. While featuring each work in their native language wasn’t a realistic option at this time (we are considering it for the future), we could at least offer some distinction within our shared currency. This means, for example, that papers originating in Europe have largely followed British conventions, including punctuation, turns of phrase and spelling; US works (and our Argentinian paper) are rendered American; and our Canadian offering follows the sort of UK-US blend common to the country. (And astute readers already will notice the difference in Peter’s British voice in his foreword and my American one in this introduction.) All of this has been something of a challenge to keep straight, but hopefully it has brought some nuance to the reflections.

Second, our writers come not only from different countries, but also from different areas of professional concentration, ranging from healthcare providers to government officials to criminal justice professionals to educators, along with several others. Some are more academically oriented, and their work is full of citations, while others aren’t, and they offered reference-free explorations. As in a dialogue circle, it’s all part of the mix, and I made little attempt to homogenize these styles other than to follow academically accepted standards.

Finally, you will see some of the same people, terminology and practices mentioned across many of the papers: David Kantor, and his seminal Four-Player system; Peter Garrett and Jane Ball, with Peter’s foundational work with David Bohm and, with Jane, decades of work in the Criminal Justice System; Bill Isaacs, with his almost-universal influence; Glenna Gerard and Linda Ellinor, with their influential book and the steady work behind it; and of course David Bohm himself. I mention these people (and could highlight others) because they are part of the language and tradition that many of us have in common. At the same time, I am aware that not everyone who practices dialogue may be familiar with the legacy shared by our writers (each of whom has a remarkable story, as you will see). If you come across terms or examples that don’t seem easy to grasp in one paper, chances are very good they will be described in another, from a different perspective and experience of practice.

This leads me to a final, short reflection on the path ahead for dialogue. In the context of a discipline that spends much of its time exploring new territory, a sense of shared tradition and language is useful and welcome. It gives shape to a field that has been, in modern times, largely ineffable, and it adds warmth to the circle. Like all living things, however, dialogue thrives in diversity, in its adaptability and eagerness to embrace the unfamiliar. It is not a closed system, to borrow a term from both thermodynamics and systems theory. And dialogue will thrive now as it has over the centuries: through hospitality, vulnerability and inclusion.

It is a pleasure to join you in this work of a lifetime.

Cliff Penwell

Editor,

Dialogue Publications

Section One

Organisations Need Dialogue!

Engaging Fragmentation, Subcultures and

Organisational Power

Peter Garrett

Did it ever occur to you that human thought may be the cause of most of the challenges we face in the world today? Some problems are the result of natural disasters like earthquakes, tsunamis, droughts and cyclones. Most, however, are caused by people, and the way they behave towards one another and the environment. The problems of crime, wars, substance abuse, deforestation, pollution, depletion of the ozone layer and so on, all arise from the way people think, feel and act. At the core of this is an identity which is fragmented, rather than being a natural part of the whole. If you stop to think about it, it is undeniable that we all live in one socially, economically and ecologically interdependent world, but so much of the time we act as if only our own interests matter. Curiously, this is just as much the case for ‘good’ people as it is for the ‘bad’ ones. We find ourselves putting our country (and our trading advantage), our community (and our local quality of life) and our personal career (along with our status and salary) ahead of others. This is an extractive way of relating to the world, where people want to know what they can get out of a situation rather than what they can contribute. Politicians stand for particular causes, but we find few statesmen who stand for the world.

The Pervasive Issue of Fragmentation

A significant shift in my own thinking occurred when I met David Bohm, a theoretical physicist, who introduced me to the notion of pervasive fragmentation in human consciousness. One of the things that impressed me deeply was David Bohm’s distinction between parts and fragments. Parts work together, like the various organs in the human body or the symbiotic relationship between flora and fauna in nature. Fragments are not meaningfully related; for example, neither a bottle nor a wristwatch, smashed with a hammer, is thereafter able to hold liquids or show the time, and the fragments cannot be reassembled to their former state. David’s observation was that human consciousness is suffering from widespread fragmentation.

With him I undertook an extensive private and experiential exploration into the nature and dynamics of human consciousness through agenda-free enquiries amongst large groups of voluntary participants. That resulted in what we called Dialogue. The key discovery lay in the relationships between the immediate experience, memory-bound thought and thinking. We discovered that the way to coherence is through understanding, and thereby a common content of consciousness.

Our early Dialogues were explorations into the roots of fragmentation in human consciousness. We were not trying to reassemble the fragments. We wanted to move upstream towards the source, which is the existing state of participatory wholeness. This phenomenon of fragmentation is very widespread. It has been fostered by the influences of fundamentalism: nationally (resulting in wars between countries); ethnically (leading to persecution); culturally (promoting sexism and racism); and religiously (fostering inquisitions, crusades and jihads). In current times these trends are exacerbated by economic dependencies. Oil-rich countries tend to ignore or question the connection between burning fossil fuels and global warming. Others who derive less income from sales of oil are convinced this is the cause of the destruction of the atmosphere. There are many such problems. When you have any problem, you think about it to find a solution. But what if thought itself is the problem? This is the assumption we made and tested.

Thought is held in the memory, and in muscular reactions in the body. It is thinking from the past that re-presents itself automatically and rapidly. That is the basis of learnt response that is essential for everyday tasks, like crossing the street or driving a car. The emotions are included. What has been felt in the past represents itself rapidly too, often in the form of intuitive impulses. This is a difficult field for enquiry because so much of what appears to be spontaneous actually happens automatically and is prompted unconsciously. We realised that an agenda-free approach to our Dialogues was the only way to succeed with this difficult enquiry. No dos, don’ts, or rules to follow – simply a common and singular intention to understand how consciousness works. It quickly became evident that limited awareness is one of the main problems. We are hardly able to discern what is immediate, and what are ‘thoughts’ (past thinking) and ‘felts’ (past feelings) being re-presented rapidly from our memory of prior experience. In the physical body, the awareness of movement is called proprioception. It is how you find the light switch in a dark room where you cannot use sight. You may remember where the light switch should be, and you are proprioceptively aware of raising your arm to the right height and feeling for the switch with your hand, despite the fact you cannot see anything.

We recognised the need for a similar proprioceptive awareness of movements in consciousness – not just a reflective capacity to understand later, but an awareness of what is happening in the moment as it is happening. We found that almost all the reactions, misunderstandings and challenges within the Dialogue Groups were based on limited awareness of what was being thought or felt by the speaker and by the listeners. So we took the unusual step of encouraging people to say what was in their minds and hearts in order to establish this proprioception of consciousness. We did it in the moment, which felt particularly dangerous at times, and we explored it together – what we thought we knew, the assumptions we were making, the responses and reactions, the implications, the sense of cynicism or reverence, and so on. We started to coin some jargon. Suspending all this (as a chandelier is suspended from a ceiling) openly and in words, enabled us to enquire collectively. It began to establish proprioception, meaning an awareness of what was happening as it happened, along with a common content of consciousness and coherence within the group. Where some people talk about wanting to ‘go below the surface’, we rather talked about going upstream into more subtle areas where impulses originate, and first begin to take form. As one colleague humorously observed, an idea coming towards you is very different from an idea moving away from you! Not insignificantly, this kind of sensitivity also created a feeling of impersonal fellowship or communion, a form of love that the Greeks referred to as koinonia.

I found these experimental Dialogues to be profoundly useful and I have applied the learning from them to address fragmentation in many sectors. During the three decades since that time I have worked with 30 or more individual commercial organisations, including small-to-medium-enterprises, and extensively with four different multinationals for four or five years each. I have supported environmental groups and Third-World development projects, trained consultants in top consulting groups, and introduced Dialogue as a consulting methodology to several MBA programmes. I am drawing on this broad range of experience to assert that Organisations Need Dialogue!

Subcultural Thought

In 1993, six months after David’s death, I started a Dialogue Group in a maximum-security prison. It came about through meeting Patrick de Maré, a colleague of David’s. Patrick believed Dialogue was the way to socio-therapy, and encouraged me to work with a student of his, a Probation Officer called Dave Parsons. This prison was a brutal and unfamiliar environment, and a challenging opportunity to engage raw social fragmentation. Things matter deeply to people living and working in a prison, and there could be immediate and long-lasting consequences as a result of what people said in the Dialogues I facilitated. I returned each week to meet with prisoners, staff and management in the prison, and there was feedback about the consequences of our previous week’s Dialogue. It would have been very difficult to determine whether or not the private Dialogues with David Bohm and a range of loosely-related volunteers had any meaningful influence on society. But in the closed society of the prison it was easier to track the impact. Fragmentation was rampant, and any easing of it yielded immediate dividends. One Dialogue led to the resolution of a hostage situation elsewhere in the prison, and others over time led to deeply resistant prisoners asking to attend therapeutic classes. All led to greater awareness and respect between participants and a reduction of violation and violence.

This is where I learnt about the collective nature of thought, which is held in subcultural groupings. People’s beliefs are formed from things they have experienced, heard or read. These give them the basic ‘facts’ that, formed through their logic, result in beliefs. I began to see that prisoners, officers and management, who were in the same Dialogue, each selected their facts differently. Also each subcultural grouping automatically used a distinct logic. So they believed different things from the same situation. I saw that what they noted in any situation, and how they interpreted it, was reinforced by their colleagues, even when it was illogical or incoherent. This is the essence of social fragmentation. Our Dialogues worked so well because the prisoners challenged the officers’ subcultural beliefs, and vice versa. They did this within the genuine and respectful containment of the Dialogue Group. These often blunt exchanges shifted the understanding and rapport between prisoners, security officers and other staff, and the participants gave weekly evidence of the consequences. It was here that I realised that a person’s identity is partly an individual story and partly a collective matter. People identify themselves with particular groupings, and these subcultural groupings hold one’s identity within collectively reinforced patterns of thought. Cultural change, I realised, is essentially about shifting the subcultural relationships and subcultural memory. That in turn affects the disposition of individuals and their behaviour.

This thinking was reinforced when, concurrently with the prison Dialogues, I was invited to help improve poor staff relations in one of the largest industrial complexes in Scotland where management and unions were in conflict. In this case there were four trade unions and three businesses operating on one site, and they were all at odds with each other. It was a complex fragmentation that led to endless, factious misunderstandings and misrepresentations. Members of each of the subgroups spoke with their colleagues and thereby reinforced their own beliefs and attributions whilst criticising the others. This could only be resolved by addressing different subcultural groupings separately, then bringing them all together. So I started to learn how to map subcultural groupings and how to use Dialogue to increase the awareness of interdependency so that they contributed as parts of a larger social system, rather than breaking it up.

Organisational Power

The third significant leap for me began with the pattern of repeated reorganisations I was encountering in my commercial consulting Dialogue work. It had set me thinking. Each new leader reorganises, and each reorganisation is rarely completed before the next one starts. Then it dawned on me that although every organisation is different, they have features in common globally. So I began with the question: What do organisations organise? There are many possible answers, including work, results, work forces, investment, time, etc. My realisation was that fundamental to their structure is power. Organisations are essentially power structures. One thing they all organise is power. People within organisations are subject to authority and constraints within the power structure that determine what they can and cannot do.

This power is delegated hierarchically in the form of decision-making authority, along with the accountability for those decisions. Typically, the owners (voting shareholders) delegate to the executive board. That board in turn delegates to managers, then perhaps through various levels to supervisors, and on to basic-grade staff members in a series of vertical lines of power. These ‘power lines’ are the primary means of delivery, and they determine how the organisation functions. There may be different dominant power lines for different products, services or geographies. They are often experienced as silos, where more attention is given to those above or below in the hierarchical line, than to what is required elsewhere or in the organisation overall. Those higher in the power line usually have more responsibility for the vision, strategy, policies, levels of resourcing and speed of change, whilst those lower down are often responsible for the planning, scheduling and the practical activities that determine timely delivery. Generally these vertical lines are competitive, because their heads meet at the executive board level where the critical decisions are determined. If there are limited resources, for example, the business lines will naturally compete for them.

Adding to the complexity, there are a series of lateral power lines that are often called functions. Each of them has representation on the executive board as well. These horizontal power lines cut across all the vertical power lines. They provide financial, HR, legal, legislative compliance, marketing, public relations and other ‘across-the-board’ specialist services. They are intended to be of service to all the vertical business power lines, but sometimes they are regarded as being primarily interested in their own (partially self-determined) remits, whilst constraining the performance of the main business delivery. The functions often depend on those people working within the vertical business power lines to achieve their targets, both to introduce and to monitor changing standards.

Despite being employed in the same organisation, those working in the vertical and lateral power lines have different interests from one another. Those in the vertical power lines want the discretion to customise their services according to their clients’ needs and interests, and to best suit their various products, services, geographies and so on. They want the space to run their business in what they see to be the most efficient, effective and profitable way. The lateral power lines, on the other hand, seek the economy of centralised specialist resources, rather than having them duplicated in every business unit and geography. They want records that prove compliance with industry legislation and they thrive on standardisation. Their power is often the power to say ‘no’. So throughout the organisation there is a tension between the lateral and vertical power lines. It is worth noting that this tension plays out in some way for every employee. The demands of the competing interests are a daily experience to be met and negotiated. Sometimes it is a matter of saying ‘yes’ to the demands from the vertical and the lateral power lines, knowing it is not feasible to satisfy both. Switching roles from lateral to hierarchical, or vice versa, is generally a real eye-opener to employees.

In my observation this is the typical situation for every organisation where there is more than one location, or more than the number of employees who can sit together in one room to address conflicting interests.

One solution is to design a matrix organisation of some kind, where individuals are given roles in both vertical and lateral power lines, but the conflicts still have to be reconciled at an individual level because it is inherent in the structure of any organisation. This inevitable conflict between power lines is a basic gripe of employees who, from their fragmented local perspective, believe that others (‘they’) are being unhelpful or unrealistic. Some managers spend a lot of time and energy trying to make people happy by attempting to minimise the tensions, rather than understanding the underlying cause. So, is the conflict a good or a bad thing? Skilful senior leaders will not try to remove the tension. They will instead value and balance the various power lines at play. These tensions could be likened to the guy ropes of a traditional tent. Slack guy ropes leave the canvas flapping in the wind, whilst a similar taut tension across them all manages the wind and rain far better.

It is when the tension, and resulting conflict, gets out of hand that an intervention is required. This is evidently the case when there is more ‘noise’ and ‘heat’ in some part of the organisation than work being done. Such a situation could be escalated into a senior power play and a directive from on high about how to proceed. The better means of resolution, I propose, is to gather a representation of all the affected staff into a multi-stakeholder (i.e., multi-subcultural) Dialogue. With everyone present and able to speak for themselves, it is feasible with a little skill to understand one another, to establish a common view about what has been happening and to agree the best way to proceed. This is one reason why Dialogue skills are needed in organisations – to resolve inevitable conflicts of interest.

I call these kinds of representative forums Power Centres. There are two types of Power Centre. One is an Interface Forum that is placed in the appropriate part of the organisation to resolve the friction and misalignment between several of the vertical and/or lateral power lines. Who is in the room matters, and the clue to the absence of necessary people is when the conversation is about ‘them’ and ‘they’ are not in the room to answer for themselves. These Interface Forums can be convened wherever and whenever needed for a working Dialogue to establish or re-establish awareness, coherence and participatory respect.

The other Power Centre is the Executive Forum. There is always the need for the executive group to function as a Power Centre. That means that all the vertical and lateral power lines are represented in one forum, and everyone involved is required to wear two hats: one to represent the interests of their own particular power line, and the other to represent the interests and well-being of the whole organisation. Few organisations achieve this kind of versatility at the executive level because of the competing organisational and personal interests in the room, but those that do benefit enormously.

A further phenomenon to note is the shifting emphasis between centralised and de-centralised decision-making and power. Each new leader, making his or her mark through a reorganisation, will move more in one or other direction. Moving more power into the centre will give him or her more immediate control, tends to favour the lateral power lines and results in greater standardisation, more reporting, less local discretion and a more directive culture. Making such a change can improve the performance of a loose organisation where everyone is accustomed to doing what they prefer. The other direction is to decentralise because the businesses are too constrained and spend too much of their time facing and answering to head office. They know their market, their clients and their products or services, so let them get on with their business! We set the targets and policies centrally, and they deliver the goods in whatever way they find works best. This clearly adds strength to the vertical power lines, and can feel liberating for the majority of staff, who sit in these power lines, and can improve the morale and performance.

One cannot do both, however, so there tends to be a pendulum swing – from decentralised vertical power line dominance to centralised, lateral power line dominance, and then back again every few years. This pendulum swing costs time and money. People are expected to reorganise themselves whilst still doing their normal day job. Changing roles and, often, reducing headcount, adds to the anxiety and tension. A more balanced state is preferable and more sustainable, so as well as using the Power Centre Dialogues as a remedial intervention, they can be pro-actively positioned at key nodes across the power structure of the organisation and at an appropriate frequency. As the Power Centres are used less reactively and more proactively, they can maintain this balance by designing early responses to changing external market conditions.

Why Professional Dialogue Is Necessary

The essential point to make is that every organisation of any size will inevitably suffer fragmentation. This is not necessarily because they are badly managed or poorly led, but because of the inherent power structure of organisations per se. The specialisation they depend on – and reward – encourages employees to become increasingly competent and experienced in one particular area of service and at the same time to have less awareness and hence less understanding of other parts of the organisation in which they work. Careers develop accordingly, resulting in silos. Typically, in any organisation I have come to know as a consultant, employees in nearby rooms at the head office have little to no understanding about what each other do, let alone how they may be impacting each other.

It is worth pausing to consider how widespread organisations have become. In the past century, as agriculture has become mechanised, populations across the world have moved from rural locations into the cities. Organisations have proliferated to manage the more concentrated mass of humanity to such an extent that this could be called ‘the age of organisations’. We earn our living wages through organisations – or our investment interest, pension or governmental support. We depend on organisations to hold and transfer our money, to process our credit card payments and to issue us with banknotes. We buy our food through supermarkets, shops and delivery organisations. We fly in aircraft, or travel in trains and cars on rails and roads made by organisations. We are educated in organisations and buy our entertainment and holidays from organisations. We pray in organisations. Many of us are born, and will be cared for and die, in organisations – with even our funeral being arranged by an organisation. Organisations are now the pervasive universal phenomenon. Along with this is the widespread need to address aspects of inevitable fragmentation within those organisations. So clearly the need for Professional Dialogue is also pervasive!

As users, customers or clients we have come to expect that different parts of an organisation we are dealing with do not talk to one another, and we know that there is always a potential gap between the communication of our needs and the service provided. These failings are now so common that commercial organisations allocate substantial funds to pay noncompliance fines, people do not expect political parties and governments to act in each other’s interests or for the well-being of the whole, and we watch debate and disagreement in the media as the norm rather than the exception.

The good news – and saving grace – is that this ubiquitous problem of fragmentation is the same problem being replicated everywhere. It appears in many guises, but the way through fragmentation to the existing state of participatory wholeness is not complicated. It does require understanding, skill, disposition and commitment. That is what we are in the process of building in the Academy of Professional Dialogue.

Addressing Organisational Fragmentation: Working Cases

The practical development of Professional Dialogue in an organisational setting depends on the context and history, as I hope these three working cases will bring to life. The first case describes the development of a Power Centre (an Interface Forum) to address subcultural fragmentation. The situation had a long history. At the outset, members of the various management and union groupings were pleased to recite this history of being wronged by each other. It took almost a year to get the relevant groupings into the room and into Dialogue together. The resulting forum ran monthly for years and became a generative, forward-looking Dialogue that delivered significant results across a large workforce.

The second case describes the steps we took towards creating a Dialogic Organisation, something that includes but goes well beyond a ‘learning organisation’. The initial Power Centre was with the Executive Leadership Group, and then extended to include the whole organisation of several hundred people in an open and fully informed, ongoing consideration of the future of the organisation. The final case shows the power of creating an Executive Leadership Power Centre from the very inception of an organisation, before its official launch. This was a master class in executive leadership alignment and the business results were evident.

A Dog’s Breakfast

A Partnership Forum within a Scottish Industrial Complex

In the late 1990s I had a call from the colleague of a manager on one of the largest industrial complexes in the UK to see if I would be willing to provide some help regarding industrial relations. Margaret Thatcher had decimated the power of the trade unions in the UK during her time as Prime Minister, but her first Labour Party successor, Tony Blair, had made promises to the unions in return for their support to get his party back into government. Those unions that had retained certain levels of membership and activity would have the automatic right to return to the collective bargaining of their pay increases. Historically, each round of bargaining had been long, drawn-out and fraught with problems for the site, causing extreme industrial relations tensions. The four unions on site all met the necessary criteria of support and anticipated, with relish, the approaching return to collective bargaining.

I worked with a former business partner, Bill Isaacs, on the initial meetings, whilst some months later he moved on to other work in the US (where he was based) but retained a direct interest. I returned to the site monthly over the following three years. During our first interviews of the three business unit leaders we found that they were concerned about the return of collective bargaining and had little respect for the union leadership. There was friction between the three of them, and they had different reporting lines back to their London head office. The HR manager, whose remit included industrial relations across all three businesses, was in a difficult position managing their conflicting interests. Next we discovered that there were four unions in the complex, each holding considerable animosity towards the management, as well as fighting openly with each other. (This is what, colloquially, the English call a dog’s breakfast. The saying refers to the leftovers from the previous day’s meal dropped into the dog’s bowl for his breakfast. It implies a completely disorganised mess.)

It was clear that we would make no progress without first establishing agreement between the three leaders, so we went off-site with them to stay in a country hotel for a couple of days. The informal setting helped, along with the fine Scottish roast beef served with Bordeaux wine at a private table for five on the first evening. They did not trust the union leaders and wanted pre-emptive negotiations for a settlement before the collective bargaining rights were resumed. They had some ways to apply pressure to try to achieve that. It seemed naive to us (Wouldn’t the unions realise what you are trying to do?) and it avoided the primary problem that was one of poor relationships. Our alternative was a radically open partnership with the unions. As we talked together and learnt more about the history of the site, and their personal situations, we made headway. By the second evening we had a reasonable agreement to pursue a partnership approach. We sensed the possibility of regression, however, and asked each of them to put in writing their willingness to attempt an open partnership with the unions. Two did so the following day, whilst the third procrastinated and took nearly a week before finally agreeing in an email. But it worked, and the agreement held through the rest of the intervention.

The door was now open for us to engage the senior Leadership Team, including all the key managers on site, in order to develop their collective thinking and disposition to a partnership approach. We did this partly through the introduction of Dialogue skills – which inevitably led to the spirit of partnership – and partly through themed Dialogues. This in turn gave us the permission to engage the unions.

Asking the leaders for free access to their extended organisation was a key test of confidence and trust. They gave it, and we invited every union official on site to meet with us in one large gathering. There had never previously been such a meeting, and who knew what might happen? In retrospect, we did not do adequate preparatory work, and we were lucky to get through that meeting as well as we did. Separate interviews with more of them would have helped. As we entered the room there was an argument already under way between the different factions of the four unions represented by the 35 people in the room. They were more interested in arguing with each other than engaging us, and immediately proposed that we leave. They then proposed we meet them in several different groupings. It took skilful negotiation to stay in the room, and then to make our case for a different approach to their upcoming collective bargaining and relationship with management. Their broad Scottish accents were not always easy to understand, but we impressed them sufficiently to be taken seriously, and to remain in the room with them to explore the options going forward.

The next step was to get management and union in the same room, but in a spirit of Dialogue rather than one of debate or negotiation. It came right down to picky disagreements about seating, with the unions refusing to attend unless they sat at tables, rather than the circle of chairs we preferred. This was a strong indicator of both a lack of confidence in the process and a jockeying for a power position. I came up with an ingenious solution by finding eight long but narrow desks, which I put in an octagon with three people seated at each desk. We had the symbolic circular seating we wanted where no seat was more important than any other, whilst they had the tables they demanded.

We discovered that a significant portion of the workforce (over 30%) was not represented by the unions, although they were awarded the same pay increases that were negotiated by the unions. So we established their representation in the emerging Partnership Forum. Their elected officials called themselves ‘The Independents’. So we now had three groupings, and this gave the chance of hearing a third perspective whenever things deteriorated into a debate between management and union. I created a structured feedback process to address the problematic subcultural beliefs. Management, Unions and the Independents each