Dialogue v.s debate?
Debate is what you see in the House of Commons. There is no listening. Each side is set on proving they are right and the other side is wrong. The side with the most power wins, irrespective of the merits of its argument.
The origin of the word debate is to beat down.
The route of the word dialogue is the flow of meaning, with each other.
In dialogue my intent is to understand what you mean even though I might not agree with you. And you listen to me and work to understand what I mean. Sometimes I don’t even understand what I mean and you working to understand me helps me understand me. We both leave the conversation with a deeper understanding of each other even though we might not agree with each other. Together we have widened our perspectives and increased the possibility of achieving a successful outcome.
In my work with teams I facilitate a series of short engaging dialogues aimed at raising awareness, gaining perspective and aggregating the many private judgements into collective decisions. People tell me they can’t believe how quickly they reached agreement and how much they have achieved together in such a short time. They also tell me that when left to their own devices their normal feeding frenzy of debate ends up in frustration and little progress.
From my experience it’s dialogue every time!
Effective dialogue requires that we suspend our assumptions:
- We stay open to the other persons view
- You don’t have to categorise anothers’s view point as right or another’s as wrong
- Listen and inquire, what is the meaning of this?
- Don’t merely listen to others, but to yourself: where am I listening from? What is the disturbance going on in me?
- What can I learn if I slow down and inquire within myself?
Informed by the writing of David Bohm, Peter Senge and others