IMMEDIATE CHALLENGES

Sustainable Dialogue as a Necessary Template for Sustainable Global Community (Part #3)

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It is not sufficient to offer a richer set of ways to look at dialogue, as above. The question is what is needed to improve the sustainability of dialogue as a template for more fruitful approaches to global cooperation.

More specifically, the question is how to distinguish and avoid the traps of simplistic dialogue. This has proved unable to engender new approaches to sustainable global cooperation, notably as a result of the obsession with consensus, 'getting to yes' and an almost pathological fear of overt disagreement. How can sustainability be ensured even when people profoundly disagree as is so often the case? Immediate challenges include:

Regrettably, dialogue methodologies and their advocates, tend to hinder any ability to discuss dialogue. It has not been possible to create a space in which dialogue can be dialogued about -- a meta-dialogue 'sacred space'. Such a space is completely vulnerable to the desire to impose particular dialogue approaches.

Many have thought deeply about dialogue. There are many valuable insights in the methodologies on offer. A space is required within which these methodologies can be compared to determine under which conditions which approaches may be the most advantageous given the current state of the art. Any such exercise is however bedeviled by the economics of many dialogue methodologies. Their development and use is a manifestation of 'growth' in the psycho-cultural domain. Ironically, these are increasingly treated as proprietary technologies, especially in North America. Presentation or use of them can then only be made by duly licensed practitioners.

An even remotely objective discussion of their strengths, weaknesses and complementary functions is also rendered very difficult by the psychological needs of their originators. These are used to being invited to perform the key dialogue function at a conference. Many less well-known dialogue facilitators without their own proprietary technologies are anxious to receive the rewards of similar treatment. This situation makes extremely difficult the task of any conference organizer, concerned to improve the quality of dialogue. How to decide between them? There is therefore a real possibility that proprietary dialogue innovations may acquire a stranglehold on the future of sustainable dialogue and the processes of sustainable cooperation it underlies (***).

During the course of any conference there is a need for new ways to monitor the dialogue as a whole and the roles performed by different participants. How can it be understood in terms of the metaphoric contexts outlined above? In what way is improvement in its quality constrained?

At a minimum this calls for some form of psycho-dynamics report to be provided on the event as a whole. Even as a confidential document, this would provide valuable learnings for future events of a similar nature. Such a document could be prepared from several different perspectives, possibly by advocates of competing dialogue methodologies, and submitted in separate sections. Such evaluation documents are almost never prepared.

Of much greater interest is the possibility of providing real-time monitoring of the conference dynamics. This could take the form of a series of memos. Better still, it could be provided as optional feedback to key conference figures (chairpersons, etc), notably via electronic means (via earphones over a free interpretation channel, or on monitors), as is done with TV anchor people.

Of the greatest interest, however, is the design of feedback to individual participants. General feedback could be provided as above (***). Personalized feedback is the ultimate challenge. Like prize-fighters, dialogue supremos need their 'managers', especially when they are egotistical geniuses. Ideally a situation could be envisaged in which a participant could select between several channels all providing personalized feedback (even to the point of being paid for by the participant). This feedback is equivalent to that received in whispered form by statesmen from their advisors during major events, but given with the professional detachment of psychotherapists or spin doctors.

For the future of governance of global cooperation, too much is at stake in major conferences for participants to assume that their style of communication is without need of corrective professional feedback. An indicator of the potential for breakthroughs at a conference may come to be measured in terms of the ratio of number of participants to the number of such dialogue support people ('minders'). A 1:0.01 dialogue is indicative of a very different commitment from a 1:5 dialogue (with 5 facilitators to each participant). Willingness to accept such feedback is indicative of participation of a different order of maturity on the part of participants. Willingness to offer feedback in the light of different methodologies is an indication of a different order of maturity on the part of the organizers, and those providing the feedback. After all, if it is considered appropriate for top professional football players to require massage and individual coaching between sessions, is it not ironic that participants at key conferences on global governance do not benefit from having their psychic muscles professionally 'massaged' and from behavioral feedback?

Of course the real art is to integrate the monitoring roles back into the dialogue as participants. Participants do indeed tend to perform such roles to some degree as part of the dialogue dynamic, but usually without the detachment and insights of professionals. Ensuring a more appropriate pattern of checks and balances is the concern in what follows.

Rich dialogues involve participants with strongly differing perspectives. Where there is a comprehensible framework for such diversity, it is valued. However, efforts towards consensus and solidarity are bedeviled by the tendency of factions to emerge, possibly after what then appears to have been token agreement. On matters of any significance, a unified approach cannot be successfully maintained and this is then much deplored. The 'centre can no longer hold'. This was most tragically evident amongst peace organizations and more recently amongst the 'greens'. It has long been a characteristic of religious movements.

Rather than deploring such factionalism, it is more fruitful to consider that it may be essential. What it effectively represents are vital dimensions of any profoundly significant issue. The failure to be deplored is rather the inadequacy and over-simplicity of the unifying frameworks on offer. More adequate frameworks would provide a context for mutually hostile factions, justifying the tensions between them as is the case between competing species in any ecosystem.

It is therefore useful to consider the kinds of factions that tend to 'break out' of any condition of consensus, once that consensus is sensed to be overly simplistic. Whatever the original unifying perspective, psycho-cultural growth will be represented by a tendency for a 'conservative' faction to emerge in opposition to a more 'liberal' faction. The more mature and significant the topic, the greater the range of factions that emerge.

The challenge is therefore to determine, or recognize, the kinds of perspective that tend to emerge around any issue as it attracts a broader constituency. In biological terms, it is these sub-constituencies which are the organs sustaining the life of that particular dialogue. Ensuring an appropriate pattern of communications between such organs is therefore vital.

Within the international community, the creation (not to say proliferation) of specialized agencies can be seen as a manifestation of this factionalizing tendency. Lip service is paid to their complementarity and to the manner in which they collaborate. Any experience of the UN Administrative Committee on Coordination, or of any inter-agency body, reveals another story. And there are many specialized bodies which are not involved in such integrating exercises, to say nothing of those which are nongovernmental. There have been no efforts to seek ways of configuring the vast network of governmental and nongovernmental bodies in ways which bypass the simplistic tendencies of those who fail to acknowledge the underlying psycho-social dynamics favouring such factionalism.

A fruitful point of departure would be to review together the more obvious factionalism by discipline and subject areas, with the more subtle factionalism by temperamental or psychological preferences. The latter are most clearly acknowledged in psychological type theory, notably in such systems as that of Myers-Briggs. There are other such systems, precisely because factionalizing tendencies also operate with respect to type theory as much as subject classification. There is a need for software tools to alternate between a variety of such perspectives without losing coherence (**).

The status of any 'deviance' from a party line now acquires different significance. In particle physics a deviance from a trajectory is an indication of forces at work, or of a collision resulting in the generation of other particles with other trajectories. Patterns of schism-formation could be looked at in a similar light as a feature of meta- physics. From such perspectives all deviant strategies are of significance and contextually they in effect define the non-deviant trajectory.

Basarab Nicolescu's question of the small deviation which is of great significance is then best mapped by recognition of the curvature of the earth which we daily experience as flat. His question concerning the balance between interiority and exteriority is, within that metaphor, then related to recognition that the earth is spherical and has a central reference point (orientation towards a centre). This, like curvature, is of course very difficult to prove to anyone whose attention is focused on the flatness of daily experience.

This perspective may then be used to suggest that schisms and deviations are constantly being formed around the surface of the metaphorical sphere. There are clearly privileged trajectories, such as great circles which have an ourobouros function in experience. But apparently cross- cutting deviant trajectories may form quite different great circles with a similar significance for experience. But all these are surface phenomena.

In the light of the above there is a case for favouring the emergence of factions, provided they can be appropriately configured in relationship to one another. They are then to be seen as necessary complementaries, especially when the tensions between them are great. It is to be expected that factions of recognizable style will emerge, often in pairs ('liberal - conservative', 'idealistic - practical', 'emotional - intellectual', etc). However they will emerge when appropriate, so that premature provision for them can be totally counter-productive (notably facilitation exercises such as: 'who is going to represent the ideal perspective?').

There is therefore an art to encouraging patterns to emerge without imposing the emergence of particular patterns. Many clues are available in existing dialogue-related methodologies. For example:

• Edward de Bono's 'thinking hats': He demonstrates how six different styles of thinking are essential for effective group decision-making. He has colour coded them.
• Henry Evering's 'eidetics': He configures sets of approaches into simple polyhedral form. Each approach correspond to a surface of the polyhedron. These are colour coded.
• Stafford Beer's 'syntegrity': He configures issues onto the apices of an icosahedron, with each edge represented by a person. The features are again colour coded.

Only in the case of Beer's approach do participants progressively engender the qualitative content to be associated with the elements of the pattern, but the pattern is in all cases fixed. In the case of Harrison Owen's 'Open Space Technology' even the pattern is determined by the participants, but it is far less structured.

Each of these methodologies is of course proprietary and may only be used under license. This would be laughable, if it was not so tragic, for each has important clues to the process of configuration vital to transcending process impotence (**). But the originators of each would be 'loathe' to acknowledge the insights of the others. And there are many others with more insights vital to any new approach to configuring dialogue to achieve higher orders of coherence and consensus.

But the challenge of configuring is in special ways dependent precisely on dynamics like those caricatured here as 'loathing'. It is such antipathy which is one manifestation of distinctiveness and boundary preservation. These are vital to the emergence of a structure capable of embodying such mutually opposed perspectives. The parts effectively compete in a larger whole that preserves their relationships, as with sibling rivalry in a family. In a dialogue group, mutual oppositions need to be valued as vital structuring elements rather than 'reconciled' into a homogeneous feel-good consensus that effectively destroys the pattern that connects across difference.

There are many vital processes that only manifest in face- to-face dialogue. But there are also many other processes that emerge to disrupt discoveries vital at this time. There is therefore a case for extensive experimentation with structured dialogue via Internet, constraining and freeing communication possibilities as appropriate, in order to discover the art of self-organization and self-governance in dialogue.

Issues of proprietary technology aside, there are vital insights in Beer's work, but these need to be confronted and married with other authors he has failed to take into account, for whatever reason, including earlier work on tensegrity organization (Judge***). Especially noteworthy is work on Q-analysis by Ron Atkin (**) and Jeffrey Johnson (**).

Comprehension of the complexities of emergent patterns of dialogue calls for new graphic display software. This could also be fruitfully made accessible via Internet. In particular the value of art in offering new approaches to organization of concepts needs to be considered (Judge**).

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