On Dialogue, Culture, and Organizational Learning

Abstract

C onsider any complex, potentially volatile issue—Arab relations; the problems between Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians; corporate decision making; getting control of the US deŽcit or health care costs; labor-management relations; and so on. At the root of the issue, we are likely to Žnd communication failures and cultural misunderstandings that prevent the parties from framing the problem in a common way, and thus make it impossible to deal with the problem constructively. Clearly, we needways of improving our thought processes, especially in groupswhere the solution depends on people reaching at least a common formulation of the problem. It is for this reason that governments, communities, and organizations are focusing increasing attention on the theory and practice of dialogue. Proponents of dialogue claim that it holds promise as a way of helping groups reach higher levels of consciousness and thus be more creative and more effective. At the same time, the uninitiated may view dialogue as just one more oversold communication technology—or nothing more than a new variant of sensitivity training. My goal in this article is to provide one perspective on dialogue, based upon my own direct experience with it. I hope to show that dialogue is indeed not only different from many of the techniques that have been proposed before, but also that it has considerable promise as a problem-formulation and problem-solving philosophy and technology. I will also argue that dialogue is necessary as a vehicle for understanding cultures and subcultures, and that organizational learning will ultimately depend upon such cultural understanding. Dialogue thus becomes a central element of any model of organizational transformation.