The following article is an exploration of the potency of dialogue as a force for social and systemic change because of its inherent connection to the ‘inner world’ of the individual. Ultimately, we will be working with the simple idea that social progress is a communication problem because it revolves around improving the relationships between people. A corollary of this is that if we are able to communicate in a more realistic and ‘human’ way, we will be able to create social systems that work in harmony with human nature, rather than having to live within systems that ask us to fabricate an inhuman nature in its service. This allows people to live more fully as human beings, rather than trying to express themselves as the insensate cogs within a mechanical system.
Three main threads will be expanded on throughout: 1) The idea that the ego, in the form of fear, pride, and desire, makes us crave control and/or certainty, 2) attempting too vehemently to cling to ideas of control or certainty, despite conflicting information from the environment, leads to a lack of control due to the fluid nature of the self and reality, and 3) the idea that ‘trust’ is the foundation of all healthy relationships and interactions, something that a progressive social system needs to engender and support in order to help people to become better equipped to work with inevitable uncertainty and lack of control, not diminish or make more difficult.
It will be shown that the creation of safe spaces (aka ‘dialogue circles’) to regularly practice the personal and interpersonal skills of ‘dialogue’ will be offer great leverage for change at both the personal and societal levels and to expedite a shift towards bottom down leadership through collective intelligence.
Why dialogue?
Social and urban progress really depends on the ability of different groups overcome the perceived barriers between them in order to collaborate at the level of higher human values. Though different social groups and organisations may have different agendas, opinions, and understanding about how things can and should be done, at the most basic level of their ‘humanity’, there are similarities beyond these surface level differences that can be worked with and built upon.
Dialogue is an attempt to uncover these similarities, rather than only focusing on the surface level differences, by actively looking for reasons why human beings can work together, instead of getting caught up in excuses about why they can’t. This is in contrast to the culturally dominant, ego-based mode of communication, hereafter referred to as ‘debate’, that fights to vanquish any perceived differences, due to the threat that this perception presents to the ego and its need for control and certainty. Though differences are important and something that need to be understood, focusing only on differences and neglecting what is shared prevents groups from coming together to the greatest possible extent.
Most negotiations between groups ‘fail’ for very human reasons caused by the ego’s craving for certainty and control, epitomised by an attachment to facts, goals, or methods about how things should be done and the ‘place-making ‘ plans built around these assumptions. Dialogue is a way of communicating that helps us to become more flexible and responsive than rigid and to work with the reality of social and urban life as it flows and unfolds, constantly bringing new information to the table. By helping individuals and group become more accustomed to the ‘flow’ of reality, instead of only ever attempting to stem the ebb of the tide through abstract concepts and ideals projected onto this ‘reality’, dialogue helps individuals and communities to build more closely upon what is, not what they think might be.
Essentially, dialogue is about working with reality instead of causing undue friction by resisting it. As the more we know about reality the longer the things that we build upon it will last, the more sense it makes to communicate in a way that takes as much as possible of human nature and the human condition into account.
For this reason, dialogue asks us to start our communication from the perspective of wholes instead of just mere fragments; it is a way of communicating from the vantage point of whole systems within wholes systems, overcoming the ‘Us/Them’ mind-set that so often holds back negotiations due to the fragmentation of the ego, showing that there really is only an ‘Us’ and that we all contribute to the state of this ‘Us’ at any given time. When it comes to bringing people and groups together, an awareness of the ego’s leaning towards fragmentary thinking and perception is a simple but powerful shift because it helps us to overcome our innate proclivity to focus on differences.
Why does all of this add to the idea that dialogue is a force for social change? Because the greatest leverage point for systemic change is in improving the quality of our relationships: If people just learned to listen more it would make a big difference; but if they also learn to speak more effectively, relevantly, and with awareness of how the ‘natural’ or default settings of the ego affect communication and negotiation, the difference will be massive, especially if this action is strategic and carried out at the local and national levels (and internationally, if we’re feeling optimistic).
How the fear, pride, and desire of the ego cause us to cling to control and certainty.
When we refer to ‘ego’ throughout this article what we are really referring to is the conceptual ideal that we carry about ourselves as individuals (or collectively as organisations) and the fear, pride, or desire that motivate our behaviour in the world in an attempt to uphold this ideal. The ‘ego’ can also be seen as the part of ourselves that creates a narrative or interpretation about who we are as individuals, an idea about what the world is, and then attempts to corroborate this story or defend itself from conflicting ideas and information whenever presented with new information. In either case, the ‘ego’ is what is most unreal about us, because reality is forever changing and the ego is founded on the illusion of stasis (see Personal Revolutions #12: Flux / Stasis).
The implication here isn’t that the ego is always a ‘bad’ thing, nor that it is something that should be expunged from our lives completely. Without the ego we would be unable to function or to set goals for ourselves, and so just as in psychology there is a ‘healthy narcissism’ in terms of the esteem and functionality it brings, the ‘healthy ego’ can analogously be seen to drive us to achieve things in the world and to make the most of ourselves and our societies.
Problems arise, however, when we forget that the personal or organisational ego is distinct from who or whatever it is that we are in reality. When we acknowledge that everything in reality is in a continual state of flux, we realise that there is a gap between the illusion of absolute or unchanging certainty that the ego leads us to believe is a possibility, and the continual flow of new information presented from moment to moment. In other words: the ego causes problems in our lives because it makes us believe that things which are in flux can be treated as being static. If we are unaware of this, then the things that we attempt to grasp will eventually slip right out of our hands – this applies to both the ideas that we carry about ourselves but also our groups, organisation, and cities, as well as the plans that we have for them.
If reality can be seen as an ‘ever changing whole’ then the intellect or mind can be seen as a tool that takes fragmented snapshots of this whole in an attempt to grasp, understand, or control it. Simple examples here are concepts or labels, all of which are mental tools that we use to make sense of the world, never the world-in-itself. Again, this offers functionality as individuals to make our way about the world, but if we fall into the ego’s trap of thinking that the fragments we have grasped are the whole of things-in-themselves, we will only serve to distance ourselves from the reality of ourselves and situations.
It is this belief in the reality of fragments that causes us to focus on the boundaries or differences between things rather than the similarities that they share, or that we think in terms of silos over systems, or of Us versus Them, instead of just ‘Us’. Though these fragments are a doorway into understanding our situation, we are making things difficult for ourselves when we treat these fragments as being real (a famous example here, given by David Bohm, is the borders between nations, existent in the mind alone but treated as a concrete part of ‘reality’). Dialogue can be seen as a way of attempting to stand back from the purely conceptual, and the veil that these concepts project over ‘reality’, so that we can get a glimpse, even if only a fleeting one, of what awaits beneath.
The ego that thinks in terms of fragments and which filters the ‘truth’ through its fear, pride, and desire, is the ego that has convinced many of us that everything about human beings can be understood through the ‘intellect’ and led to cultural dominance of ‘debate’. Debate in these terms can be seen as a battle of egos through the clashing of concepts; made manifest in the pride of wanting to be ‘right’ and fear of being ‘wrong’, as well as the tendency to value personal, departmental, or organisational desires over the greater good of the whole. When this trinity comes together, fear, pride, and desire, they prevent us from seeing clearly and encourage us to value fragments more than we do the ‘Truth’.
This battle can be seen as ensuing due to the ego’s craving for certainty and control; by constructing points of view or stories about how the world should be, we convince ourselves that we have found a place of order or calm within the chaos of reality itself. When people attack our points of view, unless we remember that opinions are only something that we have, not something that we are, we will react with more violence than is perhaps necessary because we feel that the order and calm that we have worked so hard to construct or being taken from us. This is what the intellect does: it creates a ‘rational’ pattern of how things are, were, or ought to be and then convinces us that this pattern is reality in itself. These patterns can help us to move in a certain direction, but if we forget that the map is not the territory we end up in the slumber of a dream world, not reality itself.
Dialogue is a way of overcoming these problems by acknowledging the universality of human beings and seeing that we are all ‘works in progress’ and so can continue to learn and grow through the uncertainty of life without being too concerned with the ego’s ideas about ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. It does this by cutting out the contingency of culture or concept and valuing the necessity and helpfulness of ‘Truth’, realising that ‘Truth’ is simply a direction that we move in or away from, not an absolute state of being ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. When we see human beings and human systems as being involved in fluid learning processes like this, we are less likely to try and impose or project an agenda or set of ideas upon it in attempt to control the incontrollable. Reality changes from moment to moment, so it’s irrational to assume that the most rational thing to do is to create plans that never need to change. Once we learn to let go when need be, we are able to work together to create plans in the moment, not in our heads alone, but also out in the world as it currently stands.
Seeing human beings as wholes beyond intellectual abstractions alone, creatures also endued with instinct and intuition, emotions and insecurities, we can learn to communicate in a way that embodies the whole human animal, including its limitations, proclivities, and, darknesses, and create more harmonious human systems overall. But in order to do this, we have to remember that we need to learn to ‘let go’, to see the fear, pride, and desire, as well as the many difficulties with reality itself, such as unexpected setbacks, death, and fluctuation, as something that might not ever excised from our lives, but which will always be something that we can manage and work with in ways that are creative, collaborative, and conducive to cultural change.
It’s all just a matter of trust.
There is much talk these days about the benefits of helping our systems transition from a bottom down approach to organised complexity, turning on the idea that human beings can be ‘trusted to do the right thing’ when left to their own devices. This may be true to some extent, but we mustn’t forget the way in which the systems in which we find ourselves either engender or diminish the trust that exists in human interactions within the system.
Much of this turns on the values and behaviours that the system in question makes acceptable, encourages, or is fundamentally built around due to overall system goals and specified endpoints. Whenever we enter a new system, we enter a new sociocultural landscape with its own rules, codes, and conventions of how things are and should be done. In fact, systems make trust more or less likely depending on how information and power are handled, as well as how the people within the system are encouraged to view themselves and each other and the ‘mistakes’ that they make.
For example, if a system doesn’t value transparency of information, then information will be treated as a scarcity and people will be less likely to trust each other in sharing it. If power structures are valued to the extent that people buy into ideas of truth by authority alone, then the top-down hierarchy will infiltrate the way in which people communicate with one another, with the fear and pride of the ego causing people to hold back the sharing of their own views, or to irrationally give credence to those coming from ‘higher up’. If ‘mistakes’ are seen throughout the organisation as something to be avoided, instead of something to be learned from, due to an unrealistic view of human beings as ‘static’ entities that have reached an evolutionary endpoint, instead of learners in flux, then people will be less likely to share views and ideas that are a potential source of insight for all involved.
Dialogue circumvents many of these issues from the get-go by working with human nature and the human condition instead of against it. This means that instead of trying to squeeze everything about human beings into the ‘intellectual’ or rational conception of what human beings ‘should’ be, we also bring in ‘everything else’, to the greatest extent possible, and thus face the inevitable problems of conflict, uncertainty, disagreement, and anything else analogous and unavoidable head on. We bring in the ego so that we can manage it; we bring in the incoherence of a single human being’s interpretation of the world and realise that this is only an interpretation, not an absolute fact; and we acknowledge that we are not atomistic, singular entities that have no effect on each other, but that we are all interdependent variables within the same system.
When it comes to the human condition and the way that it plays out in reality, we also acknowledge the benefits of uncertainty over certainty as a learning tool, the inevitability of disagreement, conflict, doubt, and mistakes and the opportunities they provide for growth, and the undeniability of change and limitation and therefore something to work with, not against. Adding all of this up, we see that the best way to work with all of these things is to work together, not just as self-perceived separate parts that have allowed themselves to believe that they have the ‘whole picture’ when this is impossible for a single human being, civic group, government organisation, or whatever else. In other words, only when we trust ourselves to work with our own limitations can we trust ourselves to work together and turn these limitations into collective strengths.
Dialogue breaks us out of the limitations and restraints of debate, a purely intellectual exercise by creating a container that allows us to communicate from the whole of ourselves as individuals within whole systems. When we enter a dialogue circle, a basic agreement is upheld that allows transparency and free flow of information, offering people opportunity to say what needs to be said, and is often left unsaid, because abstract power structures and ideas are given precedence over the ‘Truth’. All of this helps us to build trust between people and ready ourselves for better interactions throughout the system as a whole, creating ‘better’ relationships, and a ‘better’ system for everybody involved.
Trusts leads to collective intelligence, collective intelligence leads to ‘bottom up’.
Having taken into account everything that has been said throughout this article, we can perhaps make the suggestion that many of the complex rules that are in place in our organisations and societies at present exist because those enforcing them from the ‘top’ don’t or are unable to trust those at the ‘bottom’. Dialogue can help us to make the bottom-up shift by not only allowing us to become better systemic communicators, but also to make a shift from creating a baseline of ‘collective intelligence’ that allows us to shift to working and living not only from rules based on concepts and place-making ideas, but to standards rooted in human values. It does this by creating contexts for us to trust each other to break the rules when necessary and in alignment with higher level standards and values.
Collective intelligence is essential for the bottom-up approach to work because the bottom-up approach requires that as many people as possible are able to make intelligent contributions to the direction of whole systems. In the terms that we have used throughout this article, ‘collective intelligence’ can be seen as an approach to communication that revolves around valuing the ‘Truth’ and allowing anybody in the system to make relevant contributions towards moving towards this truth without allowing themselves to be blinded as individuals by the fear, pride, and desire that comes with the ego, nor collectively by the arbitrary rules and structures that are enforced through authority and power alone. To reach this stage requires that as many individuals possible have the skills of self-leadership and know how to link this to the shared values and vision that link systems as wholes.
Bottom up thrives on collective intelligence, and can’t really operate without it, because the bottom up approach involves unifying intelligence in a more strategic way– for this reason communicating in a dialogic manner that ultimately aims at fostering this collective intelligence means that we will be more likely to build an effective bottom-up system. In contrast, debate is ultimately top-down, or at least designed to contain arguments within the framework of whatever is sent down from the top. Dialogue looks at directly questioning the structure itself, not only arguing within its constraints (this is why ‘dialogue’ may meet resistance from those whose power rests on the unquestioned assumptions of the organisation). All of this be summarised as follows: Top Down – people at the bottom work for the system, Bottom Up – system works for the people. Debate supports top down; dialogue engenders bottom up.
Conclusion: Evolution, not Revolution
As they say over at Massive Small, “Bottom up needs top down, just a better form of top down. They are not mutually exclusive but fundamentally interdependent”. Dialogue is a way of creating this ‘better form’ by asking us to free ourselves of the inner and outer chains that traditionally bind our communication, allowing us to learn to communicate freely around the similarities that sit at the heart of ourselves and our organisations: values, purpose, and vision. By helping us to cultivate the skills and qualities necessary to work with the more ‘difficult’ aspects of human nature and the human condition, we are able to work more realistically with processes as they unfold, and to be able to dance to the music that is actually playing instead of only ever trying to impose our own melody on how we think things ought to be.
Perhaps more importantly, dialogue teaches us to move towards the ‘evolution’ of our own mind sets and to allow this evolution to permeate the systems that we build as a whole. By refusing to see communication as an ‘external’ or semantic process alone, connecting us to the inner level of who we are as individuals, and acknowledging the interdependence of what takes place within us and the impact it has on the world around us, we cultivate the self-leadership skills to change the way that systems operate and influence us overall, and to create a solid base for the bottom-up approach that so many of us think is a realistic possibility. When we learn to dialogue with ourselves and our egos, we are better equipped to have meaningful dialogue with others.
As learning the skills required to manage ourselves takes time and consistent effort, it’s recommended that we create containers, aka Dialogue Circles, where people from different groups can come together to drop their labels and agendas and to simply explore the truth of their shared situation together. With an attitude of playful curiosity and exploration, we can find the strength to look at ourselves and our worlds with honesty and openness and to build the best of both for all of us. Social change comes from better relationships and better relationships come from the way that we communicate, first of all with ourselves and then the rest of the world at large.