Resource Materials and Links on Practical Dialogue

Resource Materials and Links
on Practical Dialogue
and more....

During the last six years, my work has centered around a collection of leading-edge approaches to group facilitation that I call "Practical Dialogue." These methods include:

--Dynamic Facilitation
--Dialogue Mapping
--small-group applications of the
Transformative Mediation model

These powerful approaches allow people in working groups to arrive naturally at creative breakthroughs and shared understandings.

In this section I also include some links to:

--Large-group Practices that foster emergence

as well as to the larger field of

--Co-Intelligence and the design of sustainable human systems.

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Dynamic Facilitation

My passion for this work grew initially from my experiences with the power of Dynamic Facilitation to generate unprecedented levels of collective intelligence, shared understanding, and practical action, qualities that are critical to our future as a species.

After using Dynamic Facilitation in a variety of settings and having the opportunity to lead workshops on it, I decided to write a manual for this practice. Jim Rough, the creator of this method, has been offering the manual to participants in his seminars. Now, with his blessing, I am making the manual freely available through this website.

Dynamic Facilitation manual

Dynamic Facilitation manual in Spanish

I have also written several papers about Dynamic Facilitation. A relatively brief one is:

"Listening for Aliveness:
Dynamic Facilitation and the Redesign of Conversational Systems"

In it, I include stories and quotes from several professional facilitators who have studied with Jim Rough and been greatly inspired by him. I had the opportunity to interview those facilitators as part of the research for my master's thesis. A more recent version of my original thesis is posted on Jim's website. It's pretty lengthy and academic, but if you are interested here is the link:

"Facilitating Democracy : The Evolving Practice and Theory of Dialogue"

Dialogue Mapping

After being introduced to Dynamic Facilitation, my scientific curiosity about "how things work" led me to embark on an on-going search for other methods that might operate along similar principles. After all, if the underlying principles are sound, they are likely to manifest in a variety of forms, rather than as a singular occurrence.

Along these lines, it has been extremely instructive and gratifying to encounter Dialogue Mapping, the work of Dr. Jeff Conklin. Dialogue Mapping is a software-assisted method of non-linear group facilitation. The software it uses, Compendium, is open-source shareware that is freely available through the Cognexus Institute.

While Dynamic Facilitation only requires chart paper and markers, and Dialogue Mapping utilizes very sophisticated software, both approaches have a great deal in common. Trained facilitators often have difficulty with the Dynamic Facilitation approach, as it tends to go against the grain of what they have been taught. Yet Dr. Conklin and others in the Compendium community were extremely receptive to and enthusiastic about the Dynamic Facilitation manual. They thought it could serve as excellent preliminary material for anyone who wanted to later learn Dialogue Mapping, and encouraged me to make it more widely available. In turn, much of the theory I learned through Dialogue Mapping, helped me to better explain how Dynamic Facilitation works.

Here is a narrative description of a joint presentation that Dr. Conklin and I offered at the Organization Development Network Conference in 2003:

"The Next Generation: High Tech Meets High Touch"

It describes both Dialogue Mapping and Dynamic Facilitation as powerful, non-linear approaches for facilitating effective and sustainable conversations on complex and challenging issues.

Transformative Mediation and its applications to small-group work

Despite all the good work done by Jim Rough, Dr. Conklin, and others, it often appears to me that the field of facilitation is still in its infancy with regard to the application of non-linear, non-directive methods to situations where practical outcomes are involved.

This, however, is not the case in the neighboring field of mediation and conflict resolution. In 1994, Robert A. Baruch Bush and Joseph P. Folger published the ground-breaking book, "The Promise of Mediation". In it, they laid out the principles of a new paradigm for helping people in conflict: the non-directive, non-linear approach now known as Transformative Mediation.

The focus of Transformative Mediation is supporting the enhancement of people's relationship with one another and with themselves. While practical results are not a goal, they are a frequent byproduct. And, it's not surprising that the settlements that emerge from an open-ended process, tend to be more long-lasting than ones that are reached through a more "managed" and directive process!

While this method originallybegan in the conflict resolution field, several practitioners of Transformative Mediation have been evolving new forms of transformative practice, including multi-party policy disputes and team-building within organizations.

These, then, are some of the non-directive, non-linear methods for supporting the emergence of shared understanding in working groups that I see as examples of "Practical Dialogue". While all three of these methods were created independently, and have their own unique features, they also share significant elements in common. Collectively, they point toward a new way of working that has great potential for our shared future.

Large-group practices that foster emergence

While quite different in the details, the spirit of small-group Practical Dialogue is very compatible with large-group practices that support emergence and self-organization. You may already be familiar with...

Open Space Technology, a simple method for helping large groups of people to effectively self-organize... and, to begin discovering the power of emergence;

World Café, another simple approach for evoking shared understanding and greater alignment in a large group… and, to begin developing a shared consciousness;

Future Search, a large-group practice for generating shared visions and action plans…

Each of these large-group methods also has its own particular form, and its own unique gifts. At the same time, they share certain underlying themes: inclusiveness, the creative use of divergence, a simple format that serves as a strong container, an open-endedness that allows for powerful shared breakthroughs to emerge...

Co-intelligence and the design of sustainable human systems

From a broader perspective, all of the small-group and large-group methods described above can be seen as leading-edge ways to support co-intelligence, or the ability for us to be wiser together than we could be alone.

One of my most meaningful projects has been working with Tom Atlee, the founder of the Co-Intelligence Institute, on his ground-breaking book the Tao of Democracy. Tom is the person who originally introduced me to Dynamic Facilitation, and inspired me to pursue a life-long interest in Organization Development.

The Co-Intelligence Institute's website has a wealth of resources, many more than we were able to include in Tom's book. I highly recommend it!

I later wrote an essay for the Collective Wisdom Initiative offering some perspectives on Tom's work as well as on the larger field that many of us are midwifing.

"Deepening Democracy: Awakening the Spirit of Our Shared Life Together"

is an attempt to describe the "big picture" that inspires my own life and work.

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Well, that's a start! I plan to add more materials to this website as I am able to do so.
I also welcome any feedback you might have on the materials here, any suggested links to useful materials, and any potential collaborations that might emerge.