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

During the last nine years, my work with groups has been informed by a collection of leading-edge approaches to facilitation that help people transform conflict into creativity. These methods include Dynamic Facilitation, Dialogue Mapping, and small-group applications of the Transformative Mediation model. These powerful approaches help people arrive at creative breakthroughs and shared understandings, and are especially useful when working with practical issues where we need to engage in coordinated action.

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Dynamic Facilitation

I have found Jim Rough's Dynamic Facilitation method to generate unprecedented levels of collective intelligence, shared understanding, and committed action, qualities that are essential for our future as a species.

After using Dynamic Facilitation in a variety of settings and having the opportunity to lead workshops on it, I wrote a manual for this practice. Jim includes the manual as part of his seminars. At the same time, we wanted to make the manual freely available to everyone. So here it is!
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. If you are interested in the longer version, let me know by e-mail and I will send it to you.

                                                                                                          Dialogue Mapping

While Dynamic Facilitation has become one of my main practices, I've continued searching for other methods that produce equally powerful results. Along these lines, I've been greatly impressed with 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 Compendium 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. They are both powerful, non-linear approaches for facilitating effective and sustainable conversations on complex and challenging issues, and operate on similar principles.

I'm happy to say that Dr. Conklin and others in the Compendium community have been extremely receptive to and enthusiastic about the Dynamic Facilitation manual. They thought it could serve as excellent preliminary material for anyone who wanted to go on to learn Dialogue Mapping, and have encouraged me to make the manual more widely available. In turn, much of the theory I learned about Dialogue Mapping, has helped me to better explain how Dynamic Facilitation works.

                                                                                                            Transformative Mediation and its applications to small-group work

In 1994, Robert A. Baruch Bush and Joseph P. Folger published the ground-breaking book, "The Promise of Mediation". In it, they laid out a new paradigm for helping people grow and learn from 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. 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 originally began 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.

I see all three of these non-directive, non-linear methods for supporting the emergence of shared understanding in working groups as examples of "Practical Dialogue". While they were each created independently and have their own unique features, they also share significant elements in common. Collectively, they point toward another of working with groups, one that taps the power of complex adaptive systems to self-organize.
                                                                                                            Large-group practices that foster emergence

The spirit of Practical Dialogue is very compatible with practices that are designed to support emergence and self-organization in large groups, including:
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 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, and an open-endedness that allows for powerful shared breakthroughs to emerge. These are also the elements that make the small-group approaches to Practical Dialogue so powerful.

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.

I am very grateful to have had the opportunity to work 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 return to school to study Organization Development.

An essay I wrote for the Collective Wisdom Initiative describes some of Tom's work as well as the larger field that many of us are called to:
"Deepening Democracy: Awakening the Spirit of Our Shared Life Together"

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

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Well, that's all for now !I will be updating this page from time to time, and I welcome any feedback you might have on the materials here, any suggested links to useful materials, and any potential collaborations that might emerge.