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Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together by William Isaacs. New York: Currency-Doubleday, 1999, 448 pp., $24.99, cloth [ISBN:O385-47-999-9].
A CEO of an American company emigrated as a young woman from communist Yugoslavia. She recalled that under "worker socialism" employees felt free to criticize their boss. However, if they criticized President Tito, their careers and even their lives could be forfeit. When she came to America, she found "you could say anything you wanted about the president of the country. But God forbid you say anything bad about your boss! Is that free speech? Is that democracy?" (p. 162). William Isaacs uses these and other stories to explore the "architecture of the invisible" implicit in "conversational fields" to be found within and among organizations. In the above story, the unspoken contradiction in the conversational field cultivated by many U.S. corporations is that top managers prefer to control the discussion, rather than engage in real dialogue with internal or external stakeholders.
An associate of Peter Senge at MIT's Society for Organizational Learning and a leader of MIT's Dialogue Project, Bill Isaacs has written a rare and important book that is as accessible and relevant to management practitioners as it is to organizational scholars. He explores the promise for dialogue to enable collective cognition, or the creative "art of thinking together." Such dialogic learning is an especially promising way to mobilize "shared meaning" in grappling with complex, interdependent, on-going societal and organizational problems. Russell Ackoff characterizes such problems as "messes" because they spill across organizational and societal boundaries and affect those involved in different, but related ways. Interpretation of the causes, symptoms, and potential cures of "messes" are conditioned by the preconceptions and special interests of those who share the (frequently contested) problem domain.
Isaacs derives meaning from connections between the building blocks of language. Thus, the Greek roots dia and logos signify "flow of meaning" (p. xvii). In contrast, the roots of the word discussion signify "to shake apart" (p. 42). He finds that most conversations within and across organizations are discussions rather than dialogues. They proceed from an attempt by various contestants to defend their pre-conceived positions. This sparks a controlled discussion of the pros and cons of each position. Resolution is achieved within an...