In fact, it's not the sustainability of discrete instances of dialogical environments but rather, I believe, it is possible for even momentary discrete instances each in isolation from others that can offer seeds of overall dialogic process. These moments seem to me to have long laster effect, far beyond the moment itself. And, even a single moment could catalyze transformation far in the future. The ability to connect these remote nodes in delayed causal relationships must be difficult to verify or even to identify, even perhaps for the individual or individual experiencing that transformation.

Bohm recognized that dialogue groups do not last, and yet they are a worthy enterprise in the moment and in an overall meta-pattern of engagements.

Though some engagement may be momentary and appear isolated from any others, it must be enough for seeds to be planted in this manner. One does what one can to create, instigate an overall dialogic shift; and even isolated moments participate in this overall meta-pattern.

In the circles of engagement, the innermost circle is one where the participants move closer together through willingness by cultivating dialogic ability in their collective relationship. Like a precision stunt team, the skills of the members determines how close the stunt formation may be risked. So too the ability of participants in dialogic process determines how tightly the relationships within dialogical space can form. I sense that the likelihood and speed at which dialogue emerges is determined generally by this closeness of these dynamic, systemic relationships.

McSheffrey’s (2000) work places the rebuilding of Derry, including the building of the city walls and the subsequent renaming of the city, in the context of difficult planning that involves value judgments about people, politics and religions. These are certainly environmental factors that relate to the community and community ability to have time place and inclination to dialogue. In my 2004 case study, when I visited the city, I examined some ways that the environment, the very natural and human landscapes, appeared to create opportunities to enter into dialogical space around issues that were otherwise dialogue resistant.

In situations, environments or relationships which are dialogue resistant, it may be necessary to do foundational work creating willingness and good faith, and perhaps even re-humanizing the enemy enough to allow for suspension of judgement. Christina Baldwin () suggests that the circle was a primary form of social organization, which was lost. The work of Carol Lee Flinders () suggests that there are concurrent traditions in western society stemming from the advent of agriculture which included relational primacy.

Beverly Brown, author of In Timber Country, speaks of sharing 'sticky rice' which is her metaphor for the way in which sharing meals creates bonds between people. A more technical term for this comes from Christian theology is commensality, the sharing of meals as an act of community. While I certainly agree the creating time and place for dialogue is essential, as I've pointed out in the past, there must also be some intentionality and purpose.

I summarized some of the work done in the Olympia community around the local impact of the Palestine-Israel conflict inspired by Compassionate Listening as suggesting that in some cases dialogue becomes part of the problem when the foundation isn't there to recognize the essential and interdependent humanity of the other (Bell, 2004). One primary tasks of the Compassionate Listening Project is to create for the participants a safe place to both speak and to be heard as an experience of these which they may not have had before. The speaking and listening is essential to a process of discernment that reveals the fundamental connection between humans. However, Compassionate Listening occurs in an intentional space.

Intentional spaces, whether ritual, theatrical or political are all similar to enabling dialogical spaces; and each have histories of enabling relationships to form in spite of contentious issues or dialogue resistant conflict. This suggests that the intentional work to create these enabling spaces is part of the foundation for dialogic process, and eventually over time can create the opportunity for dialogue to emerge around event the most contentious issues.

In other words, focus not on enabling dialogue, but on enabling the enabling dialogical space.

Intention is a mild example of hierarchy, but one that is enough to disable the emergence of dialogue if it becomes a form of bad faith. Even the best of intentions can become impositions on others, a kind of social engineering that meddles in the lives of others. If one enters an enabling dialogical space with an intention to dialogue then one can obviate a shared development of relationship with the other participants by prejudicing that environment with preconceived, unilateral notions of relationship. One’s intention to dialogue becomes a barrier to seeing the other participants as equals in the process of what emerges. In this sense, hierarchy and intention to an outcome are examples of a lack of good faith. It is in the intention to create an enabling space with those willing to enter into it together that one finds an opportunity from which dialogue may emerge without imposition.

In early 2004, a colleague and I developed a survey, based on the early formation of the archetypal model of dialogic process. Using what may turn out to be an overly complex interpretation, we showed a slight statistical correspondence in our limited sample of respondents between the archetypal roles and the personality types of Myers-Briggs.

In 2004, I used an early working definition, which was comprised of the theory of enabling dialogical space and the theory of dialogical gifts, to evaluate several places in Ireland.

Since 2004, and including the case study in Ireland, I have been using my working definition of dialogue as a framework for design. I am using my working definition to test and develop spaces and processes of engagement that are dialogical. Using the definition as a framework, I am exploring the implications using more specific design questions such as:

How can dialogical environments be created that encourage dialogic process and lead to emergent dialogue for the purpose of building and maintaining community cohesion and identity in the face of adaptive challenges?

I offer these as examples of how my working definition has become for me a practical tool in design of physical and social places, a theoretical model of dialogue and a frame through which to view the world.

Atlee (2003) suggests that dialogue is a field characterized primarily by more or less transformative effect. I think this is far too simplistic as a whole definition, and draws the field far too broadly. The transformative nature of a search for shared meaning is not the same as, for example, the transformative process of personal mastery, although they can be informed by each other; and, zen meditation is not dialogue. Although it can be dialogical in some regard, a transformative experience alone cannot in and of itself be dialogue, because dialogue has specific characteristics that differentiate it from other transformative processes.

If transformation is the determination of dialogue then any human that changes is in dialogue. Since the human body is constantly re-generating, there is no point at which the human is not changing, whether they are in communication with another or not. Like Heraclitus' river, any subsequent sampling includes, necessarily, transformation of thought and idea; correlation suggests but cannot prove causation. Therefore, transformation is a necessary criteria only in as much as the presence of transformation implies the presence of a living entity, and since transformation exists outside of dialogue it cannot be a sufficient condition or dialogue would be omnipresent. I hold that dialogue is a special form of human behaviour and not an omnipresent one, and as transformation occurs without dialogue, I hold that dialogue as interaction between entities cannot be defined merely by transformation.

Here I must point out that by entities I do not necessarily mean only individuals. I hold that entities can be individuals, but that collections of individuals are also organizational entities with behaviours that are not merely an additive sum of the individuals. I also hold that individuals are a collection of psychological entities and that the individual is not merely an additive sum of these psychological entities. Relationships between entities may be some combination of intrapersonal, interpersonal, extrapersonal and superpersonal; and, these relationships are complex and systemic. I believe these dynamic relationships can all be dialogical and have the potential for dialogue.

At the same time, while not simply transformation, dialogue must be something specific or it is not worth talking about. Since I am going to talk about it, I beg the question of what dialogue is specifically. For this purpose, I will offer my working definition.

Just as there are specific techniques of rhyme, meter and construction to poetry, there is a structural technique to dialogue that can be practiced. However, the art itself is not just technical mastery, although technical mastery can be phenomenal to behold. The technique is not sufficient to the art. I would also suggest that the technique is also not necessary to the art. I suggest that the method of art, the technique, is neither sufficient nor necessary for the content of art, the art itself. There is an ideal which exists without expression and no expression is complete without being a reference to the ideal.

To me poetics is rhetoric of and from the heart, or whole person, and theatre is imitation and emphasis of life for transformation; dialogue is a communication from the heart which emphasizes transformation.

When I suggest that I am offering a poetic of dialogue I am making an explicit connection to notions inspired by Aristotle's Poetics. I link dialogue to more than just poetry but rather to a field of communication-as-art that can be mastered. I mean to suggest that dialogue is itself a form of communication that while naturally occurring can also be mastered.

By art, I mean to suggest the meaning of Aristotle as interpreted by Boal, that “Art is the re-creation of the creative principle” (1982). This suggests that art is an iterative system, a set of relationships that modifies itself, self-creates as in the systemic principle of autopoesis. I mean to imply that dialogue is a form of communication that is both a process of transformation and that can create itself, that it naturally occurs.

I am also implicitly making a connection between the art of poetics and the work of design. Working with a vocabulary, within specific constraints, both the designer and the poet have reciprocal relationships with their clients. I am offering an archetypal language of dialogue that can be used artfully, within the constraints of an enabling dialogical space, by a practitioner who is in a reciprocal, interdependent relationship with other practitioners.

I believe that the sufficient and necessary component of an art is an authentic practice, a practice that is, to be sure, enhanced by technique. Dialogue is, I believe, a natural form of communication. However, it is also an art form the quality of which can be more or less enhanced by the authenticity and mastery of the practitioner. It is enough to be willing in engage in dialogic relationships, but the cultivation of dialogic ability in self and others is the next step to building those relationships.

Of course, I also believe that this sufficiency of authenticity to dialogue makes the art of dialogue, in many ways, one that may only ever be an anecdotally verified emergent quality of human behaviour. As a subjective human interpersonal event, it may be possible to see that participants believe that dialogue has occurred, and it may be possible to see indications that a dialogue has emerged; but, to say definitively that dialogue, which is to say that special form of communication, has occurred may not be fully verifiable. I suspect that the most thorough exploration of dialogue may be available through oral history and through the techniques of ethnography and participatory research methodologies.

Dialogue must be more than merely parrhasia, free speech. Dialogue is not dialog, neither merely the ability to speak nor the ability to speak one's mind. It is not enough that people merely communicate and it is not enough that one merely speak one's mind. Dialogue is a systemic communication that is neither one-sided nor empty social exchange. While it may be possible for dialogue to emerge in the unlikeliest of places, there are places where this emergence is more likely and places where it is unlikely. There is also the possibility for dialogical space without dialogic process, and there the possibility for dialogic process without dialogue.

The emergence of dialogue from dialogic process within enabling dialogical space is an expression of an art form, a poetics of human relationship that is transformative and reawakening to the essential and interdependent humanity of the participants.

Isaacs, W. (1999b). “Dialogic leadership.” Systems Thinker Vol 10 No 1, Feb 1999. Pegasus Communications, Inc.

Isaacs, W. (1999a). Dialogue and the art of thinking together. New York: Currency Doubleday.

Manjoo, F. (2009). Twitter's not a Google Killer. It's not a Facebook killer, either. Slate. Retr on Mar 7, 2009 from http://www.slate.com/id/2213036/