Overview: For countless generations, people have gathered into small groups to talk about their life together. As a natural way to seek meaning, people tend to divide the world into categories-to see things as made up of parts. "Fragmented" thinking can be useful. It can also lead to breakdowns in effectiveness of groups, organizations, and systems. Dialog can restore and deepen a sense of group unity, trust and purpose.

How Dialog Works: Group inquires into everyday experience and into what is assumed. It establishes a "group space"--the kinds of conditions that bring about a useful coming together of the whole, listening, and a comfortable experience of shared meaning.

The Payoff: Dialog is useful to groups that seek open and respectful inquiry to discover new ways of being, understanding, working and learning together. Dialog is not set up to require decisions or specific results. Dialog works with groups of 10 to 25 people. Group size--and hearing each person--is important to developing relationships that work well over time. Large groups experience dialog by using small group exercises.

How to Make It Happen:
Dialog is a facilitated group process that affirms democratic principles and invites group members to join in talk about the past, present, and future. This process draws from core beliefs and values found in spiritual traditions world wide. It involves:

• clear purpose to increase understanding,
• ground rules to respect, listen, and share time equally,
• a facilitator who holds the group's focus on the purpose.

Organizations and interest groups of all types--government, business, education, non-profit, and community groups--can benefit from the dialog group process tool.

Senge, P.M. et al, (1994), The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization, New York, NY: Bantam, Doubleday, Dell Pub, Group, Inc.

Srivasta, S., & Cooperrider, D. et al, (1990), "Positive Image, Positive Action" In Appreciative Management and Leadership…, San Francisco, CA: Josy-Bass, Inc.

The President's Initiative on Race. One America Dialogue Guide: Conducting a Discussion on Race, Washington, DC: The White House. March 1998.