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Relationships And Communities Session Fourteen

Group Presentations

• Dialogic listening
  • finding true I-thou interactions and relationships
  • shifting from me or you to us
  • moving from understanding someone while being right to being mutually committed to something you both can support
  • • Focusing not on what is inside either of us, but the interaction that is ours
    • Beyond Encouraging
      • Paraphrase plus
      • Asking for a paraphrase
    • Building the space between us
      • Asking for an example
        • Encouraging self-disclosure
      • Running with the metaphor

• Dialogue Strategy 2: Focus on common interests, not devisive ones.
  • Dialog is a converation with a center, not sides.
• Dialogue Strategy 3: Keep dialog and decision making compartmentalized.
  • Decision making is getting to yes
  • Dialogue is getting to understanding

Cases and Emotion

Yankelovich, 58-72

• Example: Research institute hiring decision by board
• There is a natural human predisposition to see criticism of how we do things as a criticism of us.
  • The result is often defensiveness
  • Or worse, countercriticism
  • It is the natural path of conflict, and one of the primary reasons why people involved in conflict NEVER point to the same event as the the starting point of the conflict
    • punctuation
    • symmetrical escalation
    • kitchen-sinking
    • It takes two to make a fight.
• But different subcultures make different assumptions, and criticism of how we do things is usually about advocating another way of doing things that is valued within a subculture.
  • This, in its essence, is what Nola Heidelbaugh's book Judgement, Rhetoric, and the Problem of Incommensurability, is about.
  • "two opposing sides cannot translate the issue into each others' vocabulary."
• So how do we build bridges between the varied assumptions of different subcultures.
  • Nola recommends creating awareness of opposing arguments
  • Yankelovich puts it a bit more simply: clarify assumptions.
• Dialogue Strategy 4: Clarify assumptions that lead to subculture distortions.
  • Assumptions are often a bigger issue that get in the way of smaller issues.
  • Understanding assumptions often makes it easier to move forward with a win-win strategy.
• Dialogue Strategy 5: Bring forth your own assumptions before speculating on those of others.
  • Opening yourself up is a risk, but it will encourage others to do the same
  • Self-disclosure leads to reciprocity and trust
• Dialogue Strategy 6: Use specific cases to raise general issues.
  • In truth, its usually conflict over small things that points to a much larger value discongruity.
• Example: Hospital discussion of patient request in the light of managed care costs.
• Dialogue Strategy 7: Focus on conflicts between value systems, not people.
  • Those conflicts are often within us.
  • Competing subcultural assumptions in our own subculture.
• Dialogue Strategy 8: When appropriate, express the emotions that accompany strongly held views.
  • This works best when the emotion seems out of character, so its good to save it.
  • But we need to remember that values are fundamental. It is natural to feel emotion when our values are compromised.
  • Its OK to feel angry.
  • The question is what we do with it

Empathy and Trust

• Yankelovich, 73-89
• Stewart, 585-594

• Dialogue Strategy 9: Initiate dialogue through a gesture of empathy.
  • Empathy can take many forms
    • A statement of understanding
    • An act of compassion
    • Simply working together on the same thing
    • Apologies are often an effective empathic gesture.
  • Empathy is an effective way to create a feeling of equality and openness.
  • It can also help us break through to assumptions
    • Sometimes our assumptions are deep, and they spill over from the past into the present.
      • Transference
• Dialogue Strategy 10: Be sure trust exists before addressing transferrence distortions.
  • Trust is earned (via)
    • self-disclosure
    • commitment
    • investment

 Commitment ------------------+
      ^  ^                    v
      |  +---> Trust <---> Self-Disclosure
      v  v                    ^
 Investment ------------------+

• In dialogue, each person transforms the other
• There are tensions in dialogue
  • between presenting and receiving
  • between privacy and disclosure
  • between holding our ground and letting the other happen to us