Have you ever sat in a meeting where everyone is busy giving their point of view and trying to prove why they are right? Where no one is listening or trying to understand other people’s points of view. The alternate meeting format is where everyone listens and agrees with the meeting leader. Nobody contributes or adds ideas, they just comply.
In my experience, most meetings are one or the other. But when you think about it, what is the point of most meetings? Meetings are usually held to make decisions. The outcome that most people would want from the meeting is for the BEST decision to be made, not for any decision to be made, or for another subcommittee to be formed, but for a decision to be made that works. Then we move on.
So while we rush from meeting to meeting being very busy, achieving nothing in the way of measurable results, we land with yet another subcommittee. All because we have lost the art of dialogue. So the question is; What is the difference between dialogue and discussion?
DISCUSSION – Discussion is the way most people communicate. During the discussion we present our ideas and each one analyzes and dissects them from their different points of view. The purpose of the discussion, however, is to make sure you win, or that your point of view is the one that is accepted. During the discussion, you will support your idea and make your points more forcefully until, eventually, others agree with you. You want to show that you are right and that you are the most informed, just like everyone else in the discussion. Great! With everyone trying to win the argument, a decision is never made and eventually we need to form a subcommittee to decide. Either the CEO, or the team leader, uses his divine autocratic right and decides for the team.
DIALOGUE – Dialogue, on the other hand, is an exploration of ideas. It is not a new form of communication, but it is the way that the ancient Greeks and many of the so-called “primitive” societies explore ideas. During the dialogue, everyone works together contributing to the idea. Remember that the team is greater than the sum of the parts; therefore, more is accomplished with dialogue, as each person’s ideas are added to the previous ones. In a dialogue nobody tries to win. They are trying to learn and create. They suspend their individual assumptions and explore ideas and problems. It is a free flow of ideas in which participants continue to think and observe themselves thinking. The great physicists Heisenberg, Pauli, Einstein, and Bohr described the conversations they had with each other. As we know from history, their conversations (dialogue) changed traditional physics because what they could accomplish as a group exceeded what each could do as individuals. Interesting? So who is ‘primitive’ now?
How do you get your team to dialogue? 3 conditions are needed:
You are closest to achieving dialogue when your team meetings are full of questions. Questions indicate an attempt at understanding. Sit down at your next meeting and see how often a question is asked. No questions = no dialogue.
Teams can engage in dialogue if everyone knows in advance what is expected of them and if they really want the results created through dialogue. Dialogue is fun conversation and everyone should be willing to play with new ideas. Who says you can’t have fun and grow at the same time?
I hope you can achieve dialogue in your teams. Since we realized the difference and have been trying to practice dialogue, we have really had some amazing ideas about our business and what we do. We have reached a whole level of new knowledge.
Who knows, maybe there is something amazing your company could accomplish if everyone put their heads together. 1 + 1 = 3 makes perfect sense!