International development is concerned with complex global problems such as climate change, urbanisation, poverty and migration. International development actors worldwide are becoming aware that seemingly simple solutions might have short-term, localised effects, but often create more drastic problems in the long run. Solutions that look good at first sight often reproduce effects similar to those that they were meant to counteract. Over time, this leaves many people disillu

Did it ever occur to you that human thought may be the cause of most of the challenges we face in the world today? Some problems are the result of natural disasters like earthquakes, tsunamis, droughts and cyclones. Most, however, are caused by people, and the way they behave towards one another and the environment. The problems of crime, wars, substance abuse, deforestation, pollution, depletion of the ozone layer and so on, all arise from the way people think, feel and act.

Facility personnel across the Virginia Department of Corrections (VADOC) began noticing a rise in inmate disturbances. The lead cause indicated that the telephones and showers were being monopolized by the gangs, specifically the Bloods. Their ability to be subtle with the activities caused staff to be unaware of the frustration that had reached a boiling point among the inmates who had no gang affiliation. The non-gang inmate population grew tired of the situation and began

The Virginia Department of Corrections (VADOC) strives to hire trustworthy, dedicated staff and retain their employment for 20 to 30 years of professional service. While this employment strategy contrasts with the five-years-of-service trends in private industry, in corrections the employer and the employee greatly benefit from a long career history. Recently, the VADOC has struggled to hire and retain professional corrections employees. This challenge is widespread across th

My route into dialogue has followed a path from psychology to union representation, and from consulting to my current work. I started in 1971 as a mental health worker at a major psychiatric hospital in Uppsala, Sweden. This led me to becoming a member of the Swedish Municipal Workers’ Union – known as Kommunal, Sweden’s largest union – where I soon became the trade representative and then president of the local union in 1976. In 1980, I was offered the position of ombudsman

This is a companion paper expanding the consideration begun by Harold Clarke and Whitney Barton in their paper, Putting Dialogue to Work in the Virginia Department of Corrections , that was considered at our 2019 conference. That paper described the value of the Working Dialogue as a business practice for the management of organisational change, and gives specific case studies to substantiate this. In this paper I want to explain the thinking that led to the original design o

Indian Creek Correctional Center is the only Cognitive Therapeutic Community for male inmates in the Virginia Department of Corrections (VADOC). The mission of the facility focuses on substance abuse, with the majority of the inmates being enrolled by court order. As part of the ongoing enhancement of the use of pro-social behavior and cognitive skills, the opportunity to introduce Dialogue Skills Training to inmates made perfect sense. By developing these skills, inmates can

What is the purpose of the criminal justice system? Is it punishment? Or retribution? Perhaps rehabilitation? Deterrence? Public safety? While there is undoubtedly a little of all of these in practice, rehabilitation is at the heart of modern penal policy in the UK and US systems where I have worked. In my experience the reality of the aspiration to provide rehabilitation (defined as ‘the reintegration of a convicted person into society’) is hampered by the fragmentation of t

It is sometimes said that organizing church communities is like herding cats. This is meant to be funny, but there is more than a grain of truth to it. Cats cannot be pushed into formation, but  they can, in fact, be herded. All we need do is put a fish on a line. In effect, we need to find  what they all hunger for and hold it out there: they will come, and they will eat and be better for  it. It is the same way in an effective dialogue with members of church communities who

The aim of dialogic conversations, in the sense of David Bohm’s practice, is to let the emphasis be put on the process (rather than outcomes) so that the implicit and initially unspeakable can surface in a mutual conversation (Bohm 2005, p. 36). This is exactly what the student-teacher and the children succeeded in doing in the small dialogue described above. The student-teacher broke the pattern of judgement and contradiction established between Ahmed and Fatma, and gave the

In Western societies, where the mechanical world view has dominated since the 18th century, we tend to evaluate developments through measurable indicators such as economic and technological growth. One of the most important features of this kind of thinking is that technical solutions are to be universally applied regardless of the cultural or natural context. The market economy, based on competition between autonomous actors, is an illustrative example of a mechanical system

Context Between 2003 and 2016, a group of co-facilitators and I and facilitated dialogue programs in neighbourhoods and vocational schools in Rotterdam. Aims These dialogic interventions aimed to de-escalate tensions and create mutual understanding, thus restoring or building relationships. After several neighbourhood interventions the City of Rotterdam asked us to facilitate a dialogue between a group of street youngsters and police officers of Delfshaven, an old, notorious

I am enthusiastic about explaining how I came to want to give Dialogue a broad place in schools, about the added value Dialogue offers in that setting and how it benefits students and our society.

Proakatemia is a unit in the School of Business & Media in Tampere University of Applied Sciences (TAMK) in Tampere, Finland, that specializes in entrepreneurship and team leadership. Currently there are about 160 team entrepreneur students (TEs) in Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) and MBA degree programs and 12 team coaches. Last year, Proakatemia started the first bilingual (English and Finnish) international BBA degree program in Entrepreneurship and Team Leadersh

People have always been concerned with what they could do to be well prepared for future events and uncertainties. One of the skills of a successful entrepreneur is foresight, the ability to make the right decisions for an uncertain time ahead. The technical and biotechnical developments of the last 25 years, and the resulting possibilities of their use, are immense. They have changed working and thinking. The time periods between introduction and widespread usage are getting

In our work with dialogue at the Centre for Ecological Economics and Ethics (CEEE), based at the Nord University Business School, Norway, we focus on communicative processes as a value inherent to ‘living societies’. This stands in contrast to the instrumental value of dialogue in the ‘smart city’ concept, where conversation is often in service of designing technology and services for the future. Our goal is to develop arenas for conversation and to inspire processes that con

In 2005, Degerfors Municipality in central Sweden received financial support to develop an education programme to stimulate better staf communication, and to make its work teams aware of their responsibility for setting goals in the organisation. The programme was also aimed at promoting a good workplace climate, increased understanding of our diferences and awareness about how we would succeed. We focused on a three-day training in Dialogue. All staf members in the municipal

The dialogue intervention I’ll be describing in this paper consumed a year out of my life and went deeply under the surface of my own consciousness with an impact that still reverberates. It was an intense, whole-system engagement focusing on dialogue within a long-term healthcare facility. Although the intervention was conducted almost 22 years ago, it ofers a perspective that is still relevant today, as it focuses on the intensive use of dialogue, eventually taking in a who

This paper tells the story of a mediation between a local authority and the parents of two autistic adult children. I’ll explore the results of the mediation (it was successful for one parent and less so for the other), and will describe its unexpected outcome, a decision by politicians to order a larger public dialogue to improve the way in which the local authority cares for people with disabilities. It is my hope that this story will inspire others to see how dialogue and

Over the last 30 years, coaching has developed from a niche practice into an accepted form of consulting, and is now a part of the repertoire of personnel development offers in almost all companies. In the educational sector reflecting on one's own professional practice has an even longer tradition. It began to take hold in the 1970s, when teams of teachers attached importance not only to their academic competence but also to making the interaction between teachers and studen