From 2011 to 2016, the South Asia Champions Dialogue Process (SACDP) engaged dozens of officials, leaders and development organizations to create a series of innovative conversations that would catalyze several billion dollars of investment. Sponsored by the World Bank and the Department of International Development (DFID), this activity brought about honest exchanges among senior leaders and officials across South Asia in the management of Energy, Water, Climate, Ecosystem a

It is the ninth of September, 2009: coordinators, trainers and dialogue facilitators from 36 cities are gathered at the Okura Hotel in Amsterdam for the national meeting of The Netherlands in Dialogue (NID). National ambassadors and partner organizations are present, and they express their wish to strengthen social cohesion in the Netherlands by organizing dialogue gatherings across all segments of society.

In this paper, we will describe a process of reflecting on facilitation that started in our workshop at the second The World Needs Dialogue! international conference organised by the Academy of Professional Dialogue in 2019. For this event, the papers are usually distributed to participants beforehand and, at the conference, dialogues are held on the topics of the papers. Our workshop proceeded in a reverse order. We invited participants to reflect on dialogue facilitation in

I began using the term Dialogue as a Research Methodology in 2014, although Professional Dialogue had been in use for research purposes for many years prior to that by me and my business associate and colleague Jane Ball. The first published research drawing on this methodology was undertaken by us for the UK Ministry of Justice in 2015. Before introducing the Research Methodology, it would probably help to say what I mean by Professional Dialogue. The word dialogue is used w

How do you create a generative dialogue that draws people's passion and creates insights? What works well in your facilitation? What else could you do that may work better? What are your strengths as a facilitator? Where do you hit a dead end? What are you learning to do differently? What do you wish you could provide as a dialogue facilitator?

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

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

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.

In 2010, the Virginia Department of Corrections (VADOC) was in transition. The goal of the newly elected Governor was to enhance public safety with a focus on reducing victimization, improving the outcomes for offenders returning to their communities, and reducing recidivism by strengthening re-entry programs. Thus the Virginia Adult Re-Entry Initiative was established. The Governor searched for a new Director for the Department to further that mission. The question for the a

This paper will explore the basic principles of dialogic team coaching in TAMK Proakatemia, a special unit of entrepreneurship education in Tampere University of Applied Sciences (TAMK) in Finland. Currently the learning community of Proakatemia consists of about 150 students studying in the Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA), Entrepreneurship and Team Leadership, and physical therapist programmes; 11 coaches; about 20 students in the MBA in Entrepreneurship programme;

This is the story of a six-month intervention that enabled the successful handover of a government-run prison in the UK to a private company in 2011. I will be describing the mobilisation phase of privatisation; it is one chapter in a longer story of the transformation of the prison in private hands, and – although I won’t be covering it in detail here – nine years later the collapse of safety and security at the same prison to the point it was returned to government manageme

Among dialogue practitioners few, if any, have continued to use group dialogue in the original format proposed in 1991 by David Bohm and his colleagues Peter Garrett and Donald Factor. In the United States, despite major efforts by William Isaacs and his colleagues at his firm Dialogos to introduce this mode of “thinking together” in organizations, the method in its “pure form” did not take root. In Quebec, Canada, efforts were made to use Bohm dialogue with managers and prof