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Books & Papers

Dialogue: The Art Of Thinking Together

William Isaacs

Most organisational problems, William Isaacs argues, are failures of conversation. His landmark book lays out why honest dialogue is the missing infrastructure of functional workplaces, and how to build it.

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William Isaacs, founder of Dialogos and co-founder of the Organizational Learning Center at MIT, draws on years of consulting and research to argue that the conflicts corroding organisations, between managers and employees, between divisions, between companies, trace back to a single shared incapacity: the inability to think together. The book moves from this diagnosis toward a practical architecture for dialogue, addressing how people can learn to suspend assumptions, listen generously, and speak with genuine voice rather than positional reflex. Isaacs grounds the work in both the theoretical tradition running through Bohm and in fieldwork across corporate and public institutions. The result is one of the most widely read and cited texts in the dialogue canon, read by practitioners seeking both conceptual grounding and actionable guidance. Available from major international booksellers.

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Books & Papers

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Dialogue in organisations and systemsCorporate and workplace

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