
Books & Papers
Seven-Series Dialogues
William Isaacs
April 2020: the world was shutting down, and William Isaacs convened seven 90-minute dialogues to resist the urge to impose meaning on what he called 'a massive reset for the planet.' The question driving the series was simpler and harder than analysis: what meaning are we actually making of this, and can we listen for what is emerging together?
Between April and July 2020, Isaacs and colleagues ran a biweekly series of seven online dialogues, drawing on a global network of leaders and practitioners who had studied or worked with them over many years. The series was designed around collective inquiry rather than structured content; as the invitation put it, 'We will all be teachers and learners simultaneously... Each of us has some of the requisite experience and perspective; no one has all of it.' Running dialogue virtually posed an immediate challenge — the team had never done it before and held genuine doubts about whether the container could hold online. The papers document both the design intentions and the unfolding of that experiment, including what the pandemic context revealed about the conditions required for genuine dialogue. Published in The World Needs Dialogue! Four: Putting Dialogue to Work (William Isaacs, 2022).