Published in The World Needs Dialogue! Three: Shaping the Profession (2021), this paper by William Isaacs sets out the context driving the Academy's effort to professionalise dialogue. Isaacs maps the field's breadth: dialogue as collective social intervention, deliberative democracy, diplomatic practice, negotiation supplement, and organisational development tool — drawing on work by Fishkin, Susskind, Saunders, Bushe and Marshak, among others. Beneath this surface variety, he identifies significant differences in intention, worldview, and method, and notes a striking absence: no unifying body of knowledge, no shared criteria for what constitutes ethical or excellent performance. That gap, for Isaacs, is precisely what the Academy exists to address — producing reliable outcomes and coherent standards across a field that has grown energetically but without collective self-definition. The paper functions as both diagnosis and foundation, framing professionalism less as credentialism than as the discipline of knowing what you are doing and why.