An Entry-Level Practice for New Professional Dialogue Practitioners - Francis Briers

It is my perception, which seems to be fairly commonly shared by others as reality, that the pace of change in the world is getting faster. There are various terms relating to this, whether they be the originally military ‘VUCA’ acronym (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity andAmbiguity) or ‘Age of Accelerations’, coined by Thomas L. Friedman. However this experience is labelled, leaders and teams in organisations need to find increasing levels of responsiveness and agility to stay competitive and require empathy and creativity to constructively shape the experience of customers or users – and resilience, quite frankly, to stay sane!

I have found in my work some simple practices for relating to each other which evoke the spirit of dialogue, as I understand it. They help groups build collective resilience, find creative solutions to tricky problems, and establish a habit of listening more deeply to themselves, to each other, and to their wider ecosystem so that they can be more responsive and less reactive. This has been true across diverse contexts, from talent and leadership development to culture change and Agile business transformation.

While this work may not engage people in Dialogue in the traditional sense, it is proving to be of genuine value, enabling them to enter into a different kind of conversation with each other, and to elicit deeper listening, awareness, and connection. This is especially true when combined with embodied approaches to state management – practices which enable people to swiftly manage their physiological state when they are emotionally ‘triggered’ by an event – so that participants have the capacity to regulate their own levels of stress and psychological arousal and we can all relate to one another as constructively as possible.

© Francis Briers, 2018

The World Needs Dialogue!

ISBN: 978-1916191204 One: Gathering the Field

It is my perception, which seems to be fairly commonly shared by others as reality, that the pace of change in the world is getting faster. There are various terms relating to this, whether they be the originally military ‘VUCA’ acronym (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity) or ‘Age of Accelerations’, coined by Thomas L. Friedman. However this experience is labelled, leaders and teams in organisations need to find increasing levels of responsiveness and agility to stay competitive and require empathy and creativity to constructively shape the experience of customers or users – and resilience, quite frankly, to stay sane!

I have found in my work some simple practices for relating to each other which evoke the spirit of dialogue, as I understand it. They help groups build collective resilience, find creative solutions to tricky problems, and establish a habit of listening more deeply to themselves, to each other, and to their wider ecosystem so that they can be more responsive and less reactive. This has been true across diverse contexts, from talent and leadership development to culture change and Agile business transformation.

While this work may not engage people in Dialogue in the traditional sense, it is proving to be of genuine value, enabling them to enter into a diferent kind of conversation with each other, and to elicit deeper listening, awareness, and connection. This is especially true when combined with embodied approaches to state management – practices which enable people to swiftly manage their physiological state when they are emotionally ‘triggered’ by an event – so that participants have the capacity to regulate their own levels of stress and psychological arousal and we can all relate to one another as constructively as possible.

The practices I have been using with groups and teaching to teams, so that they can create diferent kinds of conversations for themselves, are fairly simple. I typically use these practices with groups of no more than 12 to 15. (I also use a ‘pairs’ practice which works well as part of a set of methods, but that is definitely closer to Nancy Kline’s work with the ‘Thinking Environment.’) The group practices use the concepts of debate, discussion and dialogue as a way of framing the kind of conversation we want to elicit. I typically refer to the Latin root of these words to define them: Debate (its Latin root being the same as bat), meaning ‘I take my ideas and seek to beat you over the head with them until you agree with me!’ and Discussion (its Latin root being the same as concussion and percussion), meaning ‘we smack our thoughts and ideas together and see what falls out the other side’. Both of these are essentially combative; they can be useful but create a particular relational tone. Finally, we speak about Dialogue (its Latin root being dia and logos, translating as ‘flow of meaning’).

Whilst discussion is typically shaped by a desired outcome – e.g., to make a decision – the way I have been working with dialogue is to shape the conversation using a focusing question. This helps establish a ‘flow of meaning’ and exploration rather than a more combative hunt for a predetermined conclusion. These conversations are then underpinned by a commitment to really listen to others as they speak, rather than planning what next to say. Also I ask people to pause, take a breath and speak what they are thinking and feeling when it is their turn. Through various versions of turn-taking and an intention to be concise, we seek to enable ‘equal air-time’ which various bodies of research have found is an enabler and outcome of high-performance teams.

There are more nuances to the practice, and ways I combine it with things like state management, as mentioned, but that describes the heart of it. I see the contribution it could make to the professionalisation of Dialogue as a well-tested ‘entry level’ practice: something that is time-efcient and accessible, but which lays the foundation for a genuinely diferent quality of relationship and a culture founded on a diferent set of underlying assumptions. The tangible shift in atmosphere and connectedness within a group from this practice can then be a springboard for exploring deeper Dialogue work and more systemic interventions.

The Purpose of the Work

I’ve described in broad terms some of the principles I have been working with as a very simple ‘Dialogue’ practice (i.e., providing a focusing question, committing to listening and holding an intention for equal airtime, etc.). I have also mentioned using state management methods – such as ‘centring’ – in connection with this work. Although there is a danger that this sounds like I am aiming to limit the conversation or in some way drive it into a particular emotional tone, I want to be clear that is not the case.

So what is the aim or intention? It is a little more numinous than this in my thinking, but here are some bullets to summarize. Our aim is to help people have the most useful conversation possible while relating to each other as constructively as possible. We do this through (as best we can):

• Creating equality of voice in the group

• Setting aside predetermined or habitual thinking

• Listening to each other openly and attentively

• Supporting everyone to continually anchor themselves in an expanded and responsive state rather than becoming entrenched in a contracted and reactive state

We do this so that we can, both in the moment and as a habit in our lives more generally, create and maintain connection with self and others rather than practising disconnection or dissociation. (Even this last is not an attempt to avoid emotionality or conflict, but to seek always to be aware and responsible with our emotions rather than allowing them to hijack our awareness and undermine our capacity for clear thinking and care.)

Some Examples of Application

I have applied this work in diferent ways in diferent environments. Mostly these are organisational settings, and most often in commercial enterprises though I have also worked in Health and Social Care, with the Police, and in some NGO organisations. Sometimes I have explicitly taught diferent ways to meet and speak together so that teams, groups or leaders can take the work away and use it themselves. At other times I have more implicitly used methods and practices as a facilitator to shape the work of a group I have been supporting. I will give examples of both.

Executive Team Facilitation

I have worked for several years with the Executive Team of a large creative agency. In my work with them I have seen the group grow, change and evolve, both in terms of the individual team member’s capacity and with managing people who are leaving and joining the team. On most of the occasions when I have facilitated their sessions exploring strategy and organisational culture, I have used simple rounds of dialogue to help them listen more deeply to themselves and each other. It is a lively group, generally unafraid of conflict. They have fierce debates, but all too often what I have seen coming out of this is simply a re-treading of old ground. What I have observed – and what they have fed back – is that by slowing down, practising deeper listening, pausing and reflecting to really sit with a question before speaking, and hearing equally from all voices, they have elicited greater self-honesty about what really matters to them as leaders of the organisation. With this, they discover more creative solutions to long-standing problems and greater alignment around their approach to future challenges.

Just before my first ofsite session with the team, a new CEO had been put in place. I chose to work with the group outdoors, to use the activation of peripheral vision to initiate higher levels of theta brainwave activity. This led to some focused conversation in pairs to reflect on their team’s purpose, before coming back together to work in rounds to hear back from others. At another time we met after they had experienced an extended period of high stress when three key members of the team had left quite suddenly. I worked with some simple centring (embodied state management) exercises, then used some rounds of dialogue to express and hear from each other how they were feeling, and how they saw the morale and social climate of the organisation. In both cases, the group identified these interventions as turning-point moments in both our work together and the evolving capacity of the Executive Team to lead the business efectively.

Priming Agile Teams

As part of a large Agile transformation programme in a Financial Services business, we ran three-day ‘priming’ workshops to help the teams launch a new way of working, usually in newly formed teams. These were made up of three strands of learning: Agile theory and techniques, personal mindset, and team ‘spirit’ work. (The latter two were experiences to build strength of the team’s relationship, along with learning tools and skills to take away and apply later). At the heart of the team ‘spirit’ work the simple dialogue practices ofered a shared foundation of relationship and a way to have group conversations which gave equal airtime to all. This was important in three ways:

1. The teams needed to be self-managing groups of equals, albeit with different roles – a significant shift away from a fairly conventional hierarchy with very clear manager and decision-maker positions.

2. They were cross-functional teams made up of disciplines that had not previously worked alongside each other. For these teams the typical personality and communication styles were much more diverse than if they were working in more traditional teams organized by function.

3. The teams also consisted of people from different cultural backgrounds, both in terms of nationality and as a mix of employees and contractors.

In both the original three-day training and subsequent facilitated support sessions we used dialogue to create more open conversation where, in the moment, the dominant voices (either due to historical seniority or communication style) were more contained and other voices were heard. This enabled concerns and frustrations to surface which previously were being avoided, which in turn enabled a diversity of thinking. In this way, the group was able to find new solutions to challenges the groups had been facing. In some of the teams, regular rounds of dialogue became part of their team practice, helping to embed a culture of equal airtime and a different quality of listening in what were very diverse teams.

High-Potential Development

As one module of a high-potential talent development programme, we have been working with collaborative leadership and resilience. The link I have made between these two themes is that, as human beings, we are socially resilient. As such, working dialogically is the connecting medium between diverse topics. It is a wonderful ground on which to practice core skills for collaboration (social awareness, deep listening, creating a frame where diverse people can be heard), a great environment to explore some of the factors involved in collaboration (purpose, motivation, feedback and honesty), and an excellent way of building greater connection and trust swiftly, in support of social resilience.

Alongside this work with dialogue, we have explored embodied awareness (noticing our physical, emotional, mental and spiritual states and being more sensitive to when we become ‘triggered’.) This, along with state management and mindfulness, cultivates greater awareness and choice in the moment. I have linked these to the work with dialogue as well by using listening as a kind of relational mindfulness practice (repeatedly bringing our attention back to the quality of our listening) and by attending more closely to our own state within the relationship with others.

We have worked with this design over two years, and in both the groups it has enabled previously more disengaged members of the cohorts to enter into a deeper relationship with my co-facilitator, me, and with the rest of the cohort. It has built capacity in the individuals to face immediate challenges more gracefully (as reported by them). These include high workloads, along with project work for the development programme. Significantly, we have also seen several instances (more than previously when the programme had a diferent session in the design at this point) of people making significant life changes as a result of the work – for the better, as far as we can tell!

Simple Practices to Start a Different Kind of Conversation

While there is nuance, detail and skill in how you can work with even quite simple practices, what I have found over the last seven or eight years is that, with some very simple guidelines and a little role-modelling from a skilled facilitator, people can shift the quality of their conversations. The most basic steps I follow are:

• If you are in the same physical location, sit in a circle – this helps to structurally reinforce equality so everyone is more likely to speak and feel heard, and it helps everyone to see each other

• Introduce the intention for everyone to have equal air time – if we all aim to speak concisely, that will help the conversation

• No one speaks twice until everyone has spoken once – we will take turns and go around the whole group

• Work in rounds, e.g., one, two or three rounds – if we want to speak longer we can repeat the core process and cycle back around

• Everyone responds to the same question – this is how we focus the conversation

• Ask everyone to pay full attention to the person speaking – listen, don’t think or plan about what you are going to say

• Then, when it comes to your turn, pause, take a breath and speak what is on the surface for you – it doesn’t have to cover every thought in your mind; trust that it is what is needed, and others may say some of the things you are thinking too

• Finally, just before beginning I invite everyone to take a moment to bring themselves present, often saying ‘Feel your feet on the ground and bum in the chair!’ I then restate the question and invite anyone to begin

• After each person has spoken I say ‘thank you’ then turn my attention to the next person

I have found that, more than anything more complex or structural that might be added to this simple practice, it is the quality of presence the facilitator brings to the conversation that makes the greatest diference to the depth and quality of dialogue and relationship. There are foundational considerations such as the maturity of the group, the environment you are in, and how well the participants know each other, which will afect any activity you engage in. Beyond these, however, quality of presence can be a gateway to a diferent way of relating in a way that goes beyond methods or techniques.

How our Physiology Can Be Friend and Foe

Embodiment, sometimes referred to as ‘somatics’, is a field of study dedicated to exploring and understanding the subjective experience of the body. When I refer to ‘state management’ methods in this text, they are always in the context of embodiment as an approach or philosophy. The prevailing tendency in modern culture is to treat the body objectively – as an object: a vehicle to get your brain to meetings, a machine to be made more efcient or a thing to be made more beautiful. In this way embodiment is deeply counter-cultural in that it asks us to embrace our body as an integrated part of ourselves. This can feel uncomfortable, just as doing anything unfamiliar can be, but the benefits far outweigh the costs, and I think there is an interesting parallel between this counter-cultural aspect of embodiment and the countercultural move towards dialogue as rather than the more typical default towards discussion and debate.

My experience is that, as a facilitator, being aware of and able to attend to and manage my embodied state (anchored in the physiological but absolutely connected to emotional, mental and spiritual capacity) is a critical means by which I shape and influence the way a group engages with me, the work and each other. I can do this regardless of whether or not the subject of state management is appropriate or welcome as an explicit part of the work. However, when I have been able to work explicitly with state management as part of the work I have found that the dialogue practices I have described here have been even more powerful in helping people to deepen their relationships and have more generative conversations.

You may well have heard the phrase ‘fight or flight’. This is the terminology in psychology for the state we enter when we perceive threat in our environment and has become increasingly common language as interest in psychology has grown in the public domain. However, the deeper process of what goes on in the body is less well understood.

Essentially, when certain finely-tuned elements of our nervous system detect a threat, we switch into a different gear. Some systems in our bodies are super-charged while others are suppressed as determined by what is essential and non-essential in a threatening situation; however, when this system was evolved our definition of threat was very specific: ‘something is trying to kill me!’ Our social evolution has moved faster than our physical evolution, though, so now if we perceive a social, emotional or intellectual threat the same hardwired threat response is triggered – albeit sometimes to a lesser degree. Some of the key things which happen when we are in ‘threat-mode’ are:

• Immune system is suppressed

• Digestion is suppressed

• Certain muscle groups tense, ready for action

• We end up shallow-breathing, using about 40% of our full lung capacity

• Blood thickens

• Heart rate increases and blood vessels can constrict

• Lymph system (which is involved in removing toxins from our bodies) has reduced function

• Cognitive function of the neocortex (human forebrain involved in rational, creative thought and risk-taking) is suppressed

• Capacity and inclination towards soothing and affiliation are suppressed

  
  

All of this makes sense in the context of life on the savannah, where a primary threat might have been getting savaged by a sabre-toothed tiger, but in our modern context, it makes less sense.

In the context of working together in organisations and creating inspiring and generative learning environments, most of these physiological shifts will be deeply unhelpful. With the pace of modern life the reality is that the emotional charge present in many work environments between team members, and the power diferential which might exist in a group when working with teams (i.e., if you are my boss then I may see you as a threat) mean that, in all likelihood, most of us are going to be operating in low-level threat mode much of the time. And that is without considering the potential for people to be in the group who have a history of trauma, or even just the way that they can arrive to a meeting still upset after having had an argument at home.

I am not advocating suppressing what is real and relevant for participants in the moment – quite the opposite – but if we are going to have a conscious, useful, responsive conversation rather than a triggered and reactive one, then being able to reduce background levels of primal physiological triggering can be really valuable. It is no good internally ‘telling’ my brain that the person challenging my ideas is not a threat. As one Calvin and Hobbes cartoon said, ‘Never in the history of calming down has anyone ever calmed down as a result of being told to calm down!’ Embodied state management methods give us the means to intervene in a way which, with awareness, we can reduce the agitation in our physiological system and bring our whole brain and attendant capacity for clear thinking and positive relationship back online. Dialogue practices then build on this foundation to create connection and enable richer and empathic and reflective ways of relating.

Resilience and the ‘Age of Accelerations’

As I referenced in my introductory paragraph, the world only seems to be moving faster and I would also say that society is generally becoming more atomised in communities and more divided along entrenched political lines. In this context, the declaration ‘The World Needs Dialogue!’ as the title of this conference could not be more true. More broadly I think we are all going to need deep reserves of resilience if we are to navigate what seems to me to be a kind of transitionary time. We are coming into stark contact with the consequences of many of the technological, environmental and social changes which have been shaped and emerging from the past 20 years or more, and as they become clear we are still working out how to deal with these consequences constructively rather than reacting to them.

In these turbulent and uncertain times, both personal resilience and social resilience in families, groups, communities and organisations are critical and only seem likely to become more necessary as time goes on. Having simple, accessible practices for building these necessary capacities seems vital to me, and if we can interweave the personal and the social so that they are mutually reinforcing, then so much the better. My hope is that these can be entry-level methods (as suggested by the title) which then enable deeper practice, but even if these small practices are engaged with sincerely and with commitment over time, my experience is that there can be a deepening of presence and relationship that is rich and nourishing on its own.

Future Exploration

What I have presented here could be further explored in my own future work or by others in the field. I’m sure there are many more, but here are a few suggestions:

• In the intersection between state management and dialogue I am aware that working with some form of ‘centring’ is not unfamiliar as a part of work with dialogue and, to some practitioners, maybe a well-ploughed furrow, but as technology to measure and understand things like brain-wave state, hormones, heart rate variance and other physiological shifts, I think it would be fascinating to better understand the interplay between dialogue work and measurable shifts in state.

• In simple practices as gateways to deeper work with dialogue I am sure there will be other simple and very accessible practices which help people to swiftly access diferent qualities of relationship and conversation. They may be seen currently as ‘warm-ups’ or learning exercises, but as someone who historically habitually always went to depth as fast as possible, I have been pleasantly surprised by the amount of value people have received from what seemed to me, on first working with them, as potentially shallow or over simplified practices. In the corporate world where I mostly operate, speed of learning and application is often vital if work is going to stick and see use outside the workshop. I wonder about having a catalogue of these more accessible practices that could be valuable in their own right, but that also serve as gateways to deeper work.

• In how a facilitator’s quality of presence enables groups to relate differently In all of my work as a facilitator, coach, spiritual counsellor, Interfaith Minister, and performer, it is my experience that the quality of presence a facilitator brings to the work is the biggest single factor determining the value of work done with groups in a variety of contexts. I think this would be very rich territory to explore and build a rigorous understanding of, especially in the context of dialogue.

  
  

However you choose to take this work forwards, I hope it is of value to you and the communities you are part of.

© Francis Briers, 2018

The World Needs Dialogue!

ISBN: 978-1916191204 One: Gathering the Field