Dialogue LO24068

From: AM de Lange (amdelange@gold.up.ac.za)
Date: 02/25/00


Replying to LO24036 --

Dear Organlearners.

Celia Moriarty <celia_moriarty@hotmail.com> ends her intro

>Thankyou for reading these thoughts and adding your own,
>I hope to hear from those interested in this area. I would like
>to find some opportunities for face to face conversation too
>(conferences, people in Australia etc.).

Greetings Celia,

I hope your face to face conversations will happen because it can be
extremely fruitful. Read in the archives of this list what Doc Holloway
had to tell about "open spaces". Perhaps you need to organise some open
spaces yourself.

Last week Thursday the Friends of Smuts Foundation had one of their
regular meetings. Their convenor asked me to present a lecture on some
aspect of Smuts' "Holism and Evoltion". I refused point blank. She was
somewhat surprised and wanted to know why. I said that when I have to
listen to a lecture=monologue, I cannot keep awake for more than 5
minutes. I would never want that happening to someone listening to me. I
suggested that we should rather organise an "open space"=dialogue. I have
partcipated in various open spaces before, but this one was a great
experiment even for me. Finally some thirty people arrived, making up a
staggering diverse spectrum of personalities and interests. The experiment
was a completely new surprise to all of them except two, but yet a very
pleasant surprise to most of them. Only one participant persisted in
trying to transform the dialogue into a percussive debate.

Meanwhile I will take you up in a dialogue in cyberspace on dialogue.

I want to connect to the following which you wrote:

>3. Dialogue.
>Werner Heisenberg said "Science is rooted in conversations".
>For me so much of my learning is rooted in converstation,
>reading and reflecting create a germ, but it is through
>conversation that it comes alive. So I want to converse with
>you about dialogue.

I think we must try to understand why Heisenberg had this conviction. Most
of the relatively few people who know about Heisenberg, associate him with
his famous Uncertainty Principle.

Few people know that Heisenberg was one of the two original creators of
Quantum Mechanics. He created what soon became known as Matrix Mechanics
because of the mathematical discipline (Matrix Algebra) with which he did
it. Erwin Schroedinger created another version which soon became known as
Wave Mechanics because of the mathematical discipline (Harmonious
Differential Equations) with which he did it.

At first it seemed as if each found an independent way to break through
the restriction of the classical mechanics of Newton. Soon there was the
usual labeling "I am a matrix person" or "I am a wave person" and thus the
usual inability to converse with the other camp on the exciting new
discoveries. But through the dilligent efforts of Heisenberg,
Schroedinger, Bohr, De Broglie, Einstein and Dirac, they managed to
discover that Matrix Mechanics and Wave Mechanics were two different
formulations of one and the same underlying "tacit knowledge". As a
result the names Matrix Mechanics and Wave Mechanics gace way to the now
familiar name Quantum Mechanics.

I wrote that few people know that Quantum Mechanics (QM) had its origin in
the Matrix Mechanics (MM) of Heisenberg and the Wave Mechanics (WM) of
Schroedinger. But only a tiny fraction of them know that blending of MM
and WM into the harmonious whole of QM came as a result of many, many
hours of dialogue at every possible opportunity, relinquishing sleep and
other luxuries. Furthermore, these men knew that the dialogues which gave
birth to QM was not something novel. Physics had other "milestones" along
its evolution like the discovery of the Law of Energy Conservation (LEC)
which were characterised by similar intense dialogues -- in person to
person and by letters.

Today we have thousands of international congresses and a moderate section
of journals didicated to letters. But guess what? The key element of
dialogue on some exiting emergence in scientific thinking is by large
absent. The formality of peer refereeing kills the spontaneous dialogue.
Judgement and dialogue simply cannot marry.

(Snip on Boehmian dialogue.)
>I realised it isn't what I do. Indeed Richard Burg later suggested
>that dialogue is not really applicable in organisations and that
>facilitators distort the process. I work whith senior teams who
>need to move through an issue (intra or interorganisational), have
>limited time and need a better outcome. We definitley have a
>purpose even though it may not yet be defined.

I am aware of that too. Some others on the list like Steve Eskow emphasise
your position very strongly.

However, I must caution that in all not-one-way communication (whether it
is dialogue, discussion or debate) there is a fundamental rhythm which we
must bear in mind for that kind of communication to succeed. A fellow
learner on the list (Bruno Martins Soares) made it the very subject of a
most interesting dialogue "Rhythm in Communication" (See the archives.) It
means that whatever you may have in mind which is not yet formalised, you
will have to pay carefull attention to its "harmonious rhythm".

There is something about the "limited time" which worries me very much. (I
will stay clear from "entropy production" as nature's direct link to time
-- the "arrow of time" as Sir Eddington loved to call it.) The more
complex any creation, the longer is the time needed to create. It is such
a simple truth, but when people do not think about complexity, they do not
grasp this simple truth. The most complex creation we can think of, is the
Creation of the Creator and that took billions of years since the Big Bang
to become as complex as it is today.

How much complexity can senior teams create when they have little time to
their disposal? Will that which they come up with be complex enough to
match the complexity of their organisation? I myself am acutely aware how
the majority of managers in my country underestimate the complexity of
their organisations. This is the main reason in my opinion why they are
reponsible for most (up to 85% Deming would have said) of the problems in
their organisations. In fact, when we take all fourteen major points which
Deming offer to reduce management problems, they constitute a bewildering
complexity.

Perhaps this is why you wrote:

>My clients are not attracted to me because they want to
>learn about their interactions, but because they want a
>better business outcome regarding a specific issue - fast.
>What I'm wondering is if their is room to move to the former
>with them after we get tangible results.

You also write:

>So I'm interested in how some of you view dialogue and it's
>application within the organisation. I agree that in it's original
>form (what I would liken to Socratic Dialogue) it is rarely
>appropriate.

I myself get frustrated by a dialogue which just meanders stochastically
like a piece of drift wood on the wide ocean. The dialogue needs to
meander a specific course like a river from its fountains to the sea. In
other words, it has to have a directive.

For me personally that directive is to "paint" as "rich picture" as
possible. That places a great responsibility on every one participating in
that dialogue -- to paint carefully and to look carefully at the painting
of others so that the rich picture will acquire a high fidility. The
reason is that the very authentic learning of each person who partcipates
in the dialogue depends on this high fidelity of the rich picture.

I am very happy that you have entered our LO dialogues.

With care and best wishes

-- 

At de Lange <amdelange@gold.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa

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