Dialogue is difficult

Last week I wrote about listening as attaching strings to what someone says to you from what you already know and what you think to know. That last part of the statement brings a large caveat on the scene. What if I listen from assumptions that won't bear up under closer scrutiny and am not aware of it? Denham Grey said "it takes two to listen" rightly, even if I only partly agreed with the rest of his comment: you need the other for that closer scrutiny. In the last few days two examples of how unsupported assumptions can thwart dialogue crossed my mind.

The first example comes from my own experience as an auditor for the QA-system in our company. When doing more in depth evaluations of projects we find that often time is lost when someone works from unsupported (you may notice that I don't use the words wrong or right, because it's not about that) assumptions. Colleague A asks you to participate on a project and briefly describes where you can contribute. And then you assume what it is that you will do and deliver to the project..........without checking back whether your assumptions are in line with colleague A's mental picture. When such an immediate feedback loop is absent, the next feedback moment will be when you show up with the assumed deliverables. Any changes to be made then means doing things all over again, with larger timespending and dito costs as a result. The delivered work in these cases is usually excellent, but not what was called for.

The second example comes from Mamamusings, the weblog of Elizabeth Lane Lawly, where she explores the differences between how more introvert minded people and more extravert ones approach conversation. (For this posting I treat introverts and extraverts as two different species, which they are not of course) In short introverts speak when they're done thinking, and extraverts speak to order and form their thoughts. The intriguing part for me is when she describes how introverts tend to think that all others including extraverts only speak when done thinking, and the other way around extraverts treat the words of introverts as attempts at forming an thoughts, not as the finished product thereof. Now imagine a dialogue between an introvert and an extravert, and watch it go of the tracks. Again in this example the problem lies in unvoiced assumptions.

The obvious solution to this of course is to voice your assumptions so that they may be evaluated, but that's no easy thing for a mere mortal like me. Dialogue should in essence be aimed at inquiry and learning, at creating shared meaning (even if only temporarily possible) and integrating multiple perspectives. And also uncovering and examining assumptions as demonstrated by the examples.

The difficulty here is that all other aspects of dialogue are content focussed: they deal with what the dialogue is about. The uncovering of assumptions is more like meta-content: it looks at from what background, from what listeners contextuality, you bring the content to the dialogue. That requires assuming two different roles at the same time in a dialogue, one inside the system and one outside it.

Taking up the meta layer of things can be very tiring at times, and also sometimes distracts from the topic at hand. I sometimes have that with blogging: in the last few days I have been blogging on blogging, but shouldn't I be blogging on knowledge management instead? Ok, I've paid tribute to KM by looking at blogging from a knowledge sharing view point, but is that a true connection, or maybe just a pretense? Metablogging looks like a great passtime of many a blogger.

Might the solution of combining both layers of dialogue lie in subtly altering the way you listen in a dialogue? I've described listening as tieing what you hear to your own contextuality. Maybe listening has to include reviewing the responses you get from that contextuality, feelings, intuitive reactions and associations.
Listening not as the one-way allocation of input but as interaction. That would make listening the meta-dialogue, the part outside the system, and speaking or storytelling the content part of a dialogue with the results of listening woven in, the part inside the system. This is something I'm not done with yet, I'll be on the lookout for pointers to source on this. Feel free to point out a few.