Building Connection While Thinking Together: By-products of Employee Training in Dialogue

Many organizational practitioners advocate 'dialogue' as a way of improving communication at work and addressing important organizational issues that seem irresolvable through normal, everyday forms of organizational discourse (Ellinor & Gerard, 1999; Isaacs, 1999; Senge, 1990; Senge, Ross, Smith, Roberts, & Kliener, 1994; Yankelovich, 1999). The most common notion of dialogue present in organizational practice is based on the intellectual foundation of David Bohm (1996), and has been popularized by management consultant and writer Peter Senge and his colleagues (Isaacs, 1999; Senge, 1990; Senge et al., 1994) as part of the operation of a learning organization. Bohm's approach to dialogue can be characterized as epistemological, because it is oriented toward a theory of knowledge. It emphasizes group members' ability to 'think together' (Isaacs, 1999) and 'build meaning' (Bohm, 1996) through collective conversation and provides them with tools to understand their 'mental models' (Senge et al., 1994) and thought processes.