Professional Dialogue, what is it good for? Is dialogue a job?

Dialogue is a specific type of conversation. To make it work, you use specific skills and settings. Read below how this works for yourself or at your workplace and when you call in a professional.

Competence and Experience

We are all experts in our own work and life and we are ourselves best placed to deal with challenges. When it comes to our own fields, we know about problems that need to be solved. We know what we are doing and we assume it is the same for everybody. We get stuck due to a lack of effective communication and not due to a lack of expertise.

Dialogue skills are acquired like any other skill that you apply in a more or less professional way. There are professional cooks, but anybody can learn how to prepare oneself a meal. The results range from an elaborate homecooked dinner to a ready-made meal cooked in the microwave. Both meals will feed you. You can learn to sew on a button, for making clothes that fit well you need much more training.

The variations in the mastery of skills also apply to dialogue. You can swiftly acquire simple skills and directly apply them. Even when only using them for small changes in the way you talk and listen to people, you will notice the difference those dialogue skills make in a conversation. You can also invest yourself in deep learning and become very experienced. You can transform the way your business operates or turn it into an occupation by servicing others.

There is one big difference with dialogue skills. Unlike cooking or sewing, to have dialogue in your life and work you have to build it yourself, for yourself. You cannot buy a solution prepared by someone else. In order to make dialogue work for you, nurture it like a tree.

Asking Questions and Testing Assumptions

Through dialogue you will become a good listener. With increased awareness of what is going on in the conversation you become more able to remain in the conversation even if you do not agree. By asking good questions you will understand better what is going on with the people around you. At the same time, you become aware of how you react to what you hear and why these reactions are triggered. You develop a stamina to go deeper in the search for answers. This generates better and more effective decision making and makes you a better leader.

Whenever you decide that you need more effective communication, you test and practice your skills. You choose if you are happy with improving personal conversations with a few dialogic moves, or if you want to transform a whole system. You need courses, practice groups and regular quality control to evolve.

Bring in the Expert

There are moments when you just want to bring in an expert. A neutral facilitator can bring fresh approach into gatherings that are stuck in set habits. Dialogue facilitation works with the experience and stories of the people present. It creates space for people to talk and think together. In most situations, solutions can be found with the people who are there, by using the experience they have.

In meetings, the dialogue practitioner’s role is to facilitate quality conversation and to intervene when the conversation is dysfunctional. That makes a meeting efficient and reduces wasting valuable meeting time. The dialogue professional helps to look at a situation in its entirety. Well-practiced dialogue can thereby contribute to getting situations unstuck and bringing people together.

In organisations, professional dialogue has improved working processes and contributed to delivering better services and products. However, bringing dialogue into an organisation at a systemic level requires a generous timeframe. Change can only work if it is supported and sustained from within an organisation. It is necessary to understand the overall structure and the needs and purpose of the people in an organisation.