This book was recomended to me as a light vesrion of Dialogue: Art of thinking together. According to one person it was description of the dialogue principles withouth the philosophical stuff around. It couldnt have been farther from the truth. Throghout the book I was constatly thinking when I would get to the good raw dailogue principles stuff and I never did (not until I started reading Dialogue: The art of thinking together). It was propably one of the harderst book I have ever read. To describe it metaphorically - it was like walking on lego pieces barefootet whereas reading Dialogue: The art was like walking on beatiful clean sunny beach. So in summary I dont recommend reading On dialogue as a first book to study dialogue, I think wehen I would read it after The art, it would made more sense and be more engaging.
Now, that was my rant to get the feelings from my head and now here are the strippets I got from the book even thought it was terrible to read.
Huge difference between dialogue and discussion is that in dialogue nobody is trying to win. If one person wins everybody wins so there is no need for fights.
For dialogue to be successful one needs to be able to change his own beliefs or at least question them.
One principle why dialogue can be useful is when someone express his thoughts second person has a little bit different brain so he will perhaps misunderstood which will lead to a new thought. Sometimes this misunderstanding can be the thing which we are looking for.
Discussions in UN aren’t even discussion because some things can’t even be discussed and some things are just nonnegotiable.
People of different religion have the hardest time working together.
When dialogue has no agenda, people feel less preassure and can practise dialogue with grerater intensity.
Enviromental activists would be much better off sitting and practising dialogue together than fight on discussions. The whole group is fragmented and going against each other even though it has the same meaning and vision - better enviroment for all of us but they are caught up in how exactly they should do it.
Its the bigger problem today. We got used to fact that we and are thoughts are the same even though thats not exactly the truth. We hold our assumptions so strongly because we fear we will lose part of ourselves if we let them go. This limits us and sometimes even harms us because anything we think up, we will give more weight to even if we shouldnt. If people who are considered evil would practise dialogue and try to separate their thoughts from their identity there too would probably feel enlightened and changed their behaviour.
Dialogue is not something new. Dialogue is a tool used throughout centuries. Old tribes used dialogue as a main tool for leadership and progress. They sat in circle in front of fire, men, women, children all equal and thought together. Even thought the meeting didnt have an angenda. Afterwards everybody got up and knew exactly what is needed and what they specifically should do.
However when our modern hiearchical structure started to develop we lost the skill and motivation to hold dialogue and according to the author it limits us significantly today. Fortunately there starts to be hope in the means of turquoise organisations where dialogue is being used more and more.
Our part of TS without goal nor agenda. I didnt have the courage to lead a TS and set part of of the TS agendaless and topicless but fortunately our awesome learning manager Ondrej Filipi did and so we got a chance to apply one of the idea from this book to practise. I was confusing at first but in a few minutes someone set the direction and the dialogue started flowing. It was really interesting and a bit of paradoxical to see that a lot of people started to take part in, voicing their thoughts, following, suspending. In the reflection we realised it was really amazing but we lacked the opposer role which limited us to dive deeper in the dialogue. Next time we need to task our couch or soemone else to watch the unraveling and watch out for missing pieces of the dialogue.
