Category Archives for "Conversation"

3 Taxonomy of Conversation: Generative Dialogue

This is the final post about of the four types of conversation. I’m asking how we experience each type online. Here is what I wrote about generative dialogue, four Wednesdays ago:

Generative dialogue is where we hear not just ourselves and others but the whole system.  We see ourselves within the whole; the role we play for good or ill.  This can be highly motivating when people experience it together.  This type of conversation can generate something new, an insight that no one person brought with them to the conversation. Everyone leaves with insights that are completely new.

As I suggested earlier, science can be a conversation between the scientist and whatever they study. Scientists make breakthroughs by paying attention to what is there. It is not about number crunching but rather insight through careful observation. Statistical analysis brings new information to light; it does not on its own explain its significance.

What is ‘the whole system’? Breakthroughs happen where scientists include something not previously relevant in their thinking. This is where any model can be weak. Have we included every relevant thing? The danger of a completely online world is that we assume the online world is all there is.

Is generative conversation impossible online?

We need to be cautious. Is it possible to discover something new through conversation online? Generative conversation is seeing something not from someone else’s perspective so much as an entirely new perspective. As such it is a subjective experience. It is not persuasion by a superior argument because no-one is aware of the argument before the discovery.

The danger of working online is we forget the world we operate in is artificial. Ultimately, our life online is not real. It is an aid to living a full life in the world; it is not in itself real. One thing our machines cannot do for us is to experience the world on our behalf.

We can choose to become more machine-like and refuse to allow the world to be seen in a different way. Our machines cannot choose to discover something new. New ideas can be communicated and debated online but they cannot be experienced.

The most significant contribution our technology makes is the opportunities for conversations between people all over the world.  Maybe we can experience new discoveries together.  I would be interested to hear any stories where this might have happened. Over to you!

0 Taxonomy of Conversation: Reflection

Reflection is the third of four types of conversation. How do we experience each type online?

Here is what I wrote three Wednesdays ago:

Reflection is where we listen from inside and hear ourselves reflexively and others with empathy.  It invites the listener to try on the insights of the other person to see if they might work for them.  It invites a more subjective understanding of unfamiliar points of view.

Is this possible online?

Any learning experience that encourages participants to apply their learning must do this. Learning new skills and applying them always involves reflection.

Some online marketers claim marketing and learning are the same.  Their model is reflective conversation. They don’t always achieve it and their results vary because learners vary.

A simple example.  I find as a coach to people designing and writing content for their website, they need to put themselves into their readers’ shoes. When someone visits their site, how do they experience it?

Plenty of tools enable online conversation and a big advantage is conversations can take place across great distances at low-cost. Here are some examples:

Of course, all these tools and approaches depend crucially upon content.  A webinar for 1000 people will be less reflective but it still depends upon its content. It is not adequate to simply explain how to do something. It is important to be inspirational, in the sense of inspiring viewers to take action. This does mean you must encourage participants to try something new.  Learning from experience is central to reflective learning.

Participants can share results and the outcome can be shared discovery and not so much debate.

Can you share an example of reflective online learning or conversation?  Is online learning ever as effective as real life learning?  Can online and offline learning be combined to support reflective learning?

0 Taxonomy of Conversation: Debating

Debating is the second of four types of conversation. How do we  experience each type online?

Here is what I wrote two Wednesdays ago:

Debating is where we listen from outside, dispassionately weighing evidence.  It is a marked improvement on downloading.  It requires debaters to think about what they are saying and what the other person is saying.  It is a gateway to types three and four because it requires listening to others and marshaling our arguments to meet theirs.  The problem is that like downloading it admits of nothing new.  This is why so many debates go on for years because neither side can ultimately hear what the other is saying.

I am a part-time theologian and enjoy debating with other theologians.

I find debates about God increasingly frustrating. This started some years ago, when Richard Dawkins and others stirred up the debate with books such as “The God Delusion” and of course the atheist bus campaign.

What tends to happen is the new atheists pick debates with fundamentalist Christians. I’ve found they share a concept of God I do not share. I don’t believe in the God of the fundamentalists and so agree with the atheists about that.

But the god they don’t believe in is the same god I don’t believe in. I find both fundamentalists and atheists tell me I am a liberal and not a proper Christian!

Well, thanks for that it’s as well to know where you stand!

What is Going on Here?

It is a good example of debate, where neither side need back down because they depend on the other for the integrity of their own view. Neither side can see the immense amount of common ground between them. The only thing they disagree about is whether they believe in this false god.

The God delusion is on both sides. This is common where debates reinforce both sides. It is very seductive. I’m sure friendships develop, sometimes people change sides but the debate never moves on. Debates reinforce both sides of the argument.

Instead of downloading material that supports my worldview, debating is about listening to your opponents to respond to their points in support of your own worldview. The opposing view therefore reinforces your view. Both sides become entrenched.

Debating online can be exciting and educational. But is it possible to go deeper? Have you been involved in an online conversation that has gone beyond debate?

0 Taxonomy of Conversation: Downloading

Last time I outlined four types of conversation. Today and the next three Wednesdays I shall look at each type in turn. My question is: how does each type of conversation find expression online (if it does)?  Today’s is about downloading.

I wrote:

The first kind of conversation is downloading.  This is where we listen from within our own story and consequently hear only what supports it.  I suppose this can be a bad habit of highly creative and motivated people where I listen for anything that supports my view. This can be healthy but where the listener listens in this mode only, they cease to hear other points of view as valid.

The word ‘download’ is presumably fairly recent and usually refers to transferring data from a server to a local computer. Whilst this type of conversation is named after this online practice, it has always been around.

The analogy with downloading from a server is helpful. Think about why you choose to download a file. You do it because you have an interest in the file. You are very unlikely to randomly download stuff. What would be the point?

You have a purpose and select what you download to meet that purpose. Your download might challenge your purpose but broadly your intention is to support your purpose.

This is perfectly legitimate; you do it when undertaking online learning, for example. You might download a video, watch it and perhaps act on its content. There is no obligation to act and that is the point.

Downloading does not have to be a conversation. You can show approval by liking something. You may be able to comment and a simple note of approval may be all you offer.

The owner of the information may value your approval but it doesn’t move their thinking along; many consumers of information never say a word.

And that is what downloading is: conversation as consumption of information. The recipient does not contribute anything other than approval or disapproval. There’s no community of learning, just individual consumers.

Clearly there is value in downloading for online learning but ultimately it’s limited. In your experience, what else do you need besides the download to take conversation to a higher level?

4 A Taxonomy of Conversations

Today, I introduce a ‘taxonomy of listening’.  Perhaps it is more accurate to think of it as a taxonomy of conversations.   I’ve adapted it from two books: Adam Kahane’s Solving Tough Problems pages 91 -92 and beyond.  Peter M Senge et al in Presence, describe the same taxonomy on pages 74f.

Outline Taxonomy of Conversations

Here is a brief review of their four types of conversation; different ways of paying attention.

1. The first type is downloading.  This is where we listen from within our own story and so hear only what supports it.  This can be a bad habit of highly creative and motivated people where they listen for anything that supports their view.  It can be healthy but where the listener listens in this mode only, they can fail to hear other points of view as valid.
2. Debating is where we listen from outside, dispassionately weighing evidence.  It is a marked improvement on downloading, requiring debaters to think about what they are saying and what the other person is saying.  It is a gateway to types three and four because it requires listening to others and marshaling our arguments to meet theirs.  The problem is that like downloading it admits of nothing new.  This is why so many debates go on for years because neither side can hear what the other is saying.
3. Reflection is where we listen from inside and hear ourselves reflexively and others with empathy.  It invites the listener to try on the insights of the other person to see if they might work for them.  It invites a more subjective understanding of unfamiliar points of view.
4. Generative dialogue is where we hear not just ourselves and others but the whole system.  We see ourselves within the whole; the role we play for good or ill.  This can be highly motivating when people experience it together.  This type of conversation can generate something new; an insight that no one person brought with them to the conversation.  Everyone leaves with insights that are completely new.

In the next four posts I shall look at these four types of conversation in more detail and their practice online.

What is your experience of these modes of conversation in real life or online?

1 Science as Conversation

Two Wednesdays ago I wrote about three different types of conversation.  Of these, I’ve written about conversations between people and conversations as prayer.  Today it is the turn of science.

Conversation is about paying attention and this is the heart of scientific method.  You study data and formulate a hypothesis.  (The data might be the results of an experiment, scientific papers or textbooks, or a real life problem.)  You design experiments to test the hypothesis and then pay attention to the results.  Bad science is failure to attend to the results;  a bad experiment does not necessarily lead to bad science.

This scientific method leads to theories; theory implies there is no such thing as absolute certainty in science.  This is sometimes hard to understand; after all it is not difficult to point to the many successes of science.  But all theories are to some degree tentative.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Newtonian physics answered all the questions about mechanics and gravity.  Einstein noticed anomalies in the available data and came up with his theories of relativity.  In doing so, he did not prove Newton wrong, Newtonian physics is still useful but is now a part of a wider theory, which itself someday may prove to be part of something even wider.

The Challenge to Fundamentalism

Fundamentalists deal in certainties.  For them theory proves science wrong because it is by definition tentative.  They believe their book (the book varies, depending on the type of fundamentalist), deals in eternal truths.   They do not dialogue with their book but impose their views upon it.

Fundamentalists and tyrants the world over close down conversations.  They live in fear of discovering something new.  For them truth has to be nailed down to be true.

The challenge, if you are marketing a message online, is to encourage conversation, not to impose views.  Conversation is a learning experience and if you commit to genuine sharing, your website and your real life business or project will become learning experiences.

In my next post, I shall show how conversation can become a learning experience and more!

What do you think?  Conversations with matter?  Do you find them more or less stimulating than conversations with people?

1 Conversation as Paying Attention

The first post in this sequence introduced the topic of conversation between people.  In the second I introduced two other approaches to conversation: prayer and science.

The word ‘prayer’ may be a turn-off for some readers but bear with me. Understanding this is important to getting your message across online and in real life.  I choose a traditional word because we need to make connections into ideas people already understand.  Whatever you call it, paying attention is important.

Simplistically prayer can be understood as conversation with God, similar to conversations between people.  There’s nothing wrong with being simple so long as it doesn’t lead to misconceptions.

So, why is prayer so important?  Through prayer or meditation, you may

All these are essential in conversations with people whether online or in real life.  A lot of exchanges in social media and websites would benefit from slowing down our thinking and producing more thoughtful responses, through paying attention.  Do you agree?

2 Types of Conversation

Last Wednesday I introduced this sequence about conversation.  Today, I shall introduce three types of conversation; conversation through dialogue, prayer and science.

What Makes These Conversations?

We live in an atomised world, where the individual is the centre of attention. It is easy to lose sight of progress made through collaboration. Indeed, conversation is the only way anyone can make progress. The response, from a person or anything we encounter, pushes us to think again, to go deeper and find new insights.

These three approaches all do this.  Maybe conversation with non-human objects may seem odd but they are there and their intransigence means we have to be challenged by them.

I’ll write about prayer and science in the next two posts, so that we can see how they work as conversation.

Are there other ways in which we converse?  How do we converse online?

4 What is a conversation?

What is a conversation?  It’s essential to understand conversation if you want to be clear about the purpose of your web presence.  In this new sequence I shall explore the meaning of conversation and how you can hold conversations online and integrate them with real life conversations.

Most people know a conversation if they see one.  Two people meet and talk and listen.  Talking and listening are both essential and the depth of their conversation is the degree to which they do both.

That’s fine as far as it goes but there is more to it.

Paying attention is essential to conversation; if one or both fail to listen, the conversation fails.

Conversation goes far beyond talking.  Face to face conversations are often helpful because it means subtle cues in facial expressions or body language can add to the meaning of the exchange.  So, paying attention involves more than listening.

Possibly closest to face to face conversations is Skype, where many visual cues can be picked up.  Next of course there is telephone, where tone of voice can be heard.

Conversations with the Dead!

It is possible to have conversations with the dead!  Jane Austen is very popular; many people engage with her, paying close attention to her text.  Is this real conversation?  It is if a conversation between a client and a consultant or psychiatrist is a conversation.  Professional listeners say very little during a conversation, so why not include reading books or listening to recordings as conversations?

If someone takes a recording of Duke Ellington and jams along with it, they are in conversation.  Ask what difference does it make if both musicians can respond to each other.  Perhaps live musicians jamming demonstrates the power of a two-way conversation.

Music performed in a jam session might be banal but from time to time, and more often as musicians gain experience, discovering something new and unexpected.

The challenge for web designers is, how can we encourage similar generation of new ideas online?

0 The Art and Science of Conversation

Conversation is something we take for granted and perhaps don’t readily associate with web design.  We don’t appreciate the extent to which online activities become collaborative.  Over barely ten years the Internet became a place where conversations are held with contacts all over the world.  We need to understand the art and science of conversation.

Two things intrigue me about conversation and they have implications about how all of us conduct our online business including how we structure our websites.

At their best conversations happen when one or more minds engage in considering a problem or situation.

The Science of Conversation

Note I suggest a single mind can hold a conversation and this leads me to the first characteristic of conversation.  Conversations happen when minds are paying attention.  Imagine a scientist who contemplates some minor fluctuation in readings, seeking patterns.  Perhaps the scientist will try something to see how the experimental system responds.

The scientist’s single mind might then enter into conversations with colleagues and suddenly a new paradigm emerges from that conversation.  Sometimes attention paid by colleagues lead the scientist to a sudden insight.  If colleagues resist their insight, the scientist must hone their argument, to test their hypothesis and produce evidence.

These two principles are typical of conversations.  Pay attention and new ideas emerge from a meeting of minds.  You may already be thinking of dozens of reasons why conversations don’t happen online.  But is it possible they don’t happen because too often we’re not paying attention to how we design our websites and online presence?