coberst - I was brought here for the first time by your post above because of a Google alert with the search string: "Dialogue, Listening and Influence." This is the title of a body of work that we do at The Henderson Group (hendersongroup.com), where I work as the VP of Services. I hope to participate here, share ideas and meaning, and make some new friends. I wanted to comment on your query and suppositions: 1) I completely agree with your comment about the nature of the dialogical process with one slightly different perspective based on my experience. 2) Regarding: "Dialogic can happen only if both individuals wish to reason together in truth, in coherence, without prejudice, and without trying to influence each other." :lol: Even if individuals wish to reason together in truth, they bring with them their prejudices and wishes to influence. Let's call them their "Mental Map" to paraphrase the term Mental Model referred to by Peter Senge in The Fifth Discipline, his seminal work on systems thinking. (For more search: Peter Senge, Fifth Discipline, systems thinking.) Essentially, it is impossible to come to dialogue as a pure vessel without prejudice and without an agenda. Our only hope to achieve dialogue is to acknowledge our prejudice and our agenda by committing to as great a level of transparency as we can. One example is to surface our assumptions and mental maps with statements such as, "I feel a strong need to influence you on this." or "My assumption is that Obama is the better candidate because he has broader appeal to independants." Can we definitively KNOW this to be true? No, of course not. Therefore, as imperfect vessels, we need to commit to Beginner's Mind, a willingness to examine our own assumptions and Mental Maps. In any case, this is a fascinating dialogue. Happy to be part of it!:lol:
