dialogic

Key ideas for conflict and change management from dialogic

KMAadmin — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 05:56:27 -0600

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895-1975) was a Russian philosopher, critic and scholar who wrote many influential works of literary theory and criticism. His works, dealing with a variety of subjects, have inspired groups of thinkers who have incorporated Bakhtinian ideas into theories of their own. These thoughts on language use are particularly interesting in Change Management and Conflict Management and include:

Language is learned through contextualized social interaction. (from: Marxism and the Philosophy of Language). It lives "in a living impulse toward the object", in a specific located social interaction.
Consequently all language use is language use from a particular point of view, in a context, to an audience. There is no such thing as language use which is not dialogic (having and addressee, real or imagined), which is not contextual, and which is not therefore ideological.
Any language has certain centripetal forces which work to render it monoglossic, a "unitary language" – there are forces of regulation and discipline; this includes literary expression.
Any language, however, as it is lived, socially, over a variety of social, professional, class and so forth positions, is really an interacting and at times contesting amalgam of different language uses.
Each of these "languages" embodies a distinct view of the world, its own sense of meanings, relations, intentions
People of different generations, classes, places, professions, have their own dialects, or ideolects; there are differences among genres, among activities, even from day to day. Bakhtin suggests that at any given moment of its evolution, language is stratified not only into linguistic dialects in the strict sense of the word (according to formal linguistic markers, especially phonetic), but are also into languages that are socio-ideological: languages of social groups, "professional" and "generic" languages, languages of generations and so forth.
These dialects contain within them traces and implications of values, perspectives, and experiences; hence any contestation of dialects is in fact a contestation of these embedded aspects. Language carries as part of its nature the viewpoints, assumptions, experiences of its speakers, and it does this because it is personally and socially situated, not an abstract system.
Bakhtin sees the "language" or ideolect of a class or social position, etc., as a potentially a prison, constructing its own set of understandings beyond which the person imaginatively cannot go -- a dogma, he says, "a sealed-off and impermeable monoglossia." Bakhtin therefore believes that one can think only what one's language allows one to think.
Specialised dialects (which are also social and ideological sites) can be internal as well, that is, a person can speak from different social sites; in fact the psyche is a made up of different socio/cultural sites, is inherently dialogic in itself.
Consciousness is "inner speech", which, like outer speech, is a social formation.
People can occupy different ideolects without being conscious of the disparity between or among them. A function of literature is to force the reader to recognize disparate ideolects and their (at times) conflicting ideologies -- "the critical interanimation of languages" is a term he uses for this forced recognition
To Bakhtin, language is inherently ideological. It is material, historically located, performative. Ideas, expressed in language, are located as outcomes of social and historical processes. As an interactive part of ongoing historical processes, language, and hence ideology, is open to change; and it is open to it through dialogue and narrative, interaction, history, and the parodic.
Within the same community one will find approximately the same vocabulary and grammar, as well as people with differently oriented social interests and perspectives.
We can view reading itself as dialogic, a process of entering into exchange with a voice or voices. This would revolutionize our reading of texts with which we "disagree", for we could see them as a process of interaction with our own views, not as a simple embodiment of feelings or positions we find alienating. One could think of such reading as being four-pointed: ourselves, our cultural milieu and the questions we have to face, the text, the text's milieu and the questions it had to face.

From Art and Science of Change Ubuhibi Media used with permission

KM for Conflict & Change Management

A KM approach to guiding Change Management

storytelling — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 00:29:26 -0600

When engaged in Change Management project, we often use a KM framework to guide and share elements of the system's functionality with client. This simultaneously engages Systems Theory, Logical Framework Analysis (LFA), Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Dialogic approaches in project work. The novelty of this approach is that is both analytical and analogical simultaneously and creates a multidisciplinary framework for engaging complex information. It has proved particularly helpful in working with African government and NGOs. The process is generally completed within 3 days as an organisational ritual and outputs form inputs to the change process. The enquiry framework asks the following key questions when we assess organisational culture and the nature of a system:

What are the roles and the relationships that make up the complex social system under investigation?
What official criteria are used to measure the success of these roles? What unofficial criteria are used to measure the success of these roles?
How does information flow between these roles and in these relationships?
What skills sets are represented in each role? What are the sources of these skills? Which skills and skills sets are capable of dealing with what challenges?
What values and beliefs inform the behaviours of each of the roles in the system?
What symbols, metaphors and stories inform the different roles with regards to their experience of the challenge? What is the source of these symbols, metaphors and stories? How are they currently succeeding in meeting the challenge?
What messages and stories that relate to this challenge are currently being produced and by whom?
What are the kinds of data that are already being collected with regards to the system? Who is collecting this data? With what intent? How is this data then represented? Who has access to it? In what form?
What feedback mechanisms are functioning in this system? What is the information that is being relayed through these feedback loops? What are these feedback loops capable of changing?
What does each role have the power to change? What is each role unable to change?
What are the natural processes of social and behavioural change in the system? Can these natural processes of change be harnessed in any way?
What are the unofficial and spontaneous forms of governance that arise in this system?

The approach evaluates every value, belief and behaviour is by asking the following questions:

Who benefits from this value / belief / behaviour?
What feedback mechanisms sustain this value/belief/behaviour?
What alternative values, beliefs and behaviours can be imagined? Are these alternatives actualised or experimented with?
How do these values/beliefs/behaviours determine changes in the whole system?

Overview provided by Steve Banhegyi & Associates trans4mation blog

Fireside Chat

Dialogic - endless redescriptions of the world

storytelling — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 23:52:56 -0600

The terms dialogic and dialogism often refer to the concept used by Mikhail Bakhtin in his work The Dialogic Imagination. The dialogic work carries on a continual dialogue with other works of literature and other authors. It does not merely answer, correct, silence, or extend a previous work, but informs and is continually informed by the previous work. Dialogic literature is in communication with multiple works. This is not merely a matter of influence, for the dialogue extends in both directions, and the previous work of literature is as altered by the dialogue as the present one is.
Bakhtin argues that all language (and all thought) appears dialogic. This means that: everything anybody ever says always exists in response to things that have been said before and in anticipation of things that will be said in response. We never, in other words, speak in a vacuum. As a result, all language (and the ideas which language contains and communicates) is dynamic, relational and engaged in a process of endless redescriptions of the world.

"Good morning, how are you? Very well thank you, and you? Fine thank you!" is a typical example of a dialogic pattern. What often -repeated, but meaningless dialogic patterns do you use in your thinking and conversation?

Fireside Chat