Application: Enabling dialogue & skilled conversations

Dialogue is a kind of skilled conversation that invites shared meaning making, and deeper inquiry. Visual Explorer is a tool for putting images in the middle of a dialogue as a way of surfacing and exploring assumptions and perspectives.


The benefits of Visual Explorer in creating more effective dialogue include:

• Asking new questions
• Imagining alternatives
• Building on ideas
• Fun and playful, yet at the same time serious dialogue
• Tapping into personal experiences and passions
• Paying careful attention to details and to big pictures
• Surfaces individual and shared assumptions
• Images bridge differing context and cultures
• Create new metaphors and shared images
• Make conversations both artful and analytical

Background

It can be difficult, but rewarding, to practice dialogue—to slow down and reflect with each other, and create shared understanding in the midst of action (Kahane, 2004). We have found that an effective avenue to dialogue is “putting something in the middle”—in other words, using tangible objects (e.g., artifacts, prototypes, images) as way to focus attention and reflection. This broader principal of the mediatiation of dialogue by sensible, meaningful objects is called mediated dialogue (Palus & Drath, 2001).

VE supports dialogue by providing a safe and reliable way for people to “project” their emotions, intuitions, opinions, insights, and hunches. Talking about the image, and thus the projections and the ideas, is somehow safer and easier than a purely verbal statement of one's thoughts. Putting an opinion "out there" onto the image helps take it as an object, to be held and examined.

Facilitation

The instructions for a typical session apply, but several cautions are in order if deeper dialogue is the goal:

• A skilled facilitator of dialogue is necessary if the conditions are difficult or risky. Prior experience with VE is helpful.

• Dialogue is a process over time that can’t be limited to an hour-long session. What happens before and after the VE session will determine the quality of the longer term relationships. A basic level of trust must be present (although a VE session sometimes increases trust.) Often VE is merely the lead-in experience, or practice field, to enable deeper levels of dialogue. Subsequent activities can be designed to aid this deepening.

• Do not shortcut the sharing of images during the VE session if dialogue is the goal. Paying careful attention to each others’ (and one’s own) images is important for getting past the “surface” (literally as well as interpersonally). Likewise, several of the options suggested in the instructions—provocative framing questions, journaling, music, no talking during image selection, re-using the images—are meant to lead to a more powerful dialogue.

• Be aware that VE can surface strong emotions, and powerful insights. The facilitator should allow for enough time, a safe space, and adequate exploration and follow-up, to do justice to the powerful experience created for at least some of the participants.

Here are several examples of dialogue facilitated with Visual Explorer at various levels of depth.