David Kantor's Four-Player Model offers that all players in a conversation work, at a minimum, from one of four roles (1995). The Four-Player model provides a base for Dialogic Leadership.
Balance is the key to effective dialogue. This is done by ensuring all roles are represented and none are silenced. Isaacs uses Advocacy and Inquiry to demonstrate the appropriate use of balance in roles associated with approaches to a group action.
Action Capabilities for Dialogic Leaders
LISTENING
Practices of Listening
Listen Together
- Listening is the heart of dialogue
- Need to let go of inner clamoring
- Have to create space for listening to occur
- Attend to both words and silence between the words
Practices of Listening
- Be aware of thought
- Stick to the facts
- Follow the disturbance
- Listen without resistance
- Stand still
Listen Together
- Listen not from own perspective, but from perspective of the whole
RESPECTING
The word respect comes from the Latin word respecere, which means "to look again."
Practices for Respect
The word respect comes from the Latin word respecere, which means "to look again."
- The act of respect invites us to see others as legitimate
- Respect means honoring people's boundaries
- To respect is to listen for the coherence in people's views, even when we find what they are saying unacceptable
Practices for Respect
- Stand at the hub - remove our attention from the activities all around us to stand still
- Centering - the practice of finding the center of gravity, a point of balance, a quietness in ourselves
- Listen as if it were all in me - recognize that what goes on around us exists not merely in others, but also within us all as well
- Make it strange - highlight what seems different or impossible to understand
SUSPENDING
Suspension II: becoming aware of the processes that generate thought
Principle of Awareness
Allows our attention to broaden and expand, thus including more and more of
our immediate experience
Ways to Suspend
- To display our thinking in a way that lets us and others see and understand it
- Let go of certainties, which are rigid, nonnegotiable, and limit dialogue
- To suspend criticism is to observe it in motion and take it back into yourself
- Two types of suspension:
Suspension II: becoming aware of the processes that generate thought
Principle of Awareness
Allows our attention to broaden and expand, thus including more and more of
our immediate experience
Ways to Suspend
- Seek the Order Between - Suspend polarizing & look between the extremes
- Try Frame Experiments - To see others in a different light
- Ask Questions - What Am I Missing? How Does the Problem Work?
- Clearness Committee - Ask questions on a subject of importance
- Sensing the System - Approach the group regarding collective behavior
VOICING
- Voicing reveals what is true for you regardless of other influences
- Requires confidence that what you think is valid
Drawbacks of Voicing
- Overinflated - crowding out others
- Underdeveloped voice - too quiet
- Idolatry - addicted to a certain view of ourselves
Dialogic Leadership
The promise of dialogue is that a small group of people might do something that impacts the world.
Leadership in this space means:
1. Having the understanding that you cannot make dialogue happen, that it must emerge.
2. Helping people to manage, or experience, the crisis of emptiness.
3. Having the resilience to stay steady
Dialogic leaders support the dialogic process by:
·Evoking people’s genuine voice.
·Supporting dreaming out loud.
·Listening deeply.
·Making it safe for opposers.
·Challenging people to suspend.
The promise of dialogue is that a small group of people might do something that impacts the world.
Leadership in this space means:
1. Having the understanding that you cannot make dialogue happen, that it must emerge.
2. Helping people to manage, or experience, the crisis of emptiness.
3. Having the resilience to stay steady
Dialogic leaders support the dialogic process by:
·Evoking people’s genuine voice.
·Supporting dreaming out loud.
·Listening deeply.
·Making it safe for opposers.
·Challenging people to suspend.