How to teach dialogue and collaboration?
The people I meet through the Cool Collaborations podcast are such a wealth of knowledge and our conversations always lead me in new directions. Take for example a passing comment that Gay Robinson made in Episode #9, where she mentioned that she will often check out the Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue at Simon Fraser University for new and exciting things in the world of dialogue.
So I checked it out, and after exploring for a while, I came upon the description of the Semester in Dialogue and I reached out to Dr. Janet Moore, Professor or Professional Practice at SFU. Dr. Moore co-creates, co-designs, and co-teaches the Semester in Dialogue program and I wanted to meet her and explore her experiences with collaboration. Be sure to check out Episode #15 of the podcast to hear the full conversation with Dr. Moore, because here I’ll just touch on a couple of the key ideas from our conversation.
Teaching Collaboration and Dialogue
Dr. Moore describes a program that I sincerely wish had been available to me in University. The Semester in Dialogue is about creating an opportunity for students to be active inside their own education, and to work directly with their community.
Each semester, Dr. Moore selects a theme and then she, her colleagues, and people from the community design a term that provides students an opportunity to carry on conversations with community members on the semester’s theme. The program is co-taught by 2 to 3 instructors with instructors acting more like mentors and coaches than ‘instructors’ whose job it is to transfer their knowledge to students.
Each week, the students, instructors, and members of the community sit in a circle to discuss the theme of the semester, discover what life is like for community members, and really just learn to carry a conversation. Students and community members design the semester’s project; work that involves a public facing event that is run by the students. And after each week’s conversation and other event, the teachers and students debrief and discuss how the session went, what could be done differently, and what went well.
One of the many things I took away from my conversation with Dr. Moore’s on the Semester in Dialogue is that we don’t really teach dialogue and collaboration. We create an environment where we practice the skills of dialogue and collaboration. It isn’t about, as Dr. Moore puts it, ‘transferring knowledge’. Students build the knowledge of how best to have a conversation and work together through real issues by experimenting with instructors that can support their confidence when or if it’s needed. It’s a sad state of affairs that there are so few programs like the Semester in Dialogue across North America.
Dialogue and Collaboration
I asked Dr. Moore about dialogue and collaboration and how they fit together. Her answer covered the connection, but then went in a different direction that was a bit of an ‘aha’ moment for me.
Collaboration, according to Dr. Moore, is the overall process of getting to the answers for wicked, complex, or ‘sticky’ problems. Collaboration is really about getting more out of the process than the sum of what any of the parts or people could accomplish independently. It is interdisciplinary by nature, because the problems cross the boundaries of any one discipline.
Dialogue though is the process within collaboration that discovers the possible; it’s the way to slow it down so that you can see the parts, the problems, and imagine what might be possible.
Here’s where the conversation uncovers some new thinking for me. Dr. Moore uses the example of divergent and convergent thinking from design thinking to describe how dialogue (and collaboration work). In dialogue, we are taking the time to explore all of the pieces (divergent thinking). This part I knew. But then, Dr. Moore says, “you recognize that some parts of organizations may no longer need to be there, or that the way we do things has to change, and that’s really scary for people. That slowing down allows the system to be seen, and that produces sometimes fear.”
My own experience with resistance to collaboration was with people whose power was threatened by the collaborative; the ‘sharing’ of authority. So, Dr. Moore’s insights here on the fear of change was a perspective I hadn’t considered before and one that really makes us consider how closely collaboration and change management are or should be linked.
Empathy Maps and Role Playing
At one point in the episode, I ask Dr. Moore what surprises she’s encountered in her career, and she pointed to what’s she’s learned about the speed at which organizations work and the importance of understanding what an organization needs.
If we are the ones organizing a collaborative effort to join together a number of organizations or individual, we often approach things with the belief that the collaboration is the most important thing and may not recognize what each of those in the collaboration needs. What is important to them when they are not in the room, in the collaborative space.
Dr. Moore pointed to empathy maps and role-playing as key tools she uses with her students and herself to understand and recognize the importance of the stories of various players in your collaborative effort. I got to add my two cents here with the observation that the accuracy of the empathy mapping results are important, but that there is also great benefit from doing the exercise to put yourself in a perspective other than your own.
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We covered a lot of ground in our 50-minute conversation, and only I’ve only touched on a few of Dr. Moore’s insights above. Check out the full conversation here. Who knows, maybe you’ll end up being part of the Semester in Dialogue or build your own insights from our conversation.
Happy collaborating.
Scott Millar, through Collaboration Dynamics, often works as a "peacemaker" by gathering people with different experiences and values and helping them navigate beyond their differences to tackle complex problems together. As the host of the Cool Collaborations podcast where he explores fun stories and insights of successful collaboration with guests from around the world, and then dives into what made them work. Cool Collaborations is currently available on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and Spotify.
