The Mission Of Conversation Advocates

Dear friends, the field of dialogue and deliberation has a mission in the world, even though many people don't know it yet. This mission includes doing our jobs. But it reaches far beyond that.

Our collective mission is to catch the world, as it falls, piece by piece, and turn it toward a new world -- a new world people create together through high quality conversations.

I feel confident in suggesting now that the world IS falling, and it will continue to fall for some time. Faster and faster.

This is not to say that many good things aren't also happening, nor that business as usual is still going on in many places.

Photo credit: H Rotgers

In fact, things are getting better and better and worse and worse, faster and faster, simultaneously. For both reasons -- the better and better and the worse and worse -- business as usual will become increasingly difficult.

Change is in the air. Major change.

Because of that, the world will have increasing need to talk with itself, and to hear itself well.

Part of our task is to help it realize that need, and to want to engage in some serious, heartful, productive talking and listening.
Another part of our task is to help the world, once it has woken to that need, to actually start acting on it.

 

 

"The world" includes our communities, bioregions, countries, networks, organizations -- as well as our neighborhoods, our families, and ourselves. No one of them is intrinsically more important than the others. High quality conversations will be needed in all of them, wherever the need to discover more life-affirming ways becomes urgent.

I suspect our most important task right now -- all of us dialogue and deliberation folks -- is to wake up to this, our mission, and to prepare to help. Since it is not necessarily clear how to do that, our task becomes the same as everyone else's -- to talk with each other, across boundaries, and to hear each other well. To search together for new ground to walk on together. And to make ourselves into a benign but powerful force that can accomplish our mission.

Each essay on public affairs, each news story I read increases my certainty that this need is real and is growing.

I offer you one such essay -- "How to Stop Civil War" by George Monbiot. It is the first commentary I've read about the Iraqi effort to draft a new constitution that paints an appropriately transformational context around that struggle. It frames the problem as a powerful transformational opportunity, grounded in the need for inclusive conversations among We the People, and the ability of ordinary people to get creative about their common affairs.

I don't know if George Monbiot knows this, but we know a lot about how this could be done.

We also have a lot to learn, because the field of powerful conversations is still in the early stages of its development.

It boggles the mind, in fact, to absorb this enormity -- both how much we collectively know, and how much we still need to learn -- and what that means for the world.

Many practitioners are already engaged creating and facilitating conversations about issues of the day. This is vital -- and we need to look ahead, as well. Today's issues will be heating up -- and new issues will surface that we are not expecting.

So I find myself asking: To what extent are we conversation advocates prepared to take on the opportunities tomorrow's crises will give us to help transform the world in healthy ways? And: What would have to happen for us to actually DO that preparation together in a timely way?