Chapter 3

A CALL TO DIALOGUE

When someone else spoke, it felt as if I was speaking. And when I did speak, it was almost egoless, like it wasn't really me. It was as if something larger than me was speaking through me. The atmosphere in the room felt like we were in a river, like the air got thicker. And in that space we started to create. We started to say things that we had never thought before and started to let ourselves be influenced in ways and think in ways that we had never thought before. It was almost as if when someone would speak, something would become illuminated, something would be revealed, and that would open up something else to be revealed.²

Start asking people to explain collective consciousness in scientific terms, and it won't be long before you hear something to do with the “quantum vacuum” and the “zero-point field.” It's no surprise, perhaps, that the latest scientific theories to have infiltrated the New Age seminar circuit would have found their way into a field as open to theorizing as collective mind. But there is a connection between physics and the group mind that is perhaps a bit less esoteric. His name was David Bohm.

A renowned physicist with a passion for inquiry, Bohm is probably best known for his contributions to plasma theory and his widely celebrated dialogues with the great Indian mystic J. Krishnamurti. But toward the end of his life, Bohm's attention became increasingly drawn to a potential he saw for a new kind of conversation that he felt held “the possibility of transforming not only the relationship between people, but even more, the very nature of consciousness in which these relationships arise.” He called it, simply, “dialogue.”

For Bohm, all the problems of human affairs could be traced to the “incoherence of our thought,” and particularly, of our collective thought. Looking at the way our unexamined cultural presuppositions, beliefs, and ideas prevent us from coming together in meaningful exchange on matters of importance, he proposed a new mode of inquiry that would both reveal this incoherence and point the way beyond it. Drawing from the Greek dialogos, which he defined as “meaning moving through,” Bohm explained that in this new form of dialogue, “a new kind of mind . . . begins to come into being which is based on the development of a common meaning that is constantly transforming in the process of the dialogue. People are no longer primarily in opposition, nor can they be said to be interacting, rather they are participating in this pool of common meaning, which is capable of constant development and change.”

The basic idea behind Bohm's dialogues was simple. Gather a group of between twenty and forty people into a circle and have them talk to each other—about almost anything. Through following a few basic, if challenging, instructions—like suspending one's strongly held ideas, listening closely to others, and speaking authentically—Bohm felt that the group would enter into a deeper current of engagement, one that would begin to reveal the unexamined assumptions behind our thinking and propel the group into a higher level of congruence and a new collective understanding. But for Bohm, the significance of this dialogue pointed far beyond the experience of those in the group. By bringing “a new kind of coherent, collective intelligence” to bear on the very thought structures underlying culture itself, he felt that this inquiry “might well prove vital to the future health of our civilization.”

Bohm's ideas on dialogue began to take shape in the early eighties, and for the eight years leading up to his death in 1992, he made a considerable effort to demonstrate and interest others in the potential he was seeing. During that time, many reported having profound experiences of the kind of collective opening he was pointing to, and a small movement began to form around his work. Bohm was certainly not the first modern thinker to have seen the potential for a collective mind. In the twentieth century, such visionaries as Sri Aurobindo, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Alice Bailey, Rudolf Steiner, and M. Scott Peck had all spoken of this extraordinary potential for the emergence of conscious collectives. But it was in Bohm's work that this emerging vision would first begin to capture the attention of a broader, more secular audience, thanks in large part to the interest of a few key figures, foremost among them the renowned management consultant Peter Senge.

It was 1990 when Senge's The Fifth Discipline rocked the business world with its groundbreaking translation of systems theory into hands-on strategies for a corporate learning revolution. In addition to introducing a radical new way of thinking about management, Senge also devoted considerable attention in the book to the merits of Bohmian dialogue as a method of “team learning.” As the book's sales skyrocketed into the hundreds of thousands, this late-formed idea from a thoughtful physicist began to find an unexpected audience in the boardrooms and conference halls of American big business. And within a few years, the demand for skilled practitioners and serious study of this largely unexplored discipline had reached a threshold. Armed with a sizable grant from the Kellogg Foundation, William Isaacs, one of Senge's colleagues at MIT's Sloan School of Management, launched the MIT Dialogue Project in 1993.

The goal of the project was straightforward: to explore the potential applications of this new “social technology” across a broad range of practical settings. Over the next several years, Isaacs and his colleagues did just that. One group brought together leaders in Colorado healthcare management. Another worked with citizen groups in urban settings. Isaacs himself took dialogue into the heart of a union/management battle in Kansas City. And at the core of the project was a practitioner group that was brought together to experiment—on themselves. As Mitch Saunders, who was part of that group, describes it, “We saw ourselves as a group of guinea pigs, and we tried everything we could imagine to explore the dimensions of the field, both at the individual and collective levels. And this was before the field had been defined at all.”

Testing the limits of Bohm's ideas, and experimenting with their own, during the three-year life of the project these pioneers of conscious conversation began to chart the terrain of collective thinking in a way that no one previously had. In the course of their research, they learned a lot about the need for a variety of approaches to meet the diverse demands of real-world situations. Some settings, particularly those involving strongly opposing sides, demanded more structure and facilitation. Others, where the inquiry was more open-ended and exploratory in nature, called for a less directed approach. But across all the modes of their research, there was at least one finding that remained universal: when people came together with a willingness to look beyond their preconceptions, something remarkable came into being between them. As Saunders describes it, “In almost any session, you could count on it happening. That magic in the middle of the circle was becoming a reliable feature of life. So much so that our fascination began to shift from the emergence of that magic toward the question of what to do with it. How could we use that phenomenon, where everybody drops into a collective mind, to take the next step and move into collective leadership? Is there some way this kind of consciousness could serve the evolution of something more coherent, to give shape to what's emerging?”

Saunders is not alone in his question. Indeed, as the field has expanded far beyond those initial experiments in dialogue into ever new domains over the past decade, the question of how our higher collective capacities can be used to our collective advantage has been coming increasingly to the fore. In the case of one organization, it has become the focal point for an initiative that is attempting to mobilize this still-fragmented field into nothing less than a movement.