Dialogue Gap

Why Communication Isn't Enough and What We Can Do About It, Fast

Peter Nixon

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781118157831
• eBook ISBN: 9781118157862
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

The book that bridges the chasm between communication and understanding in negotiations

For years Peter Nixon worked with people from all walks of life, teaching them the art of negotiation. But it soon became apparent that the issue was not negotiation itself, but dialogue between parties. We have become experts at sending information—via email, text message, Internet, TV, and other forms of media, communicating, but not engaging, in an active dialogue defined by collaborative thinking.

In Dialogue Gap, Nixon explores this growing disconnect and its significance in an increasingly globalized world where the ability to engage with others—in order to address issues like climate change, cultural differences, etc.—has become essential.

• Helps the reader differentiate communication and dialogue
• Explores the make-up and causes of the "Dialogue Gap" and what constitutes "good" dialogue (the right people talking about the right issues in the right way at the right time and in the right place)
• Identifies the most common reasons people don't dialogue effectively and provides helpful tips on how to engage in more effective, productive dialogues

Effective dialogue is essential for general success, ensuring that all key stakeholders—in business, politics, or elsewhere—get what they want in the most efficient and productive way possible. Looking at successful and failed dialogues the author has experienced first-hand in Asia, Europe, North America, the Caribbean, and the Middle East in both the public and private sector from across industries, Dialogue Gap provides essential information for making the most of your interactions with others.

Part I

DIALOGUE GAP

Chapter 1

How Dialogue Gap Arose

We need to continue dialogue with our customers and consider making changes depending on their needs.

—Atsushi Saito, President, Tokyo Stock Exchange1

Malaise of the New Millennium—A Call to Arms

In the 1960s I spent summers as a boy living in an old converted ice house built to store ice for refrigeration through the hot summer months in the Laurentian mountains north of Montreal. By the 1960s electricity had done away with the need for an icehouse and it had been converted into a living space, still with walls a foot thick and a door so low adults regularly hit their heads on the way in.

Typical of most boys in their preteens my imagination was in overdrive at night living in the forest at the side of Lac des Iles. I often found myself staring at the ceiling wondering what those strange noises were beyond the safety of my bed. Mosquitoes make recognizable sounds as do moths hitting the screen, but when squirrels scratch at the wood or bats wriggle around inside the roof the sounds fill your imagination with more sinister creatures and you find your senses moving into overdrive. You begin seeing and hearing more than you normally would.2 It isn’t that your senses improve but rather your presence and your attention forces out everything else until all you are noticing is that which you are focused on or in my case, scared about.

With senses fully activated and now wide awake the scratching sound had stopped so I focused my attention on the ceiling and how, despite contours caused by squirrel holes and water damage (caused by ice forming on the roof through the long deep winter followed by its annual retreat as temperatures returned above freezing in the spring), the roof still managed to somehow come together seamlessly with the walls. As I looked closer I saw that the walls and ceilings didn’t connect seamlessly at all, they just appeared to do so because the gaps between the walls were hidden with quarter round, wooden molding that my grandfather’s carpenter loved to use to hide just about everything. As I looked around I realized that quarter round was used to hide every seam in every wall, as well as the floors, the steps, the windows, everywhere. When my grandfather’s carpenter saw a gap he knew it needed quarter round.

Much like my grandfather’s carpenter, when I fly around the world and listen to the problems people lay out in front of me, problems caused when two sides come together but don’t quite connect or even worse collide, I find that the solution to their differences can be found in dialogue. Dialogue to me is like quarter round was to my grandfather’s carpenter. But where quarter round simply hides the problem and leaves you with the impression that all is well (especially when everything is painted the same color), dialogue goes further and aims to rectify the problem by creating a lasting and hopefully optimal outcome for all the stakeholders involved.

My grandfather’s carpenter looked after most of the homeowners in the “Paroisse St-Emile” and used the building materials available locally to build and repair whatever was requested. Back then, if you looked more deeply at the local supply chain you would have seen two completely different cultures coming together. Our carpenter and his team were born and raised locally and had little formal education; however, he could converse with my grandfather, a surgeon who had lied about his age to fight at Vimy in WWI and who after the war had requested his cottage be built on the shores of the same lake where he grew up as a boy and played with his brothers before the start of the “Great War.”

After electricity arrived at the cottage in the 1950s the little icehouse was converted into a small chalet. In the 1960s, as Kennedy spoke of the Cold War, that little cottage and others like it sprinkled on neighboring lakes and mountainsides throughout the Laurentian Shield, which spans the U.S.-Canada border, seemed totally removed from the rest of the world. This false sense of security is still felt today and while the local carpenter and the international surgeon were able to dialogue sufficiently well together to satisfy both customer and supplier, the quarter round was needed to cover the gaps.

Today, as Atsushi Saito, president of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, states,

We can no longer pretend to hide our differences if we are to compete globally. We need to continuously dialogue with customers and as their needs evolve our services need to evolve as well. Knowing how to change our services cannot be predicted, the solution results from within the dialogue itself.

Dialogue is not only needed to keep abreast of evolving customer needs, it is also needed to keep abreast of the rapidly changing world in which we live. Indeed dialogue is the fastest way to keep up-to-date and is needed now more than ever before.

Today central bankers have to take decisions in an environment marked by a degree of uncertainty in an economic and financial sphere that seems to me largely unprecedented. The acceleration of major advances in science and technology (not only information technology), the ensuing structural transformations or our economies, the ever-growing complexity of our finance and the overall process of globalisation are itself creating a multidimensional acceleration of change.

—Claude Trichet, European Central Bank Chief3

Unlike the dialogue between my grandfather and his carpenter nearly a century ago, today we are expected to dialogue across cultures effectively and instantly just to stay in business. A tall order, given we are all born into local cultures with local awareness and need to build from there.

Patricia and Mireille—Intergenerational Dialogue

Patricia, a beautiful and fit 87-year-old grandmother, has attentively been listening to one of my travel stories when her face turns grave and she says, “Peter, I want to share something I am very concerned about.” Seeing Patricia has turned serious and wondering what she is about to share I focus on her with all my attention. “My granddaughter doesn’t talk to me. She comes to visit but when she does we watch TV or more often now she just sits on her laptop doing Facebook with her friends.” Patricia goes on, her eyes changing to reveal traces of a much younger girl. “When I was the age of my granddaughter I used to be able to talk to my grandmother for hours. I could talk to her about just about anything, subjects I’d be embarrassed to share with my mother seemed to be so comfortable with her. And my grandmother would tell me things of her life that seemed so important for me to learn. Wisdom was transmitted that way and many of life’s most important lessons I attribute to having learned from my grandmother.” But suddenly Patricia turned serious again. “That’s the problem, if my granddaughter doesn’t care to engage with me how will she learn those things that were so important for me to learn at her age? I’m concerned she can’t engage with anyone. My son tells me that’s just the way she is but I hear similar reactions about their granddaughters from my friends. What can I do to engage my granddaughter in dialogue? I’m 87 and who knows how long I’ll be around.”

Patricia’s call to arms—“What can I do to engage my granddaughter in dialogue?”—is the rallying cry of our age. People who started their careers before the 1990s onslaught of e-mail and Internet surfing detect a problem but the definition of that problem is only becoming apparent and few people have figured out what to do about it. The problem that Patricia has so effectively identified is also a generational issue because people who have commenced their career in the 1990s or later are communicating faster and more effectively than ever before so they don’t understand what people like Patricia are talking about when they flag existing problems. Some see the older, pre-Internet generation as dinosaurs who just need to get a Facebook account and begin instant messaging.

Patricia’s life isn’t busy. At 87 she curls in the winter and lawn bowls in the summer. The morning paper arrives at her door and her family visits for special occasions. Patricia has a lot of time to reflect and be 100 percent present when her granddaughter visits. Patricia spotted something social scientists are only now coming to recognize. I call it the Digital Tipping Point.

Digital Tipping Point

In Patricia’s granddaughter’s case the changes were gradual. She became more introverted, spent more and more time connected with friends online and as she visited her grandmother had less and less interest in talking with her or asking her questions. The phenomenon is not new. People who watch a lot of television believe their favorite TV personalities are actually their friends. Some people report that when they visit family members who have passed their digital tipping point wa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Part I: Dialogue Gap
• Part II: Dialogue Solutions
• Part III: Dialogue Leadership
• Conclusion
• Appendix A: What Prevents Effective Dialogue?
• Appendix B: Organizational Dialogue Assessment
• Appendix C: Dialogue Skill Practice Activities
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Index