Waging Dialogue

Experiencing different cultures and backgrounds, and talking to people from all different walks of life has always been something I’ve enjoyed doing, and I find that as much as we celebrate diversity – and we should – I also find that it reveals hard work because you actually have to love and talk to people and engage and be in an open relationship with people who come from different walks of life. And eventually, if you’re going to have relationships with people, that involves hard work. It’s nice to just say, let’s talk to one another, as a tagline or something that feels good. But the actual work of diversity is challenging … yet worthwhile. 
– Sean Campbell, dyad participant, 2024

The Waging Dialogue Model is a work in progress, an attempt to address a seemingly intractible problem, but which is becoming ever more critical to solve. Humans attacking and ostracizing other humans is nothing new, but the systematic isolation of humans into echo chambers by social media algorithms is unique to this period of history. We must create a model for radical understanding in order to break down alienating categories. Otherwise we risk a dystopian future, as artificial intelligence learns from our worst tendencies.

Many efforts to address political polarization have moved toward improving debate and discourse on the controversial issues, promoting better listening and more reasoned arguments in place of defensive impulses. It is critically important to provide demonstrations of and opportunities for idealized dialogue, but this approach is not sufficient to address the deeper aspects of polarization. We must recognize that, in many cases, we stake out our strongest positions not because they feel most rational to us but because they support our identities. When our identities are threatened, our fight, flight, or freeze instincts kick in. We either become increasingly aggressive, “freeze” the conversation with repetitive counters, or shut down the interaction completely.

It is enormously difficult to have open and honest dialogue with those whose beliefs we cannot rationalize because they come from different experiential foundations. People willing to invest the necessary time and energy to confront this obstacle must be given the space to struggle together to understand why it’s so hard, and Waging Dialogue will provide this space.

Developing our model

Since Dr Alice Maher conceived the Waging Dialogue Project in 2003, we have harnessed advances in technology and our own observational research:

• 2003-2011: Moderated online listservs revealed two barriers to bridging divides:
  • the power of our identities
  • the underlying aggression inevitable in dialogue with people of different perspectives.
• 2020: Our Zoom-based Dialogue with Dignity group discussions brought together individuals of different experiences and beliefs to discuss a specific political or social issue. They highlighted those barriers not allowing sufficient time for personal storytelling, and they tended to disband as conflicts arose.
• 2021-present: We partnered with Listen First to host dialogues for their National Week of Conversation.
• 2022: We experimented with DYADS, two people of differing backgrounds and perspectives motivated to enter into dialogue. Emphasizing personal storytelling and deep listening, we encouraged the partners to “stay the course” over multiple meetings and navigate inevitable impasses.
• 2022: We pioneered the META-DIALOGUE, in which participants look back at their own dyad engagements or videotaped group discussions to observe what worked and what didn’t, note where impasses occurred and how participants worked through them — or gave up. In these larger groups, we are also studying how alliances form between like-minded individuals from different dyads to help bridge divides. Our current model — DYAD+META-DIALOGUE — holds the most promise in our mission to create a methodology for communicating across divides. Watch our model at work in the following examples:

Waging Dialogue in action