Dialogue San Diego: Providing Passage: Bridges to Somewhere

Sunday, April 17, 2016

Providing Passage: Bridges to Somewhere

The recent blogs focused on the first two skills for dialogue proposed by Chris Argyris and his colleagues:

Combine advocacy with inquiry - exploring your viewpoint by inviting others to ask questions
Illustrate your abstract interpretation with concrete information - providing specific details on how you based your claim.

In a sense, the dialogue skills create a bridge between us by explaining how we encounter the world. As we practice these skills we expand from a local (or Self) understanding to a broader (or Other) view.

Living in San Diego, it is easy to become familiar with the San Diego-Coronado Bridge. But, even with this one bridge, we may describe it differently because of the various points where we may see it (e.g., from San Diego, from Coronado, from the bay, etc.). Similarly, we may observe the same event in different ways.

San Diego - Coronado Bridge, from Coronado (Caltrans)

As we encounter people from other parts of the country or the world, their descriptions of a bridge may seem alien because of the familiarity with their own local bridge.

The third dialogue skill invites us to share our thought process, checking for agreement at each step of the Ladder of Inference.

The foggy misunderstandings between us begin to clear as we check out what is common or different between how we experience the world. Questions to consider about bridges:

Can we agree that bridges connect?
Can we agree that bridges provide passage between two points?

Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco (The New Yorker)

A city may have multiple bridges. For example, the two main bridges connecting the city of San Francisco with other parts of the Bay Area are the Golden Gate Bridge and the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. Each opened within 6 months of one another; each has its own beauty and utility. One may be more famous and recognizable, but the other is just as important to The City.

The positions each of us have come to believe may be just as valid and important. Another question to consider: how can we come to understand and accept another person's views, and allow a bridge to be built between us rather than letting the differences separate us?

San Francisco - Oakland Bay Bridge (thebaylights.org)

As we move further away from what is more recognizable to us, it may seem that another person's views are more foreign and unexpected. Thoughts may be entangled, causing a latticework that is hard to describe. Practicing the dialogue skills allows us to accept the entanglement and to discern the importance of each held belief. Slowing down, asking questions, and understanding what is important allows me to accept you, even though our ideas may be challenged. We must believe that a new bridge is emerging from the initially entangled ideas.

Brooklyn Bridge, New York

At times our view of a situation may be more distant or removed from the person we are in relationship. Sharing our thought processes draws us into the specific details that may have seemed further away. Thus, the distance between us lessens.

Tower Bridge, London (from Shard observation deck)

And, even with friends we have known for some time, it is important for us to practice the skills of advocacy and inquiry, providing concrete information to support abstract thoughts, and sharing how we arrived at a conclusion. After all, older bridges need to be reviewed, maintained, and renewed!

Rialto Bridge, Venice

"Constitution Bridge" was opened over the Grand Canal in Venice in 2008. Controversy plagued this bridge's opening with construction delays, walkouts, lack of wheelchair access, and heated criticism that the design was "incompatible with Venice's decorative medieval architecture" (Wikipedia).

As we learn to build bridges, let us not be afraid to listen to old and new, past and present. It is through the process of slowing down, listening, and testing what we have heard from the other person that new understandings and relationships grow. Bridges do create passages to somewhere: the Both-And of old and new destinations are explored when we travel from one point to another. Hopefully, we arrive together!