Given that the term has come to define a vast sector of American society — one that encompasses more than 1.5 million organizations and accounts for some 10 percent of the nation’s GDP — it would seem we could come up with a better phrase, or at least one that’s more descriptive.

The trouble is that many of the ideas put forward as an alternative simply miss the mark. Take, for example, the “voluntary sector.” The word accurately describes the activities of many charities, yes, but these organizations represent just a fraction of the total number of nonprofits in the U.S. And besides, the word implies that all those who work in the for-profit sector somehow do so involuntarily.

Other examples include the “third sector” and the “independent sector.” Hildy Gottlieb, director of the Community-Driven Institute, has made a compelling case for the term “community-benefit sector.” In a recent Harvard Business Review blog post, Dan Pallotta pitched the term “humanity sector.” And in an article some months ago in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Suzanne Perry suggested the “delta” sector.

Part of the reason we’re stuck with the term “nonprofit,” I believe, is because the field is so conceptually ambiguous. Much of what falls under the rubric of the nonprofit sector does not actually involve social service, community benefit, or even doing good. There are many nonprofits that are advocacy-driven, faith-based, or politically motivated, even though their tax-exempt status would suggest they are serving the public interest in some way.

In the academic literature, the field is often described as “civil society” or “the public sphere,” suggesting a kind of middle ground between public and private, between government and the free market. I realize that these terms encompass more than just nonprofit organizations (including, as they do, churches, neighborhood associations, book clubs, and the like). But they get closer, I think, to the real sphere of activity we’re talking about here.

These terms also avoid the unhelpful do-gooder connotations of terms like “the community benefit sector” and “the humanity sector.”

I prefer the term “civic sector,” or what the organization Ashoka: Innovators for the Public refers to as “the citizen sector.” Both of these terms put ordinary people — citizens — at the center of the equation (as distinct from business and government). And as I see it, that’s really what this burgeoning sector is all about: the role of ordinary individuals, people like you and me, in inspiring new solutions, creating change, and making a real impact.

See also:

• Civil Society and the New Global Order — an essay of mine on the rising importance of this sector in shaping our global future
• My review of Benjamin Barber’s A Place for Us
• Six Reasons to Use the Term Community-Benefit Organization by Hildy Gottlieb
• Let’s Call It the Humanity Sector by Dan Pallotta
• Goodbye “Nonprofit Sector,” Hello “Delta Sector” by Suzanne Perry

Here is an excerpt from Burns’s 1978 book, Leadership:

Transforming leadership … occurs when one or more persons engage with each other in such a way that leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality…. Their purposes, which might have started out as separate but related, as in the case of transactional leadership, become fused. Power bases are linked not as counterweights but as mutual support for common purpose.

Various names are used for such leadership, some of them derisory: elevating, mobilizing, inspiring, exalting, uplifting, preaching, exhorting, evangelizing. The relationship can be moralistic, of course. But transforming leadership ultimately becomes moral in that it raises the level of human conduct and ethical aspiration of both leader and led, and thus it has a transforming effect on both.

Perhaps the best modern example is Gandhi, who aroused and elevated the hopes and demands of millions of Indians and whose life and personality were enhanced in the process. Transcending leadership is dynamic leadership in the sense that the leaders throw themselves into a relationship with followers who will feel “elevated” by it and often become more active themselves, thereby creating new cadres of leaders. Transcending leadership is leadership engagé. Naked power-wielding can be neither transactional nor transforming; only leadership can be. [...]

Woodrow Wilson called for leaders who, by boldly interpreting the nation’s conscience, could lift a people out of their everyday selves. That people can be lifted into their better selves is the secret of transforming leadership.

For more, please see my book review of James MacGregor Burns’s Leadership.

If you believe in something your very belief renders you unqualified to do it. Your earnestness will come across. Your passion will show. Your enthusiasm will make everyone nervous. And your naïveté will irritate. Which means that you will become suspect. Which means you will be prone to disillusionment. Which means that you will not be able to sustain your belief in the face of all the piranha fish which nibble away at your idea and your faith, till only the skeleton of your dream remains. Which means that you have to become a fanatic, a fool, a joke, an embarrassment. The world — which is to say the powers that be — would listen to your ardent ideas with a stiff smile on its face, then put up impossible obstacles, watch you finally give up your cherished idea, having mangled it beyond recognition, and after you slope away in profound discouragement it will take up your idea, dust it down, give it a new spin, and hand it over to someone who doesn’t believe in it at all.

I love this quote. It’s a reminder to slow down and reexamine what we’re doing.

The fierce drive to accomplish something and make a name for ourselves too often takes us down the wrong path. In the end, the qualities we’re looking for are those that go with being free of worldly success.

Ultimately, the aim must be to become indifferent to what people think of us — to become immune to applause and unmoved by criticism. There is integrity in that.

The goal must be to be present with what we’re doing — so present that we do it gracefully, effortlessly. There is great joy in that.

Success, when it does come, tends to be relatively short-lived in any case. That means that we’re all thrown back on ourselves sooner or later. When that day arrives we have no choice but to find something more lasting to pin our hopes to.

And that, I believe, is what Merton was saying.

Incidentally, he became very successful himself. But he understood what few of us, in our quest for worldly recognition, realize — that celebrity, when freed of the trappings of ego, is simply another path of service.

The subject of her research has long been considered peripheral to the main business of economics. But today, as we face a global recession and a very serious environmental crisis, her work has special resonance. She’s shown that the three dominant economic models used for dealing with collective resource management — the tragedy of the commons, the prisoners’s dilemma, and the logic of collective action — are all inadequate. They are not necessarily wrong, but the conditions under which they hold are very specific. Her research suggests that there are other viable systems that work. For example, she has looked at Swiss grazing pastures, Japanese forests, and irrigation systems in Spain and the Philippines based on sound principles of collective decision-making that are both democratic and empowering to ordinary people.

Ostrom was the first woman to win the economics prize, which is significant. And with the exception of the prize to Amartya Sen (for his work on welfare economics) it’s one of the few awards that have recognized alternatives to the traditional neoclassical economics. I’m confident that her ideas will help us broaden our thinking to make resource management more democratic, more participatory, more community-based, and above all more responsive to everyday citizens.

Read more:

• My review of Elinor Ostrom’s book Governing the Commons

One of Hegel’s great contributions to Western philosophy was a theory he called dialectical progression. As he saw it, ideas and worldviews tend to evolve through a series of stages. First there is an idea or concept, a thesis. Over time it inevitably gives rise to its opposite, its antithesis. The interaction of the two in time leads to a new concept, a synthesis, which in turn becomes the thesis of a new triad.

J.N. Findlay, in a wonderful lecture on Hegel, rightly noted that the theory had been grossly oversimplified and misused. But he went on to say — and this strikes me as central to the notion of paradigm shifts and conceptual revolutions — that the dialectical method always involved “higher order comment” on a thought position previously achieved. In the dialectical process, you operate at a given level of thought and then proceed to stand outside it. That is to say, you’re taken in by an idea and accept all of its basic assumptions. But over time, as the idea is taken to its logical limits, its shortcomings become more and more apparent. At that point, you “become conscious,” in a sense, and begin to see the idea from the outside. It’s not unlike a gestalt-switch, only it’s more rational and linear.

“In dialectic,” Findlay pointed out, “one sees what can be said about a certain thought-position that one cannot actually see in it. And the sort of comment made in dialectic is not a comment on the correctness or truth of what is said in a certain manner or in terms of certain concepts, but a comment on the adequacy or logical satisfactoriness of the conceptual approaches or instruments one has been employing.” In this sense, each stage transcends and includes the one that came before it.

This observation ties in with what Thomas Kuhn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Boulding, Arthur Koestler, and others have observed about how systems of knowledge, or frames of reference, evolve not by an orderly and incremental step-by-step process, but by occasional upheavals in which accepted truths are overthrown and reordered.

Critics of Kuhn and his followers like to play the old relativism card, saying that his notion of shifting paradigms was flawed because it said nothing about the effectiveness of one paradigm or another in getting closer to the truth. But my understanding of the evolution of paradigms is that each one represents, in Findlay’s words, “a series of improving definitions of the absolute.”

For more on this, see:

• My review of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn
• My review of Conceptual Revolutions by Paul Thagard
• My review of Paradigms in Progress by Hazel Henderson
• Literature review: Understanding Change: Strategies for Innovation and Renewal

The basic principle also applies to ideas. Sometimes the best way to introduce a new concept is to marry it to one that is already firmly established. The early scientists understood this when they depicted the atom as a microscopic solar system, or when the early web developers pitched the Internet as an “information superhighway.” A concept that is fuzzy or abstract often has a better chance of flourishing if combined with one that is already well-rooted.

What’s interesting to note is that grafting, as it was traditionally defined, meant “the healing in common of wounds.” It referred to the process by which the old and the new rub against each other. It was always a time-consuming and painful thing. But if a healing took place, common suffering could become the basis for a powerful and mutually sustaining bond.

For example, when Al Gore speaks of global warming, he says that the entire world needs to change its behavior. “But he says so in a language that is perhaps understood by 20 percent of the world’s population,” Wilber points out. “Gore assumes that people will respond from rational self-interest based on sound science, but that’s the least of the motivations of the majority of the population of the planet.”

To be successful, Wilber says, “Al Gore has to ‘language’ his message in at least four different value structures to get, say, 80 percent of the world behind him. Anything less than that will simply not work.”

• See Ken Wilber’s Take On Saving the World Through Cross-Cultural Communication in Ode magazine.

As I was disassembling the bookshelves and moving the volumes out to the car, box by box, I was reminded of a time I had done the same thing two decades ago, only then it was vinyl records, not books. That record collection used to take up a small room, but today I can fit all my music on a single hard drive. In the same way, the arrival of the Kindle and other electronic readers, coupled with incredible search technology like Google Scholar, have rendered much of my book collection dead weight.

It’s not just that books are going digital. Used bookstores have now migrated online, which makes it possible to track down and order an out-of-print book in a matter of minutes. And if that’s too expensive a proposition, your local public library can quickly scan the holdings of other collections across the nation and have a copy in your hands in a matter of days via inter-library loan.

What this means is that it no longer makes sense to own a lot of books. If anything, it becomes a real burden, as I discovered in the course of this last move.

It seems I’m not the only one contemplating the future of books. As we know, the publishing world is in deep turmoil right now partly as a result of our changing reading habits. Publishers are “feeling the same chronic pain as other media businesses,” writes Brad Stone in the New York Times, “with layoffs, corporate restructurings and a general sense of gloom, doom and kaboom settling over name-brand giants like Random House and Simon & Schuster.” 

But amid all the anxiety, there is also a sense of optimism about the arrival of the Kindle and other readers that offer a glimpse of the future. “Just this year,” Stone says, “new electronic reading devices have emerged from Amazon, Samsung and Fujitsu, while mobile phones like iPhone from Apple have flowered seemingly overnight into acceptable reading devices for many bookworms.” (See Is This the Future of the Digital Book?)

The question is whether this represents a gradual shift or a watershed event for the publishing industry. Many have been asking this question with a mixture of dread and fascination in recent months. Bestselling author Paulo Coelho put this question to the readers of his blog recently and it stimulated a flurry of interesting responses. See Your Opinion: Will Books Survive?

Another valuable series called “The Future of Reading” appeared in the New York Times last summer. It took up the question of how the Internet and other technological and social forces are changing the way people read. See, for example, Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?

What we’re all wondering is how this shift will it affect the way we do our reading and, more broadly, the way we make sense of information?

This morning, I ran across yet another interesting quote about the demise of the book: “The book, the most traditional means of preserving and communicating thought, has been for a long time destined to disappear, just like cathedrals, walled battlements, museums, and the ideal of pacifism.”

What’s remarkable about this quote is that it was penned not this year, or even this century. Italian futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti wrote these words in 1919. Museums are mostly doing fine, and the ideal of pacifism seems, thankfully, to be enjoying a renaissance. But it’s true, the book does seem to be on its way out. 

Obviously, Marinetti couldn’t have predicted the rise of computers and the wonders of Google, but he saw that the arrival of cinema as a powerful new art form was already beginning to transform the way we present and take in information.

I ran across Marinetti’s words in Richard Lanham’s fascinating and prescient essay collection, The Electronic Word. In the book, Lanham looks at the ways electronic text is changing the structure of communication. Unlike printed text which is fixed and authoritative, digitized text is interactive, dynamic, and capable of blending word with image and sound, he explains. The electronic word challenges the traditional concept of “text” derived from the printed book, and since printed books are still the cornerstone of Western culture, it also prompts a basic reassessment of the liberal arts and how they should be taught.

Lanham makes many important points in the book. He says, for example, that the most precious commodity is no longer information itself but rather the attention required to cope with it. In today’s digital society, we are confronted daily with a deluge of information. “Dealing with this superabundant flow,” he writes, is like “drinking from a firehose.” It means that how information is presented is critical. Digital text makes this point clear in a way that printed text does not. 

What Lanham does in the book is help us to get beyond the old argument of which is better — printed books or their digital equivalents — which is irrelevant in any case. He takes us a level deeper by asking a series of provocative follow up-questions. (More about Lanham’s book in my review of it here.)

And that’s the conversation we need to be having. The question, as I see it, is how to preserve and enhance the best of both printed books and electronic texts and make sure that we retain the essential qualities that make reading such an valuable — and, at its best, deeply fulfilling — activity.

In his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell observed that just as thought can corrupt language, so language can corrupt thought. “A bad usage can be spread by tradition and imitation,” he said, “even among people who should and do know better.”

Academic prose is the most obvious example. Many scholarly books are full of not only bad habits, but sentences — and sometimes entire paragraphs — that are completely unintelligible. Here are a couple of specimens I ran across recently:

“One should not draw the conclusion that ‘new nations’ may not be created or become viable, but rather, that the process by which this occurs is fraught with inappropriate borrowings from extraneous experiences. Legitimation of such new arrangements may be produced at the end of a gun barrel, but more significant is how pivotal elites play the major role in advancing or retarding the process.”  (Donald Warren, “Displaced Majority Politics”)

“There is no easy path between cold cognition of an overdetermined structural analysis and the hot cognition of misplaced concreteness.” (William Gamson, Talking Politics)

But even ordinary speech has become increasingly contaminated by meaningless language. If Orwell were alive today, I’m sure he would be fretting about the way many buzzwords and catchphrases are bandied around today that try, as he put it, “to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

I’m thinking of verbs like “score-carding,” “leveraging,” “monetizing,” and “benchmarking,” for example. Media producers like to talk about “reconfiguring” and “repurposing” their “content.” Business leaders now make the case for “right-sizing the corporation” and making “internal staff-balancing changes.” There is no end to examples of this kind.

Australian writer Don Watson has a name for them: “weasel words.”

What is perhaps especially worrisome to me is how marketing language has come to infect ordinary speech. Everywhere you look, people have started using stock phrases like “pitching an idea,” “enhancing visibility,” and “making concepts stick” that come straight out of the advertising world.

This tendency is also reflected in the virtual obsession with “branding.” Now even individuals seem to think they need to brand themselves, whatever that means.

Take, for example, a book by Brenda Bence with the remarkable title: How You Are Like Shampoo. The book’s subtitle exemplifies the kind language that has become increasingly common, and apparently acceptable to many of us: “The Breakthrough Personal Branding System Based on Proven Big-Brand Marketing Methods to Help You Earn More, Do More, and Be More at Work.”

A recent variant of personal branding is the idea of 15-second marketing and the so-called “elevator pitch.” Authors, speakers, consultants, bloggers and other independent professionals are advised to spend time crafting a short spiel or pitch that sums up their “unique selling proposition.”

See, for example, Steve Pavlina’s 15 Second Marketing and ProBlogger’s Write an Elevator Pitch for Your Blog

It’s a tantalizing idea, and perhaps a fun parlor game, especially for hyphenated professionals who are cook-musicians, say, or artist-realtors. How do you sum up your professional identity in ten words or less, especially at a time when more and more people are working independently (or not working at all) and trying to stake out a niche online?

The trouble, of course, is that it doesn’t work very well. We’re human, after all, and no slogan or catchphrase can sum up what we do very well. And why should it? In order that we might stand out in a crowd? In order to be memorable?

Yes, some say that’s the key to success. But let’s face it, it’s also a kind of vanity. We’re so busy objectifying and packaging ourselves that we forget what it is we do, why we love it and how it nurtures us — and perhaps especially, how we can be useful to people and help them be more of what they want to be.

I like the organic approach advocated by people like Merlin Mann and John Gruber. In a talk at the recent SxSW conference with the deliberately buzzword-riddled title 149 Surprising Ways to Turbocharge Your Blog With Credibility! they make the case for doing what you do well enough, and with enough passion, that it sells itself. Then you don’t have to.

I love the English language, but I don’t think we need to reform or preserve it in all its purity. It’s not about purging everyday speech of jargon and contemptible words. Rather, it’s about being mindful of all the subtle ways our own thinking is polluted by meaningless vocabularies.

As Orwell said, one can’t change the language but at least one can change one’s own habits. “And from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase — some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno or other lump of verbal refuse — into the dustbin where it belongs.”

If you can appreciate the beauty and logic of this metaphor, you would no doubt appreciate what some innovative scientists and philosophers have to say about the evolutionary potential of social networking. The digital revolution, they say, has a lot to tell us about not only the emerging society of the 21st century but also the farther reaches of human consciousness.

One of the most compelling metaphors comes from physicist and philosopher Peter Russell who sees globe-spanning computer networks as part of an embryonic “global brain.” Extrapolating from recent theories in the fields of physics and geobiology, he maintains that the planet itself is a living system and that each person on it is a cell in a kind of global nervous system. As a species, he says, we’re advancing to the point where it will be possible for our minds to link together to create a collective human consciousness.

This shift represents “our next evolutionary leap,” he told me in an interview. Breakthroughs in telecommunications and computer networks are pointing us in that direction. “The interlinking of humanity that began with the emergence of language has now progressed to the point where information can be transmitted to anyone, anywhere, at the speed of light. Billions of messages continually shuttle back and forth, in an ever-growing web of communication, linking the billions of minds of humanity together into a single system.”

The global brain metaphor may strike some as more of a poetic vision than a realistic possibility. But when I asked evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahtouris about this, she said that metaphors have an important place in science. To speak of atoms as little solar systems or as whirlpools of energy is to invoke metaphors, she pointed out. “Metaphor simply means that you take something that is familiar to you and use it as a pictograph or an image of what you are trying to describe that you don’t yet understand well.”

Sahtouris believes that Western science in the throes of a sweeping transition “from mechanics to organics.” In her book Gaia: The Human Journey from Chaos to Cosmos, she talks about the need for a more holistic perspective that recognizes nature not as a giant clockwork mechanism, as the Enlightenment thinkers conceived it, but as a self-organizing living system.

The beauty of the web, in her view, is that it exemplifies many of the characteristics of a dynamic living system. It’s based on equality, reciprocity, diversity, and local autonomy. One example of this, she told me, is “the way each part pays its bills and lets people from all other parts use its territory.” The Internet “has the potential for being the largest, most democratic living system humanity has ever created.”

When I asked Deepak Chopra how he sees the promise of social networking, he offered a more metaphysical perspective. In his view, the net is as a perfect metaphor for the “mechanics of creation.” As he put it, the basic conclusion of contemporary quantum theory is that the raw material of the world is, in effect, non-material. Many of our new technologies owe their existence to this fact. The invention of computers, fax machines, radio, and satellites were all made possible by understanding that the atom — once thought to be the basic unit of matter — is not a solid entity at all, but a “hierarchy of states of information and energy in a void of all possible states of information and energy.”

Put in its simplest terms, this means that so-called “objective” reality is not objective at all, but “a radically ambiguous and ceaselessly flowing quantum soup,” in Chopra’s words. This “field of all possibilities” is directly affected by impulses of energy and information. That is to say, thoughts are the raw material of the universe and therefore fundamentally shape reality.

New technologies such as the Internet and virtual reality furnish us with an excellent metaphor, he says, because they demonstrate “that reality is ‘virtual’ before it gets precipitated into a space-time event.”

While traditional scientists and other die-hard skeptics wave aside the idea that thoughts shape reality, there’s a growing acceptance of this view on many fronts. It’s part of a profound change of consciousness occurring in our culture, as bestselling author Marianne Williamson puts it. “You don’t have to be a spiritual seeker in California, you can be a businessman in Connecticut dealing with the revolution in computers. In other words, no matter what area of life and endeavor we’re in, we’re seeing the signs of a sea change,” she says. No one is denying that we’re moving into a new era in politics, in business, or in science, so “why should we deny that it’s a new era in terms of all human consciousness?”

During flow experiences, our body, mind, and consciousness become ordered and harmoniously directed, feelings of indecision and anxiety disappear, and self-consciousness falls away. Athletes speak of this state as “being in the zone” and mystics sometimes liken it to being in a rapture.

Complex and challenging tasks, such as mountain-climbing, painting, playing an instrument, figure-skating, or solving a difficult business problem, are especially conducive to flow, according to Csikszentmihalyi. These activities engage, concentrate, and absorb the body and mind to such an extent that we lose our awareness of time.

In Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life, which is perhaps the most concise summary of his research on happiness, Csikszentmihalyi says that flow tends to occur when our skills are fully activated in meeting a specific challenge.

Optimal experiences usually involve a fine balance between our ability to act, and the available opportunities for action, he says. “A typical day is full of anxiety and boredom. Flow experiences provide flashes of intense living against this dull background.”

The concept of flow is an interesting and evocative idea, and it certainly has a good deal of explanatory power — which is much needed in psychology, a field that has traditionally spent far too much time focusing on distress and pathology. In developing this notion of flow, Csikszentmihalyi himself has created quite a name for himself (which is no mean feat given that his name is virtually unpronouncable).

A good deal of his success can be attributed to the way he has uncoupled “optimal experience” from the murky domain of religion and mystical experience and in the process given states of heightened consciousness a kind of academic respectability. This is a significant achievement. But does it go far enough? Probably not. By the standards of the contemplative traditions, especially those of Eastern philosophy, his exploration of optimal experience might be best described as, well, a prelude to a beginning.

Excerpt from Finding Flow:

It is the full involvement of flow, rather than happiness, that makes for excellence in life. When we are in flow, we are not happy, because to experience happiness we must focus on our inner states, and that would take away attention from the task at hand. If a rock climber takes time out to feel happy while negotiating a difficult move, he might fall to the bottom of the mountain. The surgeon can’t afford to feel happy during a demanding operation, or a musician while playing a challenging score. Only after the task is completed do we have the leisure to look back on what has happened, and then we are flooded with gratitude for the excellence of that experience — then, in retrospect, we are happy. But one can be happy without experiencing flow. We can be happy experiencing the passive pleasure of a rested body, a warm sunshine, the contentment of a serene relationship. These are also moments to treasure, but this kind of happiness is very vulnerable and dependent on favorable external circumstances. The happiness that follows flow is of our own making, and it leads to increasing complexity and growth in consciousness.

Read more:

• My review of The Evolving Self by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
• YouTube Clip: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and the Flow of Goodness

Genuine understanding seems to be the exception rather than the norm in everyday communication. We speak at each other, or past each other. We speak different conceptual languages, hold different values, embody different ways of seeing the world.

Much of the time, we’re not even listening to each other at all. The dialogue is a monologue. We fire salvos of information across the Internet, or shoot each other text messages, or blog or Twitter or Plurk about ourselves. But is anyone paying attention? And if they are, do they catch our drift?

The trouble with much of what passes for communication today is that it’s all crosstalk. It’s a din, not a dialogue.

The noisy chatter reflects the fact that we don’t really know how to engage one another in authentic conversations. We simply haven’t learned the skills of listening closely to each other, of engaging in meaningful exchanges, and of finding shared sources of meaning. We lack the know-how and the tools.

As we move into times of accelerating change and deepening uncertainty, we need to get smart about how to talk to one another. We need to be able to overcome differences, find common ground, build meaning and purpose, and set directions together. We need to be able to think together as groups, as teams, as committees, as communities, and as citizens.

The way to do that is through dialogue. The word dialogue is often contrasted with monologue, as if it were a two-way, rather than than a one-way, process. But that’s misleading. Dialogue is a contraction from the Greek words for through and words. It suggests an activity aimed at eliciting meaning.

The Greeks may not have invented dialogue, but they introduced the idea that individuals are not intelligent on their own, that it’s only by reasoning together that they are able to uncover the truth for themselves. The Greeks understood that if two or more people are unsure about a question, they can accomplish something together they can’t do on their own. By questioning and probing each other, carefully dissecting and analyzing ideas, finding the inconsistencies, never attacking or insulting but always searching for what they can accept between them, they can gradually attain deeper understanding and insight.

That’s what dialogue is: a form of discussion aimed at fostering mutual insight and common purpose. The process involves listening with empathy, searching for common ground, exploring new ideas and perspectives, and bringing unexamined assumptions into the open.

When done well, the benefits can be extraordinary. Long-standing stereotypes can be dissolved, mistrust overcome, and visions shaped and grounded in a shared sense of purpose. People previously at odds with one another can come into alignment on objectives and strategies. New perspectives and insights can be gained, new levels of creativity stimulated, and bonds of community strengthened.

While dialogue is often confused with other forms of discourse, it belongs in a distinctive category of its own. Unlike debate, it doesn’t involve arguing for a point of view, defending a set of assumptions, or critiquing the positions of others. Unlike negotiation or consensus-building, it’s not a method of reaching agreement or arriving at decisions. And unlike discussion, it can only emerge when participants trust and respect each other, suspend their judgments, and listen deeply to all points of view.

The process is also distinct from deliberation which is not so much a mode of communication as a form of thought and reflection that can take place in any kind of conversation. Such dialogue is aimed at finding the best course of action. Deliberative questions take the form “What should we do?” The purpose is not so much to solve a problem or resolve an issue as to explore the most promising avenues for action.

The process of dialogue is more important than ever today for a number of reasons. For one thing, the confrontation between different cultural traditions and worldviews requires some process by which people can communicate across differences. For another, the fragmentation of society into a myriad of subcultures based on profession, status, race, ethnicity, political loyalty, etc., make it necessary that people find a pathway to common ground. A third reason is that traditional authority structures are falling away.

Dialogue is the most effective response to these developments because, on the one hand, it allows people to span their differences and forge shared frames of reference and, on the other, it gives those formerly excluded from decision-making an opportunity to participate in the process of finding common ground and establishing priorities for action.

But dialogue is not always easy or straightforward. It can run aground in a thousand subtle ways. Effective dialogue requires that all the participants have equal standing, that they listen with respect and empathy, and that ideas and assumptions explored openly and without judgment.

Effective dialogue typically follows some basic ground rules:

• The focus is on common interests, not divisive ones
• The dialogue and decision-making processes are separated
• Assumptions that can lead to distortions of certain points of view are clarified and brought into the open
• People are encouraged to reveal their own insights and assumptions before speculating on those of others
• Concrete examples are used to raise general issues
• The process focuses on conflicts between value systems, not people
• When appropriate, participants are encouraged to express emotions accompanying strongly held values
• Participants err on the side of including people who disagree
• They encourage relationships in order to humanize transactions
• They minimize the level of mistrust before pursuing practical objectives.

The late physicist David Bohm developed what is widely regarded as the most useful model of dialogue. He saw it as a method for developing what he called a “higher social intelligence.” Nothing is more important, in my view. In the past, it may have been enough to get by on personal intelligence alone. But it’s no longer enough to be brilliant on our own (if such a thing is even possible). Our pressing problems today require that we get smart together, that we harness our best collective thinking and put it to work in the world.

Read more:

• Thinking Together — In this essay, I discuss my experience using deliberation, a form of dialogue aimed at finding the best solution to an issue or set of problems.
• Collaboration and Community — In this paper, originally commissioned by the Pew Partnership for Civic Change, I look at the theory and practice of civic collaboration (of which dialogue and deliberation is a crucial component).
• Bohm Dialogue — A collection of papers and articles about the dialogue process developed by physicist David Bohm.
• Wholeness Regained: Revisiting Bohm’s Dialogue — An excellent article by Lee Nichol that addresses the tension between the inner work of the individual and the collective process of the group.