The MAGIC OF DIALOGUE: Transforming Conflict into Cooperation [Hardcover]

Daniel Yankelovich (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0684854570 | ISBN-13: 978-0684854571 | Publication Date: September 2, 1999 | Edition: 1

In "The Magic of Dialogue," famed social scientist Daniel Yankelovich does more than revive the ancient art of dialogue; he reinvents it in a brief, practical form that suits our times. Drawing on decades of research, he offers a method that will help managers, leaders, businesspeople, and other professionals succeed in the new economy. By helping them to master the communication skills needed to conduct dialogue successfully, he shows how the discipline of dialogue can make them more effective managers, strengthen relationships, resolve problems, and achieve shared objectives.

Our new global economy is a world of exploding diversity, merging corporate cultures, and eroding top-down authority. More players participate in decision making than ever before. New circumstances and widely dispersed organizations with differences in interests and agendas oblige managers to make decisions in a climate of mistrust and misunderstanding. In this diverse and less hierarchical world, decision makers must learn to argue less and "dialogue" more.

Not just another form of conversation or discussion, dialogue is a specific skill to be acquired, a skill as important as the techniques of negotiation. Successfully practiced, it can produce extraordinary results.

"The Magic of Dialogue" highlights the following important points:

* How dialogue differs from debate, discussion, and deliberation
* When dialogue is essential
* When ordinary discussion and debate are good enough
* The new social and business trends that make dialogue more urgently needed than ever before
* Ten mental "potholes" to avoid
* How to initiate dialogue through "acts of empathy"
* Thespecial kinds of knowledge and insight that dialogue produces
* Dialogue as a path to public wisdom
* How dialogue can resolve the tensions between the Vision of the Free Market and the Vision of Civil Society

As our businesses and culture at large continue to expand, involving more people with differing perspectives in each transaction, dialogue can be the catalyst that brings us together, builds our strengths, and moves us in constructive ways.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Dialogue--a carefully structured communications technique that is generally employed to promote mutual understanding between bona fide as well as potential adversaries--has been responsible for such seminal events as ending the cold war and initiating (albeit briefly) a Middle East peace accord. But business, says well-known social scientist and public-opinion specialist Daniel Yankelovich, also can utilize the process to develop "webs of relationships" that encourage the acceptance and increase the adoption of any company's plans and visions. The Magic of Dialogue outlines 15 specific strategies (such as "Focus on common interests, not divisive ones" and "Use specific cases to raise general issues") that can be successfully applied in situations ranging from routine meetings and casual encounters to corporate retreats and union negotiations. While admitting it "is not a panacea for all the problems that ail us," Yankelovich incorporates real-life examples and suggestions to support his contention that "when dialogue is done skillfully, the results can be extraordinary." --Howard Rothman

From Kirkus Reviews

A believer in communication celebrates the obvious. Yankelovich (Coming to Public Judgment, 1991) is so giddy about dialogue his cheerleading is irritating. The promise of dialogue is certainly appealing: ``long-standing stereotypes dissolved, mistrust overcome, mutual understanding achieved, visions shaped and grounded in shared purpose, people previously at odds with one another aligned on objectives and strategies,'' etc. But does anyone doubt that listening carefully and sympathetically to each other, genuinely trying to understand the positions of others, then incorporating what we have learned into our own pronouncements is more likely to produce good things than if we refuse to do so? This behavior may be rare, but surely not because people honestly believe narrow-mindedness is superior in conversations. According to Yankelovich, ``the most frequent reason that dialogue fails is simply that it is not done well'' (of course, few activities succeed when done badly), and based on this truism, he proceeds to lay out three core requirements for dialogue (equality and the absence of coercion, listening with empathy, and bringing assumptions into the open), 15 strategies for achieving it, ten potholes that hinder it, and three cultural fault lines dialogue can overcome. Rarely has common sense been presented so systematically. The first strategy, for example, is to check for the three core requirements of dialogue and learn how to introduce any that are missing; the first pothole is that people hold back because they lack the trust to participate freely in the interaction. While no one could question the truth of these statements, there is reason to wonder whether a book featuring them needed to be written. Yankelovich and his readers would have been better off if he had applied his dialogic skills to a substantive problem like the topic of his final chapter, the ``struggle for the soul of America,'' rather than writing this naive primer. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; 1 edition (September 2, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684854570
• ISBN-13: 978-0684854571
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #350,426 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More Shared Space for Better Alternatives and Cooperation!, September 28, 2000

By 

Donald Mitchell "Jesus Loves You!" (Thanks for Providing My Reviews over 109,000 Helpful Votes Globally) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The MAGIC OF DIALOGUE: Transforming Conflict into Cooperation (Hardcover)

Think of this book as a work of applied emotional intelligence. Fans of Daniel Goleman (author of Emotional Intelligence and Emotional Intelligence at Work) will applaud this book, for it helps to expand the emotional intelligence of us all in collectively developing and agreeing to better solutions for emotionally and factually difficult issues.

For some time, the decision theorists have been focusing on ways to structure joint decisions (such as those involved in negotiations) to help the people involved perceive the shared interests they have, and how to serve them. In books like Getting to Yes, Getting Past Now, Smart Choices, and (most recently) Beyond Winning, we are encouraged to open up the scope of our considerations with others to find solutions that serve both sides well. Those books appeal to the intellect and are quite valuable for defining the game-playing and quantitative aspects of the issues.

As an example(from Getting to Yes), two children are fighting over an orange. The parent decides the battle by cutting the orange in half, and giving one-half to each child. One child eats the fruit and throw away the peel from his half. The other child uses the peel for cooking and throws away the fruit. Even though the solution of giving all the peel to the child who wants to cook and all the fruit to the child who wants to eat it would have been perfect, that option never emerged. Everyone is the loser relative to the ideal solution.

In The Magic of Dialogue, Professor Daniel Yankelovich takes on the lack of shared emotional space from the perspective of sociology, and extends the understanding of working with others that we all need to create these win-win alternatives and agreements. I found this book to be an important expansion of the subject matters of collaborative thinking and problem solving.

The book is organized around first establishing collaboration as a much-needed expansion of the way we interact with others. Next, the book does an excellent job of defining 15 strategies (neatly summarized on pages 127-128, following excellent earlier discussions and examples), and outlining 10 potholes that can get in the way (as bad thinking habits) immediately after the summaries of the 15 strategies.

Without giving you the whole list, the essence of the concepts here is to create an emotional linkage that allows us to feel empathetic towards the other person. This primarily occurs because we sense that the other person is willing to look at things from our perspective, and that we share either common ideas or values that we can respect. After that linkage is established, more information is shared, understood, and incorporated in the group thinking. More empathy builds to more sharing, which leads to more understanding, and so forth. Basically, we can create avirtuous cycle of collaboration and cooperation.

The greatest strength of the book is in providing examples of how such emotional connection occurred in many different and difficult situations, both humble (school policy decisions being discussed among parents and teachers) and exalted (arms negotiations during the cold war).

Inthe final part of the book, Professor Yankelovich focuses on fundamental flaws in the way we dialogue in the United States. By making these flaws explicit, he helps us each become more aware of these issues so we can begin to overcome them. One of the most interesting to me was the idea of considering things as either from afactual or an emotional perspective, with factual being assumed to be superior in our culture. In technical issues involving physical items, that priority for the factual makes sense. With people issuesin social situations, it often doesn't. Combining both perspectives often works best for social issues. I found that Professor Yankelovich's perspective in describing what we should pay attention to (depending on the subject) to be valuable. He also has a number of useful things to say about how to combine the two perspectives to derive better solutions and decisions (for example, inhow free markets should be combined with governmental limits and social civility).

Each issue also comes with an explanation of how one can facilitate a better dialogue by varying formats and type of facilitation employed. One of the most striking examples was an outline for how to conduct a national debate on the future of social security that would resonate with each of us, and help us create a national consensus at the voter level. He proposes using research to create a series of televised dialogues among people who represent the major points of view among the electorate (rather than the experts and legislators) to consider the ethical, moral, and economic perspectives that need to be reconciled.

Anyone who is concerned about lack of progress in solving problems where everyone in a group has a vested interest will find this book to be relevant and valuable. These concepts can be applied to personal relationships, solving problems at work, or to important social issues.

After you have finished reading this book, I strongly urge you to pick an area which you care about that has been a persistent problem for a long time. Use the book to diagnose why dialogue has been stalled, and use the book's recommendations to overcome those stalls. After you have succeeded in one area, repeat the process.

Get out of the potholes and back on the rapid road to mutual progress!

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent practical guide to dialogue, June 8, 2000

By 

Bill Godfrey (Mt Stuart, TAS Australia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The MAGIC OF DIALOGUE: Transforming Conflict into Cooperation (Hardcover)

This book could not be bettered as a relatively brief and very readable guide to dialogue - how it differs from other forms of conversation, why it is important, the conditions for effective dialogue and strategies for its use in different situations. The style is informal and the examples used are relevant and exactly illustrate the points being made.

It does not replace fuller guides, such as Ellinor and Gerard's 'Dialogue', but complements them. Whereas Ellinor and Gerard is of most use to the specialist, this book is invaluable for executives and professionals, and indeed for anyone who is seeking to achieve cooperation in a complex situation. It is particularly valuable for the range of its coverage - from resolving difference within the family to identifying directions for business. It also addresses the wider issues of how society should develop and how ordinary citizens can be fruitfully engaged in the decision processes.

The book is in three parts:

The Will to Do it: Why Dialogue is Necessary The Skill to Do it: Strategies for Dialogue The Broader Uses of Dialogue

The discussion in Parts one and two is cast mostly in the context of organisations. Part three is concerned with the political process, the divide between the elites and the mass of the citizens, the nature of knowledge in a societal context and the advantages of dialogue and barriers to its use in deciding societal directions.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Interesting ideas for both personal and public communication, September 21, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The MAGIC OF DIALOGUE: Transforming Conflict into Cooperation (Hardcover)

In this short and readable book, Yankelovich presents a theory of communication, based on his own understanding of dialogue. The book functions on a number of different levels: first, it provides useful strategies for anyone in a leadership position as to how to break through the stalemate and gridlock which are so frequently found in complex organizations; the strategies presented also have an application to everyday life, and can be useful in interpersonal communication within the family as well. Finally, the book also presents a theoretical framework which undergirds the structure. The principles are illustrated with a number of examples and anecdotes that help flesh out the author's meaning.