What Emerges in Dialogue

Looking back, I think I first became consciously interested in dialogue about twenty years ago, when I received psychological counseling.

At the time, I was running a systems development company.

We were a team of about twenty people.

It was a company I had started myself.

Although the business had been growing and profitable, a small misalignment led to a sudden downturn. I spent my days running around trying to secure funding, exhausted by the weight of both responsibility and dreams. Eventually, with great effort, we returned to profitability, and I managed to bring the company to a point where recovery seemed only a matter of time.

However, that was not the direct reason I sought counseling.

I happened to receive work from a company that offered psychological services, and partly for business understanding, partly out of curiosity, I decided to experience their counseling myself.

The counseling was based on Process-Oriented Psychology.

Rather than aiming to solve problems, this approach listens carefully to the process that is already unfolding.

Symptoms, conflicts, discomfort, and even coincidental events are not seen as things to eliminate, but as meaningful movements within a larger flow.

One day, during a session, there was a moment when one of my deeply held assumptions began to dissolve.

And that very afternoon, something unexpected happened.

The company I believed had recovered—after returning to profitability—was suddenly seized, and it collapsed.

Yet strangely, the collapse felt like liberation.

What had been, for me, the most frightening reality while I was managing the company, turned out—when it actually happened—to be exactly the release I needed at that time.

Of course, I still feel deeply sorry for those who were affected by the situation.

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If I were to explore that story further, it would become quite long, so I will return to the theme of dialogue.

After the company collapsed, I became, for a while, a management advisor to the same organization that provided the counseling.

In addition to counseling, they also offered workshops on deep listening, and I helped create materials for those programs.

There, I learned that human communication relies heavily on non-verbal elements, and that what we consciously recognize as the self is only part of the picture. The unconscious also plays a major role in shaping our behavior.

At the same time, I realized something simple but profound:

just because we have ears does not mean we automatically know how to listen.

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When I was working as a businessman—actually, even now—leadership was an important theme for me.

When I first entered the workforce after university, leadership models were largely centralized. Titles and roles defined authority. Organizations were structured like pyramids.

But with the commercialization and growth of the Internet, organizations gradually shifted toward decentralized, network-based structures.

It felt similar to developments in information systems.

And in fact, leadership is closely related to information processing.

It is built on communication between people.

Looking back, I think I left my first large company and started my own business because I wanted to try this kind of network-based leadership and organization.

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Even after my first company collapsed, my interest in leadership remained.

Around that time, I noticed something important:

for network-based leadership to function, communication becomes essential.

And that is where dialogue becomes central.

This connects to deep listening.

Just because we have ears does not mean we know how to listen.

In the same way,

just because we have mouths does not mean we know how to engage in dialogue.

So I began studying dialogue and practicing it.

While participating in listening and dialogue sessions with a group of entrepreneurs, someone introduced me to a book: On Dialogue by David Bohm.

I have rarely encountered a clearer description of dialogue.

It captures succinctly that dialogue is not merely conversation, nor is it discussion.

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"In such a dialogue, when one person says something, the other person does not in general respond with exactly the same meaning as that seen by the first person. Rather, the meanings are only similar and not identical.

Thus, when the second person replies, the first person sees a difference between what he meant to say and what the other person understood.

On considering this difference, he may then be able to see something new, which is relevant both to his own views and to those of the other person. And so it can go back and forth, with the continual emergence of a new content that is common to both participants.

Thus, in a dialogue, each person does not attempt to make common certain ideas or items of information that are already known to him. Rather, it may be said that the two people are making something in common, i.e., creating something new together."

— David Bohm, On Dialogue (1996)

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So yes. The very process of dialogue is already creation.

Bohm explains that something new emerges through communication only when participants suspend their assumptions, refrain from trying to influence one another, and listen freely.

Letting go of prior ideas and intentions.

Being willing to encounter something different.

Caring about truth and coherence.

The conditions for dialogue are the same as the conditions for creation.

Facing what is present.

Allowing what is unfolding to move freely.

It is like waiting for something to emerge from silence.

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