Chaque jour, je réserve quelques minutes de mon temps à des lectures qui sont en lien avec mon travail. Présentement, ce sont deux livres sur le dialogue qui retiennent mon attention:
- Bohm, David (1996) On Dialogue, Londres: Routeledge;
- Isaacs, William (1999) Dialogue: The Art Of Thinking Together, New York: Currency.
Les deux ouvrages sont étroitement reliés (les auteurs ont collaboré à de nombreuses reprises dans les années ‘80 et ‘90) et viennent apporter un éclairage théorique très intéressant sur le travail que je fais.
Il apparaît évident que la pensée de Bohm a été fondamentale pour les travaux de Isaacs mais aussi pour ceux de Peter Senge, Otto Scharmer (Theory-U) et Juanita Brown (World Café).
Sans prendre le temps de les traduire en français, je consigne ici quelques paragraphes tirés de On Dialogue. L’image du laser pour parler de cohérence est extrêmement intéressante.
We can say that a group of about twenty to forty people is almost a microcosm of the whole society, and has a lot of different opinions and assumptions. [...] In that size group, you begin to get what may be called a «microculture». You have enough people coming in from different subcultures so that they are a sort of microcosm of the whole culture. And then the question of culture – the collectively shared meaning begins to come in. That is crucial, because the collectively shared meaning is very powerful.[...]The power of the group goes up much faster than the number of people. I’ve said elsewhere that it could be compared to a laser. Ordinary light is called «incoherent», which means that it is going in all sorts of directions, and the light waves are not in phase with each other so they don’t build up. But a laser produces a very intense beam which is coherent. The light waves build up strength because they are all going in the same direction. This beam can do all sorts of things that ordinary light cannot.Now, you could say that our ordinary thought in society is incoherent – it is going in all sorts of directions, with thoughts conflicting and canceling each other out. But if people were to think together in a coherent way, it would havee tremendous power. That’s the suggestion. If we have a dialogue situation – a group which has sustained dialogue for quite a while in which people get to know each other, and so on – then we might have such a coherent movement of thought, a coherent movement of communication. It would be coherent not only at the level we recognize, but at the tacit level, at the level for which we have only a vague feeling. That would be more important.«Tacit» means that which is unspoken, which cannot be described – like the tacit knowledge required to ride a bicycle. It is the actual knowledge, and it may be coherent or not. I am proposing that thought – to think – is actually subtle tacit process. The concrete process of thinking is very tacit. The meaning is basically tacit. And what we can say explicitly is only a very small part of it. I think we all realize that we do almost everything by this sort of tacit knowledge. Thought is emerging from the tacit ground, and any fundamental change in thought will come from the tacit ground. So if we are communicating at the tacit level, then maybe thought is changing.
