Dialogue for Conscious Evolution
Dialogue for Conscious Evolution
Book Series: C.West Churchman and Related Works Series
Chapter in: Wisdom, Knowledge, and Management
Springer
DOI 10.1007/978-0-387-36506-0
Copyright 2006
Christakis A. N.
The chapter is based on a forthcoming book titled Dialogue for the Information Age Democracy. It focuses on the critical role of dialogue in the evolutionary guidance of social systems. It presents findings from grounded theoretical research starting with the Club of Rome prospectus on The Predicament of Mankind in 1970.
This research led to the discovery of a disciplined dialogue paradigm called Structured Design Process (SDP). The SDP is suitable for engaging stakeholders in designing their social systems in the context of the escalating complexity of the Information Age. The paradigm is founded on a new geometry for languaging, called Archanesian, which postulates three axioms: (a) the escalating complexity of social systems designing, (b) the cognitive limitations of the observer in processing too many observations simultaneously, and (c) the difficulty in determining the relative saliency of observations. These three axioms become the foundation for the construction of terminology, methodology, and architecture for the SDP. In this chapter I will focus primarily on the architecture, which is composed of 35 components, six of which are laws discovered by systems thinkers of the 20th century.
The six laws and their interactions in the context of structured dialogue for the production of meaning and community wisdom (DEMOSOPHIA) are presented in the chapter. The SDP has been applied for the last twenty years to address national, international, and inter-organizational design challenges. The results have been extraordinarily satisfactory to the practitioners and participants of these projects. A brief story from the design arena will also be presented.
Key words Dialogue – structured dialogue – social systems – designing – CogniScope – democracy – Information Age – globalization – stakeholders – design arena
RELATED WORK: New Agora: New Geometry of Languaging and New Technology of Democracy http://www.harnessingcollectivewisdom.com/pdf/newagora.pdf