1. Creating Shared Understanding
Sustainable Conversations are built upon a foundation of shared understanding.
But shared understanding is not to be confused with shared agreement.
Ways to support the emergence of shared understanding include:
- Aligning with an intention to serve a common goal or larger whole.
- Engaging people by including processes to honor head, heart and hands.
- Honoring multiple perspectives and dissenting voices, then cross-pollinating them in ways that expand the range of possibilities available.
- Building both individual and collective capacity to work with ambiguity, complexity and paradox.
- Seeking after what is useful in moving the conversation toward the desired outcome - which may change as the conversation unfolds!
Creating shared understanding moves us toward:
- Dreaming together of a mutually desired future.
- Grounding the images from that dream into a shared reality.
- Exploring how to make our shared dream our shared reality.
- The creation of shared agreements.
Not agreeing with someone does not render us incapable of working with them.
But not understanding them very often does.
Shared understanding is the basis for exploring possibilities together.