Dialogic CI

 

We are all practitioners of dialogic CI

“An idea is set in motion by being shared. The range of tools available for pooling, exchanging, and developing ideas determines the extent of our possible innovation and creativity and so fundamentally our prosperity, well-being and hope for the future.”  (Leadbeater, 2008)

The sharing of ideas and inspirations in conversation has always been central to what allowed an emergent civilization to replace the incumbent. Every new modes of communication brought with it a brand new universe of human capabilities. Our age is not an exception.

The rapid multiplication of social media is bringing on a rainforest of modalities for real-time and asynchronous conversations. Let’s assume that effective tools can be developed to help removing all blocks that still prevent a massive augmentation of our dialogic CI.

Dialogic CI is the most ancient and foundational type of CI, present everywhere and every time, where and when, two or more humans in conversation become capable to co-create something they value and could not have created separately. All human groups are a group of dialogic CI “practitioners.”

If so, then the reflecting on the following sequence of three questions will help us co-developing the direction of this research.

 

Questions for augmenting dialogic CI

A. How can groups, organizations, and communities become better practitioners of dialogic CI?

B. What are the key areas and scales of the practice in real-time and asynch conversations, which could be augmented by a multi-platform and multi-channel virtual environment, optimized for that task?

C. What is the edge of our current conversation practices? Where are the bottlenecks waiting to be dissolved?

To answer question A., we need to first answer B.; and to answer question B., we need to first answer the two questions C, which are also the first questions that we’ll ask from the participants of the action research.

We plan to include the questions listed above both in our generative interviews with members of the groups participating in the research, and in the survey directed to selected experts, using a modified Delphi method. 

 

Dialogic CI action research methods and themes

As the popular saying that circulates on the Internet goes, “if I am not living on the edge, I’m taking up too much space.” What that wise adage cannot tell us is where the edge is and how I can move it. People and groups choose their edges of not-knowing, by setting direction for learning, evolving, and fulfilling their purpose in life. Where that direction meet with the one of others, networks of dialogic CI form, networks of great potential for social creativity and synergy.

What is the edge of our current conversation practices? Where are the bottlenecks waiting to be dissolved? The participatory action research that we propose would provide a process container for those questions go viral, using a combination of modern social media. Doing so, it would become an evolving and self-running demonstration of its own target: collective intelligence in action, organizing itself across multiple platforms, geographies, cultures and generations.

Other themes that we may explore in this research direction include what augmented dialogue support can be provided for:

·      collaborative sensing and intuition

·      attenuating/amplifying complex mental models, as needed

·      collective self-reflexivity

·      visualizing networks of conversations

·      integrative decision-making

·      practicing elastic shared-attention

·      joint meaning-making while dealing with shared cognitive overload

·      reducing attention overhead in collaborative authoring

·      identifying and dissolving the epistemological barriers in the one-to-many and many-to-many flow of meaning

·      enhancing cognitive synergies

Regarding the last point, we recognize that augmented dialogue support for enhancing cognitive synergies is a foundational and compound requirement the unpacking/chunking of which will call for the special attention of the research team because:

“People think together, using dialogue and deliberation. They find and share information, critique logic and assumptions, explore implications, create solutions and mental models together. Their diversity, used well, helps them overcome blind spots, ignorance, and stuck-ness. They see a bigger, more complete picture with more complexity and nuance, and develop better outcomes than they could alone. Most of this can be readily explained in terms of cognitive synergies among the participants.” (Atlee, 2008)