Volume VI
Dialogue in Divided Communities
Somebody asks you to get them into one room. You have no mandate, no procedure, and nothing behind you. This is the training for that.
Fifty hours on convening a conversation in a place that has stopped having them. When to refuse. Who can afford to speak. What to do when the room comes apart. And the week afterwards, which decides whether the afternoon happened.
The Problem, Stated Plainly
Our field treats dialogue facilitation as the lesser relative of mediation. Softer, more open ended, useful as a preliminary for parties who are not ready for the real thing.
This training puts the opposite proposition. Take a mediation and remove the mandate, the procedure, the agenda and the document at the end. What is left was the method all along, and everything removed was costume.
Dialogue facilitation is what remains. It is mediation with the apparatus taken off, which is the form in which almost all of it is practised in the world: by programme officers, local officials, teachers, religious figures, and people both sides happen to trust. It is the harder discipline rather than the easier one, because a person with no structure to stand on carries the room on judgement exercised in the moment.
Almost every training in this subject begins one step after the hardest decision. This one begins with it.
What You Actually Get
Six chapters, 162 pages, and a town called Tarno that you carry from the first page to the last.
Chapter 1 is the case against the meeting: the three conditions, the four things a dialogue is confused with, how a meeting can confirm what each side already believes, and how to decline in a way that leaves the subject open.
Chapter 2 asks who can afford to speak: the three capacities a participant may bring, and the fourth question, which is what a sentence costs the person who says it, and which appears on no participant list anywhere.
Chapter 3 is arriving empty: why an agenda is a claim about a conflict made by the person who understands it least, and what four weeks of preparation are actually for.
Chapter 4 is the room: the first four minutes, sequence, and the four things a convener must not do, all of which are taught as skills elsewhere.
Chapter 5 is the chapter that exists nowhere else: what to do when the room comes apart, in the thirty seconds and the fourteen hours afterwards.
Chapter 6 is the week that decides it, and what a career in this costs the person doing it.
Throughout, six instruments, each fitting on a single sheet: the invitation in six lines, the participant list with reasons, the preparation note, writing while it is being said, four sentences for a broken room, and the record.
The Fifty Hours
Twelve required readings, at roughly three hours per chapter, including the institutional guidance this volume argues against and the social psychology of intergroup contact.
Seventy two questions with the answers, answered before you look. Six exercises of ninety minutes to two hours, each on a convening you choose and carry through the volume. Six written analyses that nobody reads but you. And a final assignment of two to three thousand words covering a complete cycle, from the decision to convene to the week after.
Nothing is submitted. Nothing is scored.
Who This Is For
Anybody who has been asked to get people into a room and holds no authority to do it: programme staff, local authority officials, teachers, religious figures, community workers, and mediators working where no institution is coming.
It assumes no prior training and no fieldwork. It assumes you are prepared to decline things.
What Makes It Different
It begins with the decision to convene rather than with the design of the session, and it argues that in a large number of cases the answer is no or not yet.
It records what a sentence costs the person who says it, which no participant list anywhere records and which decides who can be honest in a room.
It argues against the agenda, and states the three things you give up by not having one.
It contains a chapter on what happens when a room comes apart, which does not exist in any handbook we have been able to find, and which is the situation every convener eventually meets and believes is unique to them.
And it is explicit that the strongest single recommendation in it is to refuse. A practitioner who finishes this training and convenes fewer meetings than before has understood it.
What It Is Not
It is not a certification and confers no title. It is a statement of completed study, issued in your name, and it does not entail entry in the WMO Mediators Directory.
It is not a course in mediation, which is a formation conducted under examination and is a separate undertaking.
It is not a set of session designs. There are no exercises to run, and the fifth chapter explains at length why several popular ones reliably break rooms.
And it does not promise that conversations produce agreements. Most of them do not, and the volume is specific about what they produce instead.
Price and Terms
EUR 390. The same fee in every country in the world. Paid once, no subscription.
Access for twelve months. Study in any rhythm and any time zone. Begin the day you pay.
The fee is credited once against the Expert Training if you book within twelve months.
Questions People Actually Ask
Is this relevant if I work in Europe? Yes, and the volume makes the argument rather than assuming it. Arbitration, works councils, professional disciplinary bodies and families settle a large share of European disputes outside the courts, and every uncomfortable question this training asks of a council of elders can be asked of those.
Do I need to take the earlier volumes first? No. Each training stands alone and assumes nothing.
What does it argue with? The OSCE reference guide on mediation and dialogue facilitation, the facilitator handbooks of the dialogue tradition after David Bohm and Martin Buber, the social psychology of intergroup contact and its four conditions, and accounts written by participants rather than conveners. Each is read for where it stops.
Will it teach me a method I can use? It will teach you six instruments that each fit on a sheet of paper, and a set of judgements that no procedure can make for you. The strongest single recommendation in it is to convene fewer things.
Is there an examination? No, and no tutor and no deadlines. Each chapter carries ten questions with the answers printed beneath them, asking you to apply the chapter rather than recall it.
Do I need a place to work on? Yes, and you choose it in the first chapter: somewhere procedures exist that are not those of the state, which may be somewhere you have worked, expect to, or know well. You carry it through all six chapters.
Is there a discount? No. One price everywhere, and no sales.
Convene fewer things, and stay longer.
Fifty hours. One town you carry from beginning to end.
EUR 390, credited once against the Expert Training if you book within twelve months.