Ian Alexander's Reviews of Books on Requirements Engineering and Related Subjects

Classic Book Review: On Dialogue

David Bohm, edited by Lee Nichol
Routledge 1996.

ISBN 0415149126 (paper)

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David Bohm, physicist and philosopher, died in 1992. He leaves behind a rich legacy of thinking on dialogue. This book, expertly selected by Lee Nichol, gathers up the main threads of Bohm's work (spanning several decades, at least four books, and numerous papers) into a slim and readable volume.

As far as can be gathered from the Web, Bohm acquired almost guru status, which has persisted. While some of the groups following his ideas seem a little odd, the basic idea that dialogue promotes understanding (to use RE jargon, helps to resolve stakeholder conflicts...) is clearly sound. As Winston Churchill put it, 'jaw jaw is better than war war': and this depressingly remains just as true and just as ignored in a world with only one superpower as it was in a world with two or more.

With this amount of context, it is not surprising that people with widely differing viewpoints (oops, RE jargon again) should come to Bohm:

the philosophical and stoical in the grand tradition of Krishnamurti -- there's a published record of a 3-day dialogue between the two men;
the spiritually-inclined personal development movement;
and perhaps most interesting for our purposes (and the way I came across Bohm), a gifted facilitator like Ellen Gottesdiener, who has brought a totally fresh perspective on to requirements elicitation.

Bohmian dialogue is a very particular thing:

"A Dialogue works best with between twenty and forty people seated facing one another in a single circle."

In other words a dialogue is not at all a matter of ordinary conversation, no matter how refined. It is something you enter into with a purpose, like going to a workshop or for that matter a review meeting. And Bohm reflects on the way dialogue works, and what we do to prevent it in ordinary life. This brings us to a very Bohmian concept, suspension:

"Suspension of thoughts, impulses, judgments, etc., lies at the very heart of Dialogue. It is one of its most important new aspects. It is not easily grasped because the activity is both unfamiliar and subtle. Suspension involves attention, listening and looking and is essential to exploration. Speaking is necessary, of course, for without it there would be little in the Dialogue to explore, But the actual process of exploration takes place during listening -- not only to others but to oneself."

The question for requirements engineers is plainly how far this might be applied to make business meetings of different kinds work more effectively. Happily, Bohm addressed this issue directly:

The creative potential of Dialogue is great enough to allow a temporary suspension of any of the structures and relationships that go to make up an organisation.

Finally, we would like to make clear that we are not proposing Dialogue as a panacea nor as a method or technique designed to succeed all other forms of social interaction. Not everyone will find it useful nor, certainly, will it be useful in all contexts. There is great value to be found in many group psychotherapeutic methods and there are many tasks that require firm leadership and a well-formed organisational structure.
(Quotations from Dialogue - A proposal, by David Bohm, Donald Factor and Peter Garrett)

It isn't an accident, either, that Bohm explores issues of knowing: he's close to Krishnamurti's Indian roots when he considers the knower, the knowing and the known, mentioning Polanyi's concept of Tacit Knowledge. The point is that it takes a body to know something: understanding is a physical thing. The dreadful failure of Artificial Intelligence was that it hubristically assumed that knowledge could be disembodied, divorced from the people who knew it, codified as cut-and-dried rules. Polanyi knew better.

This is not a textbook, nor yet a book of philosophical argument, though there is a streak of that. It is closer to an appeal for deeper humanity and unmediated communication, in an era when more and more of what we do is mediated electronically. This aspect too should be a central theme in requirements work, where we forget at our peril that we are dealing with people who cannot be formalised out of their requirements (as I argued in The Glamour of Formalisation).

So, if you'd like a book about requirements that never once mentions the word, perhaps this is it. (Another wonderful choice might be Schank's Tell Me a Story.)

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