Are you aware, if your dialogue is over, your relationship is over too?
By Manoj Sharma of CusJo.com
The lack of dialogue is killing us as a society. For any relationship to be strong there has to be a strong dialogue between people; be they in a one-to-one, small-group, large-group, national or international setting. Where there is no dialogue there is no relationship. The separation, fragmentation, disagreement, disenchantments, disillusion, fear, hatred and the mutual destruction that comes thereafter is just the inevitable by-product of a lack of dialogue. It’s North Korea versus the United States, but in your world. Things are as straight forward as that.
Observe the relationships people have with each other at work, at home and at play and observe the degree to which there seems to be no genuine dialogue taking place. What we mostly observe at work, home and at play are marriages of conveniences, that are divorced of any meaningful meaning. Most people are working cause it is a means to survival, to earn a living, to look after family and hopeful get to enjoy what they can’t without their work-based incomes. Work in most, with the exception of very few organisations, is not a meaningful way to live life.
We observe the same phenomena at home, people living under the same roof, with a surname in common, maybe even in physical proximity to each other but through their own devices living in their own worlds. A world at home devoid of a real dialogue, and it’s almost certainly about to get worse. A different version of the same is taking place at social settings, people talking at and over each other but not with each other.
When two or more parties are willing to listen to each other there can be a dialogue. When one party is speaking and the other party is not listening, there is no dialogue, it is a monologue in which the earlier party thinks communication is taking place. This is speaking in an echo chamber, where anything that is observed in the form of a response is just simply a slightly distorted echo. This is what is happening in most work, family and social-based environments today. If we’re not careful, with the manner in which social media is now further evolving the nature of engagement between people, this will degrade itself into speaking in a vacuum; a situation in which a party is speaking and nobody is actually listening.
A lot of what we see in workplaces is one party instructing and the other party being forced to obey. There is a fair amount of messaging from the top-down (employer to employee) or inside-out (organisation to customer), but not enough messaging taking place from the bottom-up (employee to employer) or outside-in (customer to organisation). The absolute same is true for governments and their citizens, constituency leaders and their constituents, and we can go on. If there is indeed two-way messaging, the quality both ways is not usually of high value and it rarely connects at the level of values anyway. It’s more a case of each side talking in a monologue cause nobody is listening.
In this age of connected-disconnection (connected by devices but disconnected nevertheless) people are psychologically clamouring for a dialogue without being equipped with the basic knowledge as to how to have it. The desire for dialogue is strong but the context for having one seems to be missing as people are too busy to pry themselves away from their devices.
Also there is an odd thing about human beings demanding dialogues, and that is the moment an official stage for a dialogue is set, the desire to actually engage in a meaningful dialogue dissipates fast. Things instead degrade into a farce of talking at each other, cause the pent up need to speak has been waiting to break free and has desperately looking for an audience. So most attempts at face-to-face dialogues in todays world face miserably. The fact that the engagements are short lived and not ongoing also does not help eventually get to a dialogue in the true purpose of the intent. The idea that for a dialogue to take place requires people to be willing to listen in turns gets lost in the attempt to speak in turns. Also while waiting for their turn to interject, most people instead of listening are speaking to themselves inside their heads, while pretending to listen.
If this is not addressed in a meaningful way soon, the social structures of work, family and what it means to be part of a civil society is going to fall into a state of total disrepair.
Since we can’t stop the tide of people’s relationships with their devices, we at CusJo have built a solution for people to resolve these issues, by first using their devices to create the foundation for a dialogue and then putting away their devices to have a genuine face-to-face dialogue. We’ve happy for you to have a conversation with us to start using it at any international, national, constituency, work and community event if you’d like too.
So, do get in touch with us at https://cusjo.cusjo.com/contact to articulate your interest and also share your point of view in the comments below.
