|
Introduction:
Sallyann Roth, co-founder of the Public Conversations Project,
recommends using dialogue participants' questions as a way to identify their common
interests. This helps people to talk to those whom they might otherwise be yelling at.
| |
This rough transcript provides a text alternative to audio. We apologize for occasional errors and unintelligible sections (which are marked with ???).
Shared Questions
Sallyann Roth
Family Therapist, Trainer, and Co-Founder of the Public Conversations Project,
in Watertown, Massachusetts
| |
We collect all
these questions and we put them on a board. Everybody says them out loud. It's
an introduction and they look at each other. They are no longer Joe Jones, who's
the executive director of XYZ, they're a person who has a lively question.
That
question made me think of ones I didn't think of, and suddenly as the group has
20 or 30 questions on the table, suddenly there is a kind of excitement.
"Oh! That's what we want to hear about. Oh! I want to talk with you. I'm interested
in that also." Suddenly there is a sense of the group sharing a common
interest, beyond the interest that we are here to learn what these people are
here to tell us. That is one of the ways that we hope to make a parallel between
the work that we do with people in conflict and the training. Can it be that in
the first or second round or when we get something on paper, they're thinking,
"Oh, I can't wait to talk with these people," even if it's with people
they might usually be silent with or yelling at.
|
