To navigate the fraught AI landscape, we need to shift from debate to dialog

Debate asks who is right. Dialogue asks what is true, what matters, and what should we do next.

[Photo: Zach M./Unsplash]

AI has quickly become one of the most emotionally loaded topics in business. Depending on the room—or the page—it’s either the engine of productivity, creativity, and growth or the latest threat to jobs, trust, and human judgment. That framing makes for energetic debate, but it inhibits meaningful progress toward reaching crucial goals.

We need to shift the conversation from debate to dialogue.

Debate is a conversation with two clear sides. Debates produce winners and losers. Dialogue is the production of meaning through conversation that shares ideas, perspectives, risks, and possibilities. Debate can clarify positions but often hardens them at the same time. Dialogue helps people uncover what they are really trying to accomplish, what tradeoffs they are willing to accept, and where they might create value. Dialogue expert William Isaacs elucidates the subtle transformation that happens when people think aloud together to talk across differences and create new directions for the future. In my research on organizational decision making, I’ve uncovered too many bad decisions and failures that could have been prevented with a shift from debate to dialogue. For a particularly famous one, consider the Challenger........

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