While the systematic process described above works well in many situations, there are times when a different approach may be needed. When a group consists of people from different areas of the public and private sectors, collaborative problem solving may work best. For example, in many urban areas, coalitions of business executives and educators have worked together on plans to train people for jobs in the community. In such situations, the problems are usually important and the resources typically are limited. Because there is no clear-cut authority structure and because the factions may have different expectations or goals, the members of such groups often have difficulty working together. To be effective, they need to spend considerable time defining the problem and exploring one another’s perspectives. This should help them to recognize their interdependence and encourage them to work together. In such groups, participants must come to see themselves not as members of group A (the executives) or group B (the educators), but as members of group C, the coalition. Leadership in such groups may pose a special challenge.
One approach that may facilitate collaborative problem solving is dialogue groups. According to William Isaacs, director of the Dialogue Project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Organizational Learning, “Dialogue is a discipline of collective thinking and inquiry, a process for transforming the quality of conversation, and, in particular, the thinking that lies beneath it.”6 Such groups focus on understanding the different interpretations of the problem that participants bring to the interaction. Their purpose is to establish a conversation among the participants from which common ground and mutual trust can emerge. The role of the facilitator is critical in dialogue groups. According to Edgar Schein of the MIT Center, the facilitator must
• Organize the physical space in a circle to create a sense of equality
• Introduce the problem
• Ask people to share an experience in which dialogue led to “good communication”
• Ask members to consider what it was that led to good communication in that situation
• Ask participants to talk about their reactions
• Let the conversation flow naturally
• Intervene only to clarify problems of communication
• Conclude by asking all members to comment however they choose’8
The dialogue method is not a substitute for other problem-solving techniques, such as the rational-thinking process presented earliet Instead, it may be used as a precursor because deliberation works only when members understand each other well enough to be “talking the same language.”9 A similar approach may be found in the Kettering Foundation’s National Issues Forums.

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