(November 13, 2020)
Diego Tapia Figueroa, Ph.D. and Maritza Crespo Balderrama, M.A.
“Praxis gives meaning to words.”
(Ludwig Wittgenstein)
Dora Fried Schnitman, Ph.D. (I)
We continue with Dora Fried Schnitman, Ph.D. (Posadas, April 3, Argentina).
• The generative perspective proposes that, through reflective dialogue and conversational learning, emerging processes and novel events can take place that promote the gradual co-construction of possibilities and alternatives over time to address the problematic situations and challenges that are presented to people in different contexts. It moves away from normative and deficit models and works with a logic of possibility and a positive resource-oriented framework… The beginning of a generative cycle facilitates the emergence of new meanings that can open up relationships and possibilities for future action.
• This generative capacity of people who work in a context of dialogue offers possibilities that were not anticipated or thought of, transforms potentialities into new operational and existential realities, and brings experience closer to the open and always incomplete character of learning, co-construction, and creativity.
• The richness of the question is to open ourselves and keep the possibilities open. Different resources and generative questions are used according to the moments and needs of the process.
• For the therapist, the question is how to build alternatives in seemingly closed situations (how to promote creative solutions that build new realities).
• The challenge is the creation of what does not yet exist, beyond the available possibilities, through the generation of dialogue – internal and external – transformative.
• Curiosity, openness, generative inquiry, interest, and appreciative recognition of oneself, the other, and the process are epistemological positions that sustain the process of transformation.
• Appreciative dialogues are the co-creative search for the potential, the best of the people, teams, organizations, and systems in which they find themselves. Appreciative dialogue is based on focusing on the positive to make it grow.
• This perspective allows us to ask about the concepts of “truth”, “objectivity”, and “reality”. It is an ethical position founded and rooted at the same time in the responsibility for our constructions of the world and the actions that accompany them.
• Human projects have a social settlement that already allows us to open the present towards the construction of possible futures. Becoming a human being consists of participating in shared social processes in which meanings, senses, and coordinations emerge.
• The proposal is to explore the conditions of possibility so that the questions of these times become instruments for creativity. The planning of actions implies putting into play the visions that are about the change -and its conditions of possibility- of the “reality”, of the time, as well as the conception of the role of those who plan the construction of the “desired future”.
• We witness a turn towards a perspective that proposes that the most promising is defined by the exercise of curiosity, by creation, by generative knowledge, by a focus on the process, and by the links and nets that create new possibilities; as well as by “theorists/practitioners” who operate as observers and participants in social worlds conceptualized as pluralistic.
• Professionals who use the generative perspective as the basis for their work build a range of practices and meanings between what is and what could be, project possible paths to a future, explore bifurcations, and multiple alternatives, and use variations and random situations to create novelty.
Characteristics of the generative perspective
The main features offered by this perspective to professionals are:
*It allows sustaining a dialogical and relational approach between people, which promotes coordination and novel and productive processes about the reasons that summon them.*It favors participation and inclusive relationships between consultants and professionals, between consultants among themselves, and the formation of collaborative teams between different participants according to the context.*It recognizes participants as potential managers of possible futures and promotes proactivity in people and their relationships.*Recognizes participants’ explicit and implicit knowledge of the situations in question and their resources, and stimulates their ability to produce innovations.*It addresses people’s records and representations about their lives, experience, and hopes.*Works with emerging possibilities, the unexpected that arises in nonlinear interactions, and the complexity and opportunities they provide to create and move towards more promising transformative processes.*From the identification of opportunities to incorporate innovations into the conversation, it explores possible courses of action and ponders their implementation.*Interrogates new possibilities and moves towards the implementation and expansion of those that are satisfactory or suitable for the participants, the purposes of the consultation, and the contexts.*Recognizes and works on negative or deficit formulations, re-signifies them, explores and promotes operational frameworks that allow them to find better opportunities.*Challenges the basic assumptions, reconsider what is taken as “given”.*Facilitates the reflection of the participants and asks them fundamental questions about their personal lives, relational and social.*Reviews the perspectives, possibilities and alternative recognitions of people and relationships.*Promotes interest in another/s, curiosity, inquiry, learning, participation, and innovation.*Considers new alternatives for personal, interpersonal, and social action, ponders their possibilities of implementation, and moves towards their implementation.
Fried Schnitman, D. (Ed.) (2017), Dialogues for transformation: project development and generative research oriented to the construction of futures in Ibero-America – Volume 1. Ohio, USA: Ed. A Taos Institute Publication. WorldShare Books.
• The professional favors contexts that promote the productivity of the participants and the process. It investigates and advances together with the consultants from the emergence of the possibility towards the weighing of its contribution, its applicability, and the convenience or not of its implementation. Together with the participants, the professional learns, reflects, and evaluates the resources and productivity of the process in relation to the situation to be solved and the transformations of the participants.
• One of the first implications of this perspective is that it allows us to focus on the future and on the emerging possibilities – which do not yet exist or exist only in an incipient way – that can be created and amplified, thus expanding the construction of new alternatives for people and social relations. In a generative process, the people involved work simultaneously and with others in the development of dialogue, in the search for solutions and alternatives, and in the construction of a vision for the future that they can implement. They learn about themselves, clarify their interests, their objectives, and the ways to achieve them, and solve what is necessary to transform their conditions of existence according to what´s possible.
• A central feature of dialogue is that it is an ever reciprocal emergent generative process between interlocutors who elaborate, create, construct, synthesize, differ, and transform meanings, as this process unfolds. In dialogue, participants address others and actively listen to understand and gain a more complex and rich insight into the perspectives, data, research, and concerns of others and their own; questions are asked, new information emerges, and a good outcome requires exploration of the complexities of the topics being considered. Different perspectives enrich the version and vision of a problem and give it depth.
• In this perspective, it is important to remain reflexively open to diversity, to the unexpected, to singularities that do not belong to the dominant codes to discern the registers – which do not necessarily fit with the theory or worldview to which we or others adhere – and allow disparity to arise. The ability to develop multiple narratives and bring together diverse components exerts extraordinary pressure on bodies of knowledge closed on themselves and inspires unpublished links, repositioning participants as generative subjects in emerging and diverse universes. Knowledge is open to our participation, to our dialogue with others, and to what we study.
• Generative dialogic designs of learning are heterarchical, interactive, inclusive, and participatory. They use as part of their project the different voices of those who learn, actively include them and involve them in the construction of their learning and the knowledge that is generated. This is a process in which people work towards the creation of something new from what is thought, learned, discovered, and recycled. The recognition of what happens in this process allows the construction of platforms for new learning.
• This inclusive procedure, which understands dialogue as a social space, incorporates those who participate in the situation they intend to study or transform, using their reflections to improve understanding and actions while they take place, investigating, generating, and evaluating while practicing, and increasing the recovery of power and the reciprocal recognition of the participants.
• Generative dialogic models pay particular attention to variations, to that which appears as diversity, to everything that has any possibility of constituting something new, and to episodes of change.
• Knowledge is transformative, participatory, and inclusive; we consider our productions as dialogues and circles of dialogues. We move from models linked to the reproduction of previous developments to others that work with the construction of possibilities, transformation, and resources.
• The generative model uses a logic of possibility, works with the emergent, with what it can build, and with innovation. Working with an emerging social space promotes people’s proactivity, participation, and inclusion, and recognizes their uniqueness. Through their participation in this type of social space, people can find and co-build emerging perspectives, resources, and possibilities.
• In the position of appreciative dialogue and inquiry, people do not stagnate by blaming themselves for the mistakes of the past but seek to rescue the best of the past or even the present, the creative, the positive, the constructive and develop the potential for enrichment (“how it could have been…” whether it is in the past or “how could it be…” if present) to contribute to making that potential a reality.
• Appreciative inquiry is a reflective conversation that narrates, through meaningful questions, the successful experiences of the past; the positive stories of the present are told; the possibilities that we want to build together for the future are counted. And, how, in a creative and imaginative dialogue, we commit ourselves to expand freedom, dignity, and pleasure; so that relational ethics grow and be enhanced.
• It calls for mobilizing the collective resources that create the possibilities: trust in the relationships with which it is decided to interact; be active and alive; engage in a common desire to learn by acknowledging the positive, unlocking knots, stagnations, and repetitions; interweaving with creativity and imagination, the “how it could be”.
• Appreciative dialogue seeks creativity for innovation. The best conditions to create are those that make us enjoy, relax and feel safe. Therefore, focusing on the positive and the possibility is so powerful, since it generates an environment of comfort and security that allows us to open our minds and dare. It is about choosing between working from routine, fears, frustration, and complaints; or, from trust, and love. And we live this joint work, these processes of appreciative and generative dialogues as authentic experiences of joy, with vital spontaneity.
• We call dialogic creation the gradual construction over time of something new between the participants and the professional. Together, in relation, they open inquiries to reflect and ask – they create new spaces for dialogue and social coordination, promote perspectives, innovative narratives, learning, and new forms of relationship… Dialogue is a process of relational construction of meanings and actions between people in social spaces.
• The process needs participation, democracy, good humor, flexibility, and space for the dreams of each one, valuing what does work and imagining what could be. Collaborative and dialogical and generative practices open new conversations, which mean new relational possibilities, new worlds.
• Generative dialogue is creative. It involves the discernment and joint construction of meanings, resources, and possibilities in the relationship between professionals and consultants. A generative process is the construction of alternatives and innovations in dialogue through confluences over time. The generative professional is attentive to discerning in dialogue the situations that favor the creation, reflection, and acquisition of new resources and possibilities.
• Specificity of each dialogue: every dialogue is unique, singular, and specific. A generative dialogue occurs in a specific temporal space:
• Participants: who is involved.
• Context: in what situation and who participates.
• A moment: when it takes place and who participates.
• A domain: what it’s about.
• A purpose: what goal motivates it.
• A project that is organized over time.
Dora Fried Schnitman, Ph.D. (II)
(November 27, 2020)
• We use the term generative dialogue to refer to the gradual creation of something new in human relationships through dialogue, reflexivity, and conversational learning. In a generative dialogue, people in a relationship come to see, experience, describe and position themselves in a new and more productive way in the face of problematic situations.
• According to Bakhtin, dialogic creativity takes place in dialogue between people in a relationship. Participants jointly create and build dialogue, in the course of the dialogue. Both the speaker and the listener are co-authors of what was said in the dialogue. Dialogue refers to the co-creation of meanings and joint actions.
• There is creativity in the space between people, that is the creativity of the dialogic process. What we say and do incorporates a multiplicity of personal, relational, and social-semantic meanings. There can also be creativity both among the multiple internal dialogues involved and between the various social actors of social ecology.
• When people are in dialogue, they not only express themselves through content, but they also do so through voice tone, gestures, the particular way in which something is formulated (question, hypothesis, invitation, affirmation), context (the quality of social space), and so on. They express an understanding, an intention, a past, a present, and a future: in a process. The expression is complex, processual, embodied, and contextual.
• The construction of a generative process is multidimensional and complex. It is a process of processes that are woven. When a possibility emerges in a dialogue and the consultant responds by accepting it, a generative moment occurs. If that moment expands, it can give rise to alternative perspectives and resources, transforming people, their circumstances, and their relationships.
• When these novel resources are sustained in dialogue, they have the potential to initiate generative cycles and processes that lead to new perspectives, values, transformative actions, and novel futures.
• The construction of a generative process implies reciprocal responsibility in its different moments:
• 1. the construction of an inclusive, participatory relationship, with reciprocity in dialogue;
• 2. the creation of a work platform is a process that links problems, resources, and possibilities; it points a direction;
• 3. the concretion of transformations into new forms of life… It is not what the professional decides but what the consultants and the professional agree on responsively.
• Creation of the relationship: the first generative actions between professionals and consultants focus on the creation of a dialogue that establishes a relationship and mutual recognition to lay the foundations of a dialogical work (promotes trust, appreciation, and recognition). As well as to start designing a work platform.
• Work platform: it is built on the dialogue between consultants and professionals, as paths are created that link the problems of the consultants with their hopes, expectations, resources, and possibilities that arise in the dialogue, and give a sense of direction to the process. In the course of the process, new spaces for dialogue are created.
• Emerging knowledge: in the process, the participants recognize the transformations and the implications of their implementation for the redesign of their way of life. These emerging learnings from consultants involve reflective pragmatics.
• In a generative process, a dynamic is created between dialogues, narrative, generative inquiries (questions), and acquisition of knowledge (learning). The professional needs to be attentive to discern them, recognize them, promote interactions and facilitate innovations.
• How does something new come about? and how is it consolidated as the main context of practice or meaning? What types of dialogic and social coordination encourage these developments? What contexts or conditions facilitate the emergence and maintenance of new possibilities?
• Building futures as part of change requires acting on current circumstances to explore how to access these futures. The possibilities created in generative dialogues become virtual realities that, once created, can be updated, as long as they are supported by transformative processes. Such processes contribute to actions that lead to existential alternatives and new and diverse realities.
• Generative dialogue focuses on what therapy participants can build, create unprecedented possibilities, and active exploration of how problematic situations can relate to emerging resources and possibilities as new territories in dialogue. It focuses, then, on the dialogue’s ability to build interactions, forging a path through emerging resources, the available options, and the issues that led to the consultation.
• Working with the creative potential of dialogue offers insight into the landscape of relational constructionism in action. Generative dialogue expands the process from a problem-centered approach to creating new possibilities, increasing participants’ skills and providing them with additional resources to work with what is emerging. One of the first implications of this perspective is that it allows a focus on the future, on incipient possibilities that can be expanded – or non-existent that can be created – thus contributing to new alternatives for the consultants.
• Dialogue refers to the co-creation of meanings and joint social actions by and among a certain number of participants. A dialogue is a co-constructive interpersonal process that involves diverse voices and resonances in which people create meaning together.
• Dialogues and confluences in dialogue are formative processes of selves and social worlds. In these generative conversations, people participate integrally in the exchanges, intertwining ideas, thoughts, perspectives, and feelings. In and through dialogue, the self and relationships arise and can be modified.
• When a therapist meets with consultants, he enters into a dialogue aware of their specificity and uniqueness, with the problems and hopes they bring. The therapist is attentive, receptive, and aware of the consultant’s responsiveness to work on building a productive dialogic relationship.
• The generative perspective prioritizes the recognition of emerging opportunities and innovations unique to each process. Allowing generative moments to be discerned, in the new resources and possibilities of the participants; then it can be useful for developing alternatives, new narratives, and learning. We call this an emergent generative process.
• In this process, therapists and consultants actively work together to explore the situation they are trying to transform. As unforeseen possibilities in dialogue can occur, participants in a therapy process can become more proactive, using their questions and reflections to improve understanding and action as they occur.
• The impact of violent conflict is very painful and is not limited to the people directly involved. Violent conflict breaks the very fabric of interpersonal relationships. A generative perspective and its practices for coping with crises and conflicts help people regain resources and relationships, reconnect with what makes sense to them, reorient their lives, and restore their personal and social integrity.
• An emphasis on resources and the joint construction of alternatives facilitates spaces for recovery and coexistence. When recognized, these survival strategies can be expanded to transform identity and society with strengths that go beyond initial resources and have an impact on the personal, relational and political agendas.
• The question is how to make consultants listen to other voices present and be available to generate and create what´s new that enriches their possibilities. Whatever emerges from the complexity of dialogue, from the links between dialogues, the diversity that characterizes the human being guides these explorations. By welcoming this diversity and attention to the resources that appear, participants can move toward emerging possibilities and life alternatives.
• Generative moments are variations or minor events that occur in dialogue that can give way to the creation of new perspectives and possibilities. They can be introduced by the consultant or therapist, or simply emerge in the dialogue. The therapist is very attentive to reciprocal receptivity and will bring these emerging moments into dialogue. If the consultants, in turn, respond and validate and expand the emerging moment, it can become a generative moment, which will be confirmed and expanded through supplementation and responsiveness in dialogue.
• New personal and relational narratives emerge. When generative cycles generate more novel and productive meanings and life possibilities, they can become a generative matrix.
• The generative matrix combines meanings of emerging novel perspectives, values, narratives, and actions that enable the transformations of people and their relationships both now and in the future. It promotes more productive and viable futures about what motivated the consultant to seek therapy.
• The resources and possibilities that appear in the process are woven into the dialogue and forge alternative paths. The recognition of these transformations, and the reflections on them, open the way to new narratives and generative learnings for all participants, including the therapist.
• A contextually alternative life design is created, in the particularities of each therapy process, the transforming and enabling devices are created, opening a field of study of the transformations in which we can discern networks, totalities that are woven over time and that synthesize heterogeneous circumstances, interactions or contingent results within the process itself.
• The therapist’s first generative actions focus on creating a dialogue with consultants that establishes reciprocal receptivity and a mutually inclusive and trust-based relationship.
• When the therapist and the consultant recognize their reciprocal relationship, they develop an accepted relational reference. In the context of creating this bond, such as generative moments and cycles described above, consultants feel engaged in a relationship that provides them with a different perspective on themselves. No longer limited to problems or shortcomings, their perspective is thus broadened to encompass resources, possibilities, self-confidence, and confidence in the process.
• In their confluences in dialogue, the therapist and consultants jointly build a work platform that connects problems with resources and possibilities and gives meaning to the direction the process is taking. The term working platform refers to a “consensus” in dialogue and coordinated actions on the issues in question.
• It is a process that connects problems, resources, and possibilities over time in the direction of a viable future, within the framework of a relationship in which participants recognize others as significant in the dialogue,
• The possibilities and resources are transformative, helping the consultant to move towards a possible future and new ways of life. This mutual agreement on the direction of the process is not the result of the choice of the professional to apply a certain model or strategy; it is simply part of the same process of creating resources, possibilities, and new ways of life through reciprocal receptivity and mutual recognition. The work platform provides a domain for dialogue between participants, a project of what the therapy is going to do, and what it is about a contextualized direction and purposes.
• The generative perspective in therapy pays attention to the creative resources and possibilities of dialogue. This approach is future-oriented and is differentiated by the emphasis it places on the professional’s ability to be an active participant in dialogue and to respond in creative and innovative ways to what arises through it. For the therapist, that means getting involved in the relational field and developing a practice based on creativity, generative research, collaboration, and relational responsibility.
• Through dialogue and joint action, professionals and consultants approach what consultants are dealing with from a transformation-oriented perspective, and they do so by focusing on the present moment, and not on previous knowledge. That requires professionals to recognize the uniqueness and experience felt, and to be able to grasp each person and their specific circumstances. This dialogic approach encourages and invites creativity and co-participation at the same time, to give rise to complex and non-linear choices. Several voices are engaged, and the limitations and assumptions questioned will allow consultants to reauthorize and resignify their lives as something integral, to enrich their lives.
• In a generative process, a set of dialogical knowledge emerges that allows transformation as the process progresses. The idea is to encourage the emergence of this new local knowledge and possibilities in the course of the process and to explore them together through co-participation. The direction of change is built on dialogue, and problems are linked to both possibilities and new learning.
• Dialogic knowledge is fostered to accompany the process and expand the resources and new ways of life of the participants.
SUGGESTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Fried Schnitman, D. (1998). New paradigms, culture and subjectivity. Buenos Aires, Argentina, Editorial Paidós.
Fried Schnitman, D. (2011). “Generative coping with crises and conflicts in organizations”. Person, (14), 11-40.
Fried Schnitman, D. (2013). Generative process and dialogic practices. Networks: journal of relational psychotherapy and social interventions No. 28, (pp. 67-98). RELATES, Spain, Barcelona.
Fried Schnitman, D. (Ed.) (2017), Dialogues for transformation: project development and generative research oriented to the construction of futures in Ibero-America – Volume 1, 2 and 3. Ohio, USA: Ed. A Taos Institute Publication. WorlShare Books.
Publications from the Generative Model, of great relevance for Latin America, by Dora Fried Schnitman. Retrieved from:
https://iryse.org/2018/06/08/. https://iryse.org/?s=BIBLIOGRAF%C3%8CA+DORA
Taos Institute page containing books and publications by Dora Fried Schnitman:
Tapia Figueroa, Diego, Thesis (2018) for the Ph.D. with the Free University of Brussels (VUB) and the TAOS INSTITUTE.
The Sage Handbook of Social Constructionist Practice. Edited by: Sheila McNamee – Mary M. Gergen – Celiane Camargo-Borges – Emerson F. Rasera, – October 2020 | 696 pages | SAGE Publications Ltd.
Creating Alternatives and Resources: Generative Professional Practice:
5th DIPLOMA IN PERSPECTIVE AND GENERATIVE PROFESSIONAL PRACTICES 2020:http://www.fundacioninterfas.org/capacitacion/?p=3956
English translation of Bruno Tapia Naranjo.