A Safe Place for Dangerous Truths

Chapter 3

The Five Stages of Dialogue

Let a human being throw the energies of his soul into the making of something, and the instinct of workmanship will take care of his honesty.

WALTER LIPPMANN

GROUP DYNAMICS 101

Dialogue is a group process. Fundamentally all groups are believed to proceed through several predictable steps. Research over the last few decades reinforces the view that groups display developmental stages. The most popular way to look at these stages follows Taylor’s “Form, Storm, Norm, and Perform” model. To describe dialogue, I add a new stage in between Storm and Norm that has a developmental twist to it.

It helps to understand the developmental phases of a group so we can value each interim step as much as the step that produces ...