Dialogic Origins

Foss and Griffin suggest that three conditions are essential to support an environment where speaker and audience can share perspectives and come to understand in a deeper way the topics of choice.  Those three conditions include the condition of equality, value and self-determination.

Equality

The condition of equality attempts to ensure that all participants are afforded an equal opportunity to share their perspectives and be heard along with the speaker. For this reason, the speaker should include opportunity for discussion as a part of the speech, not after the speech in a question and answer session.  Additionally, the speaker should make every effort to facilitate the discussion such that a variety of perspectives are heard.  This means that audience members feel welcome to share their perspectives, even if that perspective isn’t widely held, and sometimes this might require inviting individuals who are quieter in a public setting. This condition does not require all audience members to speak but should ensure that all members feel welcome to speak. It might also require the speaker to hold back on sharing their personal perspective until after other perspectives are heard.

Value

The condition of value recognizes the inherent worth of other’s perspectives even when those perspectives are not consistent with one’s own.  The idea here is that we recognize the worth and appreciate others’ efforts to share their views. It requires that judgment be suspended in order to listen openly and develop an understanding of what people believe and why they believe it. This means that contributions from audience members should not be evaluated by the speaker, but rather accepted and appreciated—perhaps even explored further with probing questions aimed at understanding, not judging, at this stage.

Self-Determination

The condition of self-determination presumes that since we are not trying to persuade audience members then individuals are allowed and encouraged to decide if and how they wish to use the information shared.  There is no expectation that the speaker must convince audience members to see things in any particular way.  Nor should audience members attempt to persuade others.  Instead, audience members are encouraged and allowed to decide for themselves what if anything to do with the information including how to think, feel and act on what has been shared (Griffin, 2015).

While not every topic chosen for an invitational speech must be controversial it is possible to speak invitationally on “wicked problems”.  Wicked problems are complex issues that “involve competing underlying values” that cannot be easily solved.  According to Carcasson, “addressing wicked problems calls for a third type of public problem-solving: deliberative engagement. Deliberative engagement begins with the recognition of the underlying values inherent to public problems and focuses on developing mutual understanding and genuine interaction across perspectives, which then provides a base to support the constant adjustment, negotiation, and creativity required to tackle wicked problems (2016).