Bohmian dialogue is less a technique than a collective posture.
A handful or up to 20ish people sit in a circle, with nothing to decide and no agenda to accomplish. The only shared commitment is to notice: notice our own assumptions as they spill out of our mouths, notice how meaning begins to move between us, notice the subtle tensions that invite inquiry rather than rebuttal. Bohm called this the free flow of meaning. When that flow thickens, the group becomes an organ of perception—less a set of separate speakers and more a single sensing body.
From the perspective of context stewardship, Bohm dialogue is an awareness practice: it temporarily suspends the everyday action-horizon so that the system can feel itself all the way to its edges. No one tries to steer the conversation; steering would collapse the “bucket” that needs to widen for new coherence to appear.
The silence that often drifts in the middle of a Bohm session is not an absence but a composting phase where unspoken material breaks down, making new nutrients available to the shared soil of understanding.
The whole sensorium (a Bayo Akomolafe term) is invited – participants are encouraged to notice sensations and emotions as valid data. Bohm called these “subtle proprioceptive cues” that tell us how the dialogue field itself is moving.
Together with Theory U, Bohm’s dialogue is probably the closest to a “direct” attempt to tune into the context.
Wiser organizations 